The whole 'startup/scaleup' culture (which have become the industry titans of today) - is insane and have been insane for as long as it has been a thing - the culture of either 'just grow and figure out how to monetize'(Social media, food delivery etc.) or 'we're selling you this technology that doesn't exist yet but going to be insanely valuable in the future (AGI, self driving)' or 'we're selling shovels to the first 2' (cloud providers, Nvidia) has been insane.
I'd argue that compared to a decade. 15 years ago, relatively little value has been created. If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.
Yet in this time the US has doubled its GDP, most of it owning to the top, to the tech professionals and financiers who benefited from this.
And some of this money went into assets with constrained supplies, such as housing, marking up the prices adjusted for inflation, making average people that much worse off.
While I do feel society is making progress, it's been a slow and steady march. Which in relative terms means slowing. Of I gave you $10 every week, by week 2, you'd double your wealth, by the end of the year, you almost didn't notice the increase.
Technology accumulation is the same, I'd argue it's even worse, since building on top of existing stuff has a cost proportional to the complexity for a fixed unit of gain (and features get proportionally less valuable as you implement the most important ones first).
Sorry got distracted from my main point - what happens when people stop believing that these improvements are meanigful or that technology that was priced in to produce 100x the value will come at all (and more importantly the company you're invested in will be able to caputre it)?
> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.
While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong.
You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it.
15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own.
10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release.
Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old.
TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday.
I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.
I just tried it and no, you can't. I don't really even see how you could. Where is the form supposed to go? Is Grandma supposed to rent a server somewhere to do processing? Where?
25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whatever. That's for people that want to sell you something). You'd put it into the space your ISP gave you, or Windows actually included a personal web server. You had to be somewhat technical to use the Windows server, but it could've been made more friendly instead of being removed, and personal computers should make it easy to share a static website.
We've clearly regressed since then. People think you need an engineer or AI to build basic web pages. My actual grandma was doing some of this stuff when I was a kid in the 90s, as was I.
What happened to the web seems analogous to me to as if we abandoned word processors and spreadsheets and said you need a six-figure engineer to do custom programming any time you need the features of one of those things.
100% this. At that time if one needed a simple custom database client with GUI and analytical reports, the go-to solution was MS Access and it was working well. Could even be placed on a shared drive. Now, as accepted solution, you either pay for different SaaSes, each with a fraction of functionality, or have to code a bespoke website using overcomplicated frameworks.
MS access still exists and is still maintained and offered for sale.
You should not look back on those solutions and neglect to acknowledge their limitations. Access can only handle small databases (maximum 2GB) and about 100 simultaneous connections.
Access is basically a product of the technological limitations of its time. It isn’t designed the way it is because that way is the best design.
The kind of business that relied on Access is going to find that solutions like Airtable are far easier and more powerful, and certainly less prone to data loss than mom and pop’s shared drive. There are even open source self-hosted alternatives like NocoDB and Baserow (or cloud hosted).
You’ll inevitably complain about the subscription cost of SaaS solutions but it’s not like MS Office business licenses were ever cheap.
The thing is that you and grandma were only accomplishing static sites back then. You can still do that today with many more options than you had back then and you can even use many of the exact same methods.
But when it comes to actually accomplishing something with application logic on the web, Grandma could ask the AI agent literally all these questions and get solid answers. At any point you get confused you can just ask what to do. You can highlight a line of code and ask “what does this mean?” You can even say “I want this web page to be put online what do I do?”
Beats waiting for a human to answer you.
You’re also taking my example application way too literally. No I don’t know why Grandma needs a signup form, I just couldn’t think of a web app off the top of my head.
MS Access and WSYWIG tools like FrontPage and iWeb were not good. I know because I was there and I used FrontPage at work. A link to your email (get spammed forever) is not a replacement for an application or email form. The whole reason code is preferred over WYSIWYG is because you inevitably have issues with change management even for simple personal projects, which is why static site generators have gained popularity. I’m sure your grandma could have handled markdown + someone else’s Hugo template + Netlify.
Hell, if we want to talk about progress in WYSIWYG editors, Trix greatly improved and modernized the shortfalls of that process and that was launched in 2014, less than 10 years ago. So even in the world of WSYWIG we have better tools now than before.
IIS has not been removed from Windows home edition, by the way.
25 years ago I uploaded zip files with my PHP update to overwrite my older site, and possibly I had to do a MySQL migration before I could go live again. And when I don't have to care about anybody else's professional standards, that's still how I make simple websites.
Apart from doing the styles and layout, I don't think current tools have less friction. They're a lot safer though. Can't say I never dropped a production database.
Their point was that we don't need things like Heroku, Kubernetes, Slack, TensorFlow, etc. They're not creating value, they're propping up a tech stack, whose value is questionable, given the amount we've invested in it. It seems that over the past 15 years of tech, the end result is that a few companies and people became fabulously wealthy, and the rest of us are pretty much worse off. Tech isn't transforming our lives or society the way tech companies promised it would 15 years ago.
As for grandma, 15 years ago she could have just posted her sewing club on Facbook, she doesn't need Heroku or AI.
I think you’re willfully ignorant if you’re going to claim that Slack and Kubernetes haven’t created any value. And of course these are just random examples that I happened to think of.
I would say that these technologies/products being so wildly popular puts burden of proof on you to show me some kind of evidence that these technologies aren’t productive. Like are you trying to say that something had better deployment velocity and reliablity than Kubernetes at handling high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprise companies? What was it? Why was it better than Kubernetes?
The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers. So really it’s on you to prove to me that I should be using pants with buttons instead.
Finally, there’s a lot of irony in your first paragraph complaining about a few tech oligarchs becoming fabulously wealthy and then suggesting that Grandma just use Facebook instead of building her own site. In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.
Zippers actually are worse than buttons. I can fix a broken button, if my zipper breaks I have to throw away the pair of pants.
You're assuming that people wear pants with zippers because they have a preference for it, and not because you literally cannot buy pants with buttons in 99% of stores.
> I think you’re willfully ignorant if you’re going to claim that Slack and Kubernetes haven’t created any value.
The juice hasn't been worth the squeeze. You can look at all societal indicators except the stock market pointing downward to get to that conclusion. Nothing is actually better than it was in 2010 despite Uber, Airbnb, Kubernetes, Slack, and all the other SV tech "innovations". People are not happier or wealthier because of the tech coming from Silicon Valley. In general the end result of the last 15 years of tech is that it's made us more neurotic, disconnected, depressed, and angry.
We don't need "better deployment velocity and reliability for high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprises". Listen to yourself man, you sound like you've been hypnotized by the pointy-haired boss. The tech sector makes false promises about a utopia future, and then it just delivers wealth for shareholders, leaving everyone else worse off.
Grandma especially doesn't need deployment velocity, she's being evicted by her landlord because he wants to turn her flat into an Airbnb. She can't get to the grocery store because the town won't invest in public transport and Uber is the only option. She's been radicalized by Meta and Youtube and now she hates her own trans grandchild because her social media feed keeps her algorithmically outraged. Oh, and now she's getting scammed by AI asking her to invest her life savings in shitcoins and NFTs.
> The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers.
I don't agree that the ubiquity and utility are necessarily correlated, so I don't see the zippers and Kubernetes as analogous.
But the proliferation of zippers has more to do with the fact they are easier for manufacturers to integrate into products compared to buttons -- they come pre-measured and installing them is a straight stitch that can be done with a machine, whereas installing buttons is more time-consuming.
Zippers are worse for consumers in many ways, repairability chief among them. But really they are part of a general trend over my lifetime of steadily falling garment quality, as manufacturers race to the bottom.
> In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.
You said it, not me. We had the technology to throw up a static site in 2010 and my grandmother could actually do that with dreamweaver and FTP, and it worked fine.
1. You're going off-topic, we weren't talking about societal happiness, we were talking about whether productivity and the ease of developing for the Internet has increased. E.g. if you are trying to claim that Kubernetes doesn't work better for companies than previous solutions wrestling with Chef or Puppet with dependency hell in some VMs I am just going to assume you've never touched a backend and think Terraform is something you do in Sim City 2000.
2. Like it or not, the customers of the tech industry include a lot of large enterprises that do find value in improving velocity and reliability for complex workflows. I am not some kind of corporate sellout for pointing out this plain factual reality.
3. I totally agree with your points about income inequality and happiness metrics among our population but they are not relevant to the topic at hand.
4. If Dreamweaver and FTP is your barometer, recall that Dreamweaver was an expensive paid product. There still are plenty of FTP-based web hosts and you can totally throw up a website with a tool like https://trix-editor.org/, which as I mentioned is a tool that did not exist 15 years ago. You can also just pay for a website service like SquareSpace or Wix (or not, they have free tiers).
The fact that specific individual tools do not exist/are not supported anymore is irrelevant, as there are dozens of often-better tools for throwing a website up that are definitely friendly to novices. Let's not forget the plethora of no-code application development tools that are mostly a recent development.
Mobile users prefer apps 60% over websites. So the real modern barometer is: could your Grandma put up an iPhone app in 2008 following the developer tutorials using Objective-C or would she have a much better time using Swift and/or a no-code app development solution?
Kind of missing the existence of Wordpress? A random theme + a "form builder" plugin and it would be done with hosting taken care off wherever you created the site.
I tried that a few months ago. Just wanted a static site to replace an old WP site. It was a total disappointment. I’m not invested enough to do a write up but I tried 3 LLM models and multiple services and all I got was a bunch of dependencies and technologies that I explicitly said I didn’t want. I would has been better off using one of those build your website services for non technical people.
I actually had a lot of fun building a native .NET web frontend in VB 2005 recently lol. I thought it kind of amazing that i could just bind UI controls directly to state objects and the UI would automatically React to any changes i made. Felt very natural as a modern web dev lol. Found a lightweight .NET JSON library that was compatible all the way back to VB 2005 as well.
In case you also need to control Spotify from Windows 95 :D
I'd argue that compared to a decade. 15 years ago, relatively little value has been created. If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.
Yet in this time the US has doubled its GDP, most of it owning to the top, to the tech professionals and financiers who benefited from this.
And some of this money went into assets with constrained supplies, such as housing, marking up the prices adjusted for inflation, making average people that much worse off.
While I do feel society is making progress, it's been a slow and steady march. Which in relative terms means slowing. Of I gave you $10 every week, by week 2, you'd double your wealth, by the end of the year, you almost didn't notice the increase.
Technology accumulation is the same, I'd argue it's even worse, since building on top of existing stuff has a cost proportional to the complexity for a fixed unit of gain (and features get proportionally less valuable as you implement the most important ones first).
Sorry got distracted from my main point - what happens when people stop believing that these improvements are meanigful or that technology that was priced in to produce 100x the value will come at all (and more importantly the company you're invested in will be able to caputre it)?