Baldur BjarnasonMar 9
LLMs exaggerate and exacerbate existing market and industry dysfunctions. They've hastened media's descent into fabrications and clickbait, accelerated the devaluation of writing and illustration. And in software it has fuelled an existing crisis and exposed a divide at the core of the industry
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonMar 9

Our current software crisis—we've had a few—has been ramping up IMO since the post-2007 bailouts. Instead of regulating finance, the US let the finance industry take over, which hasn't been great overall, but for software it's meant that "quality" stopped mattering

Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.

Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.

Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices

Show threadNiels Abildgaard
@baldur This is the only time I've seen someone clearly articulate the state of the industry. The way I usually frame this is in terms of wasted creative potential in developers being captured by hypercapitalized companies, making them work on uninteresting and unimportant problems, to enable the company to capture shares of some transient market... while many real, interesting problems remain unsolved.
Mar 9 at 6:06pmWeb
Show threadNiels AbildgaardMar 9

@baldur Meanwhile governments (at least the Danish one) has been pushing to educate more software engineers, at a doubling rate of around 5 years.

But there is so much untapped potential in the industry already, from lackluster training of new developers (from too few real masters of the craft and lack of interest from companies) and poorly directed effort...

Anyway, glad to see you talk about it.