The golden age of software may indeed come to an end some day.

But I don't think the market is saturated just yet.

Even when we stop having unicorns, SWE salaries may go down, but that'll also open new opportunities.

I think there is still a lot we can do within the current paradigm - most software, especially for enterprise, is still quite bad. And that will continue to drive employment and growth.

But w may one day have to contend with expecting fewer "new" paradigms and the ultra rapid industry growth that accompanies them (dotcom, SaaS, ML, etc). Will "software eating the world" be enough to counteract this long term? Hard to say

If the clock speed improvements had happened over a much longer stretch of time then we probably would have seen much earlier multi-core capable tooling. We are still mostly optimized for single threaded applications, extracting the maximum from a CPU is really hard work. So also consider the backlog in tooling, there is so much work that still needs to be done there.

And so much of our tech stack runs on old abstractions.

Do you even need an MMU, if you have memory safe languages?

Honestly, maybe semi scaling is a problem for AI, but for most other software today, the problem is bugs, bloat, latency.

MMUs allow for overcommit and make it possible to dynamically allocate memory to applications that need it.

This is all very locally constrained.

> Objects that need new hard drives every 3-5 years to store, replenished on a constant cycle

The replenishment of these hard drives is baked into the cost of S3. If there is a major disruption of hard drive supply then S3 prices will definitely rise, and enterprises that currently store lots of garbage that they don't need, will be priced out of storing this data on hard drives, into Glacier or at worst full deletion of old junk data. That's not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.

There is lots of junk data in S3 that should probably be in cold storage rather than spinning metal, if merely for environmental reasons.