In all fairness, I thought early smartphones were pretty silly, and my opinion hasn't much changed.
I also find people touting "progress" don't realise that a lot of the time they just mean "change". I mean, sure, if a new way of doing things is demonstrably better, by all means let's use it. But a lot of the time you're just swapping one (well-understood) set of tradeoffs and considerations for a new, less understood set, because "That's what we're doing now".
For all that a lot of technical people like to make fun of the fashion industry, we definitely have our own as well.
(Not to take away from people trying different approaches. I'm all for trying alternate paths from 'best practice'. You don't want to get stuck on a local maximum. That said, there is a chunk of our industry that seems to congregate around whatever technology or approach has been recently discovered to be feasible)
Well, i sort of disagree. I agree that all progress isn't positive, but the problem is you can't really know that in the current timeframe. "progress" very often contains one (or more) steps back for every step forward. In the future, after the concept as matured, we will know if it is positive or not. But that is exactly how this works.
Sure, we can only use well tested, well understood, and well functioning concepts - but we already do that. What you are experiencing is bleeding edge, and we do not do bleeding edge where it really matters. Eg, good luck finding Nasa pulling this crap haha. In places where it is far less important, where you as a company/person have decided to use a product that is newer (probably for the sake of not being old, stale, and "safe"), then you have clearly chosen to accept the tradeoffs.
That's a fair point. I mean, I try to avoid rushing onto "the new thing" just because (although I'm certainly guilty of it at times), but I guess I forget that the ratio of articles posted to HN isn't representative of what people are actually doing, because the well-understood methods are, well, understood, so they don't generate a flood of articles.
I also find people touting "progress" don't realise that a lot of the time they just mean "change". I mean, sure, if a new way of doing things is demonstrably better, by all means let's use it. But a lot of the time you're just swapping one (well-understood) set of tradeoffs and considerations for a new, less understood set, because "That's what we're doing now".
For all that a lot of technical people like to make fun of the fashion industry, we definitely have our own as well.
(Not to take away from people trying different approaches. I'm all for trying alternate paths from 'best practice'. You don't want to get stuck on a local maximum. That said, there is a chunk of our industry that seems to congregate around whatever technology or approach has been recently discovered to be feasible)