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- Hacker News
- Consider that it used to be said that nowadays there is not much class difference in consumption between low, middle, and upper clases in the US, in that the same items are practically available to all. Well, that won't be true shortly, and when only a minority will be able to afford "real" items, made exclusively and entirely by humans, I doubt that democracy will be able to survive, because contempt and animosity between the two groups will inevitably ensue, and democracy can't survive that.by ragall
- We need to get commerce out of social media.
Anything "social" should not have to do with commerce.
There are no billboards in a church, so why should there be ads in places where people socialize? Having ads on sports fields is bad enough already.
by amelius - The whole premise of the post is that if something is cheap, then it has to be of bad quality. However, that’s not the case most of the time. One example is the knock off luxury bags made in China. Even the original ones are actually made in China, but people pay a premium for the brand name, but quality wise both are same.
Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
- > Even the original ones are actually made in China
Wrong.
by ragall - Now try to explain to me how a ten dollar drill is comparable to a makita drillby mawadev
- Wasn't there a period when the insane China tariffs started that the Chinese manufacturers of Western luxury goods threw the veil off and started selling them direct at much lower prices?
- Wow, what the hell was that javascript tab change ? Not sure if I hated or loved it, but that was the first time I have seen that.by Dependance
- visibilitychange API, and websites are allowed to modify their own title and favicon programatically.
Favicon can be part of the DOM ever since icons via ~~meta~~ link tags were introduced, because they can be more hi-res than the default favicon.ico file.
I've never thought about the ability to swap it dynamically though, although I've seen some site do that before.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/vi...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ti...
- I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add.
I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else.
Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself.
So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.
by guhcampos - They appear to be targeting users with underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. I wonder what the intention behind that might be.by andai
- The gambling roulette is triply annoying because it will inevitably start walking you through some flow where you're supposedly ending up with a big discount or free items or whatever-the-fuck. And if you're encountering it for the first time, you'll think "ah cool, i can get some cheap chinese gewgaws for free with the thing I actually wanted to buy." And then 10 minutes has gone by and 5 roulette spins and there's $400 worth of bullshit in your cart.
And the thing is, Temu - I was going to buy something from you. I saw an ad or whatever and thought "sure, I'll pay $13 for that keyboard." But then you get pulled into the dopamine labyrinth hell-realm and by the time you're out they've wasted 15 minutes of your time and you don't even remember what you came in for.
by epiccoleman - Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly.
For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid.
But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.
- not sure if I got your point but you are saying that people can't discern a bad app/system from a good one?by brazukadev
- A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet.
TEMU doesn't sell those things. They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital from PDD Holdings, Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. It's a very boring 'spend the VC bucks to get the customers' play, and when they've got the customers they'll jack up the prices and lose the customers again. It's Uber-for-cheap-stuff basically.
by onion2k - > TEMU doesn't sell those things.by CharlesW
- Why on earth would anyone be surprised that this market exists? I can understand being surprised that it's possible to deliver those items at the stated price, but the market's always been there.
- I'm not 100% sure but I also heard China subsidizes shipping of packages, to boost their economy.
I worked as a mailman a while back, most days there would be more packages in grey plastic wrap (from China) than actual mail. And you could tell that the stuff that was inside usually cost less than the shipping would have cost if you paid full price.
by andai - >They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital
They're being subsidized? How do you explain their fat margins, $15.4B of profits on $54.0 of revenue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinduoduo
Maybe there's some loss leader going on, but comparing it to "VC capital" (venture capital... capital?) doesn't make much sense, any more than calling costco's rotisserie chicken and hotdogs "subsidised by VC capital" doesn't make much sense.
by gruez - > A 2025 Veracode report found that approximately 45% of AI-generated code samples failed security tests and contained critical vulnerabilities
Co-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting about LLMS:
Him: "I guess coding will just be a hobby now"
Me: "Coding def feels that way but software engineering as a profession is still alive and well."
by alexpotato - The US has been exporting Treasury bills and digital hot air for quite a while.
LLMs are the logical conclusion of this scam, until other countries stop gambling on the US stock market with fake $1 trillion corporations.
It works because the whole world's media is captured, owned and censored by US platforms and amplifies the US messaging.
by 239182 - Haha, and the way Chinese economics are described here shows what little people know.
When they invited our professors in the 80s they came back arguing China will eventually be the future. They listened to everything and started working on everything immediately.
We did the yes men privatization garage sale, gutted R&D, outsourcing, abolish education, housing, medical care. All that good stuff - but at what cost?
by econ - Quality products are amazing but I do get the downside of building very durable products.
For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running 24/7 for weeks in humid or dusty environments (e.g. to help air dry a wet basement). In terms of money paid/hours used, we got an amazing deal on the purchase.
From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post. It reminds me of the joke "Did you hear about the company that made lightbulbs that lasted 30 years? They went out of business!"
It makes sense that manufacturers would start to lower quality at a slightly faster rate than they lower the price as this means that folks still feel happy with the purchase. Sure, the fan doesn't last as long due to what is essentially planned obsolescence but the company does get to stay in business.
Temu/Shein etc are just the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning. If you are going to wear a shirt for the one summer where it's in style, why would you spend a large amount of money on it? And in turn, why would the company selling it spend a lot of money making it?
(I should add, this is purely an economical argument and ignores the working conditions/health effects/etc)
by alexpotato - I also have an abused Vornado and it's holding up just fine. Fans are a weird product though, I know most people would just throw them out as soon as they gunk up and stop spinning, but maintenance/repair is really simple compared to other product categories. IMO the business itself has a hard ceiling too, they can't be delusional enough to think they can keep scaling fan sales YOY, so it's one of those deals I imagine would simply be a stable, predictable brand in a portfolio of businesses that somebody (or some company) owns and operates across many niches.
Doc Martens, however, are a good example of a brand/business where LTV might literally be 1, 2, maybe 5 purchases if your feet have stopped growing and you buy their Made in England boots (higher quality, but a price point that isn't LVMH territory) and want different colors -- or maybe a lot more if you buy the shitty ones (vegan leather, plastic-coated leathers) and they fall apart after 9 months and you replace them.
Regardless, a higher quality pair bought in 1994 and beat to hell and back still are very wearable in 2026, while at the same time there are junk options available too if you're so inclined for whatever reason.
I don't personally understand businesses that treat their products as disposable if the product itself isn't intended to literally be disposable by design. I get "make as much money as possible before the spigot shuts off", "endless growth is the goal", etc, but it also seems like it would create all kinds of headaches and byproducts that make operating a brand or business hell on earth (staffing otherwise-unnecessary customer service, dealing with frequent returns and liquidations, constant rebrand/brand management to deal with or paper over negative public perceptions, endless battle with knockoff competitors because your product has no differentiation in quality or value, on and on).
Temu/Shein/etc on the other hand have a distinct advantage in that they're marketplaces and aggregators of invisible brands; they shield "ghost kitchen" product producers from any kind of liability, blowback, negative attention. They're giants in a foreign land that operate with different rules, goals and incentives.
I don't really have a salient point, just thinking out loud. Ultimately, the article is probably correct in that the default, mainstream firehose of digital detritus will settle somewhere near "ultra-processed content", and that will be just fine for the average consumer. Not much we can really do about it with society and economies structured the way they are today. The knock-on effects of this on culture would be borderline impossible to unwind though, which is sad.
by kevinsync - Next to the price tag, it should include the warranty. Similar to how calories are listed next to the price tag for food. Just a thought, not sure if it would work.
- Seems to me that the TAM for a fan is basically infinite for any single company, therefore making a product that is too high quality or long lasting could still get you growing yoy sales for a long time and stay in business. But you’re probably right that vs competition lowering prices (and quality) they’d lose.
There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly.
by tony69 - For some products, it's viable to sell replacement parts. For example, I have an Ankarsrum blender. The main engine is built to last, but a lot of things are meant to be replaced after some use. They, probably, don't cost as much as buying the whole new blender, but they still generate a revenue stream for as long as the product functions.
Similarly, Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker: it has some parts that will need replacing every few years.
These are, probably, not the best options in terms of revenue generation, but they are options. Sometimes it's possible to sell some kind of service that accompanies the product, or maybe some accessories... However, they aren't available for all sorts of equipment. Some equipment is just too simple to try to organize it in this way.
Maybe we just need to accept that some goods will never be able to benefit from economy of scale and will have to adjust our expectations to the price? :|
by crabbone - > From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post.
Given there's zero barrier to substitution + the TAM for fans and lightbulbs is huge as sibling comment mentioned, there's no reason for the LTV to meaningfully exceed 1 puchase and the value of that free marketing could be higher than the EV of purchase N+1
E.g., if my name-brand turd wears out unreasonably, I don't replace it with the same name-brand turd; instead I replace it with an ephemeral Chinese brand turd which is just as likely to have similar build quality and features.
by xkcd-sucks - Love this writeup. The temu analogy is best to describe what is going on beyond just what llms have done to software. What's closer to question is temu could only exist in the way it did (it's fast rise mainly) because of the work done by amazon prime in making fast shipping both logistically doable and the psychological default for many. So my question is what was the "amazon prime" era of software and perhaps learning what did (and did not) occur then can better understand why AI has wrought the effects it has in less than 10 years.by tolugenius
- As much as I hate Amazon, I think there is a simpler explanation. Europe has been relaxing their consumer protection standards for the past two decades, and EU’s consumer protection enforcement against foreign tech companies is hardly ever done today. This applies to both American and Chinese companies.
TEMU only exists because they simply neglected quality of their products which their competitors were required by law to have. And then they were not punished for it as they should have been.
In other words, TEMU only exists because Europe has turned into a deregulated neo-liberal paradise.
by runarberg - Temu built out some local distribution after it had already reached a pretty high level of popularity, but Temu was enabled by regulatory and political indifference that allowed China, with an enormous GDP, to get extremely subsidized postage rates. Also, lax enforcement of import duties (do you think the declared values were accurate?), and effectively zero enforcement of any safety standards, etc., on the products sold.
So, it was less of them following a path Amazon had trod and was maintaining, and more like sneaking in a back door and trying to sell you a counterfeit purse.
But if the US and EU had been on their game, it'd of either not happened or would've at least happened much more slowly.
by mrngld