Sorry no. Here on HN, your having a vested interest in some market makes your opinion entirely invalid. That is, enless you're interested in one of the correct markets such as software or AI services.
That's why corporations that have made creative products have traditionally never gone anywhere. They all just went out of business. And all the artists got rich.
Yeah-- in a professional workflow, at best, these tools are for getting ideas rather than creating output that will be used directly. Lots of folks use them for actual creation because they're just so enamored with the ability to create vaguely technically competent output from text, but they're all pretty much a bee-line to mediocre, and overcoming mediocrity is absolutely the most difficult part of working with AI output. The same is true with text, as you mentioned, and image generators. As Charles Eames said, "The details are not the details. They make the design." Well, these tools suck with details, and details convey character, perspective, message, meaning, etc. Surely the tooling will improve this in years to come, but it certainly hasn't yet.
Yes, there are a TON of free tools and endless instruction on using them. If you move your budget up to making one-time payments for things that cost less than one month using a subscription service, you get an astonishing breadth of new options. Beyond that, so many of the more expensive music making tools are one-time payments rather than subscription services. Buy Ableton once? You own it. You can get the latest version at a discount, but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using the version you bought, in perpetuity.
People that never considered the value of artistic process until it was the topic du jour unilaterally decided that it was inefficient, oppressive, complex, frivolous, and unfairly inaccessible to those that hadn't put any sustained effort into developing theirs. If you didn't understand what they don't, you'd realize that companies spending billions of dollars to create tools that make cheap simulacra of artists' work to sell them at a loss to crush them in their own markets was merely the natural progression of artistic praxis. Despite it being economically unsustainable and clearly only cheap until it craters the value of artistic skill, these tools have democratized creativity. Instead of creation only being available to those with the interest and willingness to practice and develop their artistic sense, process, and skill, they're now broadly available to anyone willing to pay money for a subscription service that will obviously soon be a hell of a lot more expensive, or shell out a few thousands dollars for a top-tier video card that you almost certainly already have in your gaming rig, anyway. This is silicon valley progress and if you don't like it, you're a communist.
Totally with you. But it's the trend we get to re-balance in a good way:
> People that never considered the value of artistic process until it was the topic du jour unilaterally decided that it was inefficient, oppressive, complex, frivolous, and unfairly inaccessible to those that hadn't put any sustained effort into developing theirs.
This is eerily reminiscent of what's happening inside the USA government & administration today...
It's incredibly elitist to gatekeep people having their plans, actions, opinions, and philosophical ideas taken seriously just because they haven't trudged through the onerous process of considering what humanity has already learned about those things. Do these people expect everybody that wants to profit must try to predict the damage that their actions could cause among people that will obviously be affected? Some people just don't like ethics that much, and expecting them to be beholden to their boundaries is pretty old fashioned.
For sure! After all, what could be more democratic than a monthly subscription that could get snatched away at any moment - and clearly there's nothing more creative than pressing a button and waiting for 20 seconds!
I like the part where you confuse being sarcastic with being intelligent. A language model somewhere is taking notes.
> People that never considered the value of artistic process
One certainly learns of crazy things on HackerNews. Apparently people have never considered the value of artistic process, and not only that, but you also happen know that exactly.
> the topic du jour unilaterally decided
You're literally in this thread disagreeing.
> it was inefficient, oppressive, complex, frivolous, and unfairly inaccessible
Very interesting claims, too bad they were only stated in your imagination. That being said, your imagination I think is surprisingly close to my opinions! Let's discuss each point:
- it is very time-intensive to produce creative works of any kind, and indeed to perform any kind of mental work at all
- it does get pretty complex too, and because of this, some mental efforts are even shot down for being too frivolous (such as that bit of automation that is not worth making because it would never pay itself off)
- oppressive is a bit of an odd one, but if I think hard enough, I guess I can see how having to use the output of e.g. my work (software) can be oppressive
- same for unfairly inaccessible - lately there's been a trend where various services would only be available online, and the only contact you'd get is a self-service form or two. Maaaybe you'd get an AI chatbot to chat with. Certainly, to those with minimal to no tech literacy, this will be inaccessible and it will feel unfair.
> was merely the natural progression of artistic praxis
If only there was a way to disagree with this without being a dickhead!
> these tools have democratized creativity
How does one democratize an innate property of people? Surely you mean that they have democratized the production of creative works rather, and even of those only the less high-art ones, which I'm sure you never fail to point out when shown one?
> they're now broadly available to anyone willing to pay money for a subscription service that will obviously soon be a hell of a lot more expensive, or shell out a few thousands dollars for a top-tier video card that you almost certainly already have in your gaming rig, anyway.
And what happens after that? Artists will be like "oh gee, well I'm not doing this again!"?
> This is silicon valley progress
And also Hangzhou and Shenzen, China.
> and if you don't like it, you're a communist
Are you? You seem to be more of a raging idiot than anything to me at least.
The selection definitely changed. As soon as "Slashdot Video" started happening-- obviously a bunch of advertisements presented as news-- I was done.
Initially, the aggregation was only part of it-- the discussion was the best part. By the time Slashdot Video started happening, the comments had already gotten a bit 4chan-esque. I consistently saw comments rated "3: Troll" or similar because people were just using upvotes (without any specific descriptors) to counter what others had downvoted as obvious troll comments. Last time I went back, I looked into the comments to see pages-upon-pages of ascii art swastikas and just thought... why the hell would I bother with this?
The lack of moderation over there probably started as a philosophical stance that, at that early, naive juncture in the internet, I sympathize with. I'm guessing that after that, it just became a cash cow that they didn't want to bother creating an FTE to manage, and now most of the remaining users are there solely because it's a community that rewards being an obnoxious edge lord spewing out content-free insults as long as they resonate with the obnoxious majority in the comments.
Yeah— I hate coming across a doc that’s less like a technical reference, or even a tutorial, and more like a treatise on the philosophy behind their technical decisions. I know it’s a bit controversial, but I find Python’s docs like that. They’re very thorough and great for reading about how the Python interpreter does things, and why, but if you need to quickly reference something about a function or a quick reminder about syntax you infrequently use, they’re miles behind MDN’s JavaScript docs, any of the .NET language docs I’ve used, Elixir’s, and even PHP (though the lack of versioning when I used it seemed dangerous).
Because its continued existence has been in grave doubt for years?
I was a heavy Flickr user, but when Yahoo sold it to SmugMug in 2018, I basically assumed it was going to be either merged out of distinct existence or shuttered. I downloaded an archive of all my stuff and stopped using it altogether. Because what’s the point of using a platform that’s so obviously no longer viable…was my thinking at the time. I would never have guessed it would remain alive this long but it’s still not anything I would want to invest time in or rely on anymore.
Yeah I did a brief scan and a brief search for opinions on their practices when I saw the comment I initially replied to and didn’t find anything concerning. Doesn’t mean there isn’t anything, but it either wasn’t serious enough to be surfaced, or nobody more knowledgeable than me has looked.
As someone in the US that’s bounced in and out of tech, including some longish stints in blue collar jobs, it honestly blows my mind that the tech scene is so all-encompassing that many in it feel like it is representative of… anything else. I’m not talking about the tech libertarian types that think any impediment to the ultra rich vacuuming up everyone else’s wealth is tantamount to dictatorship. I’m talking about the typical happy path developer (I shy away from saying average because all us developers are above-average developers) that went to college for comp sci right after high school pretty quickly secured a junior role for maybe 6x-9x the (ridiculous) Federal Poverty Level.
To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside.
I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.
> it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world
It's about margins. Software has the 2nd highest margins of any sector (highest is High Finance), so it's easy to pay competitively in software compared to other fields.
Right. There’s obviously a totally valid market-based reason for it, and I am absolutely not implying that developers should receive less of that than they do. However, its an external factor which gives many developers a very skewed understanding of how much work most people expend for the amount of money they receive and agency they get at work, and how much they’re worth as workers outside of the software world with roughly the same amount of ambition and effort. Compared to most industries, software companies coddled developers and really tried to trump up the mystique of the great hacker genius. While particularly apparent in the restaurant industry, developers thinking they’ve ‘solved’ an unrelated business they’ve got no experience in using their genius software brain or assume they can simply transfer their existing skills to a new field is pretty common. I encountered one developer who thought they’d simply pivot to crime to keep their family comfortable, which is hilarious. The beginning of a career in crime is long and full of petty bullshit crimes that pay very little because you don’t have the wisdom to not get caught doing more serious crimes, and you don’t have the network to support you doing things like getting unregistered guns, fencing, etc. What I wouldn’t pay to see that guy walk into a bar in a rough part of town, order a craft beer, and try to debate the sketchiest people he saw about why he’d make a trustworthy partner in crime.
I'm just saying the only reason SWEs (and IBs) get paid the big bucks is primarily because of market economics, even if plenty of other high stress roles (eg. Nursing, EMT, Teaching) get paid a relative pittance.
I think a lot of us members of the tech industry need to cut down on our hubris and respect other industries and jobs, and understand that we are cogs inasmuch as anyone else.
Much more recently to be honest. The bottom only fell in MechE fields (Automotive, Aerospace, Defense) in the 1990s, but if global tensions continue, it might be a good time to be a MechE.
That’s right. Things are changing and it’s going to be a really tough pill to swallow for a lot of people that only think they understand what work looks like for nearly everyone else in the world.
Ask the nurses how much they got for severance when steward health closed. Or what my severance was when I got laid off in 2009 working as a fine dining line cook as a culinary school graduate. Or the career concept artists replaced by AI. Add all three up, throw in 4 bucks, and you can buy yourself a coffee at Starbucks. And all of their salaries were a hell of a lot lower, even in the exact same housing markets. Hell you might be able to add all three up and still be in the neighborhood of junior developer.
The dev world’s baseline for what constitutes good treatment, bad treatment, and fairness from employers, an acceptable amount of disposable income, acceptable housing expenses, etc. is completely detached from the rest of the working world. Now that the demand is dramatically changing, that will probably also dramatically change, and that’s going to be rough. If it does, maybe it will recover. It has before, but this seems like a much more significant change.
I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
> if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this!
Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery.
> that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous
I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue?
I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?)
My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying.
Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it
