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That is great and frustrating at the same time. This "enshitification" is totally a natural result of trading stuff. There is 0 difference between supermarkets putting a 5.99 price on food, or putting candies where people stay in line to pay, or deceiving people with those old ads on TV, and Facebook, Youtube and the like adding clickable ads in the middle of a video or making it play the next video automatically, or not making it clear what is a post what is an ad....
These are trade-based goods and services, and for them to sell, you have to engage in these "marketing" practices.
THIS IS NOTHING NEW!
Pretty much all companies and individuals do these in order to sell shit. All need to be biased towards their own business. Even the local small businesses are doing it. Everyone does it.
So instead of selecting a few of the most outrageous practices, call them shitty, and point the finger at them, better do 2 things:
- Understand why these products are "shitty". It is trade, the need to trade, that makes people put more ads, collect more data, etc..
... Show more...That is great and frustrating at the same time. This "enshitification" is totally a natural result of trading stuff. There is 0 difference between supermarkets putting a 5.99 price on food, or putting candies where people stay in line to pay, or deceiving people with those old ads on TV, and Facebook, Youtube and the like adding clickable ads in the middle of a video or making it play the next video automatically, or not making it clear what is a post what is an ad....
These are trade-based goods and services, and for them to sell, you have to engage in these "marketing" practices.
THIS IS NOTHING NEW!
Pretty much all companies and individuals do these in order to sell shit. All need to be biased towards their own business. Even the local small businesses are doing it. Everyone does it.
So instead of selecting a few of the most outrageous practices, call them shitty, and point the finger at them, better do 2 things:
- Understand why these products are "shitty". It is trade, the need to trade, that makes people put more ads, collect more data, etc.. Currency, data, or attention trade.
- Simply make 2 categories: trade-free and trade-based. If a product or a service is trade-free, it means it does not want anything from you, the user. Not your data, not your currency, not your attention. Therefore why would it want to make that product or service shitty?
Makes no sense.
We made a book all about that - tromsite.com/trombooks/#flipbo… and guess what? It is trade-free. Read it online or download it.
Side note....I like Louis but for fucks sake man start prioritizing a Peertube instance and post there rather than on the "shit" youtube....
#enshitfication #trade #trade-free #facebook #youtube #ads
Norwegian Government comes out swinging on enshittificationyoutube.com/watch?v=ii-D9LaitU…
That video was so genuinely funny I was laughing my ass off 🤣 Truly refreshing to see something like this in this day and age. And I gotta say the Norwegian government is pretty badass for doing this! Let's hope more governments follow suit 🤞
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Louis Rossmann (YouTube)
Peter N. M. Hansteen
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •I think that in the early 2030s we will be seeing dissertations and papers on "The Mid-2020s Developer Skills Erosion Caused by Indiscriminate Large Language Model (LLM) Use".
Believe me, it *will* be a hot academic topic.
Aral Balkan
in reply to Peter N. M. Hansteen • • •Peter N. M. Hansteen
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Peter N. M. Hansteen • • •Jani Nikula
in reply to Peter N. M. Hansteen • • •@pitrh I'm inclined to think "The evolution of natural language for programming" will be a hotter topic still. It's another abstraction layer. Programming will, in some ways anyway, be accessible to more people than before.
At the same time, this is not incompatible with my original post, and LLM coding has tons of ethical and legal hurdles as well.
The Penguin of Evil
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •Ben Evans
in reply to The Penguin of Evil • • •Stijn van Drongelen
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •@pitrh That's not so much making "programming" more accessible, but making "throwing code at a compiler/interpreter and see what sticks without wiping your filesystem" more accessible.
Regardless of the target language, be it Python, or "natural language" (it would be chock full of jargon), or a pseudocode used for just one problem, programming has always been less about wrestling with the language syntax, and much more about getting the solution out of your brain into the machine that can't think for itself. That part is made no more accessible by an LLM, because it can't experience the problem for itself, and it can't go through the discovery process of noticing and fixing all the details you didn't think of when you first came up with the idea for a solution.
tuban_muzuru
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •Jani Nikula
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •Yeah, I've been at this with free stacks where possible.
LLMs are MLs,. You don't seem to understand that fact. Different abbreviation I guess, it's confusing.
>We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.
Which is where the ML comes into the picture. All the coders I know, not many to be sure, but all the Rust coders I know apply Candle to their own dev/ directories.
The prospect of your output as a developer being tied to a proprietary service seems risky at best.
My output as a developer has made me moderately wealthy as these things go. I killed proprietary systems. You don't know me. The sheer effing arrogance.
Arthur van der Harg
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •tuban_muzuru
in reply to Arthur van der Harg • • •@ArtHarg
> So you did indeed not read his post but decided to go full porcupine and throw a hissy fit when called out. Talk about arrogance.
Try that gaslighting shit elsewhere.
> Using a free software stack, you could be an effective developer with a relatively low budget. A cheap or used laptop and an internet subscription.
>LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.
To which I replied
>Excuse me, no. I'm using open source MLs.
Is it this part you don't like? Or this one?
> LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.
That's a begged
... Show more...@ArtHarg
> So you did indeed not read his post but decided to go full porcupine and throw a hissy fit when called out. Talk about arrogance.
Try that gaslighting shit elsewhere.
> Using a free software stack, you could be an effective developer with a relatively low budget. A cheap or used laptop and an internet subscription.
>LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.
To which I replied
>Excuse me, no. I'm using open source MLs.
Is it this part you don't like? Or this one?
> LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.
That's a begged question and it's not true either.
> The prospect of your output as a developer being tied to a proprietary service seems risky at best.
Which is, of course, bullshit.
tuban_muzuru
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •@ArtHarg
So where's your argument, Art? Your website sure is informative.
Arthur van der Harg
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •Rokosun
in reply to Arthur van der Harg • • •@ArtHarg @tuban_muzuru
Hey Arthur, just wanted to say that your website is actually pretty nice. A few words of genuine content over SEO optimized slop anytime.
tuban_muzuru
in reply to Arthur van der Harg • • •@ArtHarg
More English lessons for you: let's parse the following sentence:
> My output as a developer
tied to a proprietary service
seems risky at best.
I lasted 40 years as a consultant and only really worked for 9 months a year for tax purposes. I did not hug a corporate tree.
And I made about 3x than my employee counterparts. How much are you clearing after taxes, Arthur? Are you brave enough to step out of the cubicle farm and make some real money?
Of course not.
tuban_muzuru
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •@ArtHarg
Now, I'm going to put you on Mute, Arthur. It's for your own good.
Arthur van der Harg
in reply to tuban_muzuru • • •Matilda Love
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •oatmeal
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •“worse than stupidity”
In a slightly different context but very much the same issues. Cloud services indeed traded convenience for diminished software freedom, control and privacy... as we can see today user fleeing US based services. Even #Proton can't guarantee protection to its customers, as we saw recently.
theguardian.com/technology/200…
#AI #theaicon
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder
Bobbie Johnson (the Guardian)Reg
in reply to oatmeal • • •@oatmeal
Cloud was heavily pushed by govts too.
@jani
Nini
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •Graham Lee, D.Phil
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •Jani Nikula
in reply to Graham Lee, D.Phil • • •Randy Simons
in reply to Graham Lee, D.Phil • • •@leeg None. It's impractically slow for actual work-use, but I run qwen3-coder-next on a little ~€750 AMD machine with regular 64GiB DDR5 DIMMs. Granted, I got that RAM 2.5 years ago before the craze. But with Strix Halo hardware I'd say its feasible.
Like you said, how accessible was hardware, let alone software, in the early days of (personal) computing? I paid ~€130 for a STUDENT license Visual C++ in ~1998!
The original premisse feels almost entitled.
Gabriel Pettier
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •yes, i’m concerned about that too, for now i have "free" access to them through work, and i assume it’d be the case even if i switched job, it would be more risky if i went independant, but still probably a manageable cost.
I’m still not at ease with the whole thing, and i keep an eye on what’s possible with smaller models (i was pretty happy with qwen-2.5-coder even at 4B, for code completion when i was still using that, but didn’t find something local that works well for agentic coding)
Jani Nikula
in reply to Gabriel Pettier • • •@tshirtman I suppose there are a lot of professions, including in computing, where the regular tools in the field are prohibitively expensive for individuals. In that sense, an LLM subscription is likely a reasonable cost. The cost of keeping up with hardware that can run the latest and greatest local models is less predictable.
That said, it's still a fairly big change for regular software developers.
polyfloyd
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •I really feel this. Having started out as an somewhat impoverished teenager, software engineering got me into a middle class. This profession is incredibly accessible to people that are stubborn enough.
I hate to see it being gate-kept with stupid LLM tools.
Marius Gundersen - mdg 🌻
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •apparently you need to use the latest model. But if the latest model 6 months ago was good enough to create software 6 months ago, then it must still be good enough to create software this month. And if today's model can't be used in 6 months (because there is a newer one) then it can't be used today either.
Having to pay for the latest model is only true if you are in a competition, not of you want to create something useful.
stony kark
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •araly
in reply to Jani Nikula • • •yeah it's what I've been fearing, it's willingly giving away the means of production to a corporation in another country.
it's also not being able to code unless you have a decent always on internet connection. it's already the case for a lot of people, but your coding should be able to be done on a disconnected laptop
Jani Nikula
in reply to araly • • •