What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap and it's a shame that we as a humanity have cheapened our lives to the point where IKEA is some kind of standard (and the only thing) most people can afford. Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it. Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer.
I disagree with this sentiment, IKEA furniture is much more sustainable than artisanal furniture. Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources. With increased electrification this problem is being drastically reduced and the wood is sourced from re-grown tree farms (which also have their environment problems, but it is nowhere near as bad)
I am from Brazil and before the recent soy-growing deforestation of the amazon the #1 cause of deforestation was furniture-making. My parents have a really old dinner table made from high grade wood, is it is a pain in the ass to move and it has a ton of scuffs we can't be bothered to fix. Once my parents move we will probably throw it away. It lasted 40 years (with a big varnish rework around 25 years in) but the trees used to make it will never come back, my ikea table has been with us for around 8 years and still works fine.
Particle board tech has come a long way and it is much better than it used to be, IKEA particle board is consistently "okay" to "great", but other manufacturers it is not guaranteed. The only thing it lacks (by design) is the weight, particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture, which is both good and bad depending on the situation (some types of furniture you want to be heavy).
> Most of the "back in the day" furniture came from tearing down virgin woods. Sorting + shredding-recycling + making new "cheap particle board crap" furniture takes a lot of energy, but not a lot of non-renewable resources.
It also lasted a lot longer. I have inherited furniture that must be around a 100 years old now and a lot that is over 50 years old and doing fine. A lot of my friends have older (even hundreds of years old in a fe cases). A lot of IKEA furniture will go in a decade or less, and they are far from the worst - I have chucked out furniture after three or four years. My IKEA wardrobe has deteriorated after five years.
You do not have to make better furniture by chopping down virgin woods. You can get timber from well managed forests. It is also an incentive to grow trees to maturity. You can upcycle things (the largest bit of old furniture I have got rid of went to someone who did just that). You can make better furniture by better use of recycled materials.
> particle board will be much lighter than "normal wood" furniture
It slowly buckles under load which is bad for things like bookshelves.
I moved a lot, and in different countries. I bought different IKEA furniture pieces. There's no one size fits all. IKEA is different by country, by price, by product line... For example, I have a bed I bought from IKEA made of pine wood. Just a few years old, but it shows no signs of wear, and there's no reason for it. On the other hand, I've inherited kitchen countertops and cabinets from the previous owner, and judging by the tags, they've started their second decade sometime this year. It's particle board all the way. The hinges have completely destroyed the nesting in the doors. The doors, literally, fell off. The countertop bent because of weight, temperature, humidity... it's the kitchen after all.
I've been trying to fix these things as the problems appeared, but, really, most people in this situation would probably tear the kitchen down and put the new one up. It's ironic, because we live in a "historic" neighborhood, where the houses have been built in the 18 hundreds and some, perhaps, even 17 hundreds. But absolutely nothing in these houses is more than a decade or two old. They also use materials that superficially resemble the old stuff: plastic panels with wood-like texture, unnecessarily thick aluminum window frames that resemble the old wooden ones (and open in the wrong direction!), plastic shingles that look like ceramics... And everything is made of crap. So much so that the whole neighborhood is perpetually under construction. It's like the Winchester Mystery House that its owners keep building in hopes to stay alive.
There are definitely different tiers. I've bought simple shelving that began to fall apart within years (Billy maybe?). I have 10 years old bedroom furniture still going strong (Kallax/Malm).
"The only thing it lacks is weight."
You must be being a bit hyperbolic no? Have you ever looked at artisanal/quality goods in comparison to IKEA? You can't see any quality difference?
I varies widely on piece, but even some (not all) of the cheapest wood stuff they have are pretty remarkable quality (or maybe I should say durability, the design side is still super simple for flat-packing optimizations). The non-entry-level stuff is quite good in my opinion.
But on some other stuff I tend to agree, their sofas are pretty bad in my opinion. The beds are okay, but even the non-cheap ones aren't "great".
The sustainability has to be weighed against the fact that cheap furniture doesn’t last. I know people who had to throw away furniture within just a couple years, because it was breaking down.
Meanwhile, I also know people who own pieces that are 50 years old. They look incredible and function great. Of course, we have a culture of consumerism. Most people have no desire to own or maintain something so old, they want new.
Sorry to call bullshit but I think that’s exactly what this statement is.
Just looking at our wardrobe and thinking about how it’s actually not one thing at all, but made up of dozens of different SKUs, and how I could reorder any of them individually if I needed. There are also third party sellers of parts such as runners, door rails, and the like (not that you need them since these can all be purchased from IKEA anyway).
The challenge with IKEA is colours: they used to offer more colours, but now lots of stuff is black white, grey, or beige with no other options (and sometimes white is the only option). If you need to replace a part in a colour other than that nowadays, you’ll perhaps find it difficult to impossible.
Depends on the specific piece of furniture, and how well you treat it. I have had quite mixed experience. Its not going to last like expensive stuff, but its generally far from the worst.
A large amount of ikea furniture is not cheap particle board crap. they have a range of materials for all of their products, and even some of the medium end products look nice and hold well.
Additionally, many middle-class families have "back in the day" stories where their houses were filled with bare essentials for which i'm sure an ikea bed frame would feel like an upgrade.
I think the real IKEA problem is global homogeneity (there seems to be a MALM dresser whatever home i'm in around the world), but that doesnt mean we are collectively living with a low standard.
Even their absolute high-end stuff is at best particle board with veneer. And you can bet the back will still be that thin 3mm fiberboard, no matter how high-end they look.
Unfortunately, top models nowadays have more and more hollow panels.
Seems to me that quality’s going down and they’re trying to save money with the materials they offer. But they can still be a good enough compromise, as I found out when looking for e.g. a TV sideboard.
The wood types are clearly labeled, so its not something they are trying to hide. And i'm not sure why hollow panels in itself are necessarily a bad thing...cutting down on material without hurting design or functionality has plenty of benefits (environmental, weight, cost).
For chests of drawers and bookcases they have one configurable wood product.
All the storage solutions for the living room are tiny and almost all of them are made of unstained pine.
For wardrobes they have two products, one of which is open and looks bad and the other’s tiny.
There are no wood equivalents to Pax, Platsa or Besta, the Ikea workhorses with a modern design.
And even if they existed, I don’t think people would rush to buy them. Solid wood’s not what Ikea’s known for and would cost too much for their target market.
I’m not saying they’re bad - I own several of their products, and while I’m overall pleased with them, I don’t love them. The compromises and cost-cutting design choices are always there if you know what to look for.
None of my Ikea furniture brings me joy or makes me want to touch it. It’s functional and looks decent to good.
Hollow panels are too light, not robust enough and essentially unrepairable. One could buy some Ikea pieces and cut them / adapt them in irder to upgrade them. These panels make that impossible.
> What a sad analogy. IKEA furniture is mostly cheap particle board crap
The first time I saw GenAI compared to IKEA, it was for this reason, ~"particle board is fine for furniture, but you really don't want it to be a load-bearing part of your house".
> Isn't that in fact weird, supposedly our societies are richer than ever before but most people can't afford artisanal goods that our forefathers would be able to afford even though they were supposedly so much poorer.
Shakespeare's will gave to his wife his "second best bed"; if a relative of yours wrote in their will that you'd get a fancy antique bed, would you want it?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_will
> (Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot)
This was true in the past, too. The historical artefacts we mostly see are the exceptions that survived, not what average people owned.
The tightly-packed wooden homes of London before the Great Fire just aren't there any more, and even fancy places in the same category as now-iconic British country houses were not immune, "around 4,000 were demolished between 1875 and 1975" according to https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-fal...
Back in the day artisans took care of horses and new have cheapened ourselves to use stinky cars. Back in the day we built computers with relays by hand, now we have cheapened ourselves to use weird semiconductors and use inefficient python code instead of highly optimized hand crafted assembly.
Typical sentiment I see that completely lacks any nuance. For one car vs IKEA are two completely different beasts entirely.
A car opened up new avenues that a human could never do before its invention. This itself makes it a far more worthy invention than most.
IKEA cheapened stuff and gave low quality cookie cutter furniture to everyone. Was this really a great thing, that propelled humanity forward? It’s also not like IKEA brought down the price to dirt cheap, it’s just like half or one third the price. What great thing will society lose if we ban IKEA tomorrow. People will spend a bit more on furniture, but they will have artisanal quality furniture and more artisans in society. That’s a trade I’d take any day.
IKEA allowed people to afford decent quality furniture who otherwise couldn’t afford it. That’s a huge benefit in my view. Your “spend a bit more” is actually a huge amount for artisanal quality furniture.
That’s how commodization has always worked. Something is suddenly available for the masses with maybe some loss of quality.
Look at Excel. A lot of elitists look down on people doing complex stuff with it but in reality it has enabled many people to do stuff they would otherwise have to pay a ton of money for.
Back to furniture. You are free to buy artisanal furniture but for a lot of people worldwide it would be a huge loss if Ikea didn’t exist.
Not just decent quality, decently looking furniture.
If you look at any architectural magazine, you can in most cases spot a few IKEA pieces in there if you know how to look. Because they look "good" - or at least mostly neutral.
IKEA is actually an example of a particularly horrible trade in this category. Claude estimates wood furniture price fell by 60% with IKEA. Plastic furniture on the other hand is 99% cheaper, far better at distributing furniture than IKEA ever will be.
So what did IKEA do, marginally cheaper furniture, complete destruction of demand for artisanal furniture (me alone buying some artisanal furniture is not propping up demand), apparently all our great wood workers should learn to code right now, but no worries LLM will code cheaper than them now, so maybe they should become YouTubers next.
And the particularly galling fact in this stupidity is the quality of the product is worse. Everyone now lives with worse furniture, the extra dollars they save, I guess they spend it on Netflix now, and we destroy a large avenue to express, human creativity, skill and craftsmanship for slightly cheaper furniture, lmao even. We will be perfectly fine with plastic furniture for the really poor, and higher quality more expensive hand crafted furniture for everyone else, they can maybe subscribe to Netflix less in return.
ikea made furniture easy to move, and easy to get furniture you actually want, vs being stuck with old stuff where the drawers are all stuck and its too heavy to move.
Expectations of society have changed. This cannot be discounted.
That old furniture was also expensive. A family would save up and buy a piece, use it their whole life, and often pass it on to children or other family members.
These days, with IKEA, Wayfair, etc, people throw out and get all new furniture every time they move, or even just to refresh a space. They do this because the furniture is cheap. If they saved up for a year to buy a kitchen table, it would be used for a long time and not get discarded and replaced along with fashion trends in home decor.
The high quality stuff is still out there, it’s just that most people don’t want to pay for it, as we don’t see furniture as an investment anymore.
People seem to have no problem paying $1,000 for a phone that they’ll replace in 2-3 years, yet they won’t spend $4,000 on a kitchen table that will be used 3+ times per day by the whole family for 50 years.
Genuine question: but are there still people eating meals in a home dining room in the 2020s?
Or is this just inertia of expectation from the 20th century from folk who expect "well that's just what you do" even though their dining room tables are presently covered in unrelated "temporarily put there" items?
Survivorship bias, you see only old tables or chairs that lasted, you don't see all the crap that didn't make it to present times.
False dichotomy "if it is not IKEA it is 'artisanal' great quality" — well — no our forefathers would be able to afford whatever quality had local woodworking shop and imagine that a lot of places didn't have best of te best... So IKEA made average quality much better.
> Back in the day furniture was artisanal and hand made yet people were able to afford and have it.
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. "Back in the day" artisanal solid wood furniture was so expensive that you would buy it once and keep it your entire life and then your children would use it after you die for their entire life. It was not even the same ballpark of price.
The conceit is similar to "ordinary plates vs paper plates".
Nobody is arguing that a single ordinary plate is "cheaper" than as single paper plate, but one can still argue about how TCO of a set of ordinary plates vs constantly buying a stream of new paper ones just to throw them away after each use.
Ikea furniture doesn't just break, usually. You can have the same Ikea furniture for decades. Even if it did though, you can also still buy the solid wood Amish furniture for a reasonable price if you're intending to keep it your entire life. A big Amish couch is ~$5k on the high end. A big Ikea couch is $1-2k, which people can and do buy multiple times.
It's just that people expect that they should be able to replace their furniture every five years on whims, and it also be high quality, and it also be cheap. That's their problem.
Most enterprise software written by your colleagues is mostly cheap particle board crap.
At least IKEA furniture is usually reliable and does not fail catastrophicaly unlike the crappy bug ridden enterprise software we all have deal with...Jira, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, etc...
Mature AI will be better than the average mediocrity that calls himself a software developer.
the "code isnt the hard part" says that the quality of the code might be higher, but itll be just as buggy because the hard part was always about communicating the right thing to build
code written by ai that the end user cant complain about or communicate their complaints about will be just as bad as hand crafted artisan code that the end user cant communicate complaints about or influence
It's not weird, it's because we define wealth in terms of buying IKEA furniture that we are considered much wealthier than the past. If the affordability of handmade goods or services were the measure of wealth, then perhaps we are much poorer today. I can see how each viewpoint exhibits some contradicting insights.
Ikea sells quality stuff as well. Also it's good that we can now afford furniture where our ancestors would have a couple of chairs and a half broken table passed down for generations.
Personally I'm quite happy that dropping a plate on the ground isn't a terrible event.
I think that is false, there is more artisanal furniture today. In the past people had less furniture and most of it was junk. With power tools people can afford more good furniture, even though it is lost among all the junk. Don't forget that good furniture lasts longer than junk and what the past made is kept for decades.
Also with the much larger population today, a small percentage of craftsmen still dwarfs the output of the past.
When you have a surplus of poor people that might insinuate insurgency it's always possible (and cheap) to hire one half to kill the other half. Problem solved.
Same in Finland. The ruling party (represents the rich and the business owners) gave tax cuts for rich (high income earners and and those who have capital gains). Next they're planning to cut the business tax 4.5 percentage point. Eroding tbe states tax income while the state is already in the hole with a ton of debt. Of course the story is that these will kick off investments and make business boom. Best part is that to compensate for the tax cuts they're gutting the benefits including social security, unemployment benefits (highest unemployment in Europe btw) and calling those people lazy who just need "encouragement" to start working. A real hero pasty.
Similarly incentives to buy EVs naturally only apply to the folks who are better off. Most working class buy cars that are +10 years old. (The average car age is among the oldest in Europe btw)
Not disagreeing with you but the "resource allocation" which I presume to hint at the fallacy that capitalism is somehow great or optiomal at allocating resources is not really true. Just look at any big company such as meta and see how much inefficiency and bad choices there is.
Stock market as a measuring stick is completely irrational.
When you take away the cost people will treat the result worthless.
For example if you hiking in the mountains, reaching the summit and enjoying the views are valuable experiences to you because it had an associated coast, i.e the physical act of hiking up the mountain. If you take the ski lift to the top it's almost worthless and you have very little appreciation for the views.
Very apt comparison! This is how I feel too. In the sense that when I’m coding as a hobby, especially something like advent of code, using an LLM would defeat the purpose for me. A bit how I don’t double check my moves with an engine when playing chess online.
On the other hand though, if I’m being paid to build, say, the top station of a ski lift on a peak, I wouldn’t be surprised if the contractee would prefer I don’t try hiking up the building materials and used a helicopter instead.
"It's not clear how civilisation functions if humans become effectively useless and the only thing of value is one's ownership of wealth producing assets."
You can get a hint of this by looking at the developing countries with high income inequality. Few rich people who typically own all the countries wealth (and access to it's natural resources) while everyone else lives in a slum.
No it isn't. The median household income in California is over $100,000/year. The 20th percentile household income in California is still over $16,000/year, higher than the per-capita PPP GDP of places like Belize or Jamaica.
While the idea is itself not without merit the problem is when people design these data oriented systems without abstractions and in fact it's often difficult to find good abstractions around the data the problem comes when the system, the data and functionality needs to change. There will be problems.
So while it's great to think about the data flow it's also important to think about the abstractions around it,.ie the (system) interfaces that let the system evolve without having to propagate changes everywhere while reaping the benefits of data orientation.
This is what ECS frameworks like Flecs can help with. They provide the tools and abstractions so you can write heavily modular code in this model. If you don't need the generic modularity, flecs will not feel like your gaining anything for the boilerplate you gotta write and the stuff you gotta learn, but if your making something huge that needs work for years, learning flecs is probably worth it.
I find the cookie banner always ironically wrongly labeled. Everyone claims to "respect your privacy" while actually disrespecting the privacy. If they did actually respect the privacy they would not use non functional tracking cookies and there would be no need to display the banner.
The problem with OpenGL isn't so much that its programming model is outdated, but that it is an incredibly confusing and (in many places) just plain badly designed API (just look at VAOs, it's hard to come up with a more broken and useless feature - some of the problems have been salvaged on more recent OpenGL versions, but those are not portable to macOS or GLES3.x).
Another (related) problem is that the many sediment layers that have accumulated over nearly three decades are not clearly separated (and Vulkan is starting to suffer from the same problem btw, there's always at least five different ways to do the same thing, three of which are outdated or not recommended to be used on specific GPU architectures, and the other two have complicated relationships and interdependencies with other redundant or optional features, it's apparently some sort of Khronos curse to always create the biggest possible mess when it comes to 3D APIs).
On Windows (maybe even on Linux via Proton), starting with D3D11 makes a lot more sense, or on macOS with Metal v1. Both APIs are 'close enough' to modern 3D APIs to carry a lot of the knowledge over, but without being too low-level like Vulkan or D3D12, WebGPU running in browsers is also a good choice (even though it inherits some bad design decisions from Vulkan 1.0 when it comes to resource bindings, and is in some places actually slower than WebGL2).
I think the dark side of OpenGL for beginning graphics programming is that debugging can be really frustrating! I really think learnopengl.com should have a mandatory section for how to use RenderDoc (https://renderdoc.org/) - it's night and day if you know how to use it.
DX11 suffers from the problem that there aren't that much high quality material comparable to learnopengl.com - I really don't like RasterTek which just dumps code at you without explaining things properly. Same for Metal - the best way would be to just download and read the example source code from the official Apple site, but it's rather unfriendly for beginners.
> incredibly confusing and (in many places) just plain badly designed API
Thankfully Khronos has ensured Vulkan follows up in this tradition, lets see if the usability improvements from 1.4 onwards are good enough for Vulkan to stay relevant beyond Android, embedded and SteamDeck.
I do agree Vulkan is too cumbersome, but OpenGL is definitely obsolete.
The OpenGL API with its binding-based approach is also very confusing for beginners, but the replacement Direct State Access API came too late (after Apple already decided they would deprecate OpenGL, so it never got supported on macOS).
And the fact that the GLSL parser and compiler are part of the driver means there are tons of hardware-specific bugs and miscompilations. Intel integrated drivers on Windows are notorious for being especially buggy.
All of those make OpenGL a pretty poor target for learning. Personally, I would recommend WebGPU to people who want to get into graphics programming. It's very similar to DirectX/Metal, and like a more streamlined Vulkan. The WGPU implementation of WebGPU has a C API, which also has C++ headers, and a native Rust API. And you can also use WebGPU in your browser from JavaScript, if you don't know any native languages.
What is the current status of WebGPU support in browsers? I tried to get into it a while ago go, when the writing was already on the wall for WebGL. But WebGPU just wasn't there yet, so I had to stick with WebGL.
WebGPU is newer, but lacks modern functionality because it was made to support ancient smartphones. That's great if you want to support ancient smartphones, but not if you want to utilize modern desktop GPUs.
I still think that OpenGL is a better place to start learning 3D because there is so much less bookkeeping to do regarding memory and concurrency vs. Vulkan. I'm working on a "Post-Modern OpenGL" tutorial that exclusively teaches the most "modern" (merely a decade old) APIs and practices of GL 4.6. But, writing is slow going...
If you are going to use Vulkan, check out https://howtovulkan.com/ Vulkan started with a lot of compromises to make mobile hardware happy at the expense of making everything overly complicated on desktop. Over the past decade, desktop devs have managed to get a lot of features added to make Vulkan on desktop more sane. How To Vulkan covers that newer approach. This recent video "It's Not About the API" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bSzp-QildA shows how simple it can be if you let it.
And, if you are on a Mac, folks who use Metal like it a lot. Don't worry about lock-in. Once you learn the basics, knowledge is easily transferable to DX12 and Vulkan. You should plan to write 3 or 4 renderers to throw away anyway :P
> I'm working on a "Post-Modern OpenGL" tutorial that exclusively teaches the most "modern" (merely a decade old) APIs and practices of GL 4.6. But, writing is slow going...
Is it the AZDO stuff? Quite interested, since there isn't really much information on the Internet about it rather than some slides and GDC videos.
Yep. It's my thesis that early GL APIs feel beginner-friendly because they are so hand-holdy, one-step-at-a-time. But, they end up more complicated when you get serious and they instill bad practices.
Instead, the "modern" APIs allow you to leverage your pre-existing knowledge of "allocate arrays of structs and start indexing them." That's not trivial. But, it is already familiar. And, it ends up a lot better in the end compared to "Invoke whole lot of functions to manipulate a hidden state machine."
OpenGL is limited to 4.1 on Apple platforms if I am not mistaken, and will not get updated ever. So you will run into missing features eventually on some platforms, e.g. SSBOs are really nice but you can't them use on Apple devices.
For me, a much stronger argument against OpenGL is that is requires a global state. This often leads to bad design, is miserable to multi-thread, and is rather tedious to port to Vulkan. I have spent several years fighting with multi-threading applications doing all sort of things in OpenGL and it is not great. Yes, Vulkan is extremely painful to set-up and you have to think about a million things you might not really care about directly, but honestly, I would also recommend against starting anything serious in OpenGL. To get your hands wet maybe, as with a couple lines you can get something running..
I think if you're trapped in the Apple ecosystem then Metal is your only production-quality option. But beginner-level learning material for it is quite sparse, so it's better to transition from OpenGL to Metal rather than learning Metal from scratch. (If you're an experienced graphics dev, you should be able to follow up on Metal by just reading their example source code)
Nope, the limitations are just too huge for actual usage. Heard Godot Engine tried to use MoltenVK for macOS but experienced too many issues so they just developed a Metal backend.
The fundamental problem is Metal 3 is just too high-level to be able to emulate all of Vulkan's behavior. The new Metal 4 API (which is more low level and similar to Vulkan in many ways) might have improved things recently, but sadly MoltenVK hasn't been rewritten to this new API yet.
Worse than OpenGL though? Haven't had the time to really look into it, probably native Metal is better, yes, but either way it might be easier to port/adapt from Vulkan than from OpenGL (due to similar concepts, no global state, etc)
Sadly, the OP is right, OpenGL is deprecated on a number of platforms and down right removed from others. Please don't learn this now. Vulkan has the shape of every modern graphics api out there, DX included. Learn this or at the very least WebGPU.
A data point: "OpenGL ES is still supported on Android, but is no longer under active feature development. Vulkan offers the following advantages over OpenGL ES" "Vulkan is the preferred Android interface to the GPU. Android 15 and up includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan."
(Hint, distribution of wealth matters a lot)