freefaler

Dude, it's not Altman, it's the real world.

If you can do something for your client, then you get to eat what you both voluntary agreed the deal is worth.

Does a plumber work for Altman, or for himself? Why this need to have a boss and not live by the direct fruits of your own labor?

The point is to survive and care for your family.

In a free market economy, you get from the butcher the meat only if you can give the butcher something in return. It might be cleaning the store, or throwing out the smelly bloody stuff out.

It's not pretty, but life is not pretty.

It is great to find a way to swap for other's needs what you're good at and enjoy, and sometimes it's possible.

However, since you need to solve another's person problem to barter with from something, it's by default not something you like, but something the other person needs. And this frequently is not what you would like to do at the moment.

So basically, this is life, sometimes we can write beautiful code, sometimes we need to fix a messy code our client uses every day.

And sometime we don't have the pleasure to work on the computer at all, because AI took our job away, and we end up cleaning the store.

The best one I've seen aren't so interested in the "artisanal" part of the programming, but on the "practical engineering" part.

They constantly are poking at the requirements to understand what's the purpose and they find a better, simpler or sometimes hackier (for temporary stuff) solution, but they are on time, they solutions work and they get shit done.

I've seen some really crafty "artisanal" ones that debate for hours and rewrite 10 time the release scripts... Not the most efficient way to spend their time.

I have an interesting observation from the programmers on my team.

The good ones are increasingly producing good solutions much faster than before.

The not so good ones, are doing the same bullshit they did before, but now the don't even bother to check it. For example one requirement to "not implement it in the frontend" led to 3 times PR rejected, because it still has been implemented (even if it's partially there) in the frontend.

I'm not sure what's the reason, but I assume it's

- inability to understand architecture choices and their consequences

- "don't bother me with shit, just pay me a salary" attitude

but the AI lead to amplification of the good and the bad in people.

I am more worried on using my Gemini (and other LLM chat providers) sessions to build my profile and sell it to data brokers.

And I'm much more worried if the government forces these providers to share my data so they can enforce automatically and cheaply the next "save the children" law, which is mostly "no tax sheep left unharvested" law.

(after a short research your LLM usage is currently used to build your profile)

So basically what will happen is what happens now, the ownership will be hidden trough trusts, multiple companies and other schemes.

It's hard to expropriate from (on average) the most active members of society that have build their own businesses and have reaped benefit based on free market economics and are mobile geographically, and not risk averse.

The bigger problem is not the tax, but how it is used. If you have a leaky bucket, no matter how much water you put in, it won't hold.

With all the technologies, the way to improve the society is through more transparency on how the money is spent, breaking over regulated sectors with inherent oligopolies and let the people keep what they earn.

That wealth has been taxed already when the profits were realised and will be taxed again on consumption.

The CEO hasn't build shit, he has been a manager all his life working for a salary and a bonus, so he might not understand the psychology of a person who risks a lot and gets paid voluntary by the value he provides to his customers.

Behold... the new lawnmower is out, all the companies that cut your grass are dead.

I can paint my house and I can change the oil in my car, but I prefer not to do it. I might host something personally, but self-hosting comes with cost, uptime requirements and bug fixing (by the AI and how would I verify the fix and possible regressions?).

A lot of B2B services exist to provide complete solutions. The business pays so it won't spend time/management resource/risk to nurse that solution.

With AI the cost of software will go down, no more 15$ per seat plans, but it won't go to 0 or self-host everything.

If he has any power over other people than may be this might be required?

If the market is filled with cheap products and a clone of your product can be easily made, then the survival of the business is in positioning, marketing, packaging the product, distribution, sales...

This makes the technical skills required but not sufficient part of the whole business and there are many businesses (like restaurants) that are bad businesses, because many people are willing to open a restaurant as a life-style choice even though most of them are not a good business. This influx of new competitors, make the current restaurant owners profit to go down, because of the increased competition that isn't purely market driven.

In the software world that means "a small product" won't have any moat & pricing power, and your competitors might be wiling to subsidise it for years as a side project, making the whole market suffer from profit erosion (an economic term) leading to zero profit long-term equilibrium.

For example try charging per message (as previously charged by SMS/MMS) in the era of subsidised messenger apps with free calls and messages.

This makes the unique position of SAAS software with 9$/month subscription highly doubtful in the future.

The same what reddit did, "this is our content" we'll try to milk it to the tilt. I think this is akin to a reverse "tragedy of commons" but for user generated content verticals. It makes economic sense for them to try to lock it and they will try to lock it unless there is a market force that prevents that. Sadly, market forces in these markets are few and far between.

Cory Doctorow argues that the antidote to walled platforms is to restore the legal and technical right to adversarial interoperability. Users and developers should have the legal freedom to reverse-engineer APIs, build scrapers, create cross-platform bridges, and deploy third-party readers without facing lawsuits under anti-hacking statutes like the CFAA or DMCA Section 1201.

Indeed. At uni, starting in my second year, I worked as a programmer (no remote work, office at 1hr commute from uni dorm) on top of my studies. It was hard, but doable. My major was applied math, so the CS part was the easier bit, but the math, especially Analysis, Numerical Methods, Linear Algebra, and Analytic Geometry they kicked my butt. We also had a really bad prof for the Math Logic class and no textbook, only lecture notes and his lectures were unstructured shit :(

The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.

Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.

So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.

University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.

Yes, there was investment, but investment without free markets and capitalism doesn't work usually for end products like cars. It's not a linear function of the capital invested, it's not possible to spend your way into good consumer products. That's not infrastructure. That's why I was mentioning that before Tesla came that investment didn't lead to any strong EV automotive players. In 2016 there was a big scandal on widespread EV fraud, where manufacturers just built to get the subsidy(骗补).

The policy shift came around 2017 when the government understood that subsidies and closed market created lazy automakers (e.g. check the US market for the same dynamic in trucks). In 2018 they removed subsidies for cars less than 150km of range and changed the requirements to receive them tying them to battery density.

After Tesla came and subsidies were reduced, most of the inefficient companies went bankrupt. It was the free-market competition that killed them. The reason why it changes was the competition not the subsidy. The subsidy was somewhat important, but as many of us knows, nothing government run produces good consumer products, you need market and free choice to get productivity. So it was the free-market and subsidy cutting that created the BYD, Li Auto, Xpeng and Nio. That's the proof that without free market it's impossible to have strong companies. And without subsidies you can have strong companies, even if it takes more time.

In EU and USA subsidies didn't create a lot (Northvolt?), because there were not enough free-market driven demand and too much regulation to jumpstart the free-market forces that will start the engine of innovation.

So the answer is not "capitalism and free-market doesn't work and governmental industrial policy is the answer", but it's the market that creates the strong companies. You can speed it up with venture/government capital, but without the brutal competition in the marketplace where people vote with their wallets you won't make it work.