I've always been stuck on the deb/apt system because it seems to have the best support but I probably need to move on at this point. It just doesn't work that well.
I guess you could argue that there should be cheaper software, but most software people interact with is free/ad supported. Where it is paid, it's already a race to to the bottom.
Basically consumers don't really pay for software in the first place, and the leverage from labour companies get through software is already through the roof even before AI. Will much change for consumers of software?
I would recommend checking out your local laws on export of software with military applications. I believe this would be illegal to release in my country (whether that's the right thing is worth discussing, but protect yourself first).
Looks like a pretty mature project though so I suppose it must be on solid ground.
It might also run the risk of breaking IMPORT laws in your respective countries, worth being sure of because that is not a realm of law you want to be messing with.
I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated.
Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.
Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.
Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
I'm not sure that he doesn't like to, so much as that the position he ended up in as a result of the Oculus acquisition had no actual authority attached to it. He was functionally a glorifier adviser, to trot out at trade shows (and reading between the lines, this was a pretty frustrating position to end up in - he'd rather have had a real job, even if it was to build something he didn't fully agree with)
The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.
It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.
It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-skill engineering work, but spending most of their time doing their own task management, calendar management, memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or whatever-ops, lauded as breaking down siloses, is just using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of headcount reduction.
My company won’t backfill product management in timely fashion.
Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
Yeah, the bit where there are 10x as many administrators in higher education, but professors now all have to do their own admin, always drove me up the wall
All of the demos of booking travel using AI are hilarious to me. This used to be a job a travel agent did, and planning a trip was either a fun conversation or you could be like "send me somewhere warm" and let them do it.
Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
> Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.
Similar example in the grocery stores with the self checkout. In the past if the employee did a scanning mistake, worst case the manager / customer would be mad.
Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants
Well, even without exaggeration - if the employee made a scanning mistake, most of the time they (or the customer) would notice during or immediately afterwards, so the employee would just hit undo or scan a negative or such, and carry on.
No such privilege is granted to regular customers. Instead, the self-checkout station locks itself up, and the customer has to wait several minutes for the assigned employee (who, most of the time, is also working two other tasks at the store) to show up, analyze the situation, enter service mode, and do the undo steps.
Do they ever actually analyze the situation? In my experience they just ignore any issues and hit "approve" and on you go. I could have done that myself.
It's a classic false-positive problem. Most times when the self-checkout clerk has to give you attention, the problem is stupidly innocuous, so they blindly approve, as they have been trained by the system that it isn't a real problem.
Some times I'm curious to see how stores work at the US nowadays.
My experience is that the assigned employee is always looking for something to do, because he can't leave the self-checkout area, but there isn't anything to actually do there. And well, the store better not accuse honest customers of anything, or else some stuff they really won't like will happen (and that applies to poor customers too).
Anyway, the experience is still so bad that I tend not to use it. But that's because the machines really suck.
Between Costco/Target/Winco/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Kroger/Uniqlo, my experience is that I can check out quicker than before. I rarely have to wait for assistance, which itself is rarely needed.
I greatly prefer the single queue in self checkouts rather than betting on which cash register line will get stuck on someone that has a pricing issue or something. Obviously, this has nothing to do with self checkouts, but I find single queues far more ubiquitous after self checkouts came around than before.
For lots of stuff, a cashier is probably quicker. But I almost never have lots of stuff.
Just buy insurance! Oh, it's up to you to understand what it actually covers, and it's about as much as the room/flight costs but won't you feel better about your choice?
There's multiple levels missing when you do it yourself. Usually they would do their best to sort things out. At the very least it was a single call to deal with the issue to someone who knew how to rebook flights, find new hotels, whatever, not you struggling to figure things out on your phone. For a full mistake, yes, they'd usually reimburse you, if not there are regulations around refunds and things like small claims court.
Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.
>Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.
90% of travel is probably happening where mobile networks are available. Also, since most travel seems to happen without travel agents today, it appears that "luck" is not that necessary, otherwise people wouldn't be choosing to forego travel agents.
They were in a position to notice and correct most mistakes near-immediately, or at least shortly after making it. For most other cases, apologies and/or reimbursements backed by insurance if needed, transparent to the customer. In self-service, all that is responsibility of the user, but it's all built on requests to third parties, so the user is not in a position to unilaterally fix a bad request.
> The travel agent is also not in a position to "unilaterally" fix a bad request, they are also requesting other parties to do things.
Yes, but they're already one level up, so they can fix the problems in their company's immediate system, and then unlike the customer, they're a trusted party in the network of all other parties, so they can mail/call other parties directly and get people there to fix issues without too much delay.
By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.
Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.
Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.
When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.
Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
> Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.
This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table.
I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above.
>Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.
When you purchase something from a company you are buying the commodity not the labor used in its making. A commodity has many costs wrapped into it, including labor. The profit a commodity brings to a company doesn't have a 1-1 relationship with the wage of a laborer, so a consumer buying a coffee isn't buying the labor of someone else, they are buying a product.
"Buying human labor" means you are an employer paying a wage or rate. Generally employers are people or entities that have accumulated wealth through profit. It's fair to say these people skew towards wealthy, hardly a silly statement at all.
Both rich and poor people can be time-poor. Depends a lot on priority and values. I value spending time with my family and I will often trade money for time to enable that.
Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.
Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
From what I've observed in different parts of the world, small restaurants, hair salons, beauty salons, boutiques, etc. all go straight to Facebook/Instagram. Opening hours and driving directions are already there, menus/offers are in the gallery - together with pictures of the meals or whatever they are selling. Contact forms are replaced with a WhatsApp number. Testimonials are the customers comments. If there are negative ones, either respond for bonus points or just outright delete them.
Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering section since delivery apps cover that too.
>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.
You're only seeing this in the perspective of a customer. Ordering apps take a huge chunk of the tiny margin restaurants have. Smart owners put up their own ordering system instead.
Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash based, tech adverse, etc)
Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant. So even if you get just half of the people to book online, that's still a great improvement.
And restaurants very commonly have events, either private events closing the place for other guests, or public events with a lot of people wanting to book. In these cases an online platform is even more useful. Then you remove a whole lot of calls.
>Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant.
What makes you think old school restaurants care about that levels of efficiency and optimisations? If they did, they'd all optimize everything till they all become become mcdonalds.
It's in the part you quoted: They don't want to be interrupted by phone calls while they are working. Because they are very busy with other stuff. People working in restaurants are always on their feet doing something.
Taking online orders helps them ease a bit of a burden without having any negative effect for the customer experience.
Someone from the staff still needs to regularly check and apply the online booking or cancellations because waiters are not autonomous robots where the booking system beams the info their brain(yet). It doesn't remove any friction you're just replacing interrupt driven phone calls with the internet driven polling and calling this radical innovation.
I've worked for some years in restaurants. Guess what everybody hates? Having their work interrupted by phone calls.
Would you like to have your work interrupted all the time by phone calls?
Today I consult for restaurants and help them get their web presence and the reservation systems they need on their websites. They are very happy for this.
A restaurant usually has their booking calendar open on a display that all the chefs and waiters can check when they walk by. The system doesn't need any human to "apply" reservations or cancellations.
And there is a big difference between being interrupted to take bookings, or checking bookings when you have down-time. But thank you for your hacker sarcasm.
Guests usually call during the day to book tables for the evening or for another evening. In the afternoon between lunch and dinner, there is more time for staff to check bookings. Instead of answering the phone in the middle of morning prep or lunch service.
Then there's events. A venue can have public events with hundreds or thousands of participants. Usually during high season. So now you'd have that additional burden of phone calls, which becomes completely impossible unless you hire additional staff to only take calls. Or you have your own online system which is available 24/7 for customers to make and even pay for their bookings.
Third party reservation systems take anything from 15%-25% to do it for you, which is not really great for the restaurant, compared to buying their own system.
Or if it's an online system for take-away orders or deliveries, these get sent directly to the kitchen ticket printer.
And it's the same for the other small business category: accommodation. The best thing they can do is have their own online booking systems. To increase sales, reduce burden on staff, and reduce expenses to third party providers. And give customers a better experience.
They can purchase the battery technology, just as many manufacturers already do.
I hate to be a luddite, but they also don't need to be pioneers to succeed here. They need cars that meet their customers needs, just like not every ICE car needs to have an F1 racing engine in it.
For that they need captive market that keeps China out to get the kind of marketshare they enjoy now, otherwise chinese makers will sweep in and dominate the market. Or another option is to just take Chinese EVs and rebadge them, like some manufacturers are doing.
I think that's the issue Meta had, they were trying to introduce VR to the greater public. VRs actual community is a niche of individuals who love the technology, they didn't want what Horizon was offering. VRChat is too weird for the average person, but Horizon was not interesting enough for the average person either.
I do believe that the recent Meta headsets pulled in a lot of users who will stay, thanks to their price point and performance.
There was a solution for meta though but they failed to pivot. Almost every generation as a whole disliked VR, except for children. Gen Alpha is into VR, but meta failed to market it as their NES or much better Roblox. Instead, meta marketing stayed focused on disinterested adults. Maybe it was because the children were using their parent’s accounts since it’s apparent that meta’s marketing department didn’t touch their VR devices? Otherwise, they’d realize the horizon and every online VR game was filled with kids.
Do they need one do you think? They are trying to make one for sure but it's interesting to think about whether they actually need their own models to survive the shift. Maybe they just deliver other people's models via Meta products?
Meta stock is priced as a growth stock - not on its current financial returns but on what the market believes it will do in the future. It has been priced like this from the start because it has been growing since the start.
As soon as it stops being able to convince the market it is still growing, then the stock price drops to what the business's current financials dictate, which will be a huge drop. That huge drop has severe negative consequences for everyone involved in that decision. Spending tens of billions on the Metaverse project was better, even though it failed, because it created a growth story they could sell to the market.
So now that's gone they need another growth story. Given the current state of the tech world, that's probably AI-related. And they probably need their own models as part of it.
They can't just "survive the shift" because it's not really about survival. They need to be part of the shift, so that they can convince the market that they're still growing.
I don't disagree with your first statement but there is a huge range of cars in the Japanese market. They make the Toyota Land Cruiser and Nissan Patrol after all, smaller by American standards but the biggest cars most other countries will see.
It was a GUI install, defaults to KDE Plasma, auto installs and manages the graphics drivers. Very smooth, better than Windows install in most ways.
reply