Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
Man I think you're spot-on. Back in the day the biggest motivator companies had to make good products was that they would be competing in the market with their own old products.
Wow, really great insight--I've never seen it framed like this before, but it makes so much sense. Typically software becomes worse over time, and therefore uncompetitive with previous versions of the same software. The fix? Never make the previous software available, and force users to upgrade to the worse, new version.
This explains a lot about why subscriptions have become the norm.
If you have a product and a team working on it, it’s tempting to just keep adding things to the product. You can’t just sit around fixing bugs, they say. When that is precisely what customers would want. Can’t make upsells though and when you’re a business that kind of thing really matters… nobody from within can see that the ship is so heavy it can’t stay afloat anymore. Until it’s sunk.
Subscriptions can create an illusion of a deal, because in principle, you’re ostensibly able to benefit more for a fixed price. But are you?
Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription.
Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
>I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? [...] It's actually more convenient than streaming services.
I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do.
Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share.
The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv.
I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.
Torrents nowadays have <1% the number of people they had a decade ago. It didn't used to be considered technically sophisticated, just a new version of file sharing that everyone used two decades ago.
I just stream files from my Macbook via AirPlay to my tv. works pretty seamlessly. No media server setups. They don't even have to be on the same wifi network. I think most TVs support several streaming protocols nowadays? I got the cheapest Samsung smart TV.
You are probably right I'm out of touch with technology, but I also think that many people do much more advanced technical stuff like using VPNs - became pretty mainstream.
>I just stream files from my Macbook via AirPlay to my tv.
Ok, explaining your situation with a laptop clarifies where you're coming from. (Which my prior reply anticipated and covered in my 3nd paragraph about torrents being easy for people using laptops.)
In any case, most normal people do not use AirPlay from their laptop, nor cast from a Chromebook, nor cast/mirror a Windows to their tv to play Netflix/HBO/Disney. Instead they just use the mainstream hardware streaming devices or the built-in tv app. Torrents would be much less convenient for the way most non-techie people watch tv (Roku/FireStick/SamsungTVapp/etc). Netflix has stated many times that the majority of their customers' watch time comes from smartphones/tablets/tv and not desktop/laptop web browsers.
Because you’d be denying cast and crew of their royalties?
If people pirated on a mass scale, the losses would add up. Whatever you may think about streaming platforms, don’t punish the people just trying to make a living.
The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
The video game industry is plagued by this problem. With live-service games becoming commonplace, there has also been a recent trend of games being released in an incomplete state. The shocking part is that multi-million dollar "AAA" game studios are engaging in this behavior. There's also a strong "own nothing" component to the issue.
I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too.
Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
I continue to maintain that the problem here is not greed but laziness. Make money with less effort or make even more money over a longer term with more effort. Building for the future requires effort and investment and has the potential to make more money than focusing purely on the current quarter.
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves.
Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.
Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually.
I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
This is exactly why I bought Affinity. That, and the fact that the old version did not require an "account" and "activation". You send them money, they give you an unlock key, and that's the end of your relationship with them.
>Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
Graphic designer here. Adobe’s products are the golden standard in the industry and are often the only products used by entire graphic teams, being the odd one out using Affinity’s or (heaven forbid) Corel’s tools makes collaboration difficult (if not entirely impossible) due to how unfriendly and unpredictable portability between apps can be, and unpredictable is the last thing you want in an environment where precision is absolutely essencial.
It’s sad, really. Adobe’s apps are powerful, yes, but they’re stuck in time. They perform horrendously and have terrible UI/X that aren’t even standardised between apps (even something as simple as the icon for their own assets library cloud is not the same between apps).
How I wish someone would come along and eat Adobe’s lunch to force it to pull itself together for once, but alas, that’s unlikely at best.
Considering how cheap Affinity is (and now it's free). Why don't studios just get both apps? There's almost no learning curve in switching between them.
I foresee a lot of smaller actors switching to Affinity in the future, just like tons of people went to Canvas.
Canva is a nice tool for light work only, but no studio, agency or design department worth their salt relies on Canva for more serious work—and rightfully so, Canva is not a player in the same space as Adobe and Affinity, for example.
Affinity is nice, and I really do wish they would corner Adobe a bit more so they could get their act together. But the fact is Adobe has encroached upon every corner of this industry, pretty much all of their apps are the standard tools for any given design job (from both a software and hardware perspective). It would take a massive amount of effort to convince designers used to Adobe’s tools to switch to an unproven new tool, and it would take an even bigger effort to actually make these new tools become the standard.
I would love to give Adobe the boot, but the truth is that no one has been able to meet Adobe’s apps head on as of yet.
But that's what I mean with studios installing both. You're not forced to choose either Adobe or Affinity. Since you can install different software on a machine, it would be in the interest of every studio to work with both apps. No need to give Adobe the boot.
Now that Affinity is free, you will have many more clients and small studios sending you material in their formats.
As for Canvas, I expect every pro studio to be able to work with that format, since legions of clients will make their stuff in Canvas and send it to you and vice versa.
It's like Visa and MasterCard. You don't have to pick only one, and if you're smart you will accept both.
The thing is, studios might “offer” it, but designers aren’t likely to go for the new kid on the block with Affinity’s option when Photoshop is sitting right there; and Canva doesn’t play any part in this little software war, really. Canva is not aimed at pro work, professionals do use it if needed but it is not a tool of choice for any serious design work, it’s really just a stop-gap tool to enable non-designers to do some decent design work, but nothing more than that.
The truth is Adobe has a massive upper hand here in both market share and public perception. Affinity’s offerings might be 100x better, but they will never be “THE Photoshop”—that’s how deep Adobe’s claws are buried within this industry.
Updates were fewer and far between back then, but they were bigger updates with more features. Now, many subscription services seem content to milk fewer feature upgrades staggered over years.
This is how I've felt about Apple, and it doesn't just include a model with a jack, but a worsening of the iOS system, models that are no for most users of previous models. Apple has run out of ideas, and maybe that's the entire smartphone category.
People will still buy smart phones, but I think their will be less enthusiasm for the latest and greatest model.
I don't care where the headline is from. Other places have the same suspicion. There clearly is _some_ concern in Labour that VPNs could be used to bypass the OSA and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this is going.
'Kyle told The Telegraph last week in a warning: "If platforms or sites signpost towards workarounds like VPNs, then that itself is a crime and will be tackled by these codes."'
"In 2022 when the Online Safety Act was being debated in Parliament, Labour explicitly brought up the subject of VPNs with MP Sarah Champion worried that children could use VPNs to access harmful content and bypass the measures of the Safety Act. "
What does it mean to train using an 'open ended' process? Is it like using a genetic algorithm to explore / generate _any_ image resembling something from the training set, instead of adjusting weights according to gradients on a case-by-case or batch-by-batch basis?
- Conventional SGD: Fixed target (e.g. "make an exact replica of this butterfly image") and it follows greedy path to minimize the error
- Open Ended Search Process: No predetermined goal, explores based on what's "interesting" or novel. In Picbreeder, humans would see several generated images, pick the "interesting" ones, and the system would mutate/evolve from there. If you were evolving an image that looked like an egg and it mutated toward a teapot like shape, you could pivot and pursue that direction instead.
This is kinda the catch -- there is a human element here where individuals are choosing what's "interesting" to explore, it's not a pure algorithmic process. That said, yes, it does use a genetic algorithm (NEAT) under the hood, but I think what the authors are suggesting is that the key difference isn't whether it's genetic or gradient based optimization... they're getting at the difference in objective driven vs. open-ended search.
I think the main position / takeaway from the paper is that something about conventional SGD training produces these "fractured entangled representations" that work but are not well structured internally so they're hard to build on top of. They look at things like the curriculum / order things are learned in, objective search vs. open-ended search, etc...
^This 100%. And sometimes I get the argument back: they've become so commonplace now that you're just being unreasonable.
I'm required to wear clothes in public (Indecent exposure laws) and I need to have at least a pen or pencil to sign documents and do tax returns demanded by law. But I have a vast array of options when it comes to clothes and stationery, and most importantly I'm not required to agree to a foreign company's EULA to use them, unlike smartphones.
I've never had a smart phone and all my work is in front of computers. I was a bit worried during COVID lockdowns that I'd be forced to get one, but didn't have to in the end. Occasionally it can be annoying in other ways for example:
1) you buy a piece of hardware (printer, cctv cameras etc.) that can only be set up with a phone or you have to work harder to find the web interface.
2) Banks - banks really suck.
3) Companies I work for who use VPNs where you need a SMS or authenticator, however this is usually easy to get around with a web authenticator and some companies have let me use a YubiKey instead which is actually much less hassle.
4) Car parking meters where they discriminate - I tend to avoid these ones.
5) QR code restaurant menus - hate these but usually can get around it by just asking somebody for a paper menu.
6) Phasing out of 3G causing low reception - this is annoying because there are fewer good dumbphones that have 4G modems. Also I hate Android and Android based phones which come with facebook app and social media stuff installed so I'm a bit more limited in options. However, I managed to get an Alcatel flip phone which has 4G and it's a bit buggy but reception is now good.
I'm surprised that I'm able to get by, given the enormous pressure everyone is put under to use a smart phone, but it gives me hope that it hasn't worked and you can still get by in society without them. It would be pretty terrible if everyone HAD to agree to a google or Apple EULA just to be a functioning citizen.
My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code.
I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to use the agentic stuff but from what I've heard it's still too slow to run on a high end workstation with a single 4080.
Or have things got better lately, and crucially is there good VisualStudio integration for running local agents / LLMs?
The problem is, it's like ads. Even if it's a paid subscription, the incentive to hoover up your code, metadata about your code or everything they can get away with is just too strong. I think it will just happen at some point, unless you run them 100% locally or hosted somewhere but self managed.
Yes and even if they were squeaky clean and didn't do anything bad with your code, there's also the possibility that they've been hacked and code is getting siphoned off somewhere.
If you're big enough, you pay for on-prem frontier level tools. If not, you can do all right with a good GPU and local model, but it's not the same. And yeah there are plenty of plugins like Continue that support local or on-prem hosted models.
No I definitely don't use GitHub. Everything is entirely in-house.
But even if I did, there's a much more solid foundation of trust there, whereas these AI companies have been very shady with their 'better to ask for forgiveness, than permission' attitudes of late.
All the model providers have offerings that promise not to train on your code.
Can you trust them not to do it anyway? Maybe not. What's the actual damage if they did?
You have to balance the expected productivity loss from forgoing the use of these tools with the risk that comes from sharing your code with them.
You may want to reevaluate that somewhat frequently. I think there is a tendency in some circles to be a little bit to precious with their code.
So would you be interested in a simple serverless service that lets you run LLM’s and is focused on privacy and security first instead of trying to run it on an expensive workstation with a single 4080?
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.