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by staplers 89 days ago
The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability, aesthetic trends, and function design still dominate the purchasing decisions of the general public.

Being tapped into fickle human preference and changing utility landscape will be necessary for a long time still. It may get faster and easier to build, but tastemakers and craftsmen still have heavy sway over markets than can mass-produce vanilla products.
2 comments
Ygg2 89 days ago
> The assembly line has been mass producing ready-made products for over 100 years and yet product quality, material stability

Luckily if you want stability or quality they are nowhere to be found.

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dmd 89 days ago
I would generally put “stability” and “quality” as attributes of mass production far more than that of handmade things. Yes, an expert can make a quality product by hand, but MOST handmade things are far more likely to be shoddy. The whole point of mass production was that suddenly you could make a million identical perfect products.
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Ygg2 89 days ago
True, but motivations for mass production also are motivations for making things worse off overall.
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barnabee 89 days ago
Agree with this. I think LLMs allow more time to bring these things to the fore and more leverage to do them cost efficiently.
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