My boss did the same thing. A team of experts working on our SaaS applications for 20 years, constantly improving it to be more secure, more maintainable, more usable, more performant, better organized, better documented, more thoroughly tested, more accessible, more suited to what users needed, more adaptable, using the most appropriate technology stack, protected from various attack scenarios, fully standards compliant, efficient to deploy, etc., and we just found out he vibe-coded a total replacement in secret all on his own in a couple of months using Claude and all written in JavaScript, and he is putting it live and retiring what we built. He wasn’t even going to tell us until he had migrated the last customer over to his thing, so he’s been letting us all work on projects that he had no intention of using, just to buy time until his slop was done.

Saddam’s Cheesecake Factory will be a monument for the ages.

It slowed around 2010 while Intel sat on its arse for quite a few years, but then transistors started shrinking again. This page has a chart suggesting the law has pretty much continued to hold. But we know that can’t continue because things really are starting to hit physical limits now.

A lot of that AI will presumably be rented from the companies that persuaded your boss to fire you and use their tools instead. So it’s an odd kind of protest, that starts by paying those companies more money.

I do like the idea of software engineers collectivizing and prioritizing work on projects that don’t have good enough open-source options, particularly where it targets the nastier companies in the SaaS space. But there’s nothing new about that work; what’s new is that we have a lot of people motivated to take software in a new direction, who miss being able to take pride in the quality of their work, and who may be more receptive to acting collectively than these people have traditionally been. I know whenever I’ve proposed any kind of collective stance at my workplaces I’ve been met with blank stares, silence, and developers nervously looking at their feet. Maybe that can change when more people have recent experience of what happens when you don’t act together.

If we want to do something new, how about worker-owned cooperatives which actually offer good-quality software and support with ethical terms of use? Build it and sell it to the companies paying for SaaS, and make your software and support deal more attractive than the one they’re being gouged for. The support is particularly important when anyone can dash off some software using AI. Make your company worker-owned, nonprofit and cheap, market it professionally, offer good support and maintenance, and make a living doing it.

Sign your letter “Joe and Eileen Bailey”.

Pass laws that severely hamper their control

Can’t Trump simply veto any such laws?

And if tech had been proceeding since then as it did for the previous 30 years, you’d expect a whole lot more power for your $15 $35 now.

The aim of those buying up all the RAM is to prevent people owning devices capable of serious computing, so we have to rent what we used to have back from them, with added censorship and surveillance. Sam Altman has been explicit about how he wants no one to own RAM except companies running data centres. The Raspberry Pi becoming unfeasibly expensive is just an example of that forced transition from owning to renting playing out. When it was introduced the Pi cost $15 $35. We’re in a different world now.

Because he’s unreasonably powerful and having a direct negative impact on all our lives.

Everyone sees it. Those in power want it.

Ah, but how about a dubbed version spoken by American robot voices, where the foreign actors uncannily mouth American words? Wouldn’t that be a joy and a gift to the world? Eventually we might even be able to replace all foreign actors with a young Harrison Ford.

I have read stores getting rid of self checkouts because of this.

That’s a good result if true. They’ll have to keep employing humans.

No one ever believed in the Metaverse except one very rich weirdo. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies were the 2010s’ really big hype wave.

All these attempts to make Proton and its CEO look better actually make them look worse.

They don’t care. They’ll sell surveillance of the poors, and weapons that use it, to governments and corporations. They’ll have everything already, and the goal then will just be to keep it that way by force.

But it’s not inevitable that the restrictions should say killing people is OK but analyzing how software works is forbidden.

Yes it’s disgustingly expensive. I spent a whole lot of money on an old used GPU and it felt bad, but it didn’t feel dirty like paying for Claude would. And then a couple of weeks later the used prices for this GPU had risen by about 15%.

(I only use Claude at work when someone else is paying. And they’re about to make me redundant because Claude is cheaper than me.)

I got shut down by it two days ago. It suddenly told me that the project I was working on had tripped some kind of guard, that it couldn’t continue working with me on it, and it couldn’t tell me why. I just went back to my local Qwen model. I can’t see this doing great things for selling Claude subscriptions.

millionare

You’re off by a few orders of magnitude.

And why is it limited, Sam? We all had plenty of affordable RAM before some asshole bought it all to rent back to us.