954 karma · joined April 26, 2026
This seems to be more on the tool-wielder than the tool.
Linux itself is receiving LLM-assisted code (a quick search saying 20% at the moment, although I don't know how accurate that is)
The end result of what you're talking about isn't that the innovator will be copied and consumers will benefit.. it's that the innovator will no longer exist and no-one will benefit.
Did you though?
Screens or tablets aren't the harmful drug in this situation, they're the needle. A needle that can contain medicine or heroin. The harm is from specific apps and social media. A device can be locked down. You can control what it's able to do and how much. I've used screens to teach myself a language to fluency, a hell of a lot about software development, and countless other things.
Would you object to a tablet that could only access Khan Academy, Openstax and Udemy? What about if we added on a 20 minute allowance of social media? I haven't looked super deep into the Amazon device much but it seems this is the direction they're heading with the parental dashboard
"Educational content has to come first. Your child completes reading or learning goals in Kids+ and educational apps before entertainment apps unlock"
I mean obviously kids are going to try to game the system to get to what they want.. but it seems like a reasonable path to test, and it doesn't require trying to turn every bad parent into a good one, or do something outlandish like ban tablets
If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering
Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm
Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer
Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)
The group of parents who let their kids smoke might get those instead, improving their health
The parents who don't allow it would never consider them
I suppose it depends how many of group 2 could be converted to 1 if they were "low tar!".. my intuition is close to zero
Amazon's target market here, wants to parent their kids without parenting their kids. Whether that's a TV with cartoons 20 years ago, a tablet 5 years ago, or a "digital pacifier" today nothing has changed. It's just being fulfilled differently.
My point is that the responsibility is on parents, not companies who will inevitably get the blame and nothing will change. See the other commenter here who said their kids don't even own a tablet.
Maybe it's making the best of bad parents
Example? "Massive" is relative, and it's almost never actually massive to the person paying. Software is incredibly cheap.
Adobe is primarily a professional program and even at higher fees it's a miniscule amount compared to the rate of the professional using it. Adobe isn't scooping up 20% of their earnings, it's more on the order of 0.07%.
The entities seemingly paying "massive tolls" are large corporations, who pay the big bucks because they're paying per seat, employing tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The toll per-person is, again, absolutely tiny and nothing compared to the salaries paid.
So in exchange for devaluing the labor of anyone in the firing lines of AI, removing a path to building a business with time, smarts and energy instead of capital, not actually fixing the lower and middle classes main categories of expenses (food,housing,healthcare) where is it going to make everyone better off?
I feel like anyone optimistic about these changes hasn't actually thought it through..
To adjust the metaphor a bit.. the cows have revolted and we can no longer get any steak.
If writing code via AI is an order of magnitude faster there won't be companies hiring people who want to code by hand. If you try to start a company by doing so then you'll lose to competitors without that restriction.
The choices left are: be homeless, change careers completely or suck it up and do something you don't like after being career-catfished
When you think through the 'change careers' path it also sucks and might not even be viable for many
I'm lucky I like coding with AI.. but I have worked jobs I hate and it's hell, and there's no amount of processing it that'll fix it except getting out of the situation
When 20% of your waking hours are free, and 10% of your mental energy.. it's pretty hard to argue that work isn't your life.
No amount of processing will move someone from ordering a steak to just enjoying their given peanut butter sandwich instead. They ordered the steak, and now the restaurant is telling us all too bad there's no steak anymore - eat your damn sandwich.
To better predict what they'll do with it we'd need to know the proportion of token usage via API vs subscription. Keeping an affordable, slightly unprofitable subscription to get people in isn't a bad idea. They also get marketing benefits from the word of mouth
If you have a large human-written system with a little thought put into it you should be able to find the specific pieces that handle the behavior you want and work on that, and if it's good then changing it should have a small blast radius and be covered with regression tests
In contrast, I've fully vibe coded a 15k line tool for myself with Opus and I have no idea how on earth it's architected after reading through it. It has "tests" but I don't trust them. It's just all over the place with no coherent design to it. It works, but it's making me more and more nervous to change it
They've built an entire strategy around moving slow and doing it better