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It's less a binary pay/no pay, and more the value of accessing the dev tools. If you consider the fact that AI companies are most likely losing money running the models, then AI tools are incredibly cheap - they're in some ways paying you to use it.

No model maker is going to try to generate a profit off users using their models, they're gonna try to generate it some other way - much like dev tools.

Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience).

Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic.

In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.

Nothing that you talked about pertains to art. Writing good code does not mean you're making art.

You shouldn't strive for internal consistency with yourself, you should strive for external consistency with the other developers in your team. If someone reads your code and immediately knows it was you, you probably aren't doing a good job.

And that's the difference. If you are doing a good job as a software engineer, no one should notice you. If you're making good art, everyone should see you. And that is the difference between devs who think they're good, and devs who are truly good.

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team.

Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.

In a world like that where you have to work in a team, why you ever wear your inflexibility as a badge of pride? The ones who are the most useful are the ones who can code any way, any how, and can plugin anywhere - "taste" be damned. If you want to be a net positive on the teams you work on, stop thinking it's about you, because it's not.

Paying for Internet is not a great analogy imo. If you don't pay $1k/mo for Internet, you literally can't work.

What happens if you don't pay $1k/mo for Claude? Do you get an appreciable drop in productivity and output?

Genuinely asking.

At the end of the day, they're subject to the same market forces. If the big publishers lose their shirts, that means small bloggers don't have any chance of making it big. The same market forces that make big publishers worse are going to squeeze smaller outfits and writers.

And I know some people are going to say how writers and news "don't deserve" to make money because they haven't sacrificed enough upon the altar of tech, hustle, and Silicon Valley - I don't really care. I think newspapers and writing in general losing out is a blow to society.

Just because the shareholders didn't vote on it, or an exec didn't explicitly say "hey steal this" does not absolve the company. Leadership doesn't get to throw up their hands and say "not my fault" when something bad happens.

It is ultimately the responsibility of the company and its people to create a system where things like this are discouraged or prohibited. Not doing so is tacit approval, especially in this case where they have a significant history of doing the same thing.

Anyone else hosting MCP servers in a generally available way? Seems like that's the end goal given the network transports (especially the one in new spec revision).

Seems like everything I find requires running locally or hosting your own instance.

VC funding is for sure less personal risk, but I don't think the other points are universally true.

1. Re: hiring, you're probably not going to hire your first FTE right after raising money. You're probably going to do so after getting a bit of traction. I hear most investors especially today will push you to be lean and do more yourself. Either way, bootstrap or VC funding, you're going to bust ass, no way around it.

2. Re: salary, yes, some investors will encourage you to pay yourself, but you're probably not paying yourself a "full" salary right away.

3. Re: selling to cohorts is a bit overrated I think. The fact of the matter is, they're probably all early-stage tech startups, which means if you don't have a product that specifically targets early-stage tech startups, you're probably not going to sell to them.

I don't think it's as cut and dried as X is better than Y. It really is all about how much risk you want to take on, if VC funding is even an option.

That's the reality of a lot of other degrees. Looks like it finally caught up to CS degrees.

Is Rust praised for its checked errors? I've personally found it extremely verbose since there essentially is no possibility for unchecked errors.

Also, external crates like "anyhow" are required if you don't want to account for literally every single possible error case. Really seems like a pedantic's dream but a burden to everyone else.

Effective Java recommends checked exceptions only in the case where the caller may recover, but in practice you're usually just propagating the error to the caller in some form, so almost everything just becomes unchecked runtime exceptions.

How do you even "fix" loneliness? If you don't know that, you can't allocate resources. Plenty of research studies have been done on loneliness to find a silver bullet.

For most people, it's not like there aren't opportunities to meet people and talk to people. It's well understood that no matter how many people you get exposed to for a period of time, meaningful relationships can't be forced.

Plenty of lonely people in big cities going to social events.

I really doubt "literally" every software you used or worked for has multiple competitors doing the "exact" same thing. VC money can temporarily prop up multiple competitors doing the same thing, but over time, winners definitely spring up.

A lot of software that on the surface does the "exact same thing" often has different nuances, either to the business or the product that makes them appeal to different niches in the market.

Understanding the nuances and exploiting the market niche is your only goal when starting a business. It's not something you ever do or think about when working on software, but people who strike it out on their own quickly realize that simply building is not enough, you MUST give people a good reason to use your software. Just because you don't see or understand the nuances, does not mean they are not there.

Unlike regular businesses, software scales infinitely and delivers immediately.

You absolutely must have a "unique" selling point, even if it's just being cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors are just a click away.

I'd argue the author HAS found PMF, just not the kind that gets you to $1b.