Imagine having a car that pulls packages from npm or Docker hub whenever it gets a network connection. If there were cosmic justice that's what many HN users would get.
Knowing the HN crowd, they would probably run over some family barely being able to make rent, then whine on the internet for the next 7 years about how much that event affected _them_ and _their_ feelings.
> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail.
This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
Even for me (a software developer who reads these articles) it's really hard to actually know whether the software is any good. Are there unlockable features? Are there subscriptions with reasonable costs? What happens if I don't have a subscription? How often are updates shipped? What's the general consensus around the quality of the system as a whole?
It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".
All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.
Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.
Looking at most modern cars, I'm of the view that most of them are so fully whacked with the enshittification stick, that it's pretty hard for them to get even more enshittified without risking sales to actual normies. A very normie person in my extended family decided against an MG because she could tell how bad the software was — an impressive feat of enshittedness.
Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.
Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?
The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.
My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.
Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.
I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...
When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.
Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do?
Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself.
Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun.
Just because there are chess computers, doesn't mean that no one plays chess anymore at home.
Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.
It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
Yeah but we've told ourselves that writing software was some kind of higher mathematics, where in reality it was mostly just plumbing that, surprise, a computer can do too.
> It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use?
Yes.
> The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
No.
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.
This remains unchanged.
The driving force of FOSS is not "how can I fix someone else's problem". It never has been.
Well.. maybe on HN it was different, but that's not "the open source ecosystem". And, yes, maybe some corps have gaslit naive people into believing that they must donate their lives to said corps.
> 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 can’t speak for everyone but it seems to me to be a very human drive to want to be useful to others.
If you are good at something that you enjoy doing and that is valued by others, that’s the ideal scenario. And that’s what writing software looked like for many people for a long time.
That doesn’t mean you should do things just to please others. And it also doesn’t mean you can’t do something just because you enjoy doing it. But it means that these people now have a diminished ability to employ their unique skills to help others while doing something they love doing. That can sting, understandably.
Not only that, I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna be disappointed now they can implement their side projects in a week instead of 6 months. Finally - the thing is there, ready. And the likely outcome is
a) Almost no one but you cares and
b) Now that this has become trivial, there's no much joy in it. The struggle we had before A.I was the real joy; prompting agents for a few days and getting what you want isn't that joyful.
Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.
It's possible. At that time people were talking about Go as the next frontier (that didn't last long). IMO, the game is the same, and for 99.9999% of folks who ever play it, whether a computer can beat the best human is irrelevant in how fun it is to play.
You've unlocked a hilarious memory of driving through southern California and seeing all these signs as a kind of one-word-at-a-time advertisement back in the 90s. Someone had to have recreated them as some kind of joke because all the original signs had been gone for decades.
> Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?
Those numbers are likely greatly exaggerated. Twitter is nowhere near where it was at its peak. You could almost call it a ghost town. Linkedin but for unhinged crypto- and AI bros.
I'm sure the metrics report 80 million views, but that's not 80 million actual individuals that cared about it.
The narrative just needs these numbers to get people to buy into the hype.
And, to be fair to them, it works. It sticks. It gets the desired reactions.
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