Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.

> the things he does.

The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?

A fool and his money shall soon be parted. Sam is a face. If it wasnt him, it would be someone else.

> unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.

Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.

> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…

Enshittification only works for the middleman in a two-sided market, which is what those things are. LLMs are a commodity, so their path to monopoly profit is very different.

I will check back on this comment in a year to see who was right.

The only people that care about enshittification are a few crazies on HN.

Google has 90% market share.

> I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.

If you reach a bit farther back, there's opium, an impactful product with limitless demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief.

But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.

The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.

> Especially as the cost of producing code drops, the value of libraries decreases.

Does it? If the cost of slop that (1) no one understands, and (2) no one can be sued for if it misbehaves drops to zero, what have we gained? A "library" is code plus reliability and accountability. (Yes, GPL disclaims liability, but that's why consultants exist.)

Reliability is important for sure, but as you noted, there is no accountability for library maintainers.

I'm not saying all libraries will go to zero values, just that their value is decreasing.

> Oof, I wish I had a job like that.

Focus on something and become one of the best in the world at it. Expertise pays.

> Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations

Same, more or less. Twitter started as a place to be interrupted by attention-seekers, and Bluesky was just "that but with less Elon Musk and more implementation throat-clearing." I never saw the point. Mastodon feels more like old-school Usenet, where you could find communities with shared interests, block the attention-seekers, and shrug at the usual human drama.

> The Go ecosystem is heavy on style guides, design patterns, and canonical ways of doing things.

Go was designed based on Rob Pike's contempt for his coworkers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16143918), so it seems suitable for LLMs.