The blockchain and LLMs parts in particular fall flat in this article. Blockchains are attractive because they are novel and can be easily monetized (usually by taking money from invest... well... suckers). Their wastefulness has little to do with anything. And LLMs are... just useful and promising. I'm personally deeply reserved about near term possibilities of LLMs, but it doesn't stop me from paying $20/mo for ChatGPT and using it as a convenient search engine for programming and other things.

And generally this doom-saying by people like Jonathan Blow doesn't reasonate with me at all. Sure there is a lot of waste. But also software is better then ever was. 3d graphics are better, programming langauges, Unicode support, software development process, hardware is faster, all the clunky C tools are being replaced with modern equivalents in Rust/Go with way better usability, cryptography and security are better, desktop environemnts are better, file systems are better. I could go on.

In my mind the only things that are getting worse are the commercial stuff: web sucks and stole the thunder from native apps and Windows/MacOS are degrading.