abathologist

This kind of seems to me like exactly what a reasonable person would expect, based on the nature of the technology and the dynamics of the market bubble: getting plausible-looking-text-generators to do text munging on web apps and servers doesn't seem likely to increase base productivity, but the companies who can collect on the hype will make a killing.

> displacing the advantages of unearned social or financial power

In what way? Sure looks like pay to win to me.

I've worked in multiple nix-heavy environments, and I've come to really dislike it, despite thinking that Dolstra's thesis and core ideas are an important development in the space of package management. Everywhere it shows up it infects projects, creates constant breakage, and requires at least 1 person to become a nix expert, memorizing a bunch of esoteric nonsense. Basically it forces all of the adhoc nonsense of unix systems to be right in your face constantly, and leads to perpetual dependency limbo.

Totally on point, except that people don't get to understanding and configuring, they just probably correct configs that they don't understand.

This is exactly what is bad about LLM-driven AI: it is perfect for papering over the deep problems with unwieldy messes like nix. In a rational world, the pain and fragility of nix would keep it from getting mass adoption, until a deeply revised, and much more refined radicalization of purely functional software delivery appeared that had the upside without all the warts and inscrutable complexity. Instead, we'll just get a metastasized growth of incomprehensible nix configs, and be stuck in that local optimum for ever.

LLMs make worse is better even better, for the worse.

Depends on the company, obviously.

Well... look at the behavior, it is bad. They use the things you say here to justify it, soo... yes.