It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all.
If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.
The truth is that there was a lot more available in the early days of Netflix than there is now, which with some rose-tinted glasses may very well make it seem like Netflix had everything.
It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services.
Having everything was part of the marketing. It was just a complete lie. Everyone had that moment with Netflix where they realized every movie is in every category and there isn't nearly as much on there as it seems.
I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.
It really was. Hulu was seen as “the worse netflix”, was launched significantly after netflix already had a critical mass, and its launch was seen as the beginning of the end for streaming as a one stop shop.
The point of this seems to be building on open hardware. If you want open source software that builds on proprietary hardware, KOReader is what you want. (I use it, it's great.)
I mean, a) regular consumers are just gonna buy a Kindle, do nothing with its software, and only buy books from Amazon. But also b) the way a lot of these hobby things expand is that if they get some market traction, someone starts making and selling pre-assembled, retail-friendly versions of the thing. Look at wacky keyboards, for instance: Used to be that you had to solder your own weird ergo split, now there are companies like ZSA and Keebio that'll make really nice versions as finished products.
This was also my thought, and I think holds true of the ones with invisible requirements that aren't stated up front and are only captured in tests. Oh, you need to rework your solution to handle requirements nobody mentioned before? Well, me too.
Yeah, it's testing a different thing than what the benchmark claims to test, but it's also accidentally testing something more real-world applicable than a clean benchmark would be, so hey.
(EDIT: That is, if the agent is allowed to see the failed tests and iterate. If not, then yeah, that's just a problem. And either way, the ones with tests that just encode a particular solution's implementation details, thereby demanding that your solution have some rando internal details, are junkier. That's not a situation you'd run into in reality.)
I kinda love that you made this post feel negative enough that a bunch of AI skeptics are enthusiastically agreeing with a post suggesting that the realistic, pragmatic bear case for AI is, uh, 2-3x productivity improvements.
This I think is fair, consumers generally have a very poor understanding of licensing.
Too many still think in the old days of buying physical goods, you 'buy' a tin of beans, they are now in all sense my beans.
I'm all for helping people distinguish, when something is a straight forward property transaction, or an agreement based on permisions, constraints and obligations ... a license.
Go to chat.z.ai right now and ask it about what happened in Tiananmen Square. Do you think it's good for the world if software is written by the model that answers that question that way?
It makes no difference to me if a coding model has an opinion about Tiananmen Square, Americans bombing schoolgirls in Iran, how many genders there are, or anything else other than designing and writing code.
A coding model is a tool, as long as it follows its user's instructions for building software I don't really care what opinion it spits out about world history.
Yes, it is important to ensure that aren't hidden guardrails that are affecting its ability to perform its function. But the great thing about open weight models is that you can actually evaluate this rigorously, and retrain to remove any prejudices you don't like.
I mean, literally the answer is that nobody knows. Maybe the robots replace us all. Maybe they shift those who remain into being some combination of Product Manager and QA. Maybe there's still a role for a technical overseer even in the medium-long run.
But it sounds like you're really asking about the state of the world today. If so, I don't think that ideal state is like your friend's company (or at least, as it appeared to be to you). It might be possible that you can make that "dark factory" pattern work (StrongDM seems to be doing it), but it would require infrastructure and discipline that I doubt they're mustering. Think about how CD didn't involve taking a sloppy build process with no testing or observability and just going straight to prod -- it required building up a lot of infra and discipline first.
But on the other hand, I don't think the ideal present involves artisan hand-crafting code either. I haven't written a line of code by hand in enough months that it would genuinely feel weird if I were to try to program that way despite decades of having done just that. That era's done with, and moderate normie practices right now today are more about supervising and guiding agents than about chiseling code into clay tablets.
10% of a developer's cost is something like $4000/month. Many companies are complaining at a point that's well, well below that.
(I think they are being irrational, and that the mental model they have of AI costs -- "how much are we spending on tooling for this developer?" -- is going to shift over time to something more sensible, but those kinds of short-sighted companies are the ones that are having cost panics.)
A company's fully loaded cost (payroll taxes, insurance, fixed company costs, infra, real estate, etc) is usually about double the employee's salary. Half of $40k is 20k/mo, which is ~$250k/hr. That's a lot but very in-bounds for software engineering salaries.
$250k/hour is half a billion USD per year. Nobody is paid that much.
Based on such a basic mistake, I wouldn't trust the rest of your comment. Everything you listed feels like made up arbitrary excuses. Most of the overhead per employee is fixed, that doubling rule of thumb is assuming an employee with a salary closer to the median. At the salary you're claiming, the overhead shrinks to something like 30% on top of the base salary.
If anyone took your numbers seriously they would run into the weird conclusion that an employee paid $50k actually costs a company $300k. That's the type of math error you're doing here.
Overhead is not fixed per employee - things like taxes and benefits scale with salary, not to mention the cost of tooling (hardware, software, AI token budget, etc) tend to be higher for higher-compensated employees.
You definitely shouldn't plan your business based on my comment, but you'd be foolish to ignore it.
Not necessarily. Those jobs are very hard to get and you have to live in the right places. At most 1% of software devs will make that much, at any point in their careers.
Github Copilot lets you use Anthropic models. This is just a way for enterprises to fold this into their existing Microsoft contract instead of negotiating with a new vendor.
Github Copilot is a different product than the Windows / Office one. Horrible naming I know but it's basically just a UI and router to pick whatever model you want.
No, I know what it is. But it's not as good as Claude Code or Codex. Harnesses matter for coding agents, it's not just the model. There's a reason Microsoft had to make its developers stop using Claude Code, and it's because they all found that Copilot sucked in comparison.
If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.
reply