Comment by darkerside
1 day ago
Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later?
Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
1 day ago
Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later?
Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
Actually yes. I wanted to get into UI programming with GTK 2 and right now im waiting for GTK $n to stabilize so i can commit to it.
Knowing that GTK $n-1 will soon be obsolete is enough reason to not put effort into learning it.
In general, we should focus more on what endures over what changes. Focus less on the times and more on the eternities. People very often drown in the noise of passing fads and fashions and ephemeral tech. Can you become really skilled at using some piece of tech? Sure. Is it worth becoming really skilled? It depends on the circumstances and the particular person, but in most cases, probably not. It usually is a waste of time (but given the kinds of SFVs that people publish or hobbies people have, people are generally quite good at frittering away their lives on stupid shit).
Incidentally, this is how you can distinguish between a good CS curriculum from a bad one. A good one focuses heavily on principles; the particular technical trappings are mostly just a medium, like Latin used to be in academia, now replaced by English. You pick up what you need to do to the job.
The conclusion that you should wait to build anything is an illustration of the danger of economic inflation that the author started with. I'm not sure why he thinks the economic version is toxic but the technological version is a good idea though.
The answer to should we just sit around and wait for better technology is obviously no. We gain a lot of knowledge by building with what we have; builders now inform where technology improves. (The front page has an article about Voyager being a light day away...)
I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.
> I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.
Government bonds already do this for absolutely everything. If I can put my money in a guaranteed bond at X%/year then your startup that's a risky investment has to make much better returns to make it worth my while. That's why the stock market is always chasing growth.
I agree. I had several projects lined up and I delayed one because it used same tech as another significantly smaller project, so I learned the tech on the smaller simpler project and then used the knowledge on the bigger project. It was beneficial to not do the bigger project first.
I think you're right. The author is quite wrong on many aspects in my view. One of the central mistake he makes is that creating a profitable startup is mostly a matter of shipping good product i.e.
> Used to be, you had to find a customer in SO much pain that they'd settle for a point solution to their most painful problem, while you slowly built the rest of the stuff. Now, you can still do that one thing really well, but you can also quickly build a bunch of the table stakes features really fast, making it more of a no-brainer to adopt your product.
> it will get even cheaper and faster later
Yeah, and will be done by somebody else. I think this is the main problem, and if you get rid of it, you'll have a completely sensible strategy. I mean there are many government contractors who, through corrupt connections, can guarantee that work will be awarded to them, and very often doing just that.