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Comment by sejje | Hacker News Reader

What a weird thing to be butthurt about. You don't have to pay them. Do it the old fashioned way, with elbow grease and pots of coffee. Or invest in local AI.

Or embrace the future and realize that you couldn't imagine everything that would unfold, when you pursued your undergrad.

How you gonna get mad about all this?

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There was a time when a generation of hackers got (rightfully) worked up about the Microsoft tax for every PC sold. It's not hard to see that somebody gets mad if they believe that an Anthropic/OpenAI tax is about to become the standard when doing any serious Physics/Math/... research or writing code.

I was one of those hackers, you're misrepresenting it.

I was mad that I had to pay for windows just to wipe that shit and put linux on. If I used it, I wouldn't have been mad about it at all.

I've never been mad about paying for my software.

The term "hackers" didn't just apply to those of us who wiped the thing off first chance they got. Folks working in IT of large corps which had fleets of a 5-digit numbers of PCs to administer and for each of them, Microsoft took their cut.

Just because a description doesn't apply to you personally doesn't mean it's misrepresenting things.

Why would they get mad about paying for software they were using? What asshats.

It's not about paying. It's about the quasi-monopoly position of companies.

The only monopoly any of them has is on their own models, what are you even talking about?

I guess you're mad about the quasi-monopoly of Tesla, too, since they're the only electric car selling worth a hoot.

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