ethersteeds

I think your intuition about quality and who signs up is correct, but doesn't insulate as much as you're assuming. For one thing, corporations have a nearly unlimited appetite for converting employees to contractors. For another, the economy has produced a large number of desperate people willing to do pure commodity work.

One reason "Uber for X" appears not to have materialized is that the platforms themselves are commoditized, not just the labor. Retailers like Lowe's and Wayfair have built assembly/installation services behind a checkout upsell. They run portals distributing work to their "network of local contractors" .

I got a window into this world through an acquaintance. He has a truck and light trade skills, but mental and reputational legacies of past addiction lock him out of the "anyone good" market. He's on a half dozen platforms, trying to stitch a living doing sink or toilet installs for Lowe's and building bookcases for Wayfair. A negative review gets you demoted from the choice gigs, or even kicked from the platform entirely. It's bleak.

The same could be said of a word document, vs a text file with markdown.

The same could also be said of an .mkv file, vs a directory with an .avi, subtitle files for each language, and suggested fonts.

Or a macOS application bundle, vs an installer program that decompresses a binary and numerous resources across the file system and sets values in a system registry describing their locations.

It's not wrong, but it misses the value that can be found in a container format. Sure, I could make a digital mixtape by dropping audio files in a folder with a .m3u playlist etc. But being able to package audio with album art and metadata in a single open file format actually strikes me as incredibly useful.

I'd love to see this take off.

You are right, I'll just eat a 65 inch TV and live in the box.

The first 5 characters of the SHA of the password, which is totally, vastly different than the first 5 of the password itself

Bro just go outside

If you won't read TFA, source being the RedHat employee paid to triage Gnome vulnerability reports since 2020:

> Have you heard that most AI bug reports are “slop?” Not so in 2026. That was true for most of 2025, but the quality of AI-generated vulnerability reports has drastically improved. That is not to say that we no longer have problems with bad vulnerability reports, but in general, nowadays most of them are pretty good. (Daniel Stenberg reports the same pattern for curl.)

We're trying to talk about realistic options here.

Yes! That is what I came to say: it's interesting, but I can't contextualize the workflow he describes without knowing the the quantity of tokens involved and their retail cost.

You could even say we are like a glass carpet: the color may be attractive but the texture is terrible...

Who are the hall of shame brokers?