That's not how investors think. They don't want to bet on one pony winning the race. Instead they bet on the whole race, on the off chance that one of them turns into a rocketship to the moon.
There's a clause in my company, once regulations around privacy that are al least comparable to the EU are enforced, we sell all assets and return money based on profits to share holders.
Then we start a new company creating just aggressive advertising patents so that they're not created by aggressive companies.
I do not follow in detail the individual companies that YC puts money into at early stages (there's so many of them), are there any examples of two companies YC invested in that serve basically the same purpose and market vertical where one was clearly the "winner", or both became successful and self sustaining?
Sure, lots of things are more important than "the hacker ethos". Like critical thinking and independent thought, self-reliance, the joy of actually creating something yourself (which AI is a hollow, artificial substitute for).
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
I think you just wrote "lots of things are more important than the hacker ethos, like [axiomatic rederivation of the hacker ethos]". That's not a persuasive argument.
I think it's just easy to dismiss "the hacker ethos" without considering the qualities it actually consists of. Maybe you'd disagree, but I think those qualities are very important and worth protecting.
I'm not saying it's not important, just that you can't reasonably expect to orient all of society around it. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about how computing is going to work for ordinary people.
I'm not expecting to orient all of society around it, but I do believe that it's harmful to remove or replace it where it does exist.
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
When you suggest that ordinary people should not use personal applications that they've built with AI because it robs them of the hacker spirit, that's what you're doing: orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference.
Is it? I mean I can always run to home depot and cobble something together based on books, youtube, and AI guidance, but I know when I need a professional.
I don't think any trade was ever harmed by the existence of hardware stores. Much the same, AI is not harming dev work. It's filling gaps where no product could exist before.
Big tech does not like DIY unless they control it and that's the actual story, not attacking devs and telling them they're obsolete. Why do you insist on avoiding that story and coming back here to argue with devs?
If I tell you to build me a house and you do so, I have not built the house.
I can give you requirements, give you feedback during the process, and otherwise contribute to the design, but at the end of the day I did not build the house.
I have no idea what this analogy is meant to communicate. If you're trying to suggest that software construction is only intentional or attributable if you write source code by hand, I'll just come back and say you haven't legitimately build anything unless you hex-edited it in machine code.
It's meant to communicate that building is something that requires effort on the part of the builder.
I don't write assembly, but I still had to learn how to code. I had to practice and put in the effort to develop it as a skill. Then, when I write something, I have to put in the effort to do it.
Of course, building things with AI generally takes varying levels of domain knowledge and guiding for now, but if we're talking about ordinary users making their own software, the implication is that in some cases existing skill won't be necessary, if not now then eventually.
At that point it would be truly effortless, and I don't think that you can rightfully say you built something if it required zero effort on your part.
It is not good to make things ordinary people use hard just for the sake of making it hard, or even in the pursuit of a perceived quality threshold if that threshold is beyond what the users will perceive. The cart is extremely dragging the horse in our field.
I would argue that Steam and Homebrew users are relatively niche portions of the userbase, and that they would be more likely to own newer systems.
Neither statistic comes from a sample group that's more representative of the average user, who is mostly browsing the web and using a handful of undemanding applications, and is therefore less motivated to upgrade for performance reasons.
Maybe for Steam, but my gut instinct is that Homebrew would be the opposite: it would be disproportionately popular among devs who pride themselves on keeping hardware for many years longer than most people. "Yeah, this 2015 MBP isn't great for gaming anymore, but it's fine for running vim!" is absolutely the kind of thing I hear frequently.
I bought an Intel MBP towards the end. No regrets, I had valid reasons.
But the MacOS support at this point is pretty atrocious. I mean, it technically runs, but the OS is clearly designed in a way that ruins performance on this hardware. It’ll run Vim, sure, for 2 hours on battery, hot as hell. At this point, Intel Macs are only fine for running Linux.
I really despise this kind of thinking, this "optimization" that only serves to benefit the people at the top who hoard the fruits of other people's labour. Why is your solution to underpaid/overworked animators to just eliminate them entirely, instead of just treating them fairly?
People DO want to do these things. They're overworked and underpaid, but they still do it, because they're passionate about it. Not just about the end result or the money, but about creating things.
I continually see AI proponents fail to recognize this across all art forms, for example the Suno AI idiot:
"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." [0]
It's ridiculous nonsense, and this widespread eagerness to throw away quality and human talent for convenient, soulless slop has made me increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry.
I think it would end up exactly like the last time they tried that with the mobile-oriented Windows 8. Nothing has changed since then that would make an attempt any easier. Windows has far too much legacy cruft and everything's spread across a dozen different GUI toolkits and design languages. They still haven't even managed to completely eliminate Control Panel after 13 years of trying.
It's worse even than the "vital apps" ecosystem - who would leave their preferred "walled garden" when so many dials have been set to make that the maximum frustration?
