[chillfox]

Because AI is a new product category in tech, and every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history, and so the dumb shit is repeated until they learn their own lessons.

I am almost 40, and I have seen the same pattern play out several times now, it’s always the same.

[disgruntledphd2]

> every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history,

I've worked in a bunch of industries and places over the years, and this is not just a tech thing. Like, there's a reason that saving a day in the library with a week in the lab is a pretty famous saying.

[joncrane]

Nice saying. Another one I just remembered is "We don't have enough money to do it right, but we have enough to do it twice."

[giancarlostoro]

Reminds me of the time a former employer which shall remain nameless paid a Senior Developer to spend an entire year coding something a $15,000 license from the maintainers of the original library would have given them. So lets spend 6 figures to save 15 grand or whatever.

This was a CTO burning funds, and that does not even cover the maintenance costs, especially as the original library changes and becomes drastically more modern.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Reminds me of the time a former employer which shall remain nameless paid a Senior Developer to spend an entire year coding something a $15,000 license from the maintainers of the original library would have given them. So lets spend 6 figures to save 15 grand or whatever.

You argumentation assumes that the goal was saving money.

On the other hand, if the company's goal is to become a little bit more independent of this library (and their licensing fees), this approach often makes a lot of sense.

[vkou]

You're assuming that the goal was making the company more successful.

On the other hand, if the CTO's goal is to grow his empire with no regard to the well-being of the company, this approach makes a lot of sense.

[snarfy]

I just used this a few weeks ago, except it was time not money. And I'm on my fourth implementation because nobody wants to stop and actually have a plan.

[partyficial]

what if kings attacking and burning down libraries of advanced civilizations (Nalanda, Alexandria) is a way for humans to reset the world's knowledge, because we got bored of our achievements and want to start from scratch ?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yeah, I feel that.

The ageism in tech probably has something to do with it.

When I see some of these brobdingnagian disasters, I always wonder if there were any adults in the room, when the idea was greenlighted.

[antonvs]

Ageism is definitely part of it, but most people just don't seem to care to learn in general, and of course the incentives are against it.

They'd rather treat the general version of Greenspun's 10th rule as a commandment, and create a new, ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of some fraction of whatever already addresses the requirement, than learn about how to use some existing tool that they don't already know.

One of my favorite examples is a company that home-rolled their own version of (a subset of) Kubernetes, ending up with a fabulously fragile monstrosity that none of the devs want to touch any more, and those who do quickly regret it.

[berkeleyjunk]

Reminds me of

https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern...

[sodapopcan]

And Kubernetes kinda built a BEAM... kinda :) Like, if everyone would just use BEAM then it's true (lol).

[kirici]

How does BEAM renew my certificates, configure reverse-proxies, mount networked storage volumes to whichever node a given process is running on and handle cronjobs, disk pressure and secrets?

I sure hope it doesn't involve a bunch of shell scripts to create a new, ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden...

[eecc]

Nah Kubernetes is a systems level, language agnostic (at least doesn’t force you to run Golang workloads) variant of J2EE. It’s basically modern day Websphere

[odo1242]

What is BEAM? I get, like, physical beams when I try looking it up.

[edo_cat]

Erlang virtual machine

[hobofan]

Would you like to explain the similarity you see between them? Apart from both of them being designed for resiliency, I don't see any.

[8note]

i think there's two parts

1. there's too much to learn and know, and the cs courseware and interviews are all about algorithmic complexity, rather than business setup and operations. same with "how do you raise money" vs "how do you make a great customer experience"

2. the market rewards building the new functionality, not building all the standard chunks required to run a business

if anthropic had great customer support built out, but no model and no claude-code, theyd be much worse than they are now having stuff people want but lacking the ability to serve it

---

clearly theres still plenty of b2b startup opportunities standardizing how all these things work, so that business can focus on their actual business rather than recreating all the basics

[orbisvicis]

I had to implement a subset of postfix because security wouldn't greenlight any MTAs (or third-party software for that matter)...

[antonvs]

There can be reasons for reinventing something, both good and bad. But I was more talking about the cases where people regiment something because they either didn't bother to do the slightest bit of research into what was already available, or because they didn't care and just wanted to do it themselves, inflicting their inevitably poor solution on everyone else.

[giancarlostoro]

> Because AI is a new product category in tech, and every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history, and so the dumb shit is repeated until they learn their own lessons.

I'm only half a decade behind you, and I agree. Sad to see really, these are people who work really hard, but I think they are too focused on the algos and nobody is hiring experienced back-end and application builders.

[SkyBelow]

What's the chance that it is market motivated? That the companies most likely to succeed are those willing to break the rules (this isn't to say that breaking the rules makes one likely to succeed, you have to break the right rules and not the wrong ones, and that distinction is often times unknown til after the fact).

This might mean that the companies that we see explode in popularity are those whose cultures are already biased in ways that don't consider negative outcomes, as the companies that did consider them already excluded themselves from exploding in the market (they might still be entirely successful startups, but at a vastly smaller scale of success).

[pjc50]

It is absolutely market motivated, by the investor market. You can raise a great deal of capital by simply making exaggerated promises, then doing the minimum effort to just about achieve it.

[cineticdaffodil]

Physics dont apply to newborn gods.

[miki123211]

s/in tech//

Every time something new comes along, people go "we are the new hotness, all those pesky lessons those old guys have learned over the last 200-or-so years don't apply to us." It applies to tech. It applies to crypto. It applies to political revolutions. Every time, it ends the same way (with the political revolutions inevitably being a lot more deadly).

[ErroneousBosh]

I am a little over 50 and I have also seen the same pattern play out. It's incredible.

Lots of things were the Hot New Things That Will Change Everything, like VLIW processors, transputers before that, no doubt others. Perceptrons! Oh wait they can't do XOR functions, well how about Neural Networks? Too complex! Tell you what then, Fuzzy Logic, it'll power everything from washing machines to self-driving cars! Now we're at LLMs that are just neural network-powered Eliza bots that pirate everything like you did the week you first discovered Torrentleech.

Some things have stuck around, like OOP and RISC processors. Others like Quantum Computing are - like Iran's nuclear weapons program - just weeks away from blowing away everything we know, for the past 40 years or so.

Everything runs on relational databases on thumping great Unix boxes and that's unlikely to ever change.

[smilekzs]

Google TPUs are VLIW machines on a circuit-switched network.

[ErroneousBosh]

So, a tech bubble, powered by the technology of two older tech bubbles.

[troyvit]

> and every single new product category in tech always, no exceptions, insists on learning nothing from history

I dunno. Maybe what they learned is that SaaS products have a familiar flow. They push as many restrictions as they can get away with to protect their moat until they do something that causes noticeable dip in subscriptions. Then they issue a disingenuous mea culpa and find another way to protect their walled garden.

Now users on the other hand. Might they be the ones who haven't learned from being jerked around in exactly the same way by SaaS providers for the past 20+ years?