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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

We've been working against the direction of capitalism and human nature for fifty years to achieve the promise of software, in all its theoretical beauty. It was always an uphill battle, but the glimmer of possibility never completely disappeared. In all this time, I never could have guessed that AI would be the thing to finally kill the promise of software.

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It's not capitalism, it's too-strong IP laws and "contempt of business model". Reverse engineering for interoperability should be legal under any circumstances - regardless of whether you have to break encryption to do it. Vendors have way too much control over how end users interact with their products.

It's not just that, current sentiment around the CFAA is that any kind of unsanctioned third-party user agent for anything that isn't the open web is potentially prosecutable. Plus, if the big user platforms decide they don't like some aspect of what you're doing, they will shut down all of your access, and potentially access of others close to you, everywhere, and aggressively prevent you from reestablishing even a baseline of inoffensive participation, at great potential cost to your well-being.

>It's not capitalism, it's too-strong IP laws and "contempt of business model".

This just seems like a semantic disagreement - I'm using "capitalism" by its common colloquial definition: As a loose shorthand for "the way we run things here", i.e. as a superset of the thing you've said.

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