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by dpc_01234 870 days ago
The blockchain and LLMs parts in particular fall flat in this article. Blockchains are attractive because they are novel and can be easily monetized (usually by taking money from invest... well... suckers). Their wastefulness has little to do with anything. And LLMs are... just useful and promising. I'm personally deeply reserved about near term possibilities of LLMs, but it doesn't stop me from paying $20/mo for ChatGPT and using it as a convenient search engine for programming and other things.

And generally this doom-saying by people like Jonathan Blow doesn't reasonate with me at all. Sure there is a lot of waste. But also software is better then ever was. 3d graphics are better, programming langauges, Unicode support, software development process, hardware is faster, all the clunky C tools are being replaced with modern equivalents in Rust/Go with way better usability, cryptography and security are better, desktop environemnts are better, file systems are better. I could go on.

In my mind the only things that are getting worse are the commercial stuff: web sucks and stole the thunder from native apps and Windows/MacOS are degrading.

1 comments

> But also software is better then ever was

It depends on what you're measuring and what you consider "better". In many ways, it is better. In many other ways, it's worse. Which you think it is depends on what you value.

> Which you think it is depends on what you value.

Sure, but more so - what software you use. AFAICT most complaining is about Windows software and web.

Windows is getting crappier and crappier because it ceased to be an important part of Microsoft's empire, and web... is web, went full stupid on JS and attracts most newcomers.

On the Linux and especially CLI side everything seems to be flourishing.