> I think software is cheap to write but expensive to maintain
OK, but I think you're agreeing with me. Regardless of why it is expensive, it drives companies to bloat their products (to increase their market) and to exploit dark patterns (to increase unit revenue).
If software were very cheap to create and maintain, then it would break that cycle.
> if you don't keep adding features to it and you build on a substrate that's similarly not adding features and putting you on a perpetual treadmill of autoupdates, then software can be much less expensive
In the 90s Microsoft found that people only used 10% of the features of Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, everyone used a different 10%. At the limit, you would have to create a separate product for each feature permutation to cover the whole market.
And of course, creating and maintaining 10 different products is more expensive than 1 product with all the features.
> I plan to just put small durable things out into the world
This is great! Actions speak louder than words and you'll learn a lot in the process.
> Will LLMs yield custom software that does exactly what you need and stabilizes?
I agree that this is the critical question. No one knows (certainly I don't). But let's say the goal is to create custom software that does exactly what you need. Is there a practical path to that other than via LLMs? I don't think so.
> do you trust the real AIs here, the tech companies selling LLMs to you
I think this is orthogonal to whether the tech works at all. But, in general, yes, I trust most tech companies to provide value greater than the cost of their products. Pretty much by definition, for all the software I pay for, I trust the companies to deliver greater value. When that changes, I stop paying and switch.
And, of course, I support all the usual government regulators and public/private watchdogs to hold corporations accountable.
I think the differing stances towards tech companies might be the crucial axiomatic difference between our positions. I've just lived through 30 years of reduced regulation of Tech, and it's hard to imagine a world that reliably prevents that from recurring.
> In the 90s Microsoft found that people only used 10% of the features of Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, everyone used a different 10%. At the limit, you would have to create a separate product for each feature permutation to cover the whole market.
They were approaching this from the other side, though, of already having built a ton of features and then trying to fragment a unified market. It doesn't work because from Microsoft's perspective the goal of Excel is market control at the cheapest price, and giving each user their 10% is more expensive.
But if you shift perspective to the users of Excel, you don't need to care about market control. If everyone starts out focusing on just the 10% they care about, it might be tractable to just build that for themselves. The total cost in the market is greater, particularly because I'm not imagining everyone using the same 10% is banding together in a single fork. But that becomes this totally fake metric that nobody cares about.
My approach involves throwing an order of magnitude more attention at the problem than people currently devote to computing. But a single order of magnitude feels doable and positive ROI. If everyone needs to become a programmer, that's many orders of magnitude and likely negative ROI. That's not what I'm aiming for.
> I think software is cheap to write but expensive to maintain
OK, but I think you're agreeing with me. Regardless of why it is expensive, it drives companies to bloat their products (to increase their market) and to exploit dark patterns (to increase unit revenue).
If software were very cheap to create and maintain, then it would break that cycle.
> if you don't keep adding features to it and you build on a substrate that's similarly not adding features and putting you on a perpetual treadmill of autoupdates, then software can be much less expensive
In the 90s Microsoft found that people only used 10% of the features of Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, everyone used a different 10%. At the limit, you would have to create a separate product for each feature permutation to cover the whole market.
And of course, creating and maintaining 10 different products is more expensive than 1 product with all the features.
> I plan to just put small durable things out into the world
This is great! Actions speak louder than words and you'll learn a lot in the process.
> Will LLMs yield custom software that does exactly what you need and stabilizes?
I agree that this is the critical question. No one knows (certainly I don't). But let's say the goal is to create custom software that does exactly what you need. Is there a practical path to that other than via LLMs? I don't think so.
> do you trust the real AIs here, the tech companies selling LLMs to you
I think this is orthogonal to whether the tech works at all. But, in general, yes, I trust most tech companies to provide value greater than the cost of their products. Pretty much by definition, for all the software I pay for, I trust the companies to deliver greater value. When that changes, I stop paying and switch.
And, of course, I support all the usual government regulators and public/private watchdogs to hold corporations accountable.