Has anyone coined the term “fast tech” yet?
chaos.social76 points by luu 3 days ago
76 points by luu 3 days ago
That era is mostly over, due to the convergence of everything into smartphones. The 1990s were the peak period for minor electronic junk, powered by round connectors with no standard for voltage, current, polarity, or pin size. The 1990s brought the Furby, Tickle Me Elmo, and a flood of R/C controlled toys.
You can still buy lots of these toys and minor electronic junk. But many of them nowadays at least standardise on USB for power or charging (otherwise, it's mostly AA or AAA batteries).
Honestly, the 'minor junk' has gotten so much better in quality, too. We got some kiddie light up shoes that we bought more than six months ago, and the LEDs and batteries in there are still going strong. The cheap RC car we got a year ago also still runs on the initial AA batteries.
Rechargeable batteries and ports becoming ubiquitous has been a boon for households. Case in point: we wanted lighting for our stairs like many people do. You can buy, in the single digit dollars, motion sensor lights that are rechargeable and come with magnetic and adhesive to mount the lights in the stairwell. Keep a usb fan out cable cluster nearby and recharging them once a week is a 10 second endeavor to pop the lights off the magnets in the walls and leave them plugged in for an hour. Amazing.
Such a setup would have been in the hundos of dollars even 25 years ago
I read somewhere that batteries get about 8% better per year. Meaning a doubling in performance about every 9 years.
There is a lot of waste still. Pregnancy tests for example. And even the small array of devices - mouse keyboard phone watch charger headphones - still need to be replaced too often.
> Pregnancy tests for example.
Don't you just pee on a stick, no electronics involved?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33957256/this-prog...
Why sell a pee on a stick for $1 at 50c profit when you can sell one with a computer for $10 for $5 profit.
OK, you can get a computer to look at the chemicals for you. But that's unnecessary and doesn't add anything.
I've bought a few pregnancy tests in my life, and never an electronic one. Not sure they were even for sale. They were definitely not pushed prominently in the shops. I see talks about them online much more than I ever see them offline. Are electronic pregnancy tests one of those American obsessions?
I've never seen one. I've only ever seen the one line two line kind that certainly aren't electronic.
A quick Google tells me electronic versions of that are common though. Weird. I've never seen those.
A surprising number of people find the two line concept too complicated. A digital read out makes them feel better. At least it’s not yet connected to a smart phone.
Funny enough, letting your smartphone take a picture of the two lines and interpreting them for you would actually be better than having dedicated electronics in the pee stick.
Better in at least two ways:
(A) Your phone can run much more sophisticated software and has a great camera.
(B) Less waste.
> Better in at least two ways:
And a third way: now everybody knows you are pregnant. /s
The only dependency of the original Furby was AA batteries. If you find one in a drawer, you can clean out the battery compartment, pop in new cells, and you're probably good to go.
Meanwhile smartphones have enabled this trend writ large with devices now entirely dependent on surveillance-laden someone-else's-computer-connected throwaway apps that are only meant to work long enough to churn to the next product revision.
I've been about it as "throwaway software." Why bother searching for someone else's mediocre LLM generated software when I can just as easily (and hopefully as cheaply) generate the same thing, but it just works for me
Features. I could whip up a single-purpose image manipulation program to do whatever, but it's just easier to use an existing multi-purpose program with a bunch of features, unless I'm doing batch processing of files, but even then, using imagemagik or writing a gim-paint plugin is likely to be better than rolling my own from scratch.
I was actually surprised that this post wasn’t going to be about software trends. I think there could be more attention paid to software business concepts that are essentially throw away pump and dump schemes. E.g., all the VSCode forks for AI coding that are already collapsing away/being acquired and enshittified.
But back to the hardware, the hardware disposability isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s still a big problem and a catchy phrase to help bring more attention to the throw away nature of it would be a good start.
What really needs to be implemented is some kind of regulation on product features like built-in wear items and irreplaceable batteries, as well as software deprecation.
There are a number of ways it could be implemented that could effectively discourage these practices, just some possible ideas:
I think a recycling program similar to many states’ recycling deposits could work really well. Each product gets a recycling serial number, customers return them to a collection center and get paid a certain percentage of the original sale price/MSRP, perhaps that percent would go down the older the item is. The refund is paid for by the original manufacturer.
AI models certainly feel like it. Everything is hot for about a week till something shiny shows up
Well, the Linux kernel is also only hot until the next version is released a few weeks later.
I'm not sure that proves anything one way or another.
Yes, but in comparison nobody is talking about the new Linux Kernel, compared to the new AI models & features.
Yes, there's just more exciting progress happening in the AI world.
But just because they are coming up with new models every week, doesn't mean that producing last week's model was a waste in the same way that replacing a physical product every week would be a waste.
This month's Linux kernel version builds on last month's version. Similarly, most of the work that goes into today's LLM is recycled from yesterday's.
There is a term "javascript framework"
https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/
vibe coding and LLM will only turbocharge this
The source code for that website is pretty amusing.
> <meta charSet="utf-8"/>
Ah yes, Next.js, still producing stupid bad HTML more than six years after it was reported.
So, you pay over 200 kB of JavaScript just for the “in about 12 hours” text to be recomputed once a second. As far as I can see, that’s the only dynamic behaviour.
For some reason unclear to me I went ahead and made a more sensible version (with dead code stripped and about two tiny material changes in CSS or text, see if you can spot them), and, minified, it’s under 1350 bytes with everything but the favicon inline. In other words, more than a kilobyte smaller than the original markup, despite embedding the functionality of an extra 213 kB of JavaScript and CSS.
<!DOCTYPE html><meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width"><title>Days Since Last JavaScript Framework</title><meta name=description content="Get the always up to date information about how many days have passed since a JavaScript framework has been published"><link rel=icon href=/favicon.png><style>body,html{font-family:sans-serif;margin:0;overflow:hidden}body{background-color:#fff}main{height:100vh;display:flex;justify-content:center}strong{font-size:20em;align-self:center}strong::selection{background:#000;color:#fff}.ribbon{background:#000;right:0;top:0}aside{padding:.2em .5em;color:#fff;position:absolute}.contact{font-size:.75em;background:#898989;bottom:0;left:0}.contact a{color:#00008b}</style><main><strong>0</strong></main><aside class=ribbon><b>updated daily!</b><br>next update in about 2 hours</aside><aside class=contact>if you spot an unlikely mistake on this website, get in touch:<a href=mailto:javascriptisa@veryfast.biz>javascriptisa@veryfast.biz</a></aside><script>function r(){var n=Date.now(),m=Math.round((Date.UTC(n.getUTCFullYear(),n.getUTCMonth(),n.getUTCDate()+1)-n)/60000);document.querySelector(".ribbon").lastChild.value="next update in "+m==0?"less than a minute":m==1?"1 minute":m<45?m+" minutes":m<90?"about 1 hour":"about "+Math.round(m/60)+" hours"}setInterval(r,1000);r()</script>
What about "fast apps" as in apps you build with AI to quickly fill a niche knowing it won't be a long term viable business, but build to just for that moment?
Related to the comments there, one thing I'm quite sure of is that every battery should be user-replaceable. Most should be field-replaceable and of a standardized type, though I realize the form factors of some devices preclude the latter.
Sounds very close to vibe coding.
This kind of thing is possible because we haven’t come around to recognizing the Earth as a finite, closed system. We’re pretty sure all the junk and pollution and carbon and whatnot goes Somewhere Else.
The earth is a giant ball of matter.
You can reasonably model it as a closed system in terms of matter. But it's very open in terms of energy.
There's practically unlimited space in landfills to take up any garbage we can produce. Later, when you need the materials, you can invest energy to mine your landfill.
I'm not saying we should do that or that it's a good idea. My point is that 'earth is a closed system in terms of matter' is a much weaker and less profound statement than it sounds like.
What is limited is the amount of resources we can cheaply get access to in the short run. Similarly while landfill space is practically unlimited, there's a limit to how much our various ecosystems can take, if we just dump our garbage and emissions into them directly.
The latter aspect encompasses eg releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. But also putting plastics in the ocean, where it might do real damage. (As compared to having the plastic sit around in a land fill.)
The earth as a giant ball of matter is an interesting geological phenomenon, but our concern is more the earth as a viable biosphere, which, as you note, is a much more constrained system, and that seems to be the set of constraints we haven’t internalized yet.
Yes. It's just that this is very distinct from the physical notion of a 'finite, closed system'.
The biosphere isn't closed: it regularly exchanges material with the rest of the giant ball of matter.
I mean, I think it’s a distinction without a difference, is the problem - yes, the biosphere exchanges material with the rest of the ball of mud, but that, for all intents and purposes, is a closed system, and so things like its ability to draw down carbon, or dilute pollutants, or break down plastics, are constrained beyond where we apparently thought they were. Per the notion of landfill mining, that also puts constraints on how effective we can be there - how much energy we can commit to that, what level of wastage or side effects we can accept. We’ve had a philosophy that all problems will be solved in the future by technological developments, but our timelines don’t seem to be lining up right now.
carbon in the air only matters insofar as the earth is not a closed system. its a very big distinction. open and closed systems are specific terms
You’re right, I’m not using the term in its correct physics meaning. Is there another word or phrase you’d suggest for the concept here?
Ecosystems have _finite capacity_ to cope with what we throw at them (and still be useful to us in the broadest sense).
The qualification in parens is just there to take care of the objection that no matter how hard we try, we won't be able to eradicate all life on earth with current technology. But we can make life pretty miserable for humans with current technology.
The benefit to us doesn't have to be in any monetary sense. Just the satisfaction of knowing there's a beautiful forest would count.
Also a lot of energy is continuously pumped in from the giant ball of (plasma) matter a bit away.
On net, we are radiating about as much energy into space as we are getting from the sun.
(Even the worst scenarios of global warming are rounding errors compared to the energy of the sun that hits the earth every day.)
In any case, 'closed system' specifically refers to matter. Energy is allowed in or out. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system and see the little graphic on the top right.
I mean pump n dump is the economy; be a first mover, guess the peak, cash out.
Spend tons of money on analytics to predict what to move on and when to cash out.
The term hasn’t been coined but the economy it describes is decades old.
i came up with one recently, "scroll based memory"
the way people seem to forget something after they've scrolled past it.
> Has anyone coined the term “fast tech” yet?
No, we have enshitification.
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