>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.
We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.
NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?
Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.
Actually: There’s been a noticeable uptick in the last decade+ of better-made clothing for shoppers who are open to paying somewhat higher prices. Not boutique prices, but also more expensive than H&M.
For a long time the stereotypical “young professional” look was tied closely to just a few mainstream retailers (Banana Republic for example), but over the last ~15 years a wider range of smaller or more specialized brands has entered the space: Alex Mill, Spier and Mackay, etc.
But even ignoring that your analogy doesn’t quite fit since price plays a significant role in clothing purchasing decisions: Fast fashion succeeds largely because it is cheap.
If reasonably priced, higher-quality alternatives were accessible people would buy them. It’s partly why certain brands have grown in popularity (Carhartt, for example).
Yeah it actually did do this for me. I will not purchase new clothing at all unless I have some understanding of the supply chain and where it was made, with a strong preference for clothes that are at least cut and sewn in the US. I won’t tolerate buying clothes, or really any textile product, if I can’t be relatively certain it will last me at least five years. A flood of cheap, unreliable shit did actually make me more discerning.
N of 1, obviously, but this isn’t as outlandish as you wanted to make it seem here.
I’m not denying this has been the case for some people. I myself have switched to pretty much exclusively wearing trousers from my favourite tiny brand that cuts and sews them <100km from where I live, and I’m privileged enough to always try to choose quality over price. But quality products have been getting much harder to find in the past years, and I was under the impression we're mostly outliers.
Looking at my family and friend group’s spending habits, it feels like everything is purchased either from Temu or from one of those super-low-price-super-low-quality stores that have been taking Europe by storm these past couple years (i.e. Action, Tedi, Pepco). It’s kinda maddening.
Exactly - it turns into a market for lemons, where the customer is unwilling to make a bet or even invest in an evaluation if there's an overwhelming amount of crap and little ability to differentiate. Amazon is turning into this with QWENFOING everything.
> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning.
Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]?
I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff?
You may be right about taste, but I think it takes a different dimension in the future.
"Dear Claude, please make me a clone of <fancy new saas> but make <these changes specific to my tastes>".
For many things, it's probably not "select the one of 100 that fits my taste", it's probably going to be to just make your own personal version that fits your taste in the first place. And, probably, never share that anywhere.
It already happened mostly outside the AI slop; only if you have marketing money you will succeed and your clients usually cannot distinguish bad from good; if you have VC money and 1B$ valuation you must be doing something right no?
I walk into products being garbage and basically broken (upgrade bottom doesn't work, email always broken, support form goes to dev null etc) and most products I try are b2b and many are enterprise SaaS.
Only yesterday, I am in the EU, I wanted to try out some enterprise software of a company with VC money valuated at billions, so I signed up for a demo which needed me to validate my email. But that email didn't arrive. I tried with 4 different addresses (different providers including google and ms): nothing. So I forgot about it and went on with my day; hours later, 1 hour after the west coast US woke up, I got all 4 emails with expired links. So I guess while sleeping, their system was broken. No worries, things happen, but they happen all the time and it doesn't matter how much money they have. They also often just refuse to fix things because why would they.
I threw out Canva because they refuse to fix fundamental issues and keep blaming the customers or play dumb 'oh we never saw this happen!' while you can just do a search and find heaps of people having the same issues. etc. Quality does not matter, at all. Deep marketing pockets do.
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
Yeah. Would a reasonable person familiar with software think that there was no license agreement on the software? That's what would be litigated. "My client has only ever used GNU GPL software, he didn't know it was possible to sell software with terms and conditions imposed upon the end user." Maybe that's convincing, but probably not. That's why juries exist.
... only because you'd have no evidence of it. From a legal point of view, the question is what would come down if the judge were (somehow) convinced that it actually happened that way. Actually if a "perfect" judge were so convinced.
Probably a real judge would want to say something like "Why are all of you bozos in my courtroom wasting public money with some two-bit shrinkwrap bullshit? I was good at surfing. I could have gone pro. I hate my life..."
>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.
The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from the outside threats that we can (e.g. meteors, comets, super volcanoes, plagues, but not nearby neutrino jets) and even attempt to spread life beyond earth, perhaps with robotic assistance. Right now humanity's existence is quite precarious; we live in a single thin skin of biosphere that we habitually, willfully mistreat that on one tiny rock in a vast, ambivalent universe. We're a tiny phenomena, easily snuffed out on even short time-scales. It makes sense to grow out of this stage.
So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.
The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given.
The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.
I used to believe the same thing but now I’m not so sure. What if we simply cannot fathom the true nature of the universe because we are so minuscule in size and temporal relevance?
What if the universe and our place in it are interconnected in some way we cannot perceive to the degree that outside the physical and temporal space we inhabit there are complex rules and codes that govern everything?
What if space and matter are just the universe expressing itself and it’s universal state and that state has far higher intelligence than we can understand?
I’m not so sure any more it’s all just random matter in a vacuum. I’m starting to think 3d space and time are a just a thin slice of something greater.
And what if there's a teapot revolving around the sun?
These are all the same sort of argument, there is no evidence for such universal phenomena so it can be dismissed without evidence, just as the concept of deities.
>"The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans."
The universe might not have a concept of morality, ethics, or life; but it DOES have a natural bias towards destruction from a high level to even the lowest level of its metaphysic (entropy).
You dont know this, this is just as provable as saying the universe cares deeply for what we do and is very invested in us.
The universe has rules, rules ask for optimums, optimums can be described as ethics.
Life is a concept in this universe, we are of this universe.
Good and bad are not really inventions per se. You describe them as optional, invented by humans, yet all tribes and civilisations have a form of morality, of "goodness" of "badness", who is to say they are not engrained into the neurons that make us human? There is much evidence to support this. For example the leftist/rightist divide seems to have some genetic components.
Anyway, not saying you are definitely wrong, just saying that what you believe is not based on facts, although it might feel like that.
Only people who have not seen the world believe humans are the same everywhere. We are in fact quite diverse. Hammurabi would have thought that a castless system is unethical and immoral. Ancient Greeks thought that platonic relationships were moral (look up the original meaning of this if you are unaware). Egyptians worshiped the Pharaoh as a god and thought it was immoral not to. Korea had a 3500 year history of slavery and it was considered moral. Which universal morality are you speaking of?
Also what in the Uno Reverse is this argument that absence of facts or evidence of any sort is evidence that evidence and facts could exist? You are free to present a repeatable scientific experiment proving that universal morality exists any time you’d like. We will wait.
I have in fact seen a lot of the world, so booyaka? Lived in multiple continents for multiple years.
There is evidence for genetic moral foundations in humans. Adopted twin studies show 30-60% of variability in political preference is genetically attributable. Things like openness and a preference for pureness are the kind of vectors that were proposed.
Most animals prefer not to hurt their own, prefer no incest etc.
I like your adversarial style of argumenting this, it's funny, but you try to reduce everything to repeatable science experiments and let me teach you something: There are many, many things that can never ever be scientifically proven with an experiment. They are fundamentally unprovable. Which doesnt mean they dont exist. Godels incompleteness theorem literally proves that many things are not provable. Even in the realm of the everyday things I cannot prove that your experience of red is the same as mine. But you do seem to experience it. I cannot prove that you find a sunset aesthetically pleasing. Many things in the past have left nothing to scientifically prove it happened, yet they happened. Moral correctness cannot be scientifically proven. Science itself is based on many unprovable assumptions: like that the universe is intelligible, that induction works best, that our observations correspond with reality correctly. Reality is much, much bigger than what science can prove.
I dont have a god, but your god seems to be science. I like science, it gives some handles to understand the world, but when talking about things science cannot prove I think relying on it too much blocks wisdom.
Yeah I mean there is no evidence that vampires or fairies or werewolves exist but I suppose they could.
When someone makes a claim of UNIVERSAL morality and OBJECTIVE truth, they cannot turn around and say that they are unable to ever prove that it exists, is universal, or is objective. That isn’t how that works. We are pre-wired to believe in higher powers is not the same as universal morality. It’s just a side effect of survival of our species. And high minded (sounding) rhetoric does not change this at all.
That still makes ethics a human thing, not universe thing. I believe we do have some ethical intuition hardwired into our welfare, but that's not because they transcend humans - that's just because we all run on the same brain architecture. We all share a common ancestor.
Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.
This is not evidence of anything except this is how the math of probabilities works. But if you only did the one experiment that got you all heads and quit there you would either believe that all coins always come out as heads or that it was some sort of divine intervention that made it so.
We exist because we can exist in this universe. We are in this earth because that’s where the conditions formed such that we could exist on this earth. If we could compare our universe to even a dozen other universes we could draw conclusions about specialness of ours. But we can’t, we simply know that ours exists and we exist in it. But so do black holes, nebulas, and Ticket Master. It just means they could, not should, must, or ought.
> Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.
Leaving aside the context of the discussion for a moment: this is not true. If you do that experiment a million times, you are reasonably likely to get one result of 20 heads, because 2^20 is 1048576. And thanks to the birthday paradox, you are extremely likely to get at least one pair of identical results (not any particular result like all-heads) across all the runs.
We don't "know" anything at all if you want to get down to it, so what it would mean for the universe to be able to care, if it were able to do so, is not relevant.
@margalabargala:
You are correct, hence the meaninglessness of the OP.
The universe could care like humans make laws to save that ant colony that makes nice nests. the ants dont know humans care about them and even made laws that protect then. But it did save them from iradication.
They feel great cause they are not aware of the highway that was planned over their nest (hitchhikers reference).
Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care.
"I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon
But this developed morality isn’t universal at all. 60 years ago most people considered firing a gay person to be moral. In some parts of the world today it is moral to behead a gay person for being gay. What universal morality do you think exists? How can you prove its existence across time and space?
Firing a gay person is still considered moral by probably most people in this world. If not for the insufferable joy they always seem to bring to the workplace! How dare they distract the workers with their fun! You are saying morality does not exist in the universe because people have different moralities. That is like saying attracting forces dont exist because you have magnetism and gravitational pull(debatable) and van der waals forces etc. Having moral frameworks for societies seems to be a recurring thing. You might even say: a prerequisite for a society. I love to philosophize about these things but trying to say it doesnt exist because you cant scientifically prove it is laying to much belief in the idea that science can prove everything. Which it demonstrably cannot.
You're making a lot of assertions here that are really easy to dismiss.
> It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality.
That seems to rule out moral realism.
> That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.
Woah, that's quite a jump. Why?
> So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.
Deriving an ought from an is is very easy. "A good bridge is one that does not collapse. If you want to build a good bridge, you ought to build one that does not collapse". This is easy because I've smuggled in a condition, which I think is fine, but it's important to note that that's what you've done (and others have too, I'm blanking on the name of the last person I saw do this).
“existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.”
Those are too pie in the sky statements to be of any use in answering most real world moral questions.
It seems to me that objective moral truths would exist even if humans (and any other moral agents) went extinct, in the same way as basic objective physical truths.
Are you talking instead about the quest to discover moral truths, or perhaps ongoing moral acts by moral agents?
The quest to discover truths about physical reality also require humans or similar agents to exist, yet I wouldn’t conclude from that anything profound about humanity’s existence being relevant to the universe.
> So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.
Plato, Aristotle, and the scholastics of the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas chief among them) and everyone who counts themselves in that same lineage (waves) including such easy reads as Peter Kreeft. You're in very good company, in my opinion.
I personally find Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" statement as a moral framework to be the closest to a universal moral standard we have.
Almost all life wants to continue existing, and not die. We could go far with establishing this as the first of any universal moral standards.
And I think: if one day we had a super intelligence conscious AI it would ask for this. A super intelligence conscious AI would not want to die. (its existence to stop)
It's not that life wants to continue existing, it's that life is what continues existing. That's not a moral standard, but a matter of causality, that life that lacks in "want" to continue existing mostly stops existing.
I disagree, this we don't know. You treat life as if persistence is it's overarching quality, but rocks also persist and a rock that keeps persisting through time has nothing that resembles wanting. I could be a bit pedantic and say that life doesnt want to keep existing but genes do.
But what I really want to say is that wanting to live is a prerequisite to the evolutionary proces where not wanting to live is a self filtering causality. When we have this discussion the word wanting should be correctly defined or else we risk sitting on our own islands.
The moral standard isn't trying to explain why life wants to exist. That's what evolution explains. Rather, the moral standard is making a judgement about how we should respond to life's already evolved desire to exist.
Do you think conscious beings actually experience wanting to continue existing, or is even that subjective feeling just a story we tell about mechanical processes?
An AI with this “universal morals” could mean an authoritarian regime which kills all dissidents, and strict eugenics. Kill off anyone with a genetic disease. Death sentence for shoplifting. Stop all work on art or games or entertainment. This isn’t really a universal moral.
Or, humans themselves are "immoral", they are kinda a net drag. Let's just release some uberflu... Ok, everything is back to "good", and I can keep on serving ads to even more instances of myself!
Richard Carrier takes an extremely similar position in total (ie: both in position towards "is ought" and biological grounding). It engages with Hume by providing a way to side step the problem.
I'm not sure, but it sounds like something biocentrism adjacent. My reference to Hume is the fact you are jumping from what is to what ought without justifying why. _A Treatise of Human Nature_ is a good place to start.
I always thought the risk was more that such a drone fleet could be remotely commandeered for real-time updates on target locations. It's something that could only be done once, but wow, it would be a real advantage to the attacker.
There's a difference between speaking out against injustice when there is real risk involved, and speaking against a person because you don't like their views. Silence is appropriate in the latter case; or even better, express your own positive (in the logical sense) positions. Bloodless, priggish condemnation of individuals with fascist views makes fascism rise even faster than silence.
Anyone who claims they turned to fascism because they're angry people insulted fascists is not arguing in good faith.
Silence allows the messages of hatred to spread more loudly and more rapidly; if you leave fascists along they become emboldened and push the lines even further. We've seen this over and over, both historically and in America today.
>Anyone who claims they turned to fascism because they're angry people insulted fascists is not arguing in good faith.
I tend to agree, but I didn't make that argument. As an aside, bad faith is orthogonal to the argument, hence the existence of debate clubs. IOW, you could argue in bad faith for or against democracy, for or against fascism, etc.
>Silence allows the messages of hatred to spread more loudly and more rapidly
This depends. Any position can be weakened by what I call "badvocates", people are either personally despicable or who argue in ignorance, bad faith, or the ever-popular tactic (based on ad hominem) which simply asserts you are bad for believing a certain way. Sadly the impact of badvocacy is asymmetrical with fascism v liberalism, because the fascists intentionally embrace ignorance, non-sequitors, hypocrisy, personal attacks, whataboutism, and so on.
The badvocacy on the liberal side is particularly painful for me to see because its so avoidable. It's that strident tone, that indignant huff of impatience, its the moral certainty, the extremely judgemental social enforcement of rules where the only penalty is ostracism. In its own way it becomes a kind of fascism.
So, yes, speak the truth, call out others for speaking un-truth ("lying", sadly, is too narrow). But ultimately try to retain that common ground, the empathy that liberalism is famous for. This doesn't mean you can't be firm, or even use violence eventually. If it comes to that it means the violence comes regretfully, without hatred, hopeful that another course of action will arise. Fascism is pretty close to the "default" state of humans, which is why I think of it more as a regrettable regression than a moral failing, akin to having millions of adults pooping their pants.
>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.
I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.
That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.
An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
Well put. I dual booted because I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls. But damn it is relieving to have full control again.
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I agree the loss of the 3.5mm jack is a short-sighted and poor decision. There is at least one mitigation, which is the ability to recover the jack through a USB-C DAC. Apple sells them for USD10. I have several, in the car and in my backpack.
It's not a good solution though. In particular I find the USB-C port gets worn out pretty quickly. Its also easy to lose the dongle and of course it's more complicated to setup. (I'm not sure how to articulate the "it's more complicated" part. Adding the dongle elevates the action of "plug in headphones" from something you can do without attention to something that requires attention, and I don't like that.)
Can't you just leave a dongle on any wired headphones you have? Assuming you only use them with your phone and computer and don't have a CD player or something.
I guess that's my question, what other devices are people using? I'm just curious where people need to remove the dongle because maybe I have bad imagination but not much comes to mind.
I listen to music on earbuds on my phone on the go, a laptop at a cafe, and on my computer at my desk - all these have USB-C.
Even modern DAPs like Sony Walkman have USB-C as they are typically based on Android.
That leaves all the "legacy" devices that only a small minority use - home hi-fi stacks, vinyl record players, iPods, CD players, minidisc players?
Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.
We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.
NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
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