Eventually the models will be good enough for this to work. And it will work.
Think about it: in the limit, the agents won't be emailing people in the future, they'll be directly contacting one another to do business and trade.
Every new data center is an inch further towards the automation of value creation, and that includes outbound sales and business process automation.
I'm not being an alarmist (I'm excited to witness all of this), but we're basically on borrowed time between now and then. I don't know what's going to happen, but every week brings new things. And in some years, those hacks and experiments will inevitably get good.
2026 has been a hell of a ride, and we're just getting started.
There are lots of "not clearly legal" things that turn into big business.
- YouTube had dubious legality when it started and definitely benefited from lax copyright enforcement initially
- PayPal didn't have all the licenses it needed to transfer money between states
- Spotify used pirated music when it started
- Uber and Lyft broke rules around taxis
- Square captured magstripe data over an analog port, in violation of every credit card rule (Jack Dorsey's "break the rules" mantra). He tells each of his employees this story when he onboards them.
- Companies scraping data to train models
- ElevenLabs growing big off of deepfake celebrity audio
...
A lot of new markets start out by totally and completely breaking the norms.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
Nothing wrong with honest advertising per se..... back in the day we bought computer magazines mainly for the adverts.
Rather, the problem is the SV AdTech industry which seeks to track me, invade my privacy at every opportunity and is busy sniffing my knickers trying to work out if I'm pregnant so they can sell me more shite.
One observes the FUD those employed by AdTEch are spreading on here about the GDPR; a bunch of people whose very salaries are dependent on abusing our privacy.
The problem was that the Internet allowed for the "innovation" of tracking users to send specific ads to them. And it wasn't made promptly illegal. That's all it took
That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.
Institutional misincentives at Google. People are promoted for launching a product, and they're promoted away from the product they launched, and nobody wants to maintain it since you don't get promoted for maintaining a product someone else launched.
There are a lot of possible futures for Google. Here are a couple that I see:
1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.
2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.
I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.
I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.
While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
Steel workers, pipe fitters, air-traffic controllers, electricians? There are LUs for each of these popping up all the time. Admittedly they are new chapters for existing large unions but also these jobs have existed for a lot longer, in larger numbers, than "software developer" and barista.
The larp is that software unions are anything like blue collar unions, and that socialists want to selectively act as the voice of blue collar when they are in a completely different class and do not interact with them.
I’ll note one key difference. Software output and skills vary on a power scale. Blue collar work is often heavily defined by formal procedures and codes so that trained personnel are largely interchangeable from a business perspective (not always or completely true). So without a union it’s a constant race to the bottom because the labor is fungible and the only requirement for success is passing minimum criteria.
The people you are describing are not liberal. They are progressive which is very much anti-liberal. This is why terms like left and right are so loaded. You can have people who do not agree on almost anything being lumped together. For fun, you can take old Clinton or Obama quotes, post them on progressive forums and watch them call you (them) every name in the book. This is because progressives actually hate liberal policies but will do anything to not admit it because they want to wear the Dem brand as a suit.
One person complaining on Wired about "... says she ... had seen too many colleagues decline to speak up during internal meetings out of fear of retaliation for raising issues or proposing far-out ideas." that is evidence of at least one anecdotal individual personal issue. HOWEVER, the vote being "overwhelming" would seem to indicate they have a severe company culture problem not just one anecdotal issue, its not like she was the only one voting for the union LOL. I've worked at companies with and without unions and the ones that had a union, severely needed the union due to incredibly toxic workplace culture combined with a total lack of management accountability for their responsibility/behavior. Generally people won't bother keeping a union going unless they badly need it, given the enormous resources stacked up against them against forming and operating a union... It has to be a pretty awful workplace if forming a union against all that opposition is somehow still the better path... The quality of management has certainly not improved over generations or decades, so an era of declining union membership is probably not an indication of there being too many unions LOL.
Right? If your logo[1] is going to be a fist raised in defiance you'd better at least have something you're trying to fight about. And if you're going to brag about succeeding in your vote at least give an idea about WHY you want a union in the first place.
There are unionization attempts I understand like Amazon warehouse workers and unionization attempts that I don't like the Minneapolis small coffee chain workers whose demands included being able to decide the milk supplier. One seems like standing up for necessary rights, the other seems like cosplay.
I think that this fundamentally comes from thinking that unions are only there for the worst possible jobs in the worst conditions, or where outright abuse occurs. And also from the (imo incorrect) idea that you should have those bad conditions before organizing.
Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of power (which seems unlikely) -- you should want a union in place _before_ an org decides to do layoffs, or force a practice on its workers that they don't want.
I worked at a tech company a few years ago and the standard anti-union cliche from execs was "we already treat you well" but then about 20 months later they laid off 2000 people, including folks on parental leave. A bit late to try and organize a union at that point.
Yes, but if you don't allow corporations to lay off people when it makes sense you end up with low salaries, meaningless jobs, and economic stagnation (like Europe).
Europe is nice to visit but a giant pain in the ass to do business in. Certainly don't even consider aspiring to anything. If you can manage that, then yeah...France, Spain, and Italy are cheap and have good food and weather :-)
As someone who has worked in tech in the EU and Canada (and for US companies, and ran a small company in Europe) -- I agree. The extremely high bar for letting someone go in Europe is a significant problem. It does lead people to hire slowly and fire slowly, however.
But having a union doesn't mean "never do layoffs" either -- it just means that they are negotiated. Usually that means severance packages are standardized and the layoff process is transparent. It also often means you have to try and place suitable employees internally, rather than let people go while you are actually still hiring for roles that they could be doing.
In general, even with a union, the company has far more leverage anyway (they control the money) -- a union makes it a negotiation between two organizations (one of which, the company, has more power) vs. a negotiation between the HR & legal departments of a company and one individual employee.
You can fire people when it makes sense, for example if there is not enough work, but you cant lay off half of your workers and demand that the rest work twice as hard.
In my country we don't have minimum pay in law, but union contract defines minimum pay and they also negotiate collective salary increases.
So everyone (even non-union workers) gets higher pay because of unions.
> Right? If your logo[1] is going to be a fist raised in defiance you'd better at least have something you're trying to fight about. And if you're going to brag about succeeding in your vote at least give an idea about WHY you want a union in the first place.
The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs.
And this is one of the things that's really annoying about trying to explain the appeal of unionising. You don't need to have a bad workplace first to have a union.
You can have a good workplace and it's better if you do. The point of the union is to codify structures that empower workers to keep their workplace good and drag it back to being good if problems arise.
This is a solidarity union and therefore the leadership are not paid. They are exist to provide a counterbalance against the management chain and provide a safe avenue for workers to communicate concerns and have them addressed. Notably one where they are on the side of the worker and not the side of the company (HR has its use but it's also often going to side with the company).
Our international union will officially empower the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) workers to work together with WMF management to address long-standing concerns, including:
- Encouraging transparency and accountability on various issues from WMF leadership toward both the WMF staff and the Wikimedia movement communities
- Ensuring staff are heard and have effective ways to provide input on policy changes or annual planning (ideally while in deliberation and not as post-factum pushback)
- Prevent questionable or unclear hiring, firing, promotion and other HR practices
- Guarantee ability to safely express dissent
- Advocate for mental health support for staff
- Advocate for pay and benefits equity that makes sense to the staff
- Hold management accountable to promises made to staff
Many of the concerns above have been raised by staff repeatedly over several years. Through unionizing, WMF workers can take proactive steps to address them in collaboration with management.
-----
Those are reasonable complaints and a union makes sense to provide a continuous mechanism towards improving on those concerns.
>The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs.
>And this is one of the things that's really annoying about trying to explain the appeal of unionising. You don't need to have a bad workplace first to have a union.
Some reflection is in order. If you're annoyed about constantly having to explain what you REALLY mean, perhaps your message and your symbolism need reconciliation.
Just because a workplace is good currently does not mean it will always be good.
The fist is a fist none the less because the workers have the power if they need to use it. The hope is that they never have to but if changes in management force the workers' hands it is far better to be already organised and ready to correct management than for the workers to have to scramble to organise after the fact.
Again, mixed messages. Your symbolism is just tradition and doesn't really mean that, until it does.
Talking about how unions are for everyone and not about antagonism while adopting clearly antagonist symbolism while trying to take both sides simultaneously really sends the messages: A) we're cosplaying rebellion because we think it's cool and B) we're the ones starting the antagonistic relationship.
This is the problem with supporting unions rationally. They are sometimes necessary in certain industries and situations but also full of people who want to cosplay rebellion and grab power so they can abuse it instead of someone else.
Adopting a fist raised in defiance is definitely a way to attract cosplayers and repel support from everyone but the extreme. Particularly when your message loud and clear is "unions are for everyone not just those in trouble".
You may not see an issue, other people sure do. Do you want to radicalize or do you want to welcome? Unions in America have a perception problem which makes their jobs harder, their image is one the rebel without a cause, people agitating and being oppositional not for valid reasons but because they want to rebel. Cosplayers. People imagine 1900s coal miners as fighting for their freedoms and baristas as a joke.
You reenforce this by flying flags with raised fists to represent knowledge workers at a nonprofit unionizing with nothing in particular that they seem to want to fix.
> You reenforce this by flying flags with raised fists to represent knowledge workers at a nonprofit unionizing with nothing in particular that they seem to want to fix.
1. they very much have things they want to fix and they list them on said website.
2. Don't forget that WMF fired 7 people for trying to start the formation of this union. It had a peaceful formation at the end of the day but even if it's currently a pleasant workplace, that doesn't mean management won't throw you to the wayside the moment they see you as a threat or a liability. That's why you want a union. So you can fix shit and be ready to react should something happen in the future.
That is the sort of thinking that allowed tech companies to offer perks like remote work when labor power was higher, only to yank them away once labor was on the downswing.
This is divide-and-conquer rhetoric from someone who doesn’t want labour power. Workers would be much better off if we all stood together no matter how much we were paid or what our conditions were.
Edit: oh I see, your bio brags that you’re a scab, that explains it
Exactly. Unions don't have to exist solely because the company is evil and refusing to give workers a fair shake.
Unions are a compromise and frankly exist to provide a democratic path and open dialogue towards resolving issues before the workers are sufficiently pissed off that the only option left is a full on strike.
Some unions start with a strike but it's by no means a requirement.
after having had unions literally put me out of work as a blue collar employee - yes. i've had enough of them.
my family has also been in a long line of tradesworkers, and they have been continually screwed by their bargaining be it with the state trades, with nursing unions.
unions did nothing to save the hundreds of manufacturing jobs that were destroyed and taken away from upstate New York.
massena new york is now an absolute drug-ridden shithole but they still run around celebrating the handful of steelworkers that still somehow kept a job up here out of the hundreds and thousands across industries that got fucked.
so you know what? these white collar union LARP demands are just frustrating to stare at and look at and see how cushy they've had it while my brothers and sisters sit in rot.
Heavens forfend that those who work in an industry that preens and postures about innovation and reinventing every facet of life to be better try to build a better union. Oh, so taxis, software tools, the very act of courtship, loans, the concept of socialization can be innovated upon, but not labor unions? How unfortunate.
I'm curious: Why do you arguments against unions not equally apply to employers? Why do you blame the unions and not the companies responsible for it in the first place? Especially when you proudly admit you're partially responsible?
I just wish Rust itself compiled faster. Serde, proc macros, it's all so slow.
I'm going to start prototyping systems in Go, then porting them to Rust when they're more concrete.
I feel as though the Rust code LLMs emit is generally higher quality than most other languages, perhaps due to the error handling being a chief concern of the language, but the iteration on making changes and running tests is so slow.
Rust could grow into "the final language" if it wasn't so slow to compile. Assuming the WASM bridge also continues to improve.
LLMs being good with Rust makes sense, because the language itself gives you more safeguards than many others. What's good for the (human) gander is good for the (agent) goose.
LLMs are ungodly good at Rust, and I say this as a 10-year veteran of the language.
My problem is that now iteration with LLMs is so quick when prototyping new things that I now spend an inordinate amount of time waiting on agents to compile Rust and run tests. It's a huge slow down.
I still want to serialize production logic to Rust (and TypeScript for the frontend as the WASM for frontend ecosystem isn't there yet), but it's really slow to iterate. I'm starting to build prototypes in Golang now and then convert them to Rust when I'm done.
Hopefully the Rust team makes strides over the coming years to address this. I know they have a lot of irons in the fire for many speedups.
But once you start to close the loop (as in allowing the LLM to build and run its changes) what’s good turns suddenly bad again. Long build times also increase LLM turnaround times. Especially bad when you have a fast model.
20 years ago, this wasn't the case (at least in tech in SV). If you are seeing this today, its because of something (or somethings) specific. Could be the general increase in size of the companies or industry, a problem with recruiting or a problem with the universities that feed into that industry. Maybe a combination of those things. But 20 years ago, you could tell who worked in tech and who didn't.
I still hold the line on interviewing. Maybe some don’t. I am sure it is true. My team us too small with too much responsibility to tolerate mediocrity to any real extent
Eventually we'll just construct 100% synthetic training data that can reliably reproduce pretrains and fine tunes.
The first broadly useful fully open source models will do this.
We already have open data / open code / open weights for some domain-specific cases, such as audio models trained on large open datasets, eg. Tacotron / LJSpeech from waaay back in the day, though that is certainly not SOTA anymore.
Distillation could possibly be considered an early case of this as raw AI outputs are themselves not copyrightable unless humans enrich, filter, or transform them. Granted, that does not handle the cases where the outputs are sufficiently similar to copyrighted original works.
But how much of that synthetic data still ultimately derives from non-open sources? You'd still have to ask what a clean room implementation ultimately is, depending on how granular or aggressive a large publisher wanted to get about it.
That said, I don't necessarily disagree with you. Talkie[1] presents an interesting case for it being at least possible to do this entirely on public domain material.
But even that used Claude somewhere in the course of its training pipeline (it's listed as a contributor on their GitHub), so again, how granular you want to get with that is still a question.
That would be so cool and would make these limited hot commodities.
.name was one of the very first expansions of gTLDs back in the very early 2000s. It's a shame that it's being shut down as it was spearheaded by the ICANN itself rather than some registrar / investor like Donuts, Inc.
I suppose this is impractical as someone has to run the registry and there are costs associated with that. But don't the domain fees cover it?
From having worked in that space what feels another lifetime ago, I vaguely recall that you can just offload the registry work to a registry that would manage this together with a mountain of other TLDs.
As I recall it. This was mostly a money scam that targeted private users with ads like "make sure to claim to your .name domain so no one else does it and use it to impersonate you". It was stupid from the beginning and never took off.
My engineering has changed so much that I'm now using this time to catch up on emails and think about design and architecture for the next leg of work. (And post on HN, of course.)
I would never have predicted this a year ago.
I always scoffed about engineers not doing work during Github outages - I'd always find some kind of other engineering to do if PRs or builds were piling up.
But during model outages, and since I'm not actively set up to use OpenAI/Codex at the moment, I'll just find something else productive to do. I don't think I'm ever going to write code by hand again unless I'm fixing something the AI can't manage or the change is small enough. Why even try when the machine is 100x faster?
Should I give Codex another try? It's been a month or so since I last used it, and it always felt inferior at Rust and TypeScript.
I think if you've got the money, you should set up a coding harness that you can plug to openrouter and then be able to switch quickly, as these new models seem to be coming out pretty regularly now
switching subs is kind of a PITA since you need to commit to a month at least
Hugging Face has no path to substantial profitability and the investors and employees want liquidity. Nvidia doesn't want this to look like a bubble pop (as they have lots of GPU data center build outs to complete), they've got plenty of cash on hand, and they're an extremely good natural fit for the company.
Nvidia is seeing its top frontier model customers develop their own chips to sidestep Nvidia and as a counter, Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem. Open source means more competition and more demand for GPUs rather than single all-powerful labs that can will their own chips into existence and begin to push Nvidia aside. Plus Nvidia is betting big on local inference for robotics. All of this is bolstered by open source.
It's not like you can't just post model weights anywhere. There's really no lock in that Hugging Face has.
If you're looking for real monopoly issues that distort market economics and make it hard to compete without paying taxes to your competitor, consider Google's ownership of 92% of URL bars or the Google / Apple duopoly of smart phone software distribution.
> Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem
Wasn't always the case and will probably only be as long as there is a self interest.
> Linus Torvalds himself noted that the AI boom changed NVIDIA, turning them into a much better contributor to the Linux kernel Linus Torvalds: AI CHANGED NVIDIA.
It generally was always the case. Nvidia was a huge stakeholder in technologies like OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan, supporting Khronos' goal to further expand the FOSS API ecosystem.
Linus is probably referring to Nvidia's "open" driver series and capitulation on EGLStream. Nvidia got a terrible reputation for refusing to implement GBM for Wayland desktops, insisting on the nonstandard EGLStream protocol for close to a decade. Around 2024 (550-series drivers) they gave up and reworked their drivers for GBM-agnostic usage, fixing Wayland and generally resolving the biggest gripe people had against Nvidia hardware.
Probably not forever.
Eventually the models will be good enough for this to work. And it will work.
Think about it: in the limit, the agents won't be emailing people in the future, they'll be directly contacting one another to do business and trade.
Every new data center is an inch further towards the automation of value creation, and that includes outbound sales and business process automation.
I'm not being an alarmist (I'm excited to witness all of this), but we're basically on borrowed time between now and then. I don't know what's going to happen, but every week brings new things. And in some years, those hacks and experiments will inevitably get good.
2026 has been a hell of a ride, and we're just getting started.
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