[davidw]

What I'm curious about is how a young programmer in, say, Sicily or Finland or somewhere who is a student or doesn't have a lot of spare cash, is going to deal with a world where everything is predicated on access to expensive tokens controlled by megacorporations, or where even 'open source' models require fairly expensive hardware to run.

[debugnik]

I think about that too. Had I grown up thinking that I need to pay a subscription to build software, I wouldn't have tried to get into engineering at all. As a teen I wanted to learn electronics and robotics, but I couldn't afford the parts to build anything so I taught myself programming and CS instead, and that's the only thing that helped me slog through academic education.

I can't imagine making the same choice again today. Nowadays I worry that software engineering is about to become short-lived right after I've entered the workforce, in which case I'll regret the time I spent to get to this point based on a false hope.