Comment by rsynnott

To be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.

2026: you're fired. Hey Claude, implement bad idea please

Give me a break. This was already happening with Web 2.0 and things like "microservices".

That's how I got my first opportunity 20 years ago

> Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards

It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.

Good thing we trained our fortune teller calculators on all that historic shittiness!

Maybe, but at least the 10,000,000 options were there instead deemed that they are not to be used by those pesky users. And now its they are not just hidden. They are simply not there.

Guns and bombs also didn't create war. But they did made it way more lethal.

The sentiment is mutual.

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> Some time ago my then project owner remarked that possibly in the future apps won't require an UI and people will just interrogate the LLM directly.

And those LLMs will run on unicorn farts and world hunger will be solved too. Do people lack basic logic or is it just when it comes to LLMs?

To be fair, most of our industry is so stupendously bad at executing that you can keep growth and save costs by simply laying people off. No AI required.

The recent cases of companies who deleted their prod DBs while using LLMs are blaming “the rogue AI”. So it seems you can just blame AI lab companies and folks roll with it. Even better, they asked it to generate its own apology, no need to spend time trying to explain to your customers why everything is gone

That's definitely not true.

There's always people for management to blame. That's the great part of being management.

By definition, there's someone/thing you're managing that you can pass the blame onto.

Hard to blame the engineer when the engineer gets fired for not implementing management's whims. As much as I'd like to hold people accountable and say they should just accept getting fired instead of compromising the ideals, the truth is I've got a family now and if they paid me enough I'd do the same.

Of course there are shitty engineers, but they aren't allowed to do anything without shitty management.

Found the project manager

Remind me who makes the final decisions in these scenarios. Also, how do boots taste?

Come off it. Sure some of them had "morals" but a decent chunk of them just lacked the imagination or connections to monetize their lack of morals.

after 2+ years of non-engineers vibecoding applications, show me one startup/app without devs.

Approximately everybody would like more money.

Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.

Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.

maybe long term vs. short term is the key idea. apple, for example, could rake in bountiful measures in the short term if they ventured away from their boutique-electronic-consumer-goods niche. in the long run it would hurt their bottom line to do so

The Seven Deadly Sins provide an interesting perspective to human psychology even in modern times. Greed / avarice is defined as wanting more than you need.

The fish rots from the head. The AI push, the destruction of Windows are the result of Nadella's strategy.

Isn't that just like.. what Microsoft has always been? Browser wars, Tay, bad behavior around open source software.. This is how they roll. They're being their best selves.

Windows still asks you to reduce the refresh rate of your monitor from 240Hz to 60Hz in order to save the environment.

They literally have a green leaf next to power saving options. Also, there's an option in windows upgrades to time the upgrades to when the grid is mostly renewables.

Dotnet core was also a move in that direction with large portions being open source.

Not really. A company is not one monolithic entity with a single will. Far more plausible than "it was all a trick" is that for a time, people were in charge who really were trying to improve things, and now, those people have been replaced with others who are willing to burn it all down.

That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?

Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.

Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them

I remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O

I tried my hardest to block that out of my memory. Everyone knew their fingers were crossed behind their backs.

"good" is not important for software anymore, at least in the regular consumer market. Companies have discovered that people will just continue to accept subpar, unfinished and sometimes even partially-functioning software.

Making good products simply no longer seems to be on the agenda for most of these companies.

> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.

I really liked Copilot - it gave you a lot of tokens across a bunch of models and their agentic features were perfectly serviceable, alongside it being really affordable! And then they moved over to usage based billing and it no longer has that advantage over the alternatives: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

I still think they have a really good AI tab autocomplete implementation and it's nice to be able to use that in VSC without swapping to another editor altogether... but that's not enough to really make me pay for their subscription. I could probably move to Zed altogether if I had a problem with VSC itself, though at least the base editor doesn't feel like it has been enshittified and I quite like it, all things considered.

Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.

Good products are not profitable enough. Not that good products are profitable at all, but if it doesn't make disgusting amounts of money this quarter it's not worth considering at all.

We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death

> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions

They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...

While this is very pithy, we need to acknowledge and remember that there's a gulf of difference between normal terminal interfaces and command line interfaces, and whatever the chatbots are doing.

Yes, both have a prompt where you type text to do things and get text back, but the type of text you write in one is very different than what you'd write in another. Prose versus commands and so on. Oh, and normal terminals don't waste electricity and water in amounts approaching small countries.

There will always be jobs for private security, firefighters, and utility repairmen to protect / restore the data centers when people inevitably attack them.

There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.

The AI tool providers need companies and customers to pay for the tools and automation. If all the white collar jobs in the Western world are replaced by AI or AI generated SAAS products, some 60% percent the workforce suddenly won't have jobs. If such a large percentage of the workforce has no income through employment, who will be able to pay for the services from SAAS providers and thus ultimately the AI providers?

The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.

The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.

So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.

Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.

Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago.

Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.

AI companies are in trouble.

I guess if they are wrong the world economy crashes and burn again, because they wasted all these shiny dollars on infra build out. It's lose lose.

Initially I assumed that when the bubble burst, some VCs would go bust, Oracle would go bust, a few hyperscalers would take a significant haircut but carry on, and life would pretty much go on. However there's now sufficient dodgy AI-related debt making its way onto the debt markets that the bubble burst could be a lot messier, and it may be more than a few percent.

> Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.

A few percent of your net worth, when you're sitting on top of a pile of gold like a dragon on a yacht is one thing, but when you're a retiree, and you're on a fixed income, living off the proceeds from an annuity and a reverse mortgage, and inflation in all its forms is eating into the plan you had, and you don't have any backup, yes there will be consequences!

LOL.

Robotics isn't even 1% of the way to replacing anything.

Consider why every neat demo is a backflip and not washing the dishes or laying bricks or something.

No country would want them.

If you have worked in Silicon Valley you know that Bangalore and Shenzhen came here ;)

In all seriousness, the silicon is still designed in Silicon Valley but maybe you don't hear about that as much? Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, AMD, Nvidia, etc. all have a huge presence there still.

One things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI.

We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.

Automation tax solves all the problems? Seriously? The tax would go to retraining programs, according to the linked paper, so that workers can be reabsorbed into the workforce. Undiscussed conditio sine qua non: the economy has room for additional workforce, the government - as the distributor of said tax - has implemented sufficient legislation into social networks to ensure the tax goes to these programs and not another pointless war or subsidies for agriculture or tax relief for the rich.

This paper proposes a solution for which the framework/base is missing.

This feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it

There's a lot of flaws with their fantasy world, that's not even the most prominent one.

In my circles it literally was the same people. Instead of trying to get me to buy ETH they started talking only via LLMs. Unsurprisingly we aren't in touch anymore... Maybe they are happier with their chatbots, I'll never know that's for sure

All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.

Yep, 25 years ago it was the web. And remember the great electricity grift 100 years ago. And horseless carriage grifters like Ford!

If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.

If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.

They basically revolutionized the web with the JavaScript V8 engine in chrome. Before them, JavaScript performance was so bad you had to have a really light touch with it.

If you had been a Yahoo user when Google launched, you’d understand.