Dystopian cyberpunk was always part of the fantasy. Yes, scale has enabled terrible things.

There are more alternatives than ever though. People are still making C64 games today, cheap chips are everywhere. Documentation is abundant... When you layer in AI, it takes away labor costs, meaning that you don't need to make economically viable things, you can make fun things.

I have at least a dozen projects going now that I would have never had time or energy for. Any itch, no matter how geeky and idiosyncratic, is getting scratched by AI.

They're possible, but they're not exactly relevant, and you couldn't do something like that on newer hardware. It's like playing a guitar from a museum because the world just forgot how to make guitars. Pretty dystopian.

It’s never been easier for you to make a competitor

So what is stopping you other than yourself?

I’m not the OP, but my answer is that there’s a big difference between building products and building businesses.

I’ve been programming since 1998 when I was in elementary school. I have the technical skills to write almost anything I want, from productivity applications to operating systems and compilers. The vast availability of free, open source software tools helps a lot, and despite this year’s RAM and SSD prices, hardware is far more capable today at comparatively lower prices than a decade ago and especially when I started programming in 1998. My desktop computer is more capable than Google’s original cluster from 1998.

However, building businesses that can compete against Big Tech is an entirely different matter. Competing against Big Tech means fighting moats, network effects, and intellectual property laws. I can build an awesome mobile app, but when it’s time for me to distribute it, I have to either deal with app stores unless I build for a niche platform.

Yes, I agree that it’s never been easier to build competing products due to the tools we have today. However, Big Tech is even bigger today than it was in the past.

Yes. I have seen the better product lose out to network effects far too many times to believe that a real mass market competitor can happen nowadays.

Look at how even the Posix ecosystem - once a vibrant cluster of a dozen different commercial and open source operating systems built around a shared open standard - has more or less collapsed into an ironclad monopoly because LXC became a killer app in every sense of the term. It’s even starting to encroach on the last standing non-POSIX operating system, Windows, which now needs the ability to run Linux in a tightly integrated virtual machine to be viable for many commercial uses.

Oracle Solaris and IBM AIX are still going. Outside of enterprises that are die hard Sun/Oracle or IBM shops, I haven't seen a job requiring either in decades. I used to work with both and don't miss them in the least.

Billions of dollars?

You don't need billions of dollars to write an app. You need billions of dollars to create an independent platform that doesn't give the incumbent a veto over your app if you're trying to compete with them. And that's the problem.

Yes, this is where it's at for me. LLM's are cool and I can see them as progress, but I really dislike that they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.

Use local OSS models then? They aren’t as good and you need beefy hardware (either Apple silicon or nvidia GPUs). But they are totally workable, and you avoid your dislikes directly.

"Not as good and costs a lot in hardware" still sounds like I'm at a disadvantage.

$3000 is not that much for hardware (like a refurbished MBP Max with decent amount of RAM), and you'd be surprised how much more useful a thing that is slightly worse than the expensive thing is when you don't have anxiety about token usage.

$3000 might not be much to a wealthy software engineer in the US, but to, say, a college student in Portugal, it's a big expense.

Open source software democratized software in a huge way.

Ok, from that perspective we are still a few years from when a college student in Portugal can run local OSS models on their own hardware...but we aren't a few decades away from that, at least.

> they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.

is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which you work, software that you use to browse the internet, read the email... I've heard similar comment like yours before and I am not sure I understand it given everything else - why does this matter for LLMs and not the phone you use etc etc?

I’ve used FreeBSD since I was 15 years old - Linux before that.

My computer was never controlled by any corporation, until now.

Yeah I've always run Linux on my computers for the past 30 years. I'm pretty used to being in control.

what phone do you use?

A desktop/laptop is fundamentally different from a phone.

except of course they are controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use

Yes, but they are fundamentally different use cases.

> Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage.

So similar to IBM in the 80s. Time for a scrappy little startup to disrupt the industry.

> So similar to IBM in the 80s

In 1980 IBM earned 3.56 billion dollars[1] (15 adjusted for inflation). Apple earned 416.16 billion in 2025, Alphabet 402.8 billion.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/17/business/earnings-ibm-net...

Unfortunately we live in a "vote with your wallet" paradigm where some of the most mentally unhealthy participants have wallets that are many orders of magnitude bigger than the wallet of the average participant.

> our software is over-engineered garbage

Honestly I think it's under-engineer garbage. Proper engineering is putting in the effort to come up with simpler solutions. The complex solutions appear because we push out the first thing that "works" without time to refine it.