I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to weigh in kindly too.
> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.
Listen to the comments that say that experience is more valuable than ever.
> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far more powerful and sophisticated than you ever could have dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project gone bad without that experience.
> I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon.
Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break? Work on a side project, something you love to do.
> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.
Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists", but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism, conceptualism, post-modernism are examples of art movements that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple with that shift decades, even a century later.
Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and illustrators became very valuable after the invention of photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.
Ehto is correct and this is the way. I'll go further and say that if someone is tailgating you and it's pissing you off, generously let them pass. Literally pull to the side of the road if you must.
I sympathize with this a lot. What you’re describing really is exhausting, and it shouldn’t be this hard.
My take is that parental controls fail because they’re trying to solve a social and psychological problem at the technical layer. No amount of filters or settings can keep up with the internet, and kids are better at routing around them than we like to admit.
What’s worked better for us is treating this like other hard topics. We talk to our kids directly about social media, disturbing content, and strangers online, the same way we talk to them about drugs or sex.
We’re explicit about why some things aren’t allowed, what kinds of content exist out there beyond just sex, and that if something upsetting happens, telling us is always the right move and won’t cost them our trust or love.
That doesn’t remove all risk, but it shifts the burden from constant surveillance to shared understanding. To me that feels more realistic than trying to centrally control an environment that isn’t controllable.
We do that too of course. It’s not even the content that really bothers me. What bothers me is the targeted capitalization of kids’ attention. The instant gratification content model is changing behaviors for an entire connected generation in a way the world has never seen before. The real reason parental controls don’t exist is because it’s counter to what makes money for megacorps.
The impression that one might get from this article is that the ban is essentially a done deal, but it’s not. What exists right now is political signaling by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, plus preliminary fact-finding and position papers by ministries and agencies, but no enacted legislation. There’s still a big gap between "government floats an idea with broad public support" and "a legally enforceable, technically workable ban".
The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.
You are a global expert in this space. Now is your time! Write a book, make a blog, speak at conferences, open all the sources! Reach out to Moltbook and offer your help! Don't just rest on this.
Thank you, those are all good suggestions. I'm going to think about how I can be more proactive. The last three years since the company was taken over have been spent traveling and attending to personal and family issues, so I haven't had the bandwidth for launching a new company or being very public, but now I'm in a better position to focus on publicizing and capitalizing on my work. It's still awesome to see all of the other projects pop up in this space.
The essay is right about the behavior but wrong about the explanation.
It correctly observes that once companies become dominant, they stop acting like normal competitors. Instead of just building better products, they lobby regulators, buy potential rivals, and shape markets to protect their position. This pattern is real, widespread, and shows up in every industry, not just tech. That alone should hint that ideology isn’t the cause.
Where the essay goes wrong is treating this as executive confusion or moral contradiction. Executives at dominant firms aren’t confused or especially immoral. At scale, durable dominance and real competition are incompatible. Public companies are punished for slowing down, executive pay is tied to growth and stock price, and losing dominance can end careers even if the company survives. Regulation becomes something to manage or reshape. With weak enforcement, rule-bending is the rational move.
This doesn’t need a moral or psychological explanation. It follows directly from incentives, scale, and governance gaps.
Coherent narrative might help. Framing the problem as bad beliefs (as this essay does), bad people, or “capitalism in general” misses the point and leads to confused demands. Policymakers are pressured by the public to punish individuals or signal virtue which are distractions from effectively funding enforcement, closing loopholes, and limiting power at scale. Meanwhile, clear, well-funded lobbying focuses their attention on their needs.
Clearer public narratives won’t fix the problem by themselves, but they’re a minimum first step. Without a shared understanding of what is wrong and how to fix it, meaningful pressure for reform never even starts.
The insane conclusion that amoral and mostly unaccountable conglomerations have the right to direct US legislation and policy without limit is why we are in this mess. Until we sentence an entire Board of Directors to a life sentence in prison, I think I will remain unconvinced that "corporations are people".
Outrage is fast. It’s legible. It doesn’t require grappling with incentives, enforcement mechanisms, or tradeoffs.
But outrage has a cost:
It replaces diagnosis with blame.
It trains the public to expect villains, not mechanisms.
It produces demands that can’t be implemented.
It gives cover for inaction, because nothing concrete is being asked.
From the perspective of power, it’s almost ideal. Lobbyists show up with clear goals and specific language. The public shows up angry, divided, and incoherent. Guess who wins.
Proposing life in prison for people who are doing lawful things is a non-starter.
The other part of the preceding comment was about citizens united. A concrete action would be to pass a law that explicitly excludes corporations from the definition of people and restricts the kind of lobbying/legalized-bribery that currently empowers the powerful.
> ...you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?
The observation was that the wage boost of a minimum wage can be undercut by importing cheap goods made with slave labor. Workers can't get hired, domestic manufacturers cannot afford to hire.
The point is not that snapping phones together is some aspirational career. The point is that a legally mandated wage floor is meaningless if domestic producers cannot hire at all because they are competing with goods made under conditions that would be illegal here.
If you support minimum wages and labor standards, you either accept trade barriers that enforce those standards at the border, or you accept offshoring as a structural feature that permanently shrinks the set of jobs available to low-skill workers. You cannot have both.
No one is arguing that people should be forced into factory work. The argument is that a living wage should be available to anyone willing to work, and that requires domestic production capacity. Whether those jobs are in manufacturing, logistics, or automated facilities is secondary. What matters is that the price system does not systematically reward labor exploitation abroad while penalizing it at home.
I'll respond with a question: why wouldn't you want a living wage available to anyone willing to work? One way to enable that might be to ramp up US manufacturing and production.
Definitely support a living wage available to anyone willing to work.
However, as evidenced by the current situation, the US economy doesn't support manufacturing all types of consumer goods that it demands.
I understand the pressure points you're arguing for but I don't think that the US society will be in a better place once those are enforced.
If everybody willing to work doesn't have access to a job that pays a living wage, isn't that a different issue? Maybe the government could have educational programs so everybody has access to getting the education needed for jobs that pay a living wage (those not offshored to China and others) but I guess that's too much socialism for the US.
I see little to no sign that a living wage isn’t available to anyone willing to work and lots of signs that there are plenty of people who simply don’t want to work. They want a handout, not a wage.
I don’t doubt that there are people who choose not to work, but that’s not really the claim being discussed.
"A living wage being available to anyone willing to work" is not about whether every individual takes a job. It’s about whether the labor market reliably offers full-time work that covers basic costs like housing, healthcare, and food. On that question, the data are mixed at best. Many full-time workers still rely on subsidies, and job availability varies sharply by region, skill level, health, and caregiving obligations.
Some people will always opt out of work. That has been true in every economic system. The harder question is whether the structure of the economy provides viable options for those who do want to work but lack leverage, credentials, or geographic mobility. Pointing to the former doesn’t really answer the latter.
There is no right party, unfortunately. The Duopoly of Democrats and Republicans rely on this illusory idea of "the other side" to maintain a stranglehold on power for both parties. The sooner we give up that idea that one side is better than the other, the sooner we can hold "both sides" accountable. The Democrats are an absolutely corrupt shit show. As are the Republicans.
Each expansion of executive power is treated as unprecedented until it becomes normalized. Before Bush, indefinite detention without trial was unthinkable. Before Obama, the executive assassination of U.S. citizens without due process was unthinkable. Before Clinton, routine humanitarian war without congressional declaration was unthinkable. Each step is later reclassified as “different,” “necessary,” or “less bad,” each step decried by the "opposition" but excused by partisans.
The danger isn’t that one party does uniquely shocking things. It’s that both parties participate in a ratchet where norms only ever move in one direction supported by the rank and file. What looks like a false equivalence is actually a cumulative one: today’s outrage rests on yesterday’s precedents.
And it’s not even mainly about presidents. Fixating on the occupant of the office misses how much of this is legislative and bureaucratic drift. The real damage is often done through laws that quietly expand state power, normalize surveillance, weaken due process, or lock in perverse incentives. Presidents sign them, but Congress writes them, renews them, and funds them. That’s where the ratchet really lives.
USA PATRIOT Act (2001), Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994), FISA Amendments Act (2008), National Defense Authorization Acts with detention and secrecy expansions, Telecommunications Act (1996), Controlled Substances Act (1970), Defense of Marriage Act (1996), Welfare Reform Act / Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996). All terrible. All drafted and passed by both parties.
This is why “no one did X before” is the wrong metric. The system advances through laws and precedents that feel technical, temporary, or defensive at the time. Each one lowers the bar for the next. By the time something looks outrageous, the groundwork was laid years earlier by people insisting they were the reasonable alternative.
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