Clearly, there is a thing missing here: Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user. So in that case biz just becomes a filter for users that actually are willing (and able) to fund your software. That's a good thing.

Obviously, our regulations aren't perfect or even good enough yet. See DRM. See spyware TVs. See "who actually gets to control your device?". But still...

I like the final conclusion. And sadly I don't feel like anything changed for the better on this topic since 2023.

I am afraid that without a major crash or revolution of some sort, user won't matter next to a sufficiently big biz. But time will tell.

I've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years.

It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:

- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails

- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code

For example:

- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code

- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was

- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction

I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.

And cars are driven more than worked on, but putting the oil filter inaccessibly in the middle of the engine block is still an unforgiveable sin.

Oh noe, noe no.. you want to crowdsource debugging.. describe the error and your expectations, then build software by machine learning while screwing up.

    biz > user

is capitalism. Removal of that isn't capitalism. Non-removal of that is capitalism.