Not if they don't have access to capital. Lacking that, they won't be building much of anything. And if there a lot of people seeking capital, it gets much harder to secure.
Capital also won't be rewarded to people who don't have privileged/proprietary access to a market or non-public data or methods. Just being a good engineer with Claude Code isn't enough.
> Could this lead to more software products, more competition, and more software engineers employed at more companies?
No, it will just lead to the end of the Basic CRUD+forms software engineer, as nobody will pay anyone just for doing that.
The world is relatively satisfied with "software products". Software - mostly LLM authored - will be just an enabler for other solutions in the real world.
There are no pure CRUD engineers unless you are looking at freelance websites or fiver. Every tiny project becomes a behemoth of spaghetti code in the real world due to changing requirements.
> The world is relatively satisfied with "software products".
you can delete all websites except Tiktok, Youtube and PH, and 90% of the internet users wouldnt even notice something is wrong on the internet. We dont even need LLMs, if we can learn to live without terrible products.
> It feels as though all we need is a spark. And yet, many sparks seem to have come and gone. Big market moves, in stocks or yields, that have recovered. Tariff and invasion threats, protests, you name it, they might move the needle but it always seems to move back. So, perhaps we won? Perhaps we built our markets so stable that they are these days impervious
This is a myopic question only considering the values of securities, gold/silver, etc, which are owned in significance by relatively few.
The working class economy has already crashed. People who have to put in hours to get paid are struggling, and consumer spending is dominated by the top 10%.
The media, ever fixated on the economic welfare of the top 1%, spins a story that if the stock market is doing well, the economy is doing well.
Meanwhile there is an quiet bet that authoritarians will protect interests of capital owners over all else (i.e the bailout OpenAI hinted they might need), while suppressing the primary methods the masses have for expressing their discontent: speech, organizing/demonstrating, strikes, and voting.
> They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.
The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.
That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.
> That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC
I doubt that.
As software has grown to solving simple personal computing problems (write a document, create a spreadsheet) to solving organizational problems (sharing and communication within and without the organization), it has necessarily spread beyond the .exe file and local storage.
That doesn't give a pass to overly complex applications doing a simple thing - that's a real issue - but to think most modern company problems could be solved with just a local executable program seems off.
It can be like that, but then IT and users complain about having to update this .exe on each computer when you add new functionality or fix some errors. When you solve all major pain points with a simple app, "updating the app" becomes top pain point, almost by definition.
> The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
That is an example of poor teaching of historical facts. It's bad (especially in our current times when people have forgotten the perils of fascism), but it's different than what the GP describes, which sounds like the biblical literalist timeline of life on Earth (with creation happening only 6000 years ago).
That is not just poor education, but instead direct contradiction of widely understood knowledge that much of our modern world is built on.
To use your WW2 example, it's
similar to explicitly teaching someone that the Holocaust didn't happen. Or in the scientific realm teaching that the earth is flat.
> What's taught in public schools is pretty thin gruel.
It's pretty thin gruel at many private schools too. The limiting factor in either case is that most kids are there because they are made to go, not self directed. Money does not buy motivation, but it buys access.
These stores were solving for an Amazon problem (brick and mortar stores without the expense of workers), and not any significant customer problem.
They often put them in places, hoping that people would be attracted by marginally lower prices and brand extension, all while removing one of the primary appeals (for most people) of in person grocery shopping: impromptu community socialization, even if it is simply greeting the checkout worker.
> When I think about the counterfactual me that grew up in a large American city, New York or L.A. instead of Toronto, I see someone who's more stunted than me, in important ways. No skating classes, libraries too far to walk to on a regular basis and more poorly stocked. Student debt. Without generous public incentives, that version of me would only have the life that her own parents can afford to provide for her.
America has long been a place where hardship or trauma for a subset of the population has been seen as the system working "correctly".
It's just that the makeup of that subset has shifted over time (although much less so for black Americans).
You'll find many people here that will believe that without deprivation of basics and even comforts, nobody would want to pursue or achieve anything.
This is often believed by people living in communities that - because of wealth clustering -provide basics and comforts, as well as growth opportunities, and sometimes especially by the few people who escaped deprivation into comfort and security through their grit, thereby assuming that is the best route for all of society.
We think we did it all ourselves, without any helping hand up, while often being ignorant of our own privilege.
They have to solve for it being cheaper to launch and operate in space vs building and operating a datacenter with its own power generation on Earth.
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