1st: no need to personalise, I agree. Sorry about that.
2nd: where did you get the 200 bn USD figure for the US ?
3rd: if we multiply 250 M people (likely Google users in the US out of a population of 349 M) and multiply it by the 1,605 USD that Google is said to make out of an average user in the linked blog post by Proton, we get 401 bn USD, not 200 bn.
on another note - is the exponential growth from 'agentic' workflows actually resulting in productive software in the wild. Or it is just noise. On my end I haven't seen the software I use getting better.
the tragedy is we are gonna have a generation of "engineers" (if we can call them engineers) who won't know how to properly use tools such as Cassandra, ScyllaDB, FoundationDB etc.
excellent db's meant for very specific use cases. abused by resume driven mercenaries - but used with precision by missionaries.
Most devs don't understand how to use a traditional SQL style RDBMS appropriately either. Especially with support for JSON encoded fields, you can do a lot of things that break traditional normalization but have a massive impact on performance and scalability. The massive increase in hardware alone has shifted the balance a lot.
There's still lots of room for specialization tuned database options like Cassandra, Scylla, etc. I do wish more developers had a lot more awareness of how/what/where these things are appropriate.
FWIW, you see similar efforts to shove GraphQL into application stacks and environments where you gain very little benefit. Often and especially when you have the same people developing the app and managing DevOps with smaller teams.
the tragedy in this is the people who control the money - VCs etc - and people who ask for money are all from the same backgrounds - typically white & Ivy educated. Groupthink.
hence it's a vicious self-deluding bubble that has massive reinforcement. likewise the talent/capital that could be going to useful impactful opportunities in society doesn't.
hence we get money & labor being pumped into non-problems and solutions seeking problems like LLMs and the massive propaganda going into it as if the propaganda is going to cause behavior change.
which is why diversity of thought, experiences, culture is very important.
This critique reads to me like "capitalists should have asked anti-capitalists about whether or not to do capitalism". This is either going to get resolved through the political process as is proper and good, or else our politics is broken and it will be resolved through older and less peaceful means.
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