I don't work for the public transit company; I introduce immigrants to Berlin's public transit. To answer to the broader question, good documentation is one of the many little things that affect how you feel about a company. The BVG clearly cares about that, because their marketing department is famously competent. Good documentation also means that fewer people will queue at their service centre and waste an employee's time. Documentation is the cheaper form of customer service.
Besides, how people feels about the public transit company does matter, because their funding is partly a political question. No one will come to defend a much-hated, customer-hostile service.
Sure, the megacorps may start rotting from the inside out, but we already see a retrenchment to smaller private communities, and if more of the benefits of the big platforms trickle down, why wouldn’t that continue?
Nicbou, do you see AI as increasing your personal output? If it lets enthusiastic individuals get more leverage on good causes then I still have hope.
When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?
When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?
It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just better of reallocating your resources from the production quality towards the the shouting match of marketing and try to win by finding ways to be more visible than the others. (SEO hacking etc shenanigans)
When you drive down the cost of doing something to zero you you also effectively destroy the economy based around that thing. Like online print, basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles but alternative revenue streams (ads) are needed. Same for games too.
No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism).
Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems.
When it became cheaper to mass produce sneakers, tshirts, and anything, the quality of the individual product probably did go down, but more people around the world were able to afford the product, which raised the standard of living for people in the aggregate. Now, if these products were absolute trash, life wouldn't make much sense, but there's a friction point in there between high quality and trash, where things are acceptable and affordable to the many. Making things cheaper isn't a net negative for human progress: hitting that friction point of acceptable affordability helps spread progress more democratically and raise the standard of living.
The question at hand is whether AI can more affordably produce acceptable technical writing, or if it's trash. My own experiences with AI make me think that it won't produce acceptable results, because you never know when AI is lying: catching those errors requires someone who might as well just write the documentation. But, if it could produce truthful technical writing affordably, that would not be a bad thing for humanity.
One of the qualia of a product is cost. Another is contemporaneity.
If we put these together, we see a wide array of products which, rather than just being trash, hit a sweet spot for "up-to-date yet didn't break the wallet" and you end up with https://shein.com/
These are not thought of as the same people that subscribe to the Buy It For Life subreddit, but some may use Shein for a club shirt and BIFL for an espresso machine. They make a choice.
What's more, a “Technivorm Moccamaster” costs 10x a “Mr. Coffee” because of the build and repairability, not because of the coffee. (Amazon Basics cost ½ that again.)
Maybe Fashion was the original SEO hack. Whoever came up with the phrase "gone out of style" wrought much of this.
What happens when all the engineers left can't figure out something, and they start opening up manuals, and they are also all wrong and trash. And the whole world grinds to a halt because nobody knows anything.
It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to read your posts, I expect them to be hand-written. If I'm paying for software, it better not be AI Slop. If you're offering me something for free, I'm not really in a position to complain about the quality.
It's undeniable that, especially in software, cheaper costs and a lower barrier to get started will bring more great FOSS software. This is like one of the pillars of FOSS, right? That's how we got LetsEncrypt, OpenDNS, etc. It will also 100% bring more slop. Both can be true at the same time.
Average quality or peak quality?
Obviously, yes? Maybe not the median or even mean, but peak quality for sure. If you know where to look there are more high-quality takes available now than ever before. (And perhaps more meaningfully, peak quality within your niche subgenre is better than ever).
> When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?
Yes? The quality and variety of indie games is amazing these days.
> When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?
This is the case where I don’t see a win, and I think it bears further thought; I don’t have a clear explanation. But I note this is the one case where production is not actually democratized. So it kinda doesn’t fit with the digital goods we are discussing.
> basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles
Is this actually true? Substack enables more independent career bloggers than ever before. I would love to see the numbers on professional indie devs. I agree these are very competitive fields, and an individual’s chances of winning are slim, but I suspect there are more professional indie creators than ever before.
Nowadays the problem is that both technical and legal means are used to prevent adversarial interoperability. It doesn't matter if you (or AI) can write software faster if said software is unable to interface with the thing everyone else uses.
Thank you so much for saying this. Trying to convince anyone of the importance of documentation feels like an uphill battle. Glad to see that I'm not completely crazy.
They do document how to delete an unrecognized device.
I'd argue that this started 30 years ago when automated phone trees started replacing the first line of workers and making users figure out how to navigate where they needed to in order to get the service they needed.
I can't remember if chat bots or "knowledge bases" came first, but that was the next step in the "figure it out yourself" attitude corporations adopted (under the guise of empowering users to "self help").
Then we started letting corporations use the "we're just too big to actually have humans deal with things" excuse (eg online moderation, or paid services with basically no support).
And all these companies look at each other to see who can lower the bar next and jump on the bandwagon.
It's one of my "favorite" rants, I guess.
The way I see this next era going is that it's basically going to become exclusively the users' responsibility to figure out how to talk to the bots to solve any issue they have.
Thank you. I love it when someone poetically captures a feeling I’ve been having so succinctly.
It’s almost like they’re a professional writer…
I have exactly 1 guess but am waiting to say it.
