When all the valuable code is free, the price of valuable code will be 0.
People will only profit from the value of the code, not the creation/ownership of the code itself. LLMs seem like they're dropping the cost of code creation significantly (50-90% so far)... impacted players should plan accordingly.
It's a fundamentally different model, not a broken one. It will break a lot of businesses if they don't adapt.
It's the shop management software. The shop owner is a friend, he tells me he could disable that feature for me, but he gets paid a little bit every time the free offer is sent out. I think it's just funny. Maybe one of these days we'll turn it on before going on a long road trip just to have satellite radio to play with on the highway, but around normal life I have zero use for subscription radio.
In the world of "fair" - it still has the old battery powered remote buttons to keep in the cars, and the button on the wall, just like openers always have had, but I'm not in my cars or near the button about 2/3 of the time I want to open or close that door - so I just get pissed off specifically at that company every time I use their app. Whatever they get from those ads really can't be worth that loss of customer good will, can it?
Have one, suppose I could try tweaking filters around whatever it gets its ads from, but the code to present the button to open the door doesn't show up until after the ads do, so I suspect all my pihole will be able to do is break the app.
I think I got the last one of those, but mine did come with a "free" phone app to open/close the door. The app turned into an advertising platform about 3 years after I put the opener in - no options out, gotta see the ads if I want to use my opener via app.
Never forget: Han shot first.
When I get an oil change now I also get "three free months" of Sirrius Satellite radio... racket and a half subscription seeking scum.
I purchased a used car from an individual, it had some hacky alarm system spliced in under the dash which malfunctioned quite comically at the grocery store (if it weren't for the fear of being stranded with a car full of frozen foods) after we had owned the car about a month. That one was such a mess, I managed to identify its components and clip it out, leaving the factory harness undisturbed - would have been a bit more challenging if the system had actually cut some wires that later needed to be re-spliced.
have a larger profile in the surveillance capitalism machine.
This is why, when I'm not watching, I'll set Netflix to stream movies I like.
Well, aren't you quaint. Next thing you'll be asking for is seed corn that you can replant year after year from the corn it grows, heated seats in your cars without a subscription payment, replaceable batteries in your battery powered electronics.
easily looked up via a search engine,
Search engines have been evolving toward chatbots for 20+ years. Ever since they started fighting back against SEO, search engines became more and more opinionated about what they were going to serve and what they were going to ignore. Of course, along the way, most of the advertising supported ones slowly (and not so slowly) succumbed to the financial pressure of a little quid-pro-quo or we take our money elsewhere...
LLMs are going to go the same way, probably much faster. Some, like Grok, didn't need any pressure put on them at all. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content
Yeah, I thought that foolishness was behind us with the crypto export impossible to enforce rules, but it's baaaack with AI.