> Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated,
Absorbing information doesn't make you "educated". Learning how to employ knowledge with accountability and trust with beings in the real world is what's important, and a machine can't teach you how to do that.
> or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Why is it "co-opting" if it involves a mutually consenting exchange?
Neither does traditional human interacting education - those are things you learn in your first jobs in the real world, regardless of how you were educated.
The reason they didn't release Chrome for arm64 Linux almost certainly wasn't about technical feasibility, but rather about it being worth the support costs.
The Android arm64 Chrome build is clearly worth it to them, as is the Chrome build for ARM Chromebooks.
Before this point they probably didn't think that arm64 Linux was a worthwhile target to support (especially since Chromium was available on arm64 Linux anyways).
I'm not sure what has changed in the desktop/laptop ARM Linux market that changed their minds - or maybe they want to put their shoulder behind that market.
> If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.
That may work if you are a sole proprietor or small business person, but that's not how shareholder owned corporations work.
A sole proprietor is willing to work more if business drops (effectively lowering their compensation rate) because they are the beneficiary of any future gains that may (or may not) result from their short term sacrifice. If they want their employees to do the same they have to give them the same deal.
A large corporation can't easily make its employees work much longer for the same pay (except in the very short term), nor can it easily get shareholders to be OK with increasing spending on labor. This usually ends with massive layoffs when it can't sustain itself anymore.
That's one reason that smaller companies can be more nimble.
Fundamentally because a lot of people here think it should be, but sure behind that, it's at the top for many of the reasons you state. This is a forum about work after all, something that has lots of uncertainty at the current time.
Then any company that was staffed at levels needed prior to the arrival of current-level LLM coding assistants is bloated.
If the company was person-hour starved before, a significant amount of that demand is being satisfied by LLMs now.
It all depends on where the company is in the arc of its technology and business development, and where it was when powerful coding agents became viable.
> If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
This assumes that the companies' business growth is a function of the amount of code written, but that would not make much sense for a software company.
Many companies (including mine) are building our product with an engineering team 1/4 the size of what would have been required a few years ago. The whole idea is that we can build the machine to scale our business with far fewer workers.
How many companies have you worked at in the past where the backlog dried up and the engineering team sat around doing nothing?
Even in companies that are no longer growing I've always seen the roadmap only ever get larger (at that point you get desperate to try to catch back up, or expand into new markets, while also laying people off to cut costs).
Will we finally out-write the backlog of ideas to try and of feature requests? Or will the market get more fragmented as more smaller competitors can carve out different niches in different markets, each with more-complex offerings than they could've offered 5 years ago?
Clearly, since calculating the individual refunds are impossible, the companies will be broadly discounting products going forward by their effective tariff rate for roughly the time the tariffs were in effect. /s
> The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why not also share it as gift.
If you have the time tona scratch your own itch and gift the results, it implies you have a source of income that gives you the time/lifestyle to do such a thing. You might be a tenured academic, or live in a society with a strong safety net. Or you might be able to do your day job in 1/2 the allotted time.
The problem is that a those scenarios are eroding precipitously, leaving more to seek compensation for their work output, whether it is closed or open source.
You think there won't be students or academics anymore? Arguably, most non-corporate-supported (when that became a thing) FOSS was created by students and academics.
Higher education is less affordable and accessible to more families, and the value proposition is eroding. CS academics survive by joint ventures with corporations, not by their University salaries.
Escalating cost of living and reduction in institutional support systems push more people toward allocating their scarce spare time toward fundamental needs rather than contributing to the software commons.
I see your point, thanks — it definitely rings true!
I agree the scale will change, but most of the core FOSS we depend on today has started off when software development was not as lucrative as it was in the past 2+ decades — which means it can still happen. It does change the dynamics as you say.
I think this is missing the forest for the trees. With 4000 fewer employees, they could have a $136M meetup party and still be ahead by hundreds of millions, assuming they can sustain or increase revenue.
That's the big bet software companies are making right now.
Absorbing information doesn't make you "educated". Learning how to employ knowledge with accountability and trust with beings in the real world is what's important, and a machine can't teach you how to do that.
> or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Why is it "co-opting" if it involves a mutually consenting exchange?
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