HN user
I'm curious, where would you prefer to go for a discussion like this one with people you've never heard from before?
That's my point: HN/Reddit/etc serve a different purpose than phpBB-style forums. The format isn't improved or superior, it's just different. I suppose it was originally popularized by Slashdot, so it isn't even "new".
It seems like you find it valuable enough to participate.
I never said I didn't?
Reddit and HN aren't forums, they're factories for quick takes and reactions (and yes this is one of them). It's a transitory experience.
The good old "crappy" forum format isn't gamified with upvotes and often have long-running, slow-burn threads that go on for months or years. Even once popular, high-traffic forums such as SomethingAwful had a different pacing and community feel to them. It's like a pub with its locals and regulars, but where new faces sometimes pop in.
With that said, there are still plenty of "crappy" forums around, typically at least one for every special interest or hobby imaginable.
It really wasn't. It was a moronic move fueled by hype, implemented by the same type of incompetent business leaders who previously, to various extents, drank the blockchain and metaverse kool-aid.
There was demonstrably zero cost or consequence analysis, which is also why it was dialed back as soon as the (still) subsidized tokens became just slightly less subsidized, and the wise leaders realized they spent huge sums of money with no way of gauging ROI.
LLMs may have their use cases, but let's not make up free excuses for blithering idiots who, by any rights, should all be fired for cooking up money-burning policies that are textbook implementations of Goodhart's law.
Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest.
For me it's mostly about knowing what you're getting when craving the flavour of a particular dish. Carbonara is perhaps an example of a recipe that's turned too rigid, but I've also ordered it and been served diced boiled ham in bechamel - an affront to anyone with their sights set on pan-fried pork and a rich, fatty mouthfeel.
Everyone has their own personal limit and variations are allowed within certain unwritten boundaries. Swedish meatballs, for example, can be varied in many ways - but if you put garlic in them, I think you should call them something else.
Meta fired 8,000 employees not two weeks ago: "[Meta] revealed to employees in April that it would conduct a major round of layoffs the following month while nixing plans to fill 6,000 open positions. The company told workers in a memo at the time that the job cuts were intended to help offset investments into other areas like AI." [1]
That sounds exactly like funneling money away from hiring and into AI investments to me.
As for COVID overhiring, Amazon doubled their workforce during the pandemic. I'm sure plenty of those hires are still employed. During their latest layoff, they also spoke about "shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence".[2]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/meta-layoffs-zuckerberg-says... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engi...
What if there are several reasons all at once?
* Economy is tighter overall.
* Covid overhiring followed by firing means fresh graduates face competition from a large cohort of people with a few years of work experience.
* Even if it's not necessarily true, if the C-suite _believes_ that AI can replace juniors, that's enough to funnel money away from hiring and into AI investments. When money for hiring is tight, seniors are prioritized.
* Like it or not, workforce immigration (such as H-1B) causes displacement.
* The number of CS graduates in the US has doubled over the last decade.
In Sweden, fresh graduates across a number of fields are having a hard time finding jobs. Many of thosee seem to have either a STEM education affected by a dip in "green" capex/investments, or in "overhead" sectors likely to be tightened in bad times, such as HR specialists.
Imagine asking “What will be changed by the internet?” in 1997
Pretty much all of the stuff that was suggested back then or earlier: Shopping, advertising, video conferencing, collaboration, software distribution, media consumption, banking, finance and of course communication overall.
Most of these ideas weren't exactly new in 1997, but go back to services like CompuServe and even Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos. The bottlenecks were bandwidth and personal computer performance (both of which were then predictably following Moore's law), not human imagination.
A few examples that a lot of people correctly extrapolated from: NLS (1968), PictureTel (1987) and later LiveShare, IndyCam (1993), CUSeeMee (1995), RealAudio (1995), RealVideo (1997).
Perhaps the core business problem with LLM:s isn't finding a product-market fit, but that our imaginations have been running wild with expectations on "AI" since at least the 1950s, and now we have something that quacks - but doesn't quite walk - like a duck.
An Indigo² would have been a pretty decent machine in 1998 though? As in, running current versions of application software and capable of keeping up with normal surfing, programming workloads, etc. A friend of mine still used a beefy Indy for that kind of stuff in 1999 IIRC.
I can see how an O2 can be a fun second machine at work however, as a conversation starter and mood lifter!
It's just that when I see someone running an SGI or equivalent these days, it's mostly Buttonfly or something to that effect. Maybe they're even running NetBSD, which seems even more pointless, since it gives the same exact experience you can have with any dirt cheap old PC. Is anyone still using them for, say, personal video editing or home project CAD drawings just for the heck of it? Or maybe solving Advent of Code?
I toyed a bit with a NeXT cube a while back. It was fun to tick that box on the workstation bingo sheet, but the excitement wore off rather fast; running an old version of Mathematica very slowly isn't my personal idea of fun. Similarly, I tried a pair of SGI/CrystalEyes stereoscopic glasses together with an Indigo a while back, which felt like a fun novelty trinket and held my attention for about as long.
I'm glad there are enthusiasts around who care for these machines and keep them around for posterity, because I think they have great historical significance. I guess I'm just not into that particular flavor of retro computing.
Old home computers are still fun because there are hundreds or thousands of games and scene demos, and active enthusiast audiences for creative output.
SGI machines are extremely cool, but I don't quite grasp if collectors of old UNIX workstation use their machines regularly, and if so, what for.
Still, if I had the cash and desk space, I wouldn't mind a souped-up Indy that I could play around with for half an our once a year.
Running your own small website is a constant battle against grifters and bad online etiquette. When people hotlink images, I usually make a point of having some personal fun with mod_rewrite.
Perhaps the approach to, and leverage from, using AI is different for someone who's been active on HN for two decades, and junior devs who've been brought up on iPhones in the flawed school system you're describing?
As TFA says, the problem is that accumulating knowledge takes time and effort, and the AI hype and expectations on LLM-assisted coding helps with rationalizing ever more short-sighted decisions that squander or hinder that process.
It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser.
Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app.
The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone. It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies.
Ah, the paradoxes of modern software.
Microsoft invented AJAX when building Outlook for the web back in 2000. GMail was released in 2003 and Google Docs in 2006. Around this time, even enterprise giants like SAP started offering web UIs. This is the shift from RAD to web I'm talking about.
The current idiomatic way of doing web layouts was, back then, almost entirely theoretical. The reality was a cross-browser hell filled with onResize listeners, in turn calling code filled with browser-specific if statements. Entire JavaScript libraries were devoted to correctly identifying browsers in order for developers to take appropriate measures when writing UI code. Separate machines specifically devoted to running old versions of Internet Explorer had to be used during testing and development, in order to ensure end user compatibility.
In short: The web was not in any way, shape or form more convenient for developers than the RAD tools it replaced. But it was instant access multi-platform distribution which readily allowed for Cloud/SaaS subscription models.
Electron happened more as an afterthought, when the ease of distribution had already made web UIs, and hence web UI developers, hegemonic. Heck, even MS Office for the web predates React, Electron, and something as arcane as Internet Explorer 9.
Things have gotten much better, but we're still having to reinvent things that just existed natively in VB6 (DataGrid, anyone?) - and at the cost of increasingly complex toolchains and dependencies.
Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps
Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development.
a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`
This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replacing RAD tools like VB and Delphi. In fact, it still looks like this in many ways, except now you have a JSX property and React state for disabling the button, and a mess of complex tooling, setup and node modules just to get to that base level.
The web won not because of programmer convenience, but because it offered ease of distribution. Turns out everything else was secondary.
Visual Basic solved that. The web is in many ways a regression.
You're sort of right. This particular grant is extra curious because it's typically been given to already highly accomplished artists. Sweden is a small pond and although there are a few fun outliers in this crowd, most of them make out the upper echelons of the Swedish cultural societé. Some were born straight into it. Others, no doubt, had parents who could put them there and knew someone who knew someone. One, for example, is Swedish nobility and the son of a diplomat. Another was the son of a Swedish secretary of state.
While I'm sure there are some wholly self-made virtuosos on the list, it does give off an air of apparent nepotism.
Amazon was founded in 1994, went public in 1997 and became profitable in 2001. So Anthropic is two years behind with the IPO but who knows, maybe they'll be profitable by 2028? OpenAI is even more behind schedule.
Sweden introduced a similar scheme in 1964, in which artists (broadly defined, having since come to include one clown and one chess player) have been given a basic income, supplementing their other incomes up to a specific level.
Artists couldn't apply for this, but were officially selected. The program was stopped in 2010, meaning no new recipients have been selected since. As far as I know, there's been no studies surrounding any measurable increase in artistic quality or artistic output.
It is of course easy to point out how deeply unfair such programs are on multiple levels. Unsurprisingly, many recipients have utilized loopholes in order to receive the grant despite having incomes and wealth well above the threshold.
Edit to clarify: Sweden still grants long-term stipends to various artists, sometimes up to a decade. What's described above is a guaranteed, life-long, basic income.
I don't really care if it's because of bizarro designer hegemony, device unification, cost cutting, bad developers or something else, but it's astonoshing how far the desktop paradigm has fallen (and not just in MacOS). What baffles me the most about things like this isn't that crap slips through, it's that crap accumulates in an alarming rate and that apparently tech-savvy people aren't just seemingly fine with stuff like this, but will happily step up and defend it.
A shame it can't be viewed anymore, it has all the makings of a cult classic.
The guy who coded the actual Nohzdyve game (that runs on real ZX Spectrum hardware) is Matt Westcott aka Gasman. He's a demoscener and has made some brilliant speccie demos. https://demozoo.org/sceners/5879/
Sure about what?
Some real ingenuity and creativity on display. The Amiga only had two pointer modes, the normal one and a "busy" pointer, and the system preferences provided a nice little pixel painter specifically for drawing pointers, so making your own was a low threshold activity.
Applications could define their own as needed, of course (the pointer was just a hardware sprite).
The one in the FVWM screenshot is FvwmPager. It comes with FVWM.
1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when speaking to customers on site."
2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to customers on Zoom."
Here's what I think would happen if anyone, by tomorrow, could download GPT 5.1 for free and run it performantly on something like a $500 laptop:
* It would stop datacenter- and other related infrastructure construction, making huge investments effectively worthless for companies like Oracle and Amazon, and of course hurt the construction sector.
* It would hurt the companies you mention, plus a many more including NVidia, likely in ways that would lead to large-scale layoffs.
* It would seriously hurt corporate and VC investors and likely make them much less interested in large investments for quite some time, thus affecting other sectors as well.
* It would seriously hurt index funds and pension funds.
A number of years down the line, if LLMs are indeed capable of significantly boosting productivity, I'm sure we'd see a recovery, but when large bubbles suddenly burst there's usually some pretty serious fallout.
What happens tomorrow if eg ChatGPT 5.1 performance becomes doable for $500 of tech? $50?
The bubble would burst and the US economy would face a recession?
...which is and has been used, very successfully, in the service of propaganda used to consolidate resources and power.
Interesting examples with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, which were both dominant for about 10 years during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, Microsoft has been dominant in the same segment - for a whopping 30-35 years. During this time, they've made massive, unpopular interface overhauls, released products that nearly everyone dislikes but still has to use for some reason (Teams comes to mind), offer basically zero end user support and have moved from one-off license purchases to SaaS subscriptions.
Either Microsoft has managed to get it "just right" for more than three decades, or there's something else at play, too.
Yes, consumerism makes us throw out and replace perfectly working things. That doesn't mean there's not a decline in quality _as well_.
One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost relevance.
some companies design certain products -- especially household appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact.
So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_.
healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every year"
But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of the population.
five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of technological advancement.
No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement, in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society.
It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than those of 20 years ago.
No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered.
In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.
Opting out is easy, we can just stop using products from Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Google. Of course, for many that also means opting out of their job, which is a great way to opt out of a home, a family, healthcare, dental care and luxuries like food.
I don't think it's entitlement to make a well-mannered complaint about how little choice we actually have when it comes to the whims of the tech giants.