Many of their points ring true - increased pressure on maintainers, LLMs turning coders into paper pushers, the erosion of community.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
> The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic
The US is both. Or, to phrase it another way, it is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic. That's a good thing, it helps to reduce the downsides of both.
Buddy, you should take a real hard look at US policy this past decade or so. We've got secret police kidnapping citizens in broad daylight and shipping them off to other countries. We tarriffed the entire world, threatened to take over Greenland and Canada and waged an unprovoked war in Iran (and lost, badly). And let's not forget the mass surveillance of citizens, suppression of constitutional rights to speech and assembly, voter suppression, and an actual factual literal coup attempt.
The US is the bad guy on the world stage right now. If you can't see that then you're part of the problem. Dunno what to tell you. Read a book, maybe?
Wikipedia has a whole page on the definition of Fascism [1]. Also worth reading is Umberto Eco's article on this subject, which also has its own wikipedia page [2].
To anyone having read about Mussolini, Italy's economy and political landscape in the 20s onward, his model of corporatism etc, the answer is obviously clear: the US. China also is authoritarian, of course, but the societal structure sharply differs from Italian fascism.
That's just one surface feature of how fascism manifests at the level of economic policy, it doesn't capture the essence of the movement. You wouldn't expect Mussolini to have the introspective capacity to actually understand those murky depths, let alone the intellectual honesty to put that capacity to work, would you?...
I recommend Umberto Ecco's essay "Ur-Fascism" [1] if you want to get a more accurate picture of what fascism is. It might make you reconsider which of these two countries fits the pattern better, at least at the moment.
I think the term 'techno' in 'technofascism' is doing the work here, because--just as you claim that historical fascism is the idolatry of the state--technofascism is the idolatry of technology and intelligence. Modern accelerationism, as espoused today by people like Marc Andreessen in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, is really just another rehash of Italian Futurism, which was closely intertwined with Italian Fascism and one of its intellectual foundations. It was, essentially, a progressive ideology.
The idolatry of the state does not vanish, but rather gets transformed and re-imagined as a technology, e.g. network states, platform governance, companies that function as sovereign entities. The idolatry shifts from the nation-state to the infrastructure that replaces it. Also, you don't need to look far to answer your own question about corporatism, as you defined it yourself. Now, who's currently moving between Silicon Valley boardrooms and government offices?
Fascism is not merely idolatry of the state. That is simply its ideological mask, its method for currying the favor of its base. To say that this is what fascism is at a fundamental level is to mistake its superstructure for its base. But how is Fascism structured? How does society reproduce itself? Is there a fascist mode of production? No. The state mobilizes its population so as to target scapegoat(s) while simultaneously expanding in order to secure the spoils of war. Without scapegoats, there is no Fascism. And a state requires social cohesion to mobilize its base. Thus without cohesion there is no Fascism. At minimum, social cohesion requires the ability to sustain and motivate a critical mass of the population. Thus Fascism requires the continued maintenance of the capitalist mode of production in order to persist, but it simultaneously undermines capitalism due to A. the continued need for war machines and B. the need to punish a scapegoat, which both siphon value from the rest of the economy, thus dooming the entire enterprise. This is why fascism burns out and leads to doom for all parties involved wherever it has been tried. Any definition of fascism that ignores this is historically inaccurate and practically useless.
This smells like a humble brag, driven by strong ego; count the number of 'I's in the post. I reckon the author is just as rigid in conversation as they always were, but now they can add "ego free" to their self satisfaction.
Maybe denial is a river in Egypt, but I (most of the time) believe that the glass is half full and we will need MORE humans as LLMs gain in ability. My thesis:
1. most jobs are created by small to medium size enterprise
2. the throttle for new SMEs has been people, money and ideas, in that order
3. with LLMs being a force multiplier, fewer technical people are needed but some people still ARE needed
4. with less throttling, MORE SMEs will be created with more jobs - they will be able to do more, faster, but still need some human oversight.
Also, what is the point of software if it is not to serve human needs?
Also, in open source, community building and tending is a very human enterprise that will not be replaced by bots any time soon. So, as coding becomes commoditised, perhaps the soft skills backed by technical knowledge will be the complementary
skill that increases in value.
Or, maybe it's time for me to become an itinerant folk musician.
Software boom due to SMEs looks very unnatural to me, because what makes software so special is its ability to scale, so it naturally tends to monopolization
Well, alright, scalability + expensiveness create ideal conditions for monopolization. Assuming it's cheap now, scalability still doesn't go away. So it's a) cheap b) easily reusable, you make it once cheaply and quickly and it stays with you forever, and can be used by others too - I don't see a condition for lots of job creation in software engineering here.
One could argue that scalability matters more when software is expensive to make, as you need to reuse it to make the cost worthwhile.
So, for context, two data points I have that make me want to argue for the opposite side.
First, some time ago I worked for a startup that had a B2B offering that in most cases involved integration costs to align with whatever the client was already using. We tried to eat this as much as possible, but we still had to have some “integration price” we asked. More than once we had a potential client who just couldn’t lift it. They needed the software but just didn’t have the cash buffer for the initial cost (us neither). With how things are now, we’d have onboarded all of them. And much faster than it normally took. And yes, they still would have bought our solution instead of rolling their own (see the next point).
The next point that kind of ties into the previous one if you squint. I’m in a position now where I see non-technical people building stuff with AI. _Most_ can’t. As an example, the AI says they need a database. But they don’t really know what that is, and deploying one sounds scary, so they ask the AI if they can build it without a database. And the AI happily complies and makes a “CRUD” API that “persists” data in RAM. And the AI is not being dumb here. The best, most perfect model is still an LLM at the end of the day, so it completes the context window. Sure, you could make a mod that “sticks to its guns” more, but that comes across as the model being “non-compliant” and “difficult”. Now, I’ve also seen non-technical people who have succeeded. But then they have the kind of a mindset that they could’ve been engineers in the first place in different circumstances. But also, even they build fragile monstrosities that they don’t understand.
So, going back to the first point. Our clients were deeply nontechnical for the most part. Most of them wouldn’t even have attempted to build their own. But also, getting the system up and working involved more than just code - relationships with suppliers, some legal stuff, etc.
So, I can totally see how the amount of software produced might grow exponentially leading to “pre-AI” engineers being worth their weight in gold due to that. That doesn’t exclude a painful transition though.
Right so you might see a CTO, a CDO (development?) CAI? I dont know.
basically small and medium business mostly do not invest in having programmers on staff. Maybe you have an IT guy, half the time its someone whos real job is accounting, warehouse, etc and he knows printers and can type without looking
My bet is more software then ever, more dispersed and more lego like than ever.
The day ROCm supports EVERY AMD card on release, just like CUDA does, is the day I will actually believe this marketing hype.They really dropped the ball here,
also when they abandoned recently released cards (at the time) like the 400 series.
Hopefully management gets their heads out of their butts and invests more in the software stack.
I think GB10 is a bit of a counter point. There are tons of features that are not implemented for GB10 which was released 8/2025 It isn't all roses on the cuda side.
