1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when speaking to customers on site."
2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to customers on Zoom."
That slide rule got replaced by software at least two decades ago and probably far more. The engineering staff got quartered and the sales staff tripled, QA was fired, and stock buybacks are the name of the game.
No, it wouldn't as the whole reason people were giving Openai that 500 dollars is because they thought they could make more than 500 dollars from it.
So now that value is just shifted into the companies that were going to purchase from openai.
It would just hurt the investors who have exposure to openai/anthropic/google/microsoft.
Much of the value of this AI boom is not from the direct model companies but its from companies which use their technology.
Although the government could be stupid and bail out these companies which WOULD hurt all us citizens and the inflation caused by money printing due to that could cause a recession.
Here's what I think would happen if anyone, by tomorrow, could download GPT 5.1 for free and run it performantly on something like a $500 laptop:
* It would stop datacenter- and other related infrastructure construction, making huge investments effectively worthless for companies like Oracle and Amazon, and of course hurt the construction sector.
* It would hurt the companies you mention, plus a many more including NVidia, likely in ways that would lead to large-scale layoffs.
* It would seriously hurt corporate and VC investors and likely make them much less interested in large investments for quite some time, thus affecting other sectors as well.
* It would seriously hurt index funds and pension funds.
A number of years down the line, if LLMs are indeed capable of significantly boosting productivity, I'm sure we'd see a recovery, but when large bubbles suddenly burst there's usually some pretty serious fallout.
Interesting examples with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, which were both dominant for about 10 years during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, Microsoft has been dominant in the same segment - for a whopping 30-35 years. During this time, they've made massive, unpopular interface overhauls, released products that nearly everyone dislikes but still has to use for some reason (Teams comes to mind), offer basically zero end user support and have moved from one-off license purchases to SaaS subscriptions.
Either Microsoft has managed to get it "just right" for more than three decades, or there's something else at play, too.
I think this "something else" is called something along the lines of "monopoly", "market domination", "entrenched in politics & military", "embrace extend extinguish" or "buying everything that could potentially become competition"
Yes, consumerism makes us throw out and replace perfectly working things. That doesn't mean there's not a decline in quality _as well_.
> One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost relevance.
> some companies design certain products -- especially household appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact.
So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_.
> healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every year"
But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of the population.
> five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of technological advancement.
No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement, in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society.
> It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than those of 20 years ago.
No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered.
In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.
Opting out is easy, we can just stop using products from Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Google. Of course, for many that also means opting out of their job, which is a great way to opt out of a home, a family, healthcare, dental care and luxuries like food.
I don't think it's entitlement to make a well-mannered complaint about how little choice we actually have when it comes to the whims of the tech giants.
IMHO, what would give real value to retro enthusiasts is BSD licensing all the Commodore (and Amiga) IP, rather than these constant efforts to slap the chicken lips logo onto some random hardware in the hope of charging premium for an "official" product.
Would any of the many replacement/emulation/FPGA efforts that already exist be better with a specific logo? More convenient? Cheaper? More successful? I have serious doubts.
This feels, as the saying goes, like a big fat nothingburger.
Context from the link: Editor's note: Commodore Corporation B.V. only owns the rights to the "Commodore" brand and the well-known "Chickenhead" logo. Software rights such as firmware ROMs or AmigaOS are owned by the Italian Mike Battilana or his Amiga Corporation, the same applies to various brands from the Amiga sector.
One problem is that we've become so conditioned to seeing some of those iconic games with square pixels (because of emulators and screenshots) that the original aspect ratios look unfamiliar.
This is true also for most Amiga NTSC and DOS VGA games (both 320x200 on 4:3), such as Monkey Island. Here's an interview with Amiga artist Jim Sachs where he laments the lack of 4:3 aspect ratio when his works are displayed on modern machines: https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?t=1618
Some artists may of course have adjusted their screens in order to get square pixels, but I think the safe assumption is that they wanted to fill the typical default viewing area with graphics, since most users didn't (or, in the case of many cheap old TV sets, couldn't) adjust their screens.
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