fresh
@fresh@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn't happened there in a 'long time' 1 year ago:
Yes I noticed that too about the tech layoffs. Especially nowadays, corporations seem extremely uninterested in competing to make newer better products.
I think maybe we mean the same thing when you say “Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology”. The Nintendo Switch was never a technological marvel, even when it was first released. It’s an attractively assembled collection of other people’s technology. The Switch is “innovative” in a way, mostly in functional product design, but it’s not science.
- Comment on Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn't happened there in a 'long time' 1 year ago:
Ah I see. Insofar as UI/UX research resembles science, and it certainly often does, I agree that it would be better if it was public not private. But as much as I dislike corporations patting themselves on the back, I just don’t think it’s realistic to say they never innovate anything ever in designing a product.
Here’s an example: every part of the first iPhone in 2007 was already invented before its release. None of the core technology was new. But I think it’s hard to deny that Apple innovated in packaging it together in a useful attractive product.
- Comment on Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn't happened there in a 'long time' 1 year ago:
As you can see from my original comment, I’m no knee-jerk defender of private sector innovation, but I don’t think I agree with this. I love open source software, but the UI is often clunky and unintuitive, like Gimp or LibreOffice. Even when it’s good, it’s often because it mimics the major commercial software.
The heuristic I have is, when the end result benefits from communal information sharing, public is hands down better than private. We have an opioid crisis today because privatized proprietary medical research didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the scientific community as public research. Science and secrecy are incompatible.
But when the end result benefits from a small group of opinionated people getting their way, private can sometimes be better. And good design is more like the latter.
- Comment on Sam Altman feels Silicon Valley has lost its innovation culture, saying great research hasn't happened there in a 'long time' 1 year ago:
I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.
The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.
- Comment on Sibling communities: A middle way 1 year ago:
That’s an interesting proposal. I think I need to understand it better. Could you describe to me in what ways this would be better?
- Submitted 1 year ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 5 comments
- Comment on Lina Khan: The most feared person in Silicon Valley is a 34-year-old in DC 1 year ago:
Blame the laws and three decades of Borkian precedent.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Americans support a lot of things they don’t vote for. Most Americans want universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, more government services, etc. But many famously “vote against their interests”. Abortion is turning out to be the surprising exception.
- Comment on Your Computer Should Say What You Tell It To Say - Google is adding code to Chrome that will send tamper-proof information about your operating system and other software, and share it with websites 1 year ago:
At this point, I only keep Chrome around for the odd website that only works on Chrome. It’s astonishing how quickly Google is burning through good will lately.
- Comment on On the future of Lemmy vs reddit 1 year ago:
For me, getting rid of the old reddit design as default was pretty egregious. Usability tanked if I wasn’t logged in.
- Submitted 1 year ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 177 comments