Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have.
Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.
When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.
I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality.
The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right.
It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations.
However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff.
We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.
Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.
If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
You hit this so hard it was impossible not to recognize. In every sense there is too much "ok" shit (in every media realm) that we cannot help but miss amazing stuff. Knowing that I don't have enough time for all the incredible things that technology has enabled crushes me.
All of the old, great classic movies are available for streaming somewhere.
I still find great value in the TCM cable channel. Simply because if I tune in at a random time, it's likely to be showing an excellent old film I either never heard of or never got around to watching.
The service they are offering is curation, which has a lot of value in an age of infinite content flooding our attention constantly.
TCM is also my go-to example for why linear TV still has value in the age of streaming. You not only get curation and exposure to stuff you didn't know about, but also knowledgeable people putting it in context and explaining backgrounds to you. Such a wonderful channel.
It affects even the competent photographer. How many times do you see that photographer with all the gear sit in front of a literal statue and fire off a 30 shot burst in 2 seconds? I don’t envy these pro photo editors either today in sports. I wonder how many shots they have to go through per touchdown from all the photographers at the end zone firing a burst until everyone stands up and throws the ball back at the ref? After a certain point you probably have to just close your eyes and pick one of the shots that looks almost identical to another 400. Not a job for analysis paralysis people. I guess it sure beats having to wait for the slide film to develop.
I suspect most of the time you can eliminate 300 of those 400 right away - they obviously are either too early or too late to capture the moment. On the remaining 100 you can choose any one (or more likely 5 as there are likely several moments - the moment the catch is made and the moment the athlete smiles as he realizes he made that catch).
The reason to take all 400 though as every once in a while one photo is obviously better than another for some reason. You also want several angles because sometimes the light will be wrong at the moment, or someone will happen to be in the way of your shot...
The AI is already picking out the best photo in those 400-shot bursts.
And sometimes it is even combining elements from different photos: Alice had her eyes closed in this otherwise great shot, but in this other shot her eyes were open. A little touch-up and we've got the perfect photo.
people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful.
people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count.
it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example.
so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder.
someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.
Live music sucks when you're trying to watch the show and some dumb-dumb is holding their phone above their head to shoot the entire show with low-light, bad angle & terrible sound. NO ONE is going to watch that, and you wrecked the experience for many people. Put your phone away and live in the present, please...
> people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
There are other types of dances where dancers are far more interested in the dance than selfies: Lindy Hop, Blues, Balboa, Tango, Waltz, Jive, Zouk, Contra, and West Coast Swing to name a few. Here are videos from the Blues dance I help organize where none of the dancers are filming themselves:
Thank you for sharing your social media videos as evidence in a rebuttal to "camera phones are not all good; they're ubiquitous use has negative implication too". So delicious...
That sort of dancing is basically a sport. You have to learn it, you have to get good at it after you learned it, and it is cardio after all. I think op was talking more about what you see in the edm scene these days. Where basically people aren’t there to dance like the old days or sing along like other genres, they are there to see a certain DJ and then they will post clips from the entire set on their instagram story. And they can do this because the dancing they are doing at the edm show is super passive kind of dancing where you are just swaying a little so you can hold the phone stably at the same time. If you were dancing like how they’d dance at the edm concerts in the 90s all rolling on molly it would be like your blues swing where its just too physical to do anything but rave around flinging your arms all around shirtless and sweaty.
I would add one thing though. The pie definitely gets bigger - but i feel there is a period of "downsizing" that happens. I think this is becuase of lack of ideas. When you have tool that (say) 10xes your productivity, its not that bosses will have ideas to build 10x the number of things - they will just look to cut costs first (hello lack of imagination and high interest rates).
We’ve had many improvements that increased productivity at least as much as current LLMs, and I don’t think any of them ever temporarily caused downsizing in the total number of programmers.
It is still as hard as its been to get a good photo. They had full auto film cameras that could take good photos in the 70s but the devil is always the edge cases and the subconscious ability to take an evenly exposed (in the Ansel Adams definition not auto camera exposure definition), well composed image at the decisive moment. Understanding how lighting works (either natural, or different artificial light like flash or studio lighting) is also not easy.
It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
As I said in a sibling reply: practice is much easier and so it is much easier to get good. Film was expensive and so few could afford to become good photographers. Sure everyone had a camera, many of them nice SLRs with decent lens (but probably not auto focus - for both better and worse), but it wouldn't take a lot of photos to exceed that cost in film.
This implies photographers used to be paid well in the past, which isn't true. Like painting or rock music, photography has always been a winner-takes-all kind of market where a select few can get quite wealthy but the vast majority will be struggling forever.
While photographer was never a sure path to rich and famous, professionals used to do very good business and make a good living.
Demand is way down because while a $5000 lens on a nice camera is better than my phone lens, my phone is close enough for most purposes. Also my phone is free, in the days of film a single roll of film by the time you developed it costs significant money (I remember as a kid getting a camera for my birthday and then my parents wouldn't get me film for it - on hindsight I suspect every roll of film cost my dad half an hour of work and he was a well paid software developer). This cost meant that you couldn't afford to practice taking pictures, every single one had to be perfect. So if you wanted a nice picture of the family it was best to pay a professional who because of experience and equipment was likely to take a much better one than you could (and if something went wrong they would retake for free).
I see your point, but I'm having personally having a different experience.
A client of mine has gotten quite good at using Bolt and Lovable. He has since put me on 3 more projects that he dreamed up and vibe coded that would just be a figment of his imagination pre-AI.
He knows what's involved in software development, and knows that he can't take it all the way with these tools.
Absolutely not, not to the same extent. That's a really illogical statement on your part, considering that the technical barrier to entry to even begin to think about developing a program in 1980 was much, much higher than what it's been for more than a decade now.
How much online shopping could you do from your PC in 1980? How many people had smartphones in 1980?
That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.
But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.
Maintaining and rewriting existing shit is quite well paying though, and also something that AI seems to struggle with. (Funnily enough, AI seems to struggles even more with refactoring vibecoded projects than with refactoring human-written apps. What that says about the quality of the vibe coded code I don't know.)
In the current state, yes. But that is also an opportunity, isn't it?
When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
Under capitalism, because greater margins. Under not-capitalism, so as to free up resources and labor for other things or just increase available downtime for people.
Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.
> everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.
Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again.
You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots).
One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)
While the vast majority of photos are bad, there are still more great photos mixed in than ever before. You of course won't see them because even great photos are hid from view in all the noise, but they are still there.
And now the business of wedding / portrait photographer has become hyper-competitive. Now everyone's cousin is an amateur photographer and every phone has an almost acceptable camera built in. It is much more difficult to have a profitable photography business compared to 20 years ago.
That's good to hear. Back when I got married there were some real jerks in the wedding photography business, and they weren't worried about running out of customers. Here's an actual conversation I had with one of them:
Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer."
Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year."
Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?"
Them: "No" and hang up the phone.
The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
The game has definitely changed. It used to be profitable to be a photographer for hire, and that’s no longer the case. But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot.
If today all you do as a programmer is open jira tickets without any kind of other human interaction, AI coding agents are bad news. If you’re just using code as a means to build products for people, it might be the best thing that has happened in a long time.
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark.
In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.
With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera.
That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.
> In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.
Everyone in the 1970s was gifted a camera. Many of them got a nice SLR with better lens than a modern smart phone. Cameras were expensive, but within reach of most people.
Film was a different story. Today you can get 35mm film rolls for about $8 (36 pictures), and $13 to develop (plus shipping!), and $10 for prints (in 1970 you needed prints for most purposes, thought slides were an option), so $31 - where I live McDonalds starts you are $16/hour, that roll of film costs almost 2 hours work - before taxes.
Which is to say you couldn't afford to become skilled in 1970 unless you were rich.
Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.
When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.