Comment by jakub_g
19 hours ago
The people who pay for the apps vs people vibecode them are largely a different demographic.
Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.
19 hours ago
The people who pay for the apps vs people vibecode them are largely a different demographic.
Linux is free, but most people don't mind to pay the Windows / macOS tax.
Exactly! It’s like I saw you selling pre-cut fruit for $7 so I decided to cut my own fruit every week.
I think the difference is I was buying pre-cut fruit for $7 every week so I spent two days and now my fruit magically cuts itself forever.
He turned an ongoing expense into a one time expense. And bonus he likely had fun doing the labor.
In some cases, that’s true, but sometimes you need to update cutting rules because of law changes, or you saw different way of cutting for example. There are cases where this is not one time investment. What I agree with that cutting-it-yourself became significantly cheaper
It's more like he was renting a knife to cut fruit for some reason and now, and instead of just buying a knife, he built one from scratch.
(1) Let's hope he doesn't cut himself if the knife breaks apart while in use.
(2) Why is it so hard to just buy knives these days? Why does every knife maker suddenly feel entitled to charge rent?
I'm all for DIY instead of hiring others, but the insanity here is the rent vs. buy thing going on in the industry.
Not for long. Tools to create tools will get more popular. My 70 year old mother can login to Replit and vibe code anything (and has thankfully stopped asking me to help her). We’re close to something like that for phone apps and then it’s game over for us devs.
Well Replit supports building mobile apps also: https://replit.com/mobile-apps
Game over, devs
Part of the AI hype is that normies can build things without learning to code. In which case, if AI is as good as some expect, wouldn't that kill all software products? What's stopping me from asking an AGI to oneshot me a photoshop clone?
I think it's more likely the case that AI is not going to be as disruptive as they think.
Linux is free, but it doesn't come bundled with hardware that might not work with it.
Linux is free, but you pay for it with your time.
And calling Windows and MacOS a tax is a complete misunderstanding of what a tax actually is.
> Linux is free, but you pay for it with your time.
People like to repeat this thought terminating cliché because they think it makes them sound smart and insightful, to doubt that a free thing is really free. But it's an uniquely naive opinion.
On Windows or MacOS, it's more often than not that, when you meet a problem, the only thing you can do is throw your hands into the air, and suffer the problem. This is paying with your time. Every single time you have to sit and wait through a forced update, this is paying with your time, in the realest sense of the word. You give your time for continued use of the product, and nothing else.
What people mean with the idiotic folk-wisdom is that you spend lots of time with the internals of Linux.
That's not true, but let's assume it is. The internals of Linux are likely a thing you'll really want to learn in depth if you're professionally into any computers science related job, because the market has settled on that.
If you're not, it's also something you'll want to learn, because Linux's design makes a single skill you learnt applicable in a lot of different workflows. So stuff you learnt while troubleshooting, you may adapt in other situations.
You don't pay with your time, you invest your time. Like all investments, it has an initial cost and dividends. It's a pretty good investment.
The days of compiling kernel module to have your adsl modem working or copy/pasting modelines in an xfree86config files have been over for well over 15 years anyway.
You don't fiddle more in Linux than you do in MacOs or Windows nowadays and that screen recorder tool he had to spend time vibecoding is embedded in the desktop already, the rest of the apps are 2 clicks away from being installed.
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