We are able to build literally any digital product we can imagine from our laptops and deploy it to the world, yet the vast majority of us choose to join a company that pours its engineering talent into making dog filters on teenage girls, or that adds emoji reactions to posts. It seems that tremendous amounts of energy are poured into created these laughably narrow, stupid products or features. I look at someone like Steve Wozniak who seems to have once been an engineering genius and wonder why the f*ck has he not done anything good since apple? I include myself in this rant
Why are most people in most fields so uncreative, non-visionary? E.g. why is the average person so damn average? Fixed the title for you.
No, there are few other fields where so much can be done at such low cost, and where the "cogs" in the machine wield so much power and freedom.
E.g.?
Why does our society always fight with each other, can you imagine how much more we can accomplish if we stop killing each other and hoarding resources. If all nations would just work together to advance the benefit for everyone. Nope, that’s not how humans work. We are lucky to be where we are now.
That’s how humans worked for millennia until agriculture. Prior to that there was no goods worth stealing or having to defend. Even after agriculture, hoarding was only by priests/chiefs and most cultures had tales and customs that created peer-pressure against hoarding.
Because we always get side tracked and spend all our intellectual energy on solving useless problems https://youtu.be/mMeqEDEfniA
Have you seen the sex change filter on Snapchat? Tell me that feature isn’t amazing. We often trivialize features which do silly things but i think people just have different opinions about what is impactful
This. Even if it is just silly, it brings joy to millions of people.
Because the customer is always right and they want useless uncreative nonvisionary shit that everyone else wants.
Money
It’s just capitalism, not tech. Look at healthcare. Sure, you could research cures or treatments for horrible diseases and viruses... but we’ll only hire you to research analogues for penis and depression pills that already exist under different patents.
From this comment, I can guess you neither have worked in healthcare nor have many friends who do.
No, but I can read. Do you have a counter-argument or do you just network with a lot of professionals? I’ve read that pharma companies, for example, do innovative R&D on a select few big things like Alzheimer’s but other than that, the business incentive is on new drugs for existing “markets”. Not to mention the spending outside of R&D which is mostly marketing to providers to compete with companies making similar drugs. Not very efficient from a abstract “health” standpoint, but sometimes efficient for making profits.
There are still so many problems in the world that need solutions: 1. True object DB 2. Distributed transaction Mgt over REST 3. Something better than SQL. 4. A true high level Prog Lang that is also scalable. 5. If you want to take it up by a notch then: A. A true personal robot B. Robotic weed wacker And many many more problems . Why don’t you start solving them ?
No, we used to be able to do that, but software has gotten incredibly large and complex and we certainly can’t on our own anymore. The same phenomenon applies to Wozniak on the hardware side. He was a genius at designing a floppy disk controller at low cost with a small number of primitive parts, but nobody really cares about those skills anymore. Software is made by armies now, and what gets made is up to people who have the money to hire that army, not us.
You're wrong about this. Part of the reason I asked myself this is because I saw how this guy, Pieter levels, built Nomadlist by himself and earns great income off of it while providing a useful service to thousands of people. Cool web app too. He created another web app by himself called remote ok that also makes him money. He runs his apps on cheap linode servers. Other indie makers do the same.
Your claim wasn’t that a guy built a nice thing. It was that “we literally can build any digital product we can imagine.” No, in fact, we can’t. We can build a web site that isn’t too elaborate. I’ll give you that.
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Capitalism - low risk high reward to work for an established company vs high risk, potentially very high reward / ruin in a startup.
True