Comment by TeMPOraL

9 hours ago

> I don't know what's wrong with people that they put up with this stuff voluntarily.

They have no other choice.

Tech is magic, it's near-pure supplier-driven market. Consumers don't understand it, barriers to entry are stupidly high[0], but the products/services are still necessary. Consumers are thus forced to choose from what's available on the market, not what would be actually useful. Companies know this very well.

This was true before computers, too - TVs, appliances - but is much stronger with computers (and every non-computer tech becoming a computer skeuomorphing as appliance).

That's why people "put up with this stuff voluntarily". They learn to cope, learn to not touch this if they can avoid it, and maybe silently complain to friends and family. That's why "can you fix my printer" is one of the most hated aspects of family life by computer people.

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[0] - Hardware is pretty much impenetrable, because the easy parts are high-capital, and the important parts are supplier contracts, which everyone who matters has cornered already. Software-side is technically one of the lowest barriers-to-entry economic activities in history, and LLMs help a lot, but in practice, software is rarely the valuable part of software (!) - it's usually network effects (e.g. social media) or supplier contracts (Spotify, etc.), or such.