Copying does not directly deprive anyone of anything. In fact it just adds more value to the world, and makes it more available to more people.

Nobody can "copy" stuff and put it behind a paywall, because the original is still free. It's the prevention of copying that leads to expression being locked behind paywalls.

It's said that copying disincentivizes creativity and creation, but in practice it does the opposite. Just look at the incredible amount of music, fiction, software, stories, art, and information that have proliferated since the birth of the web.

What copying does do is it indirectly deprives people and companies of the ability monopolize profits on particular expressions without competition. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

For example, look at the software industry. I'm extremely grateful that patents and copyright are so rarely enforced in software and UI design, and that we've all been copying the good ideas that came before us for decades with no consequence. I'm grateful the same is true of food recipes, too. I think the world would likely be a richer one if this was true for most fields and art.

You have two mistakes in your thinking.

1. You assume that people are not comfortable with this economic model, when in fact millions of people are making the choice to be on the labor side of this model on a daily basis, who could actively afford to be on the ownership side. 2. You mistakenly believe that "the thing" that produces returns is the product/service/offering when in reality it's the entire business.

Let's start with #2.

Producing and capturing value is about more than just building the offering, i.e. coding something. Millions of people have coded something "valuable" and made $0, because building something is not enough. You have to make sure people learn about the thing, and they have to find it good enough to pay you for it, and then actually pay you for it, and you have to be able to make this happen repeatedly, a sufficient number of times and at a high enough price point to sustain and ideally grow the endeavor.

This goes far behind simply building a product. It requires building a business.

And let me tell you, my friend, software engineers at FAANG companies are only building the software, not the business. The people building the business are the ones making the biggest earnings.

Creators in every industry do not like to hear this. Take the music industry, for example. Everyone who can sing or create music hates the "middlemen". The record labels and whatnot. The DJs. They hate the grind. Every creator wishes that simply creating was enough, and many naively believe that it is. But we live in the real world, which has these things called markets and people and psychology. Markets are competitive, and people and psychology are complex, and someone who works to build a business (an offering + market research + a marketing/sales/distribution process + a viable business model) is going to beat the pants off someone who only wants to create the offering and do nothing else.

Building a business is incredibly difficult, and incredibly risky.

It's more likely than not that you will lose a ton of money and a ton of time. Most people would rather not face this challenge, take this risk, or endure these losses. Most would rather learn a fraction of the skills required (e.g. just the programming part, just the design part, just the singing part, etc.), then allow someone else to do the hard work of starting the business and turning it into something from nothing.

Most people would rather sell their time and services for a comfy salary instead of trying to become an owner. Which is why there are large numbers of well-paid white collar workers who make this choice every day, rather than quitting to start a business.

This is not slavery, it's people being content with what they have and trading risk for security. (God I hate writing any sort of sentence "it's not X it's Y" because AI has ruined this phrasing.)

It isn’t. It’s capital.

Risk looks very different when you’re risking surplus wealth versus when you’re risking your rent, healthcare, visa, and your entire savings in one concentrated bet.

Calling that a simple matter of “choice” is fiction.

Saying most engineers could just become owners if they wanted to is like saying most renters could just buy apartment blocks.

Technically possible. Structurally delusional.

Ownership compounds. Salaries don’t. Equity scales exponentially. Labour income scales linearly. The system is designed that way.

You can defend it as efficient. You can defend it as rational. But pretending everyone is standing at the same starting line deciding between “comfort” and “ambition” is cosplay.

The dividing line isn’t grit. It’s who can afford to fail.

This isn't delusional, this is reality for a huge percentage of tech founders.

Then factor in the fact that it costs very little to start a web/app company compared to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. And the fact that funding is available (e.g. Y Combinator). And you have a lot of explaining to do for why so many well-paid engineers don't even try to start something.

> But pretending everyone is standing at the same starting line...

No one in this discussion has implied that everyone is starting at the same starting line. It's obvious that having more money makes things easier. As it should, because that's the entire point of money.

But the reality is that there are millions of millions of people in America today, even from the lower classes, who have access to the internet + a laptop + free time + the ability to survive a failure.

That’s not to paint them as wise beyond their years or anything like that, but just that historically Apple has wanted strict control over its products and what they do and LLMs throw that out the window. Unfortunately that that’s also what people find incredibly useful about LLMs, their uncertainty is one of the most “magical” aspects IMHO.

There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.

You can tell it's watched almost exclusively by old people because all the ads on the channel are for those funeral pre-pay services or retirement homes.

Safe to ignore anything they have to say.

And that of anyone who quotes them too

I do wish me dad would stop watching that channel though, it can’t be any good for his heart.

I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.

The output of code isn't just the code itself, it's the product. The code is a means to an end.

So the proper analogy isn't the photographer not looking at the photos, it's the photographer not looking at what's going on under the hood to produce the photos. Which, of course, is perfectly common and normal.

I’ll bite. Is this person manually testing everything that one would regularly unit test? Or writing black box tests that he does know are correct because of being manually written?

If not, you’re not reviewing the product either. If yes, it’s less time consuming to actually read and test the damn code

So a percentage of your code, based on your gut feeling, is left unseen by any human by the moment you submit it.

Do you agree that this rises the chance of bugs slipping by? I don’t see how you wouldn’t.

And considering the fact that your code output is larger, the percentage of it that is buggy is larger, and (presumably) you write faster, have you considered the conclusion in terms of the compounding likelihood of incidents?

Coverage doesn't matter if the tests aren't good. If you're not verifying the tests are actually doing something useful, talking about high coverage is just wanking.

"have the agent create progressively bigger integration tests, until I hit e2e/manual validation."

Same thing. It doesn't matter how big the tests are if they're not testing the right thing. Also why is e2e slashed with manual? Those are orthogonal. E2E tests can [and should] be fully automated for many [most?] systems. And manual validation doesn't have to wait for full e2e.

My approach is similar. I invest in the harness layer (tests, hooks, linting, pre-commit checks). The code review happens, it's just happening through tooling rather than my eyeballs.

I've found that focusing my attention upstream (specs, constraints, test harness) yields better outcomes than poring over implementation details line by line. The code is still there if I need it. I just rarely need it.

How is this decoupled from the code?

Specious analogies don't help anything.

If you ignore the specific similarities being pointed out (learning and training work similar in different mammals), and you instead focus on the most offensive differences you can think of (dogs are lesser intelligent creatures than man), then of course you can find a way to be offended.

But doing so is optional, FYI. And counterproductive to an interesting conversation as well.

Note the word "future" not "present". People are making a prediction of where things will go. I haven't seen a single person saying that Gas Town as it exists today is ready for production-grade engineering project.