Absolutely correct, Capitalism will incentivize innovation only as long as it’s profitable to do so. Once a company becomes a dominant player in their industry, innovation actually becomes largely unprofitable.

We can see this play out all the time, this is why industry giants almost never try to outcompete smaller start ups by innovating their products and services, instead, they either crush them out of the market via a bunch of different methods. Or they just buy them out, kill off their IP, or if it’s way better, they just brand it as their own, and usually fire most of the old staff.

In a Capitalist system, this actually creates a whole new incentive structure where start ups will try to grow as fast as possible with the sole intention of getting bought out by an industry titan, making the founders of the start up filthy rich.

Check out Neocities, it’s a revamp of the old Geocities platform.

All individual small sites, in the style of the late 90’s-early 2000’s web. Tons of animated gifs, sparkling cursors, hand-crafted HTML and CSS, web rings, shrines and fan pages, etc.

Very fun to just click random pages and explore, just like back in the day before search engines and algos curated our feeds and content for us.

If there’s anybody I trust to use LLMs in a responsible way, (to whatever degree that’s even possible) it would be Linus Torvalds. He has some of the highest standards for software development in the world, and the same can be said for the core Linux kernel development team.

The general problem though, is that the people who are the least qualified to do software development are very often the people who are the most likely to use LLMs to try to slop their way to the top.

I think that the combination of cost increases for inference, inherent limitations in model integrity, and the economic destruction that will ensue when these fraudster CEOs have finally squeezed every last drop of blood from every last stone they can find, will leave “AI” in a similar place as blockchain/crypto/NFTs.

There will be a relatively niche market for software engineers and related tech workers; local LLM boxes, some subscription-based models that companies pay for with their licensing packages, hobbyists, and some minimal integrations into software suites for tools like background removal, lighting enhancement, etc.

There will be no Singularity, no AGI, no all-knowing Machine God.

Because many tech jobs have become glorified vendor management. You don’t actually support anything yourself, you have a vendor sales rep and a technical rep or maybe two.

When something breaks or needs an update, you call/email the rep, go back and forth a few times, schedule a date for patching, and then create your 10,000th email Chain/Teams group chat with all the various people internally and externally who “need visibility” into the process. Everybody says their piece, argues about coverage or pricing, asks the same basic questions 5 different ways, so on and so forth.

Now multiply this by all the unique software/hardware components of your infrastructure. Add to that the AI executive-led slop fest, angry sarcastic, tech-illiterate end users, corporate software enshitification, etc.

Totally agree, I threw a quick filter on some public domain, actual human artwork, and cropped it square. Took me as long as it would have taken to generate that slop logo.

Here’s the original source: Citation

For the love of anything even mildly good or wholesome…enough of the fucking AI slop images!

Not only are his comics CC, his entire artistic workflow is built on FOSS. His art tablet runs Linux, he uses Krita for digital painting, his fonts and brushes are FOSS too, and he provides them free of charge for anybody to download.

He also provides free tutorials and guides on his setup and workflow, and advice one how to start using FOSS as a professional artist.

Finamp has been my goto for my music collection for several years. I know there are better solutions, but I’m not hardcore, I just want a simple app that streams my music from the server reliably.

The only thing that is a pain is getting all the tags and metadata correct, but there are lots of good apps to help with that also.

Same conclusion for me. Been using Linux for years, Mint is the only distro I’ve used that #JustWorks in my experience.

I use LMDE as my personal laptop, it’s rock stable.

In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.

During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn’t even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.

And even if you weren’t getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+

Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn’t “that much” money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.

Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.

This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it’s a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won’t have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.

That’s finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.

Of course, that’s what I said; in this Capitalist world, sometimes you have to compromise and choose a worse license in order to support FOSS.

MIT makes sense in a Capitalist world where corpos want all the advantages of FOSS without having to give up the massive amounts of money generated and protected by IP laws.

Copyleft licensing scares them away, and anything that scares mega-corps away is probably good.

Don’t get me wrong, MIT is still better than proprietary licensing, but not as good as strong Copyleft licensing like the GPL.

MIT is the most popular Open Source Permissive license. It’s permissive vs Copyleft like the GPL, meaning it doesn’t require the same license to modifications/forks. That means new contributions to MIT licensed code can be made closed source at any time, which is why it’s so popular in the Silicon Valley corporate Open Source space.

Companies love having the ability to start out Open Source so that can rapidly develop and get free code contributions from the community, then when their application gets super popular and deeply integrated, they change the license to something more restrictive to lock in customers/vendors/users and start getting more money.

That’s why some folks in the FOSS community don’t like it. It’s still better than straight up proprietary licenses, because the old MIT version can still be forked and remain open if there is a large enough community around it, (this happened a few years ago with Terraform and Open Tofu). Best though to just start out with a Copyleft license like the GPL.

Same for me. I clearly separate my “experiemental” machines from my “just works” machines now.

My laptop runs LMDE, my servers are mostly Debian 13, a handful of Ubuntu Server in there. My gaming rig is Nobara Linux, which is just Glorious Egg roll’s gaming-optimized Fedora build. When I first set it up a few years ago, I had everything all customized, themes, fonts, icons, fancy desktop/window effects, etc.

I actually considered just going with something vanilla recently, not because I have had any major issues with my current set up, but just because I don’t feel like tinkering with it anymore.

My tinkering desire has shifted more and more towards server/enterprise infrastructure and DevOps automation.

I’m older now, my career has taken off, and with that comes more responsibilities and mental energy required during the workday, then family obligations through the week/month, etc. I find myself with less time and mental energy to just tinker and play with tech. So when I do find myself with a bit of free time, I want to maximize it and work on stuff that both helps with my actual career, and helps me get more stuff self-hosted for myself and my family.

Way back in college, I used to spend more time tweaking my PC’s overclock than actually gaming xD

Ryzen 7 5800 X3D Radeon RX 9070XT 32GB of DDR4 system memory.

What local models have you been using? And what hardware are you running them on? I’ve been playing with local LLMs a bit for exactly your use case.

I have zero interest in vibe coding or full agentic workflows. But having a local LLM generate a Bash script to help me automate parts of my home lab infrastructure would be nice.

Awesome!

Oh great, they’re already preparing the next industry grift mania…

Lol, awesome. 🎉🌈✊🏳️‍🌈🎊 FOSS is for everybody!

Nice, I’ll have to give it a try.

Thanks for the feedback!