Enshittification is pump-and-dump for companies over years instead of stocks over days/months.
Academia’s problems with replication and funding for null/negative results have been known about for a while and are a separate problem. I guess it could be argued that they’re related in that maybe an academic’s career shouldn’t be based on the profit cycle of their institution.
I still wasted a click after reading this because I thought, “no way is this article on science dedicated to that Lizard Person”.
And I was right, but only because it’s not really an article, much less about science. It’s more like a business experiment to find out if this particular LLM “author”, which generates disconnected gobblygook, can save them significant CapEx over a more expensive AI model that would output articles with something more closely resembling a coherent thought process, or being written by a human.
The amount of ethics of any leader is irrelevant in capitalism. The system itself demands the creation of monopolies and constant growth. If you try to be a good person, some other company will “win the race” and take you out of the competition one way or another.
Expecting or demanding ethics of people is trying to fix the wrong problem, while the solution is toppling the entire system.
It’s more than that - once you grow to the point where management don’t all have personal relationships, how do you decide who to promote?
Metrics. Meaning, money minus controversies… So basically, everyone with decision making power is incentivized to push profits as far as they can without crossing that ever shifting line where the public gets pissed at them…
At all levels, there’s a selection pressure to find the people who push the boundaries as far as they to maximize short term profits without drawing attention to how the sausage is made…
With that as the basis for all promotions across all industries, is there any surprise we are where we are, with the system cannibalizing itself now that there’s no new markets to expand into?
Yeah, we need to celebrate negative results, it’s still good scientific work. Hold the “grounding” scientists up in esteem next to the “groundbreaking” ones. All of the people who do scientific work are necessary for further scientific discovery and in the search for truth.
I’m an Apple customer but this is straight up wrong. Non-compete clauses this broad are ridiculous and practically stop ex-employees working anywhere they’re actually skilled to work. It quite literally ends someone’s career after their tenure.
If you’re expertise is SoC design and implementation, to be contractually restricted from working anywhere else that does SoC-related business is effectively kicking you out of the very industry and job pool you’re capable of working. Your mobility is totally stifled.
These kinds of restrictive covenants need to be outlawed or at least be limited to a short time frame no more than six months, requiring ex employers to pay the ex employee during this time if made redundant or fired or requiring the incumbent employer to pay the new employee during this time until they’re legally able to work again.
Hopefully this case goes against Apple favour and sets a strong precedent against absurd non compete clauses like this.
I’m not convinced by the premise of this statement
Scientific innovations should make ‘zero to one’ breakthroughs, such as the mobile phone or the combustion engine, but are instead making ‘one to many’ improvements to existing innovations
Maybe we are simply past the curve where a few people can innovate a breakthrough and now it has to come from a lot of data gathered from existing implementations? In order to invent a cellphone a lot of technologies had to be improved compared to their first introduction. And get cheap enough to enable experimentation
i think what they are trying to say is… because of bureaucratization of research the current method is stuck on improving rather than take risks and thinking outside the box.
I get that. But my point is: are we really sure that this is the problem?
One of the bases of our scientific method is repeatability of experiment. But at some point, when we can produce a lot of experiments, comes a problem: we can run out of people with time and resources that allow to repeat it. And one of the ways to mitigate it is to strengthen the requirements on the data gathering. So when you do find something weird, you can analyze how the parameters differ from other similar runs and if someone else is able to repeat it, you might have easier time finding which variable makes it so. Without consistent “we measured X after setting that to Y” it’s hard to repeat the experiment or even recognize if you really are observing something new.
Take a look at that error a few months ago that resulted in us thinking that a new superconductor that can work in ± room conditions was found. If we didn’t have precise description of what they did and what they measured, we could be still trying to reproduce their observations
modern inventions are orders of magnitude more complex than anything in the past
Well, in a way that’s always the case with inventions. I think when the first modern submarine (it’s just an example) was built it also was a marvel of alloy purity and manufacturing precision compared to anything in the past. It’s just that in the last century we observed a lot of technological progress because we started doing research in a lot more directions and in much higher volume. We caught up to our technological and theoretical knowledge and now the progress will slow down. Only to explode again after another breakthrough, as we often move in sinusoids, but that will be in one field + how it can help other fields, not a bunch of fields developing all at once in a short timeframe
Maybe not in this article but this is a perpetual accusation for just about any large and successful corporation to deal with. Using “Apple” gets headlines, but you’ve probably read similar accusations against Alphabet, Microsoft, Epic, EA, John Deere, etc…
you’re were ‘going to say’ but your ‘going’ preface implied that you didn’t actually, even though you did write the text ‘fuck apple’. semantics, however I don’t think we should ever miss an opportunity to say fuck apple. Fuck Apple.
upon re reading your text I now understand you were using the term ‘going to say’ in a colloquial sense not a literal one, so I misinterpreted the comment sry.
I think it goes back to Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Buy or squash competition until you are the only one standing. Certainly Bill Gates did this and quite aggressively at times.
Apple is a huge, rich, billionaire in cash, company, they can write their NDAs in a way that would cover them both. Is Apple Silicon out? Because I haven’t heard of it so it can’t be that groundbreaking. What does it do?
If you’re gonna participate in a discussion within a specific community, I wouldn’t call it gate-keeping for others to expect of you at least a base level of topic-specific knowledge.
Apple silicon, within the tech community, and Apple specifically, was a major thing. It’s the reason Intel needed to up their game as it’s why Apple severed the relationship. It drastically increased both battery life and performance, while reducing heat. Even people who hated Apple took a moment to give credit for the industry advancement.
I expect Apple people to understand all that, as well as others in the computer hardware community. I think it’s fair to expect commenters in an “Apple Enthusiast” community to know what Apple Silicon is before they start bashing the company for total failure to innovate.
Because their lack of innovation is the topic of the NDA. And all of what you said, is literally (and I mean literally, literally) is gatekeeping, lol. They have not been innovative in the common user space IMO for a long time. It sounds like behind the scenes, they have been. Go team Apple.
Then let me reframe this. Not all gatekeeping is bad. If I went to a MTG tournament, and started criticizing the company regarding something I’m totally wrong about, I think it’s totally justified for people there to gate-keep, as I’m in their community with no prior knowledge.
Just because you’re wholly unaware of innovations doesn’t mean no innovations have occurred. Jumping in and stating so in an Apple Enthusiast community will more than likely invite warranted criticism. Gatekeeping? Sure. We’ll agree on that. Justified? Yah. Read the room.
Where did I say that Apple Enthusiast equates to tech bros? In fact, I specifically differentiated Apple people from those in the computer hardware community.
I agree that the majority of Apple enthusiasts may not know “how their products work,” but if one is a self-described “Apple Enthusiast,” I’d be surprised if they didn’t even know about Apple Silicon. It’s only their biggest ACTUAL innovation of the past few years (imo).
Look. I see you have an axe to grind, but I’m not sure where my standard of “expecting Apple Enthusiasts to know about the existence of Apple Silicon” contributes to the slow adoption of federated social media. I mean, if you want an award for being an early adopter, then I’ll mail you a ribbon. I’m just glad you’re here making it a much more pleasant experience!
It’s not an exclusive club and anyone is free to comment. Ignore them if you don’t feel like it belongs but to tell them off and tell them they shouldn’t be posting here is shit bullies do.
If you haven't heard of it, you don't follow hardware at all. M1 Macbooks were one of the highest profile, most broadly respected hardware releases in years, at least. Even people who have no interest in Mac OS took serious notice.
If you don't know what Apple Silicon is, you're way too ignorant of the hardware space to comment on how innovative Apple is. Even extremely casual audiences have heard of it.
Obviously, I haven’t lol. But I’m admittedly not techy, I’m more of a software person. You’re very defensive about them, you have the tampon ear thingies, don’t you?
I just can't stand world class stupid comments. "Apple doesn't innovate" is incontrovertible proof that you have no clue what you're talking about. It's not "2+2=5" level. It's "2+2=sbtaywbshd".
“I have no idea what I’m talking about, but since people are calling me out for talking out my ass, I’m instead gonna turn it on them for being ‘defensive,’ then recycle my same stupid ‘ear tampon’ insult.”
Also quite possibly literally every consumer headphone brand that serves America copied the wireless earbud trend they popularized (I have no clue if they were actually first).
I can tell you they weren’t the first, they are the most popular, but idk if everyone else copied them because of that or if that was something everyone else was also working on already before that.
No, I haven’t, I borrowed someone else’s Apple a couple of years ago and the privacy, control they had really freaked me out. It was super complicated to turn off the cloud, I couldn’t control the settings, it was disheartening. I have to say though, their software was why I borrowed it and why I understand why people love them. They know how to make the software smooth. I believe you that their new computer feels great. They always have a quality when you use them that has an indescribable niceness to them. I just wouldn’t buy one unless I had to.
Fair. The software settings can be a headache, but in large part because they are so granular IMO.
I had a high end intel mac for a while for my job and swapping to the m1 pro for the same command went from >50sec to like 17. It was game changing. Where the intel had to spin up its fans as loud as jet engines and got unbearably hot and loud all the time, my m1 never so much as gets noticeably warm. It feels like magic.
It’s called knowledge, and it’s not fair to prevent people from using their knowledge.
Apple already have their patents. That’s what patents are for! The startup can’t do exactly what Apple did, or they would be sued. The startup will have to use their knowledge to create NEW tech, and that’s an excellent result.
Any big company that doesn’t do this is doing it wrong. You may not like it but that’s the way things work. But all big companies will eventually fall given enough time and management changes.
The number of per capita patents taken out by inventors is decreasing, suggesting that ideas have become harder to find.
A metric they use for measuring scientific progress is how innovation is bureaucratically represented, which these god damn geniuses follow to the conclusion conclude alongside the idea that science has
“become bureaucratic, with too many inputs and too much process required to reach success".
Man economists are all fucking stupid and you’ll never convince me otherwise
Edit: Skimmed the paper, the metric of per capita patents had its own claims and was discrete from the source that led to the claim about bureaucracy. It’s still stupid that the paper is at odds with itself.
The theoretical motivation of the paper was actually so dumb. It was all bullshit quotes from entrepreneurs and other economists, not researchers whose jobs revolve around actually creating the innovations that these losers go around parading.
US funding for basic research–the type that will lead to the truly paradigm-shifting breakthroughs–has also been in decline for 50+ years as a proportion of GDP. While bureacracy could be an obstacle, the much larger one is insufficient resources to fund a lot of moonshots that may fizzle or may result in 'zero to one’s innovation, as the author states
Modern movies, tv, music, and gaming prove pretty decisively that putting hyper-greedy capitalist shareholder proxies in charge of said industries turns their creativity to shit. It also turns healthcare, education, and more core societal functions to shit, but that’s another story.
Why take a risk on a bold, original, visionary script that might succeed or fail spectacularly, a risk your industry exists to take, when you can make another derivative established IP sequel with a mass appeal formula applied to the story resulting in a highly predictable revenue stream?
Capitalism eats itself in the quest for infinite growth in a finite system. When it runs out of room to grow, it starts eating itself and calling it maximizing efficiency.
*edit sorry I replied to the person’s top question instead of their followup of whether capitalism increases creativity, still applies though.
I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.
The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.
I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.
This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.
Not to mention stuff like patents and being secretive for profit, hiding knowledge instead of it being used for the good of all and allowed to be iterated upon. Also monopolizing, undermining others, intentionally sabotaging innovations for profit, wasting a ton of resources and effort on things useless on the grand scheme of things, such as how to manipulate people into buying more of your product… etc.
Also not seeking the most logical option/investing in the logical technologies, such as intentionally sabotaging climate change/renewable energy efforts in order to earn more from oil sales and so on, and so forth. Capitalism/competition does not breed innovation. Cooperation does. And it shows, because research is very much based on cooperation… at least researchers love to cooperate in the quest for more knowledge.
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