That is why we have slow, bloated software. The companies that create the software do not have to pay any of the operational costs to run it.
If you have to buy extra RAM or pay unnecessary electrical or cooling expenses because the code is bad; it's not their problem. There is no software equivalent to MPG measurements for cars where efficient engine designs are rewarded at the time of purchase.
I upgraded my desktop last year (motherboard, cpu, RAM) and I felt like I wanted 64GB of DDR5 but figured I might need 128GB in a year or so. Normally, I would have bought the 64GB and waited to get the extra RAM later. Price usually dropped over time.
Boy, am I glad I decided to get the whole 128GB before RAM prices spiked!
I see the next really big task for software as the ability to separate the signal from the noise. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has gone from a 'nice to have' to 'rescue my sanity'.
Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse.
This is just one of the many risks you take when your app or service is dependent on some other third party service. Even if it is run by 'the big boys' (in this case Apple), your success is dependent on their good graces.
They can kick you out and make your software the equivalent of bricked hardware; without any means to appeal their decisions.
> Even if it is run by 'the big boys' (in this case Apple), your success is dependent on their good graces.
Not "even if" though, it is "particularly if". The big boys don't have to care, so they don't care, because what are you going to do. They have all the power, you have none.
If you are going to depend on a third party it is best to depend on small ones where they need you as a customer as much as you need them as a service. In an equal relationship you can always reach a human to have a dialogue about any issues that arise.
Of course, if you're targeting a mobile platform, you're out of luck. Best to target the open web if at all possible.
They aren't dependent on a third-party "service", exactly. If you make software for phones, the most popular hardware platform in the world @ 8 billion devices, you are at the complete mercy of Apple/Google, period.
Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.
I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.
> contract provisions that would require the company to
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.
I agree. Faster hardware or horizontal scaling on distributed cloud environments can mask the problem; but it certainly doesn't solve the problem of bloated, inefficient software.
While it might not be necessary to spend hours fine-tuning every function; code optimization should be the mindset of every programmer no matter what they are coding.
How many fewer data centers would we need if all that software running in them was more efficient?
If you are trying to bootstrap your startup, then one of your biggest challenges is trying to find co-founders who can/will put as much skin in the game as you do. Everyone wants you to take all the risks while sharing all the rewards.
That’s not true. Most of the time it’s the founder who wants early employees to take all of the risks by paying them much less than their market value with the promise of statistically worthless illiquid “equity”.
Especially bad when it comes to non technical founders with nothing but an idea, who put “ai” in their names and convinced YC to fund them.
Unlike OP, I don't think forks are great. Far too many forks happen when they shouldn't. In this case, it feels like the original project was hijacked just because it lacked a feature this person wanted.
Many forks can confuse the market and fracture adoption. A dozen different projects, each with slightly different features, is harmful in my opinion. A fork should be done as a last resort. With AI, it may become just another knee jerk reaction.
If you have to buy extra RAM or pay unnecessary electrical or cooling expenses because the code is bad; it's not their problem. There is no software equivalent to MPG measurements for cars where efficient engine designs are rewarded at the time of purchase.
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