Tech fashion

…because tech is a pop culture, it will apply techniques and approaches because they are fashionable even when the outcomes are worse.

— Baldur Bjarnason https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/book-production-ai-spa/ (commenting on the computational limits of photography and the ‘fashion’ for software processing in phone cameras)

I have been thinking a lot lately about applying pace layers to technology, particularly in the current climate of hype, where everything is declared a breakthrough (probably because slow, incremental progress toward stable, usable platforms is too ‘boring’)

Bjarnsason provides another example of software moving at the speed of fashion when its users need it to move slower, be more reliable, to learn from fashion (and either adopt or reject as appropriate) rather than to be fashion.