The shininess of the engineering blog and the actual product seem to be completely disconnected. All the major players (Airbnb, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) go on about all these often genuinely impressive perf optimizations, but if you actually try the product they're borderline unusable. It's pretty clear that the blogging is just a clout chasing exercise, but the cognitive dissonance is still palpable.
What's so baffling is a behemoth that attracts some of the top engineers would settle for 2 vastly inferior technologies. To be fair, it is a glorified todo / commenting system.
It struck me that once again things had reached an imbalance between design and engineering. When that happens either something is reliable as a tank and impossible to use (too much engineering, not enough design) or beautiful to look at and massively unreliable (too much design, not enough engineering). It takes both.
I think people like the author go through all this hassle just to post photos of their setup online and get praises from like minded users.
That seems over engineered, over-thinked and downright not practical.
It's great to be amazed by this stuff, but it really just shows how poor human intuition is at these things.
> Imagine envisioning Airbnb, and having its whole frontend and backend done within 1 minute.
...sigh...
You're seeing the tip of an iceberg, and you're like, "wow, it's cold"... but you honestly have no idea.
Any tool that you spend less an hour using, you have no idea about.
That's it. There's nothing more to say.
Use it for longer. Try building larger things. Give me a considered opinion when you've formed one, not a reaction video.
There was a spate of this kind of article when chat-gpt first came out, and at the time, it was like: why are we seeing these "I spent 10 seconds with a LLM and I made a potato!" and "I spent 20 minutes with an LLM and made a one-page HTML website!" articles, and none of the "I spent a month with an LLM and build a new programming language", or "I spent two weeks with an LLM and I build a raytracer" articles?
Oh they said, "It's too soon, give it time... it's only been out a month. 3 months... 6 months...".
You still don't see them.
...because they don't exist.
No one has done anything impressive with this stuff; it's fundamentally limited in what it can produce, and the massive productivity benefits you see (30x faster!) are for trivial tasks, not difficult tasks.
...and the modest productivity benefits you get from using an actual copilot don't make articles that are nearly as interesting to get as many clicks.
Look, AI can seem magical, but when you have something that seems too good to be true, after using it for an hour, or even a day, maybe it's not the right moment to drop a blog post about how gosh darn amazing it is?
this rant reminds me of many similar things I've read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.
I've had similar experience with silly old web development.
I spent a week sitting down with actual users of the web site that I was so proud of and watched them use it. Oh, man did that hurt.
All the "telemetry" in the world will never prepare you for actually watching real people at work and talking to them.
It completely changed the way I build web sites.
The Tesla designers should spend more time in truck cabs, shadowing actual truckers. Based on this Twitter rant, it should be illuminating.
Pretty low-effort blog spam stroking developer ego about being (yet again) the smartest people in the room and everyone else being monkeys. The inferiority complex is kind of tiring.
Hackaday comments have never not been salty, and I say that as someone who's followed that site since before the pictures were in color. I'm not sure there is a useful comparison to be drawn.
I'm also a huge fan of the blog posts that suggest throwing away fundamental technologies and replacing them with half-bakery without understanding the problem domain or the problems that have been encountered and solved before.
It's also worth noting that it can actually hurt your image if you try to bolt on virality when you don't know what you're doing. You can become a laughing stock. I'm reminded of recent failures by two of the largest engineering companies in the world.
Making snap engineering conclusions about technology that had tens of thousands hours R&D poured into them is a popular genre of fiction.
I just see how the thinking goes. "No way this issue that crossed my mind in the first 40 seconds I heard about the product was addressed by the bunch of hacks behind it".
A lot of idiots on that forum. "Hey, in just two minutes of casual thinking about this, I've identified a flaw which a professional working on this for years has been unable to see!"
Um, yeah, not so much. The concept may have problems, but that's not how it'll be debunked.
I don't understand how the commenters on TC think it's anywhere near an actual prototype. Groupthink?
If they're serious about this project, TC should focus on the skills they have (PR, contacts and reputation) and get this actually built by some pros rather than by some barefooted web 2.0 nerds with bits of Arrington's old macbook air.
I remember very clearly when something or other about this company got posted here awhile ago and almost immediately thereafter someone submitted a blog post explaining in basic physics terminology that the company's premise was in no uncertain terms total bullshit, and reamed the entire startup community for heaping attention and praise on them without thinking through what (to the author) were obvious faults in their plan.
I enjoyed that piece. I like it when the discussion reverts to basic math and physics to resolve points of contention.
At any rate, it continues to amuse/distress me in the time since then that the company is still around and still has investors, etc. Do people still not get it? It won't work.
On some level, moreover, it disturbs me that people are actively pursuing a technology that would effectively be torture to household pets. Does that mean nothing to anyone? Do they get that dogs and cats would be able to hear this as a siren in their skull?
"Do you think it's right to continue work on a project that the majority of people dislike for a variety of very legitimate reasons?"
Almost certainly yes. How else can you find new, previously unknown products and ideas of value? Don't you ever just brainstorm crazy ideas because you don't know where an idea will take you? You know... think different... here's to the crazy one's.
Also, "majority of people" might need to be edited to say "majority of a subset of people who are HN readers/commenters and who are so interested in browsers that they watch nearly 10 minutes of video on the topic."
Not really sure why I'm replying to this, as it just seems like vitriol, but anyway...
Just because a technology seems silly and annoying at first doesn't mean it's useless. Facebook is a prime example of this. Allowing people to play Farmville and post about their drunken antics isn't inherently valuable, but under all that noise, there's actually something hugely valuable going on. People are creating and sharing content with people they already know, strengthening bonds that already exist in the real world. This is a major weakness in the Internet -- at the outset, it enabled information sharing in the large. Facebook allows for information sharing in the small. Just because most of that information is inane doesn't mean it's any less fundamental than ARPA's internet vision or other major informational ideas (e.g., assembly lines).
You can make similar information-sharing arguments about YouTube and Twitter -- YouTube spreads ideas that can't be captured in words, Twitter allows for personal broadcast. The signal/noise is miserable, but the absolute impact is huge.
It's easy to look at the garbage produced by informational technologies (which most web startups basically are) and condemn them as silly, annoying, and useless, but that misses the point. Each new successful startup trains another subset of people to expect more from their tech, enabling the truly visionary among them to forget about whatever problem that software solves and concentrate on their own work.
Building a tool that allows anybody who uses it to actually push the boundaries of human knowledge is not silly and annoying. Be careful not to miss the forest for the trees.
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