Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean.
Nothing there is a surprise.
This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal.
Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on.
Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional, you're skewing reality.
> Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.
Honestly, it's alright.
Just think of what we could do with computers up until this point.
We keep all those abilities.
And more, even, because the industry still keeps churning out new local LLMs.
So you even gain more capabilities than right now. Just not at the rate of the bleeding edge.
Which is just like the Linux desktop, essentially.
It's fine, really. There is no need to consume the bleeding edge. You will be fine.
Definitely agree here. Made the swap to Linux a little over a year ago and the only reason I even have nice hardware is because I like gaming. But if I was cut off from everything tomorrow, the decades of stuff I have that I have not played will keep me very happy lol
There is something comforting about seeing that the SV stopped having ideas and now just recycles and recombines the same tropes over and over again.
It's still all terrible, but it's a devil you know. You can live with that. You can skip the broken stair and duck, knowing exactly when they're trying to punch you in the face again.
Now here's hoping that eventually, they get bored and just stop entirely.
Reading it I mean. The commenter putting into words why exactly someone would think that this would be a good idea.
Of course, you're 110% right that it isn't, but it's still nice that HN provides some subtiles for those that are out of the loop and out of substances in their bloodstream.
Imagine having a car that pulls packages from npm or Docker hub whenever it gets a network connection. If there were cosmic justice that's what many HN users would get.
Knowing the HN crowd, they would probably run over some family barely being able to make rent, then whine on the internet for the next 7 years about how much that event affected _them_ and _their_ feelings.
> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail.
This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
Even for me (a software developer who reads these articles) it's really hard to actually know whether the software is any good. Are there unlockable features? Are there subscriptions with reasonable costs? What happens if I don't have a subscription? How often are updates shipped? What's the general consensus around the quality of the system as a whole?
It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".
All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.
Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.
Looking at most modern cars, I'm of the view that most of them are so fully whacked with the enshittification stick, that it's pretty hard for them to get even more enshittified without risking sales to actual normies. A very normie person in my extended family decided against an MG because she could tell how bad the software was — an impressive feat of enshittedness.
Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.
Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?
The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.
My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.
Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.
I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...
When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.
Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean.
Nothing there is a surprise.
This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal. Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on.
Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional, you're skewing reality.
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