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beloch 19 hours ago [-]
"The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days."
--------
While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes.
The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.
The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated.
TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.
mattmcal 18 hours ago [-]
I've seen many accusations and exposes of clothing brands secretly sourcing sweat shop labor, but this is the first time I've seen anyone allege that sellers are secretly hiding the fact their clothing is made in high-tech ethical factories.
Sprocklem 17 hours ago [-]
Me too. My understanding is that clothing manufacturing is basically impossible to automate with our current level of technology, due to the difficulty of manipulating fabric.
pineapplepizza6 17 hours ago [-]
I think T-shirts are automated, that's why they're so cheap. Because it's a very simple construction.
Sprocklem 1 hours ago [-]
They are a simple construction, but I'm not sure I've seen any evidence that their construction is automated.
soltanov 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe in high tech ethical factories, maybe automation with cheap labor. But i think automation with robots can be possible with ai nowadays.
wodenokoto 3 hours ago [-]
It’s really expensive to automate.
Talked with a guy who wanted to built automation in food industry and it turned out it was cheaper to hire a guy to push the food item into a correct position on the conveyer belt than to set up a machine to do.
I imagine Temu changes things so often they’ll never get to numbers where full automation makes sense.
Something something, why buy a robot when you can hire a guy for $10/hr
> for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes
Wow. This is a sophism class in just one sentence. This is not a personal criticism to you as a person, but these "arguments" are not solid.
> for the vast majority of products
Quantifier-Shift Fallacy: from something does not exist to it does not exist for the vast majority. A much weaker assertion and not equivalent (also unsourced)
> its more likely
We are not discussing the likelihood, but the truth. You are confidently asserting something based on claimed likelihood.
> that exists only in stereotypes
It is just a stereotype, nothing to see.
Then some comments about automated factories. As if those 2 cannot be compatible (false dichotomy).
This is sophism with zero arguments, sorry.
The quote you are replying to is
> The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website
So we are not only talking about factories (Hasty Generalization). Delivery, for example, could be considered in that quote, as well as pollution, hand-work (most clothing garments are not automated btw) or many others. I am going to recommend a great book I read on the working conditions of a delivery person in China:
Automation doesn't mean there are no more people working long hours for little pay. It just means that they spend those long hours operating and maintaining machines, and are producing truly tremendous amounts of stuff compared to what they get paid. Also, TEMU isn't exactly known for selling the kind of high-value, high-volume products where a fully-automated production line pays for itself, so expect some steps to be done manually still.
conceptme 16 hours ago [-]
Look at this Ikea sells handblown glass on industrial scale the tv program went on a research how it was done on such a scale.
I guess you’re unaware that brands like Shein effectively use slave labour then?
pineapplepizza6 17 hours ago [-]
Lockheed has refused to share missile plans with Ukraine on the grounds that Ukraine could make better missiles for cheaper and ruin Lockheed's business.
If they had said national security grounds, it would be understandable. But they didn't. They said American manufacturing is too inefficient and the only moat is keeping the designs secret.
itemize123 8 hours ago [-]
when you make assertions that can be checked, check them please. doubly check it when it's contrarian.
rootusrootus 17 hours ago [-]
> Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.
That seems unlikely. Businesses usually price to market, they don't pin the price to the wholesale cost. People in higher income companies are always going to pay more for essentially the same products.
pineapplepizza6 17 hours ago [-]
Only worthwhile when you have low competition and a lot of sales in the market. By default, Americans get the same car prices that Chinese people get.
Which pissed off American car companies so much they banned imports.
tolugenius 1 days ago [-]
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.
mrngld 1 days ago [-]
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.
Grombobulous 13 hours ago [-]
Postage rates and geopolitical games aside, it’s an easy high horse to stand on to say that quality and good experience is going down the drain in favor of junk products and ad-riddled media. Not to say that having junk/ad-riddled stuff is good, but there are two sides to this coin.
My feeling during my time I have spent in most lower cost of living countries including China is that people in wealthy countries regularly get ripped off on consumer goods for the mere fact that they live in a wealthy country. For many consumer goods categories they don’t gain a whole lot of additional safety or peace of mind, they’re just paying more.
Anyone who has ever gotten prescription glasses made in the markets in China realizes how badly they’re getting ripped off.
If you actually live in China you aren’t paying $30 for a hooded sweatshirt like you do when you walk into a Target store. That price would be insane, astronomical (unless you’re just wealthier and shopping specifically at a luxury or Western brand).
Let’s take an example: a Boogie Board writing pad.
At Barnes and Noble the Boogie Board Jot Kids drawing tablet is $20.99
At Temu/AliExpress, it’s $3.50 total including shipping.
I.e., it’s easy for us to say that the “Netflix without ads experience” or the “smart TV without ads/spyware” is the experience we should all have. What’s harder is putting up the money to pay for those items when you’re working a real working class job.
I can’t blame anyone for dropping even moderately priced SaaS subscriptions for vibecoded cheap/free alternatives. I’ve done it myself: for example, why is every notes app with a decent feature set and collaborative functionality that is outside the Apple/Google ecosystem $5-10/month? That should cost $5/year.
runarberg 21 hours ago [-]
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.
bobthepanda 11 hours ago [-]
TEMU also existed because of the de minimis exception. To speed up customs processing and ease business, the US and EU had minimum package values before customs and tariff inspection occurred.
TEMU and Shein just kind of took it and ran with it by shipping $5 shirts en masse.
---
This also only really happened because China's whole export oriented policy relies on keeping workers underpaid via capital control. Workers get their bank accounts at uncompetitive rates and that capital is used to fund manufacturing expansion. The normal thing that happens as a country gets richer is that workers earn more, start buying more of their domestic surplus and their export advantage goes away. However, the current thinking promoted by Xi is that consumption is just capitalist decadence, and so Chinese consumers can't buy the ever increasing goods surplus even if they wanted to. And China is also dealing with internal deflation now due to the massive confidence shock after the property bust.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
There is a world, where Europe did not turn into a neo-liberal paradise as soon as the cold war ended. Where Europe straightened their labor rights (and kept their consumer protection). In that world, as people started waking up the fact that their products were largely made in sweatshops in India and China, Europe would have imposed import restriction and fined and closed companies who knowingly sold products made in sweatshops.
We do not live in that world. We live in a world where Europe went fully neo-liberal as soon as the threat of communism was over. And the results were companies taking full advantage of labor markets with abhorrent lack of labor protections.
European regulators and politicians could have done something about this, and decided not to. And so we have TEMU.
alexpotato 1 days ago [-]
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)
tony69 1 days ago [-]
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.
xkcd-sucks 24 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xerox13ster 21 hours ago [-]
Time and Materials?
IncreasePosts 21 hours ago [-]
Total Addressable Market
bottlero_cket 24 hours ago [-]
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.
crabbone 18 hours ago [-]
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? :|
kevinsync 23 hours ago [-]
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.
aziaziazi 22 hours ago [-]
The vegetal dock Martens are actually great quality based on 2 friends of mine that own them. Not sure what anecdotic evidence is worth though.
A comment found on internet has a possible explanation:
> I cannot recommend them highly enough, especially as everyday footwear because real leather should not be worn everyday as they need time to dry out
Not sure if the "Made in England" Dr Martens are Solovair made but they're the brand you want. Solovair continue to make good boots after DM moved production and whatnot to crap factories and methods.
239182 1 days ago [-]
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.
econ 19 hours ago [-]
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?
alexpotato 1 days ago [-]
> 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."
onion2k 1 days ago [-]
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.
gruez 24 hours ago [-]
>They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital
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.
stickfigure 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, parent's comment doesn't make any sense. Temu is a marketplace, they aren't manufacturing these products. I doubt Blackrock is investing in random bottom-tier manufacturers in Yongkang.
veeti 22 hours ago [-]
Temu was hardly the first online store for cheap Chinese goods of varying or dubious quality either. Does anyone remember DealExtreme.com? They were around before Aliexpress.
mvcosta91 21 hours ago [-]
It was circa 2012, and a coworker bought a drone but received an Invisible Bra instead. The unboxing guaranteed the loudest laugh we ever had.
officeplant 21 hours ago [-]
I miss buying random crap on deal extreme and finding a box at my door 3 months later I forget I ordered.
andai 1 days ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 24 hours ago [-]
Shipping is also subsidized by all of us on this end. International postage agreements were never intended to cover a massive unidirectional deluge of low-value packages. The costs of all the additional logistics are ultimately externalized to the taxpayer, and China totally exploits this. It’s exactly the reason the EU set a tariff for low-value parcels in particular.
maxglute 16 hours ago [-]
This 2026, PRC small parcels been routing through local EU warehouses for years now. Guess what, IT'S STILL CHEAP. This isn't complicated, mainland PRC has efficient logistics, they can haul shit from any producer to bulk air freight, for pennies per package, and then local distribution and last mile delivery also aggressively costs optimized globally. Like any competent country can do cheap last mile. The public's not subsidizing shit anymore. It should cost basically nothing to ship small parcel from Chinese factory to your door. The difference is intra EU logistics is captured by state and private interests who want their cut. Even with less efficient first mile, there is no reason any small parcel should cost more than a few euros to ship door to door within EU, outside of regulatory bloat. But bloat is exactly why EU needs to tariff small parcels, because even san-subsidy there's shit EU can do except to be competitive except raise costs.
behringer 23 hours ago [-]
It's not hardly an exploit when the taxpayer is the one benefiting
andai 21 hours ago [-]
If everyone bought from Temu then the net benefit would be zero relative to just including it in the price right?
In practice the value flows from people who don't buy cheap crap from China to people who do.
fn-mote 22 hours ago [-]
This amounts to a subsidy of Chinese manufacturing over local manufacturing.
I can’t see how a market distortion is a net benefit to the importing country.
It seems self-destructive.
ThrowawayTestr 16 hours ago [-]
It's self destructive that I can get cheap crap that has no chance of being made locally with free shipping?
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
No, it's self destructive that the government takes my money to pay for your cheap crap, creating a game where everyone individually benefits from buying cheap crap but everyone else suffers from it, creating a race to the bottom.
Sharlin 23 hours ago [-]
It’s a classic negative externality. Not every taxpayer partakes in this pathological consumerism.
throwaway27448 22 hours ago [-]
Imagine how dysfunctional society would be if we each individually got back precisely the value to capital we put in.
Sharlin 21 hours ago [-]
Subsidizing giant Chinese webshops over local vendors and supporting unsustainable consumption of single-use plastic garbage is not exactly the sort of public service that governments are supposed to provide.
throwaway27448 21 hours ago [-]
And that's exactly how we use USPS to subsidize amazon. Or did for a long time, anyway.
To be clear, this is the smart thing to do—package delivery SHOULD be subsidized. Amazon should pay into this disproportionately through taxes, though.
bit-anarchist 19 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, subsidies do cause actors to make otherwise unsustainable decisions. In this case, excessive consumerism.
throwaway27448 22 hours ago [-]
One might even refer to it as a "public service".
Magicrafter13 22 hours ago [-]
I think the parent comment is incorrect, however this is true for some products. Solar panels being the one I know for a fact, because we buy them at work. We pay less than it costs them to manufacture them because the Chinese government subsidizes it. (Granted, after tariffs we're probably hitting that manufacture price again, but that money doesn't go to them obviously.)
HeyLaughingBoy 17 hours ago [-]
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.
GP means that TEMU is just the marketplace. They aren't actually selling you the drill, just facilitating the sale.
onion2k 1 days ago [-]
If someone says to you "You can buy this widget that costs $10 to make for $5" that doesn't mean they they're selling it for $5. It means there's more going on and that the $5 price take is not the full story.
You may choose to ignore that and believe someone is selling you something for $5 but that doesn't make it true.
In the case of Temu, they're selling it for $5 of your money, and $5 of someone else's money, in order to capture you as a customer in the hope that you continue to buy things when they increase the price to $6, then $8, then $10, $15, $30 and so on in the future.
This is the Uber playbook, and if you have a solid product that people want and you can spend VC money long enough to build a trusted brand (or ideally keep prices artificially low until the competition gives up and you have a monopoly) it's very lucrative. I don't see it working for Temu myself. They sell things people don't need so as soon as the prices go up they'll probably fail. That said, Amazon see them as enough of a threat to launch Haul, so what do I know?
Joker_vD 1 days ago [-]
> You may choose to ignore that and believe someone is selling you something for $5 but that doesn't make it true.
Sir, I suggest you use the word "sell" in its usual way, not your own definition of it. If someone takes $5 and gives you in exchange the merchandise and right of ownership on it, then that indeed does mean they "sell it for $5". The fact that something else is going on doesn't make it false.
pessimizer 23 hours ago [-]
I suggest that the passage that you read begins with a claim that seems unreasonable ("but I've bought a $2 dress from Temu!"), and then explains its thesis in order to make you view that claim in a different way ("VC capital paid for half of that dress!") I also would like to mention that this is a very common and unremarkable way to begin an argument.
notpushkin 23 hours ago [-]
All that aside, I’m happy that VCs are paying for my stuff! I have no idea why they keep doing that. They’ve studied my behaviour so they should already know I’ll delete {app_name} as soon as I get a better deal elsewhere. (Better yet, I’ll keep both and let them fight!)
Maybe they can capture the market for a brief moment, but if they do have a long term strategy, I’m not seeing one.
sgarman 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not? It drowns out any competition and all we are left with is a single company with a monopoly that speed runs enshitification where consumers lose.
notpushkin 10 hours ago [-]
This can briefly happen, but until VCs run out of money we’ll get competitors about as soon as the enshittification starts. Well, at least in theory, regulatory caprure is a thing, so it doesn’t always work out.
This also doesn’t work when there’s network effects at play. I believe this is why Grab (Southeast Asian Uber/UberEats) is adding social features like a whole fucking messenger into the app. Didn’t help: Bolt has launched there as well and is often cheaper and faster so I usually check both.
(Now, Grab is publicly traded, and maybe it’s profitable, which would undermine my whole argument. But I’m still getting cheap transportation and discounted food. Maybe they externalize the costs somewhere else which indeed also sucks.)
stronglikedan 1 days ago [-]
None of that changes the fact that they are indeed selling it to me for $5 today, so the sentence you quoted is indeed accurate.
19 hours ago [-]
CharlesW 24 hours ago [-]
The use of 'loss leaders' has a long history, so is your point that Temu's use of loss leaders may be illegal?*
(*I poked around a bit, and this may be possible, especially in California.)
onion2k 19 hours ago [-]
Illegal? Hell no. Spending VC money to capture a market and drive out the inefficient incumbents is a genuinely good plan. Market disruption is a massive net benefit. I just don't think it'll work in the case of Temu, and anyone who looks at the prices and think "Wow, that's cheap!" isn't including where a chunk of the money is coming from.
I guess the same people were surprised when Uber started raising their prices too.
dtagames 2 hours ago [-]
The real punchline here is saved for the end of the article. It has nothing to do with Temu and everything to do with dumbing-down the population.
If people get used to relying on free or cheap AI-generated content, their overall intellectual capacity and ability to act in the world will be lower.
RigelKentaurus 20 hours ago [-]
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.
brazukadev 27 minutes ago [-]
not sure if I got your point but you are saying that people can't discern a bad app/system from a good one?
guhcampos 1 days ago [-]
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.
epiccoleman 1 days ago [-]
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.
xp84 23 hours ago [-]
For sure, the ridiculous promo games are best skipped (when even possible to skip!!) as 99% of the time they're just that you win the right to get a discount on a future order based on this next order. And those discounts are always described as like "a $400 credit" ... when it's really the sum of "50 cents off of $5, $1.50 off of $10... $30 off $250" and so on, so you will have to place like 8 orders of increasingly hilarious value to "use" all of your "$400."
All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.
andai 1 days ago [-]
They appear to be targeting users with underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. I wonder what the intention behind that might be.
Dependance 19 hours ago [-]
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.
moritzwarhier 19 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
m463 11 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the "temu-fication" of software happened in 2007 when the iphone came out.
Software used to cost $39.99 or $199.99 or more.
then the app store.
...and small crappy phone apps drove quality software away from 9.99 to 4.99 to 99¢ to free (with ads, and under-the-covers theft of your contacts, your photos and bookmarks and eventually every possible other thing)
zem 8 hours ago [-]
there was cheap shareware earlier, it just didn't have as much reach
mawadev 9 hours ago [-]
Very true, but it was more "functional" back then and I'm not talking about software quality, but dark patterns/enshittification obstructing it. Now you have dark patterns and decreasing quality. Where exactly is the value in trying to squeeze every penny out of something while moving the costs into an area that nobody can track and if pushed, will do plausible deniability on?
sajithdilshan 23 hours ago [-]
The whole premise of the post is that if something is cheap, then it has to be of bad quality. However, that’s not the case most of the time. One example is the knock off luxury bags made in China. Even the original ones are actually made in China, but people pay a premium for the brand name, but quality wise both are same.
Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
HeyLaughingBoy 17 hours ago [-]
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?
mawadev 9 hours ago [-]
Now try to explain to me how a ten dollar drill is comparable to a makita drill
ragall 17 hours ago [-]
> Even the original ones are actually made in China
Wrong.
mhitza 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for the laugh with the netflix logo. I feel that is very apt when all their recent shows I've glanced at seem to have their scripts brought from Temu or from a genai prompt.
m3047 18 hours ago [-]
"Please disable JavaScript by default and only enable on websites you trust. You have been warned." Random overlays if you click away.
Edits:
"two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm.
Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.
iugtmkbdfil834 20 hours ago [-]
I personally keep going back and forth on this, partially because I am seeing examples that cut both ways. On the one hand, I am mildly concerned a seemingly permanently raised floor, because I can already see ( and I already heard once or twice ) how now I should have x amount the output. I am saying seemingly, because we just had a meeting where higher ups are clearly concerned about the token cost so some form of 'more with less' is coming.
I am not saying some variant of temufication won't happen. If you look at openai's build week projects, you will see a fascinating array of things, but, also otherwise familiar patterns not completely dissimilar to 'calculator plays yankee doodle(but now llm interprets your next move)'. I guess what I am saying is that some things won't change: interested people will remain interested and use new tooling to its limits.
The question to me is what happens in the middle.
9 hours ago [-]
opengrass 1 days ago [-]
Why does Temu take the heat when Aliexpress has been around for years?
eterm 1 days ago [-]
Because Temu pushed advertising hard and fast at the US market and it paid off in a big way.
galleywest200 1 days ago [-]
Temu had a Superbowl ad. Not sure AliExpress did that.
andai 1 days ago [-]
Temu is Temu brand AliExpress.
Magicrafter13 22 hours ago [-]
One of the only people I've seen who gets it, and has a sane take on the matter. I've been trying to write my own article on a very similar subject for a while now, and it's always hard to put these things into words.
I yearn for humanity to stop being so greedy and always looking for the cheapest crap they can get, so they can pretend to be rich by having a lot of stuff. Particularly people in countries like America (where I live), are too comfortable, and pretend to live above their means (not necessarily consciously) by partaking of low quality mass produced goods.
thn-gap 9 hours ago [-]
I agree with the article, and it's something that I've been thinking for a while now as well.
I think however that the article is missing a big point, and that is that the cheap manufacturing from Temu/Shein work greatly because the steal and copy design from other people. So it's not just that AI will make production very cheap, it's that it's making it quite trivial to copy design and ideas from others at almost 0 cost.
So it's not just the product market that gets spammed by slop. It's that new creative human designs get hindered because anything great that you create, will be instantly stolen and copied.
chachra 23 hours ago [-]
True only if the end-product is better in some way. A gourmet meal is better than Chipotle. A handmade leather bag is better than the Temu version. In software, it's harder to make out the difference; of course, better UX, faster APIs etc. can all affect the end-user experience. But who is to say that AI-generated code can't do all of that (and more!)?
mawadev 10 hours ago [-]
The netflix example hits hard. I don't want to advertise the chinese pendant to it, but basically it has 2 minute "movies" with AI generated scenes that you can scroll like netflix. The amount of raw energy that went into producing this slop is just insane.
We went from "shorts" to movie "shorts", its going to be a dire decade for attention spans
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
There are Western shorts netflixes too. I don't want to give them publicity by naming them.
1 days ago [-]
andai 1 days ago [-]
> A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future ... in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse
Isn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.
a1o 1 days ago [-]
An exception is probably cars, they are better, more expensive but uglier too.
jerlam 24 hours ago [-]
Cars are slowly becoming subsidized by subscriptions and advertisements. And to some extent, costs of maintenance and gasoline.
Sarkie 20 hours ago [-]
First unicode hostname I've seen?
graceful6800 2 hours ago [-]
Americans will do and say literally anything to avoid admitting capitalism was a horrible, terrible mistake.
uglysnowcone 22 hours ago [-]
I agree with some points, but I don't like the take that AI/LLMs also aren't built on the backs of underpaid workers. While a lot of the training for LLMs may be unsupervised, we wouldn't have gotten to this point in AI without the support of data labelers. And on the hardware side, how many factory workers operate in unsafe conditions on a daily basis?
ragall 17 hours ago [-]
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.
nubg 18 hours ago [-]
good article, mostly because i have a feeling it was 100% hand written. thanks for not using ai. makes it much more authentic
cynicalsecurity 20 hours ago [-]
The article makes absolutely no sense. AI works better than humans. The quality of AI output depends on request. Higher quality request produces high quality output and vice versa. The article completely misses the point.
Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.
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cindyllm 22 hours ago [-]
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ls-a 22 hours ago [-]
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seki285 1 days ago [-]
You choose to consume bad media, not my problem.
____tom____ 1 days ago [-]
Have you tried YouTube recently?
Simply FINDING good media becomes the problem. I have no interest in AI slop, but it's everywhere.
I don't choose to consume bad media, but finding good media is getting harder and harder.
seki285 1 days ago [-]
Fair, but I don't use YouTube as much anymore. Except for music and old videos it lost its purpose for me. I mostly rely on word of mouth now, a friend recommends me this art channel or that show. If I like it I forward it to another friend etc.
I still feel bad for what is happening though, it's wrong and anyone with our best interests in mind would agree generated content needs to be firewalled from the human internet.
stickfigure 23 hours ago [-]
I use YouTube all the time and it's great.
Log in, pay for premium, and use the like and subscribe buttons liberally. Use the downvote button too. It learns.
My feed is really fantastic. Once a month or so I notice some AI slop (usually with a handful of views - clearly the algo testing something out). Thumbs down, problem solved.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
"Human made" is not automatically better and we need to stop pretending that it is.
Hah, I love sharing that link too. But contemplate this: Give the Oracle 12 engineering culture an unlimited token budget, do you think the code will get better or worse?
Based on what I've seen in industry, I think the answer could be very likely worse. They'll generate bad code at an even faster rate, and very quickly nobody in the company will have any idea how anything works.
What this proves is that "human made" is not automatically good. Better is a complex question. LLMs have a magnifying affect on the quality of human decisions.
NoGravitas 21 hours ago [-]
Oracle's codebase got the way it is over several decades of human programmers and customers with changing needs and ambient technological environments. LLM code can get that way in a weekend.
matheusmoreira 18 hours ago [-]
Dunno about that. I have some "vibecoded" projects. I wouldn't exactly call them stellar examples of craftsmanship, but they sure as hell didn't become insane thousand flag contraptions. I actually manage to understand the code when I review it.
coldbrewed 1 days ago [-]
Show me a fully LLM-generated database with an implement that's clear, documented, and adequately bug free.
Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments.
LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.
dsign 23 hours ago [-]
I was arguing with a colleague today that we will never have a reason to make our AIs autonomous and sentient. But now I can't stop imagining an AI startup meeting where somebody says "LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?"" and the next second the technical founders jump in joy "...that's our way in! Let's outcompete the competition by inventing pain for AIs!"
htrp 21 hours ago [-]
sounds like the torment Nexus, but someone else is being tormented.
matheusmoreira 22 hours ago [-]
> we had a 10k line lua function that grew through ten thousand point modifications
> It's bad and humans caused it.
LLMs do the same thing. I review the code and interrogate the model about the bandaid fix it applied until the proper architectural solution becomes clear. Then the model implements the correct solution which usually involves some major refactoring.
> LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person.
Of course not. That's the human's job.
And it's not every human either. Way too many humans are actually quite content to ship whatever works then go the hell home. Just a job after all.
16 hours ago [-]
alexpotato 23 hours ago [-]
I've worked at many firms as a SRE/DevOps and have seen lots of human written code that fell into at least one or generally of the below patterns:
- 30+ committers on <5K LOC
- software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable
- changes take a long time b/c there are no tests
Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.
HeyLaughingBoy 16 hours ago [-]
> software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable
I come across this fairly frequently. I think it's because the code has simply been tested into submission. So it works for that particular set of use cases, but the instant you try to add a feature, it all falls apart.
LunaSea 23 hours ago [-]
What you are describing is not bad software, it's complex, performant and software with a long lifetime.
matheusmoreira 23 hours ago [-]
> can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests
> all held together with thousands of flags
> ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher
> needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag
> Sometimes 100s
> only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests
> The fact that this product even works is nothing short of a miracle!
Sorry, but I can't think of any adjective for this mess other than just "bad". That's some truly industrial grade slop, and I hope whoever worked on that got paid handsomely for it.
mawadev 9 hours ago [-]
It is quite shocking how you over generalize one massive codebase of a working product that has been in use for decades to a couple of projects you did with your single human in the loop process while projecting that experience onto every other project that uses ai to write code regardless of scope and scale. I don't understand your train of thought here.
matheusmoreira 8 hours ago [-]
Not sure what's so confusing here.
I don't like the stigma towards AIs and the people who use them, which is what a post titled "TEMU-Fication of software" is ultimately all about. Call me a misanthrope if you want, as some people have done in the past.
Since I don't like it, I go out of my way to post counterexamples whenever I think people are deluding themselves into thinking human work is somehow magically guaranteed to be better. I cited that example specifically so you wouldn't have to take my word for it.
Working product? With this argument, you're basically admitting that it's all fine as long as it works. What does it matter if the database needs a billion special case flags not to fall apart? What does it matter if it's some AI slop? So long as it ships and people get paid, it's all fine.
I mean seriously, would you work on that Oracle thing if they weren't paying you serious money as compensation? You can literally feel the suffering through that person's words. Whoever they are I hope they're doing alright now.
And it is equally shocking to me that people think it's fine to thoughtlessly generalize and dismiss projects that use AI as slop and AI users as incompetent vibecoders.
So I don't think I'm generalizing at all. I'm trying to dismantle people's generalizations. People act like every human programmer is a deeply caring code artisan or something. Reality is far more cruel, of course.
LunaSea 27 minutes ago [-]
Reality is that this is how a codebase evolves naturally when these requirements are expressed.
Asking an AI to create a database or something similar would not match the difficulty level of adding new features to Oracle.
These flags are needed because your many versions need to be supported combined with many configuration options. This is true no matter if the code is written by humans or AI.
mawadev 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly, you have a fair and balanced point here, I agree
--------
While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes.
The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.
The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated.
TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.
Talked with a guy who wanted to built automation in food industry and it turned out it was cheaper to hire a guy to push the food item into a correct position on the conveyer belt than to set up a machine to do.
I imagine Temu changes things so often they’ll never get to numbers where full automation makes sense.
Something something, why buy a robot when you can hire a guy for $10/hr
Wow. This is a sophism class in just one sentence. This is not a personal criticism to you as a person, but these "arguments" are not solid.
> for the vast majority of products
Quantifier-Shift Fallacy: from something does not exist to it does not exist for the vast majority. A much weaker assertion and not equivalent (also unsourced)
> its more likely
We are not discussing the likelihood, but the truth. You are confidently asserting something based on claimed likelihood.
> that exists only in stereotypes
It is just a stereotype, nothing to see.
Then some comments about automated factories. As if those 2 cannot be compatible (false dichotomy).
This is sophism with zero arguments, sorry.
The quote you are replying to is
> The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website
So we are not only talking about factories (Hasty Generalization). Delivery, for example, could be considered in that quote, as well as pollution, hand-work (most clothing garments are not automated btw) or many others. I am going to recommend a great book I read on the working conditions of a delivery person in China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Deliver_Parcels_in_Beijing
https://youtu.be/w1AadRupGQ0?si=pzY0fS4nbh_JcUFi&t=82
If they had said national security grounds, it would be understandable. But they didn't. They said American manufacturing is too inefficient and the only moat is keeping the designs secret.
That seems unlikely. Businesses usually price to market, they don't pin the price to the wholesale cost. People in higher income companies are always going to pay more for essentially the same products.
Which pissed off American car companies so much they banned imports.
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.
My feeling during my time I have spent in most lower cost of living countries including China is that people in wealthy countries regularly get ripped off on consumer goods for the mere fact that they live in a wealthy country. For many consumer goods categories they don’t gain a whole lot of additional safety or peace of mind, they’re just paying more.
Anyone who has ever gotten prescription glasses made in the markets in China realizes how badly they’re getting ripped off.
If you actually live in China you aren’t paying $30 for a hooded sweatshirt like you do when you walk into a Target store. That price would be insane, astronomical (unless you’re just wealthier and shopping specifically at a luxury or Western brand).
Let’s take an example: a Boogie Board writing pad.
At Barnes and Noble the Boogie Board Jot Kids drawing tablet is $20.99
At Temu/AliExpress, it’s $3.50 total including shipping.
I.e., it’s easy for us to say that the “Netflix without ads experience” or the “smart TV without ads/spyware” is the experience we should all have. What’s harder is putting up the money to pay for those items when you’re working a real working class job.
I can’t blame anyone for dropping even moderately priced SaaS subscriptions for vibecoded cheap/free alternatives. I’ve done it myself: for example, why is every notes app with a decent feature set and collaborative functionality that is outside the Apple/Google ecosystem $5-10/month? That should cost $5/year.
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.
TEMU and Shein just kind of took it and ran with it by shipping $5 shirts en masse.
---
This also only really happened because China's whole export oriented policy relies on keeping workers underpaid via capital control. Workers get their bank accounts at uncompetitive rates and that capital is used to fund manufacturing expansion. The normal thing that happens as a country gets richer is that workers earn more, start buying more of their domestic surplus and their export advantage goes away. However, the current thinking promoted by Xi is that consumption is just capitalist decadence, and so Chinese consumers can't buy the ever increasing goods surplus even if they wanted to. And China is also dealing with internal deflation now due to the massive confidence shock after the property bust.
We do not live in that world. We live in a world where Europe went fully neo-liberal as soon as the threat of communism was over. And the results were companies taking full advantage of labor markets with abhorrent lack of labor protections.
European regulators and politicians could have done something about this, and decided not to. And so we have TEMU.
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)
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.
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.
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? :|
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.
A comment found on internet has a possible explanation:
> I cannot recommend them highly enough, especially as everyday footwear because real leather should not be worn everyday as they need time to dry out
https://www.reddit.com/r/DrMartens/comments/18ygnd4/for_thos...
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
In practice the value flows from people who don't buy cheap crap from China to people who do.
I can’t see how a market distortion is a net benefit to the importing country.
It seems self-destructive.
To be clear, this is the smart thing to do—package delivery SHOULD be subsidized. Amazon should pay into this disproportionately through taxes, though.
Oh? https://imgur.com/a/tjAdSQL
You may choose to ignore that and believe someone is selling you something for $5 but that doesn't make it true.
In the case of Temu, they're selling it for $5 of your money, and $5 of someone else's money, in order to capture you as a customer in the hope that you continue to buy things when they increase the price to $6, then $8, then $10, $15, $30 and so on in the future.
This is the Uber playbook, and if you have a solid product that people want and you can spend VC money long enough to build a trusted brand (or ideally keep prices artificially low until the competition gives up and you have a monopoly) it's very lucrative. I don't see it working for Temu myself. They sell things people don't need so as soon as the prices go up they'll probably fail. That said, Amazon see them as enough of a threat to launch Haul, so what do I know?
Sir, I suggest you use the word "sell" in its usual way, not your own definition of it. If someone takes $5 and gives you in exchange the merchandise and right of ownership on it, then that indeed does mean they "sell it for $5". The fact that something else is going on doesn't make it false.
Maybe they can capture the market for a brief moment, but if they do have a long term strategy, I’m not seeing one.
This also doesn’t work when there’s network effects at play. I believe this is why Grab (Southeast Asian Uber/UberEats) is adding social features like a whole fucking messenger into the app. Didn’t help: Bolt has launched there as well and is often cheaper and faster so I usually check both.
(Now, Grab is publicly traded, and maybe it’s profitable, which would undermine my whole argument. But I’m still getting cheap transportation and discounted food. Maybe they externalize the costs somewhere else which indeed also sucks.)
(*I poked around a bit, and this may be possible, especially in California.)
I guess the same people were surprised when Uber started raising their prices too.
If people get used to relying on free or cheap AI-generated content, their overall intellectual capacity and ability to act in the world will be lower.
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.
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.
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.
All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.
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...
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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.
Software used to cost $39.99 or $199.99 or more.
then the app store.
...and small crappy phone apps drove quality software away from 9.99 to 4.99 to 99¢ to free (with ads, and under-the-covers theft of your contacts, your photos and bookmarks and eventually every possible other thing)
Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
Wrong.
Edits:
"two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm.
Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.
I am not saying some variant of temufication won't happen. If you look at openai's build week projects, you will see a fascinating array of things, but, also otherwise familiar patterns not completely dissimilar to 'calculator plays yankee doodle(but now llm interprets your next move)'. I guess what I am saying is that some things won't change: interested people will remain interested and use new tooling to its limits.
The question to me is what happens in the middle.
I yearn for humanity to stop being so greedy and always looking for the cheapest crap they can get, so they can pretend to be rich by having a lot of stuff. Particularly people in countries like America (where I live), are too comfortable, and pretend to live above their means (not necessarily consciously) by partaking of low quality mass produced goods.
I think however that the article is missing a big point, and that is that the cheap manufacturing from Temu/Shein work greatly because the steal and copy design from other people. So it's not just that AI will make production very cheap, it's that it's making it quite trivial to copy design and ideas from others at almost 0 cost.
So it's not just the product market that gets spammed by slop. It's that new creative human designs get hindered because anything great that you create, will be instantly stolen and copied.
We went from "shorts" to movie "shorts", its going to be a dire decade for attention spans
Isn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.
Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.
Simply FINDING good media becomes the problem. I have no interest in AI slop, but it's everywhere.
I don't choose to consume bad media, but finding good media is getting harder and harder.
I still feel bad for what is happening though, it's wrong and anyone with our best interests in mind would agree generated content needs to be firewalled from the human internet.
Log in, pay for premium, and use the like and subscribe buttons liberally. Use the downvote button too. It learns.
My feed is really fantastic. Once a month or so I notice some AI slop (usually with a handful of views - clearly the algo testing something out). Thumbs down, problem solved.
Here's an example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
Based on what I've seen in industry, I think the answer could be very likely worse. They'll generate bad code at an even faster rate, and very quickly nobody in the company will have any idea how anything works.
What this proves is that "human made" is not automatically good. Better is a complex question. LLMs have a magnifying affect on the quality of human decisions.
Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments.
LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.
> It's bad and humans caused it.
LLMs do the same thing. I review the code and interrogate the model about the bandaid fix it applied until the proper architectural solution becomes clear. Then the model implements the correct solution which usually involves some major refactoring.
> LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person.
Of course not. That's the human's job.
And it's not every human either. Way too many humans are actually quite content to ship whatever works then go the hell home. Just a job after all.
- 30+ committers on <5K LOC
- software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable
- changes take a long time b/c there are no tests
Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.
I come across this fairly frequently. I think it's because the code has simply been tested into submission. So it works for that particular set of use cases, but the instant you try to add a feature, it all falls apart.
> all held together with thousands of flags
> ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher
> needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag
> Sometimes 100s
> only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests
> The fact that this product even works is nothing short of a miracle!
Sorry, but I can't think of any adjective for this mess other than just "bad". That's some truly industrial grade slop, and I hope whoever worked on that got paid handsomely for it.
I don't like the stigma towards AIs and the people who use them, which is what a post titled "TEMU-Fication of software" is ultimately all about. Call me a misanthrope if you want, as some people have done in the past.
Since I don't like it, I go out of my way to post counterexamples whenever I think people are deluding themselves into thinking human work is somehow magically guaranteed to be better. I cited that example specifically so you wouldn't have to take my word for it.
Working product? With this argument, you're basically admitting that it's all fine as long as it works. What does it matter if the database needs a billion special case flags not to fall apart? What does it matter if it's some AI slop? So long as it ships and people get paid, it's all fine.
I mean seriously, would you work on that Oracle thing if they weren't paying you serious money as compensation? You can literally feel the suffering through that person's words. Whoever they are I hope they're doing alright now.
And it is equally shocking to me that people think it's fine to thoughtlessly generalize and dismiss projects that use AI as slop and AI users as incompetent vibecoders.
So I don't think I'm generalizing at all. I'm trying to dismantle people's generalizations. People act like every human programmer is a deeply caring code artisan or something. Reality is far more cruel, of course.
Asking an AI to create a database or something similar would not match the difficulty level of adding new features to Oracle.
These flags are needed because your many versions need to be supported combined with many configuration options. This is true no matter if the code is written by humans or AI.