It's similar to when factories got mechanized, and people were promised 2 day work weeks. In reality, the number of high paying jobs shrunk, and wages compressed. That's just the march of progress:)

It's available to anyone who pays. Not limited to nation states. I doesn't concern me much: $10M is out of reach of anyone I'll ever meet.

Are you a mobile dev?

As it appears to me Mastodon is public like Twitter. I didn't know about private instances. Why use this format when there's chat rooms?

What subscriptions do you have?

Thanks, I'll take a look at misskey.

What does it say about you if you let idiots have power over you?

M chip MacBooks are pretty sweet. Especially if you want Xcode.

People don't go to public places to hang out anymore, so we're dependent on the internet for that these days. Does it mean addiction? Not at all. It's similar to drug addiction, if you're in good health and good company, time flies when you're sober. When you're sitting by yourself in a small room, you're dependent on time accelerating media devices. For me, meth accelerates time in a similar fashion, and I can spend hours sitting in a room looking out the window, no urge to look at memes in chat rooms. Meth is easier to stop for me because of harsher side effects.

Will it lead to the exodus towards Matrix/Element? If I have to pay for messaging, I'd rather cut the middleman.

Is making a profit = profiteering? I agree with endless growth. I hate the big data model that assumes large numbers of users, huge churn, low success rate.

The ads I had in mind would be topic-based. If you're on a supplement sub, you see suggestions for a vendor. If you're on a web dev sub, you see VPS vendors. Nothing crass like Betterhelp or Masterworks.

What collective perspective? There's gonna be winners and losers, non uniform rewards and costs. Companies are already acting like that. And IMO more will join. They're a hive mind who eagerly copy Google, Amazon, Facebook. And younger devs will add "LLM code gen" to their resumes. No job is safe, even kings and dictators get their heads chopped off.

It was. $10M/year. After Apple patched the buffer overflow in the gif lib and introduced blastdoor, they replaced it with Pegasus 2. Apple patched it again. That's why it's sold as a service.

I'm too unfamiliar with the cooking and writing/publishing biz. I'd rather not use this analogy.

I can see many business guys paying for something like Devin, making a mess, then hiring someone to fix it. I can see companies not hiring junior devs, and requiring old devs to learn to generate and debug. Just like they required devs to be "full stack". You can easily prevent that if you have your own company. If ... Do you have your own company?