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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

I was like oh cool... until you mentioned the ads.

I would not fork or re-release proprietary code. I would ask my LLM to write a very rigorous end to end test suite for your tool, delete all the code, then have a clean context LLM re-write the code to pass all the same tests. Then I could publish it under an open license.

Ads are a cancer, and it is a matter of weeks before someone does the above where you have zero recourse.

I suggest open sourcing the code properly without ads yourself before someone does it for you. If you do that someone might donate to you instead of paying for the tokens to clone your work.

Software is no longer a moat and DMCA means nothing anymore.

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How are you supposed to make a living without ads in this "ecosystem" or should we say walled garden?

You aren't. People aren't going to be able to make a living in software anymore, unless they work for a corporation. And even then, that's disappearing as well.

When the whole industry manually punched machine code into punch cards, people were threatened by assemblers taking their jobs, and then later by compilers, and now by inference engines.

The real engineering work that will always be paid for is identifying problems and testing solutions to see what solves the problems.

The substrate in which we use to do that will change, but the job will endure.

Those that just do what they are told however, yeah they are SOL unfortunately.

Creative problem solving is the only skill that will matter anymore.

And how many companies need creative problem solving? Way less and less. The problem is the moat is getting higher. Name any other profession that is kneecapped worse than by the free open source movement and the like. Meaning you can't monetize what you create. Or the usual ways are non-conformant, dictated by the corps and their mindless followers.

Almost anyone learn anything they want now. This all cuts both ways.

If security is a solved problem then anyone that wants to teach themselves enough can move to trying to solve disease, until disease is solved, then we all move on to building enough robots to mass produce enough food to solve world hunger and shelter... and once the needs of everyone on earth are solved at an ever cheaper price until it is free... then I guess we do whatever we want.

Only way to earn a good living is to pivot to solving diseases for a few years until robots solve world hunger and shelter. Then we can do what we want without the money to do it?

Doubt any of this is going to happen.

Most positive changes in this world happen because of the tiny subset of the people delusional enough to believe they can do so that also happen to be correct.

I feel like trying to better humanity, even if I fail, is a better use of my time than simply saying nothing can be better and giving up. At least by failing well, at worst, the next delusional person can carry the work forward learning from my mistakes.

It is going to be a slog, likely over multiple generations, but one worth the climb.

"I feel like trying to better humanity, even if I fail, is a better use of my time than simply saying nothing can be better and giving up. At least by failing well, at worst, the next delusional person can carry the work forward learning from my mistakes."

If you have the capacity to do that, I.E. a multimillionaire, then sure.

I want a post scarcity society where money has no meaning.

Capitalism is just a bootloader to get us there.

I want people like you to get your heads out of the clouds and realize that post scarcity is never going to happen in our lifetimes

Who said anything about our lifetimes?

Humans once built things to benefit society over multiple lifespans.

There will always be scarcity, it is unsolvable problem. Humans needs can't be met, people will always want more.

If everyone has unlimited access to food, shelter, medicine, and knowledge then we are left with a tiny subset of compulsively competitive people fighting each other to acquire new forms of entertainment. I would pick that world over this one.

> unlimited access to food, shelter, medicine, and knowledge

That is not the things that can be unlimited. There will always be better food, bigger houses, better medicine etc.

In the eyes of the bottom 30 (or maybe even 60) percent of humans on the planet Earth average American already has the access to unlimited food, shelter, medicine, and knowledge. But good luck to convince Americans that they have those access.

People bring up this argument again and again as if AI is somehow the same as everything else.

It's not. The economic landscape is also entirely different from before as well.

AI may be the biggest change to society since electricity, but fundamentally we survived that transition and on the other side the baseline quality of life is much higher now. This one stands a very good chance of ending the same way.

Doubtful when we're flying toward hyperinflation because of government overspending with zero care for their citizens.

Doubtful when stock prices go up because companies lay off/fire employees.

Doubtful when hiring foreign workers for cheap is strongly preferred over their own citizens.

If you're already a millionaire now invested in tech and S&P500 and have property maybe you'll be alright and maybe you won't agree with this perspective, but my perspective applies to the vast majority of people.

I was a software engineer and pivoted to full time security about 10 years ago. Security will be in demand for a while longer I selfishly suspect.

Adobe buys ads rather than sells them, is that correct? How are they making money?

Enterprise customers and dark patterns.

Supposedly like any software company selling their product or a service.

If ad was the only way to get money, there would be no product/service to sell anymore and thus...nothing to advertise. It just cannot work that way.

As a reminder, this is the year 2026.

Photopea is lucky that it has a decent amount of revenue. But that's an exception, not the norm. Generally speaking, for new software, the business model of desktop, client-only software hasn't worked well since late 2010s at least, and nobody should expect to run a viable business like that today. There are very few applications you "install" on your computer that doesn't require native capabilities in some way.

True. I understand the author on the emotional level, but the fact that a lot of work went into the product does not mean that it is that valuable. The author should focus on making the product better - unfortunately (for them) that means inventing a new business model.

Someone speaking the truth.

A closed source, client-only "desktop" application, especially a web app with obfuscated/minimized JavaScript code, has no real copyright protection these days. You either sell ads, sell it to enterprises, or if you are lucky enough to be able to pull it off, sell a subscription. Not putting the logic on the server in the first place means everything is basically public knowledge.

Hey buddy, you’d better be careful what you post on a public forum. Sooner or later somebody’s gonna ask their own personal LLM to write a comprehensive test suite for how you respond to comments and situations, move the mouse cursor upwards and to the left to click a button there, and recreate you as legally their property now. If I were you I’d gimme money gimme moneyyyyyy before my big LLM here teaches you a lesson the hard way.

Please rip me off if you can! I would be thrilled. I open source 100% of my work and if people plagiarize it and the net result is my work and ideas positively impacted more people, then that is an outcome I am proud of.

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