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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays reading HN comments I imagine what it was like watching a buggy whip manufacturers meeting around the time of Henry Ford. The world is changing and many previous assumptions are being exposed as not widely held.

Most people in the world don’t care how software comes into existence or what the source code looks like, and never did. Just like most people never cared how most anything else was made. We are seeing software turn from a handcrafted commodity to a mass produced product. The quality is getting better and the cost of production is getting cheaper and this is happening at an astonishing rate.

The world is changing. As much as you enjoyed lovingly crafting buggy whips; most people just want the car. It’s not cruelty; it’s that buggy whips were never the point.

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I didn't know that people used to make buggy whips for free and give them away?

The thing about FOSS that everyone keeps forgetting is that it sits outside the market economy.

We write FOSS code because we love doing it, and love giving it away. If nobody else uses my code, I don't care - I'll still write it and still release it. That's the way it's always been, and LLMs will not change this (quite the contrary - they make it easier to realise and maintain FOSS projects).

I see more of it like cannibals sitting around a fire, trying to decide where they get their next meal from while side-eying their neighbors body fat percentage.

>most people just want the car.

That didn’t happen on its own. It took a huge amount of marketing and lobbying to get where we are today.

I don't think this analogy holds. I'll give you an example of why.

One of my skills is graphics programming. A decade ago, a huge part of my job was writing special effect shaders for videogames -- kind of as a technical artist (although that wasn't my exact title). One of the things I saw coming was that shaders were being created by shader graphs, which allowed non-technical artists to do a lot of the same things. This was fine though! You know why? Because I could reskill into new things, and a lot of my old knowledge was still useful.

If these oligarchs get what they want, "the nerd reich" is I think we should start calling them (these people are insanely far right), there would be nothing to reskill into. It's not "buggy whips are gone so I should work on cars", it's "I guess I'm just living off disability checks now?" I don't know why anyone not directly affiliated with an AI company is ok with that! It's not "progress" to destroy the entire economy. I don't think they can ACCOMPLISH that, because frankly they're mostly incredibly stupid, but that's absolutely what they want.

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