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Increased productivity makes employees more valuable, not less.

Not necessarily. If there aren't enough tasks to make use of the increased productivity of the employees, it makes them less valuable, because the company can get away with fewer employees.

Have we saturated all tasks that can be done by computers through development?

The downvotes on your comments are weird. Maybe coming from an emotional place. I get it, I wouldn't want to be constantly reminded that the career I sacrificed so much for is a dead end. But it's true, at big companies there may be a ton of items in the backlog but none of them bring in more money. Having a bunch of idle engineers sitting around wastes money, and LLMs allow more engineers to do less. Why would a responsible VP keep around expensive employees who don't contribute to revenue?


If you believe in government-measured CPI, sure. No one I know (very median people) would say they’re doing better economically now than ever before. Literally zero people I know would say that.

> It's in the interest of your employer to get the greatest amount of value for the smallest wage.

No it's not necessarily, because employment is a repeated game with public information.

(Other people can see how much you're paying people by checking levels.fyi/blind/etc.)

There's better ways to motivate people anyway - thus tech companies pay with stock grants and performance bonuses.


Most people are poor because being poor is the natural state of sentient beings. You should be amazed anyone is ever not poor.

Foreign companies suddenly increasing local wage levels isn't popular with local governments because it means all the local essential workers, doctors, government employees etc quit their jobs to work for the foreign company.

> Today the furniture we buy is much less expensive as a percentage of income but the quality is crap and you may end up needing to replace it once the finish has worn off because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.

But that's not a problem and is likely a good thing. eg it lets you move more often which reduces your commute.

Though none of my Ikea furniture has ever failed and most of it is ~15 years old.


> But that's not a problem and is likely a good thing. eg it lets you move more often which reduces your commute.

You can still move if furniture was more expensive and higher quality. You'd be able to sell what you have and buy new or used wherever you move. Most furniture is very consumable now so you just throw it away and buy new. You can't restore old furniture so the used market is full of stuff nobody really wants if they have the choice.


Users don't always have write access to the apps.

I mean, this file hierarchy is already so integrated into the OS that it wouldn’t have been difficult to circumvent that by allowing per-user folders in .app folders with the good ACLs by default.

Mostly like a mini home folder in each app.

That would have been an interesting decision, quite hacky maybe, but incredibly ergonomic. And that would have changed one of the biggest flaws of Mac OS into one of its biggest strengths.


And when someone deletes the app? Poof. Everyone’s data is gone. Separation of concerns. The config and executable/bundle should not share the same lifecycle.

The best counter argument to this though is that Apple haven’t shipped a native “uninstall” action which can optionally strip caches, config and other state when an app is removed. That’s the real issue I see here.


It seems to me the obvious answer to this is "app copy per user" (possibly with os-level dedup) and "undelete"? What do they actually do instead?

> What do they actually do instead?

They do the same shit as every other OS : files with a more or less random place in the home folder.

So it's more akin to linux where removing a package lets the garbage in the home dir. On Windows it's not THAT MUCH better, it's just that removing app can be so stupidly complex that the concept of uninstaller had to be created, and it happens that some uninstallers are also helping to remove user files.

Of the three, it's the same shit, it just happens that in Windows it's so shitty that the hack we found to circumvent (the uninstallers are fucking executables with logic to remove another executable, that's stupid) made the situation less shitty.

MacOS is regarded as shit because they DID think about a nice way to sore and expose an application (a Mac OS program is just a folder named "MyApp.app" in the /Applications folder containing all the binaries and assets) but they didn't really care about where to store the application data (in fact it exists but it's not enforced and never cleaned).


“If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what [Alan] Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.”

-- Paul Krugman, 1997

Note this does not say "it will decrease if we suddenly invent new productivity technologies".


Copyleft comes with restrictions on code - you have to keep it public. It's the BSD licenses that basically don't.

The end goal is not adoption of FOSS licenses, the end goal was the Four Freedoms ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... )

- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Note that "preserve licenses" and "preserve attribution" are very much not in that list. Well, the Four Freedoms are what these AI doohickeys enable by being able to in theory reverse engineer or replicate any code, making all code effectively "public", and to bypass any copyright issues around distribution. The fact that AI blowing away the existence of proprietary code also blows away the licenses of FOSS licensed code is a harmless side effect of getting to the Four Freedoms, which was the Free Software goal all along.

If any of this is surprising, then you didn't understand what you signed up for. The AI monkey's paw has curled and you've got what you asked for, sort of.


And none of those freedoms are guaranteed today for all software but we effectively killed the the mechanism that guaranteed them at least for open source software.

> There’s a reason we went from massages and pet daycare to rentier agriculture executive style management of the peons.

And that reason is "service businesses are too expensive in California because of high housing costs".


And the housing costs are high because the rent extraction industry figured it out before the tech industry did

That's right-NIMBYism. California is expensive because of left-NIMBYism in the cities, and pastoralist old people in the suburbs.

(Also because of firefighters. And American urban planners who basically believe their job is to stop any project that anyone ever objects to.)


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