For example it ignores the gazillion medium(-like) "articles" that are not much more than the output of a prompt. Here AI is not about style, is about content too. If you open such a post, maybe with the intent of learning anything, and you realize is AI slop, you might close it. Making it harder to recognize is poisoning the well in such cases.

Open research papers, that everyone can access is democratizing knowledge. Accessibile worldwide courses, maybe (like open universities).

But LLMs are not quite the sane. This is taking knowledge from everyone and, in the best case, paywalling it.

I agree in spirit that the original comment was classist, but in this context your statements are also out of place, in my opinion.

I know the versions differ by model, so perhaps your model was not as well supported.

AWS EU region is not doing much, and I suspect most companies run on US providers. EU needs independent platform for this to matter.

I am not going to deny that YouTube (and all social media) created new markets. But how is this not an argument that shows that when N people suddenly do some activity, only a tiny minority is successful and gains some market share?

If tomorrow a product that is made by 3 companies will see competitors by 10000 1-man operations, maybe you will have 30 different successful products, or 100. 9900 of those 10000 will still be out of luck. I

YouTube is not an example of a market that being exposed to a flood of players gets shares somewhat equally between those players or that allows a significant number of the to survive with it. Nor is twitch or any of the other platforms.

Channels that make money consistently also have teams behind. Sure, probably they are smaller then TV studios, but TV studios do also other jobs compared to youtubers.

Anyway, these are the only numbers available. If there are numbers that show that masses of individuals can make a living in a market with so many competitors like YouTube I am happy to look at them. Until then, I will observe what is known for almost everything: a small % takes the vast majority of resources.

I understand there is an argument to be made about what is the "value" of things, but for me it's quite clear that journalism has the inherent value of providing information, similar to how many other activities have values beyond "generating money for their owners". AI allows to "mock" many activities resulting in the social value of that activity being lost, while possibly maintaining the economic value. A trajectory that is not new but also not good to accelerate on.

Claims 0.25% of channels makes any money at all. The amount that make a decent living is realistically even smaller, possibly < 0.1%.

To me the YouTube example seems to be the exact demonstration that markets saturate and market distribution is still a winner-takes-all kind of deal.

To me it seems the reality works in the opposite way. Among the many products built, some will be successful and will swallow the whole market, like now with basically any software or SaaS product.

A quick search leads to different answer, but https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon... suggests that 0.25% of all YouTube channels makes any money (not good money, any money). Which means 99.75% earns 0$.

Basically I would flip the question and ask: if you could produce videos now very simply with AI and so could other 10000 people, how many of the new channels do you think will be successful? If anything, the YouTube example shows you exactly that it doesn't matter than 1000000 people now can produce content with low overhead, just a handful of them will be successful, because the market of companies available to spend money to sponsor through channels and the men hours of eyeballs on videos are both limited.

Talking about companies that just produce products, either you come up with something new (and create a new market), or you come up with something better (you take shares of an existing market). Having 10000 companies producing - say - digital editing software won't make suddenly increase by 10000x the number of people in need of digital editing software. Which means that among those 10000 there will be a few very good products which will eat all the market (like it is now), with the usual Paretian distribution.

The idea that many companies with smaller overhead can split the market evenly and survive might (and it's a big hopeful might) work on physical companies selling local and physical products (I.e., splitting the market geographically), but for software products I cannot even imagine it happening.

New markets are created all the time, and it's great if maybe smaller companies (or co-ops) could take over those markets rather than big corporations, but the way the market distribution happens I don't think will be affected. I don't see any reason why this should change with many more companies in the same market. I also don't think that 10000 new companies will create 10000 new markets, because that depends on ideas (and luck, and context, and regulation, etc.), not necessarily on resources available,

Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?

We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on long-term optimal effects.

I am saddened too by the fact that the system is designed so that people like him can waste a large amount of economic and human capital.

Being political for software means for example making some specific choices while designing it and advertising them as such. Means choosing a license over another. Means announcing political positions and possibly aligning the software to them (depending on what it is).

It doesn't mean going in forums related to that software to discuss random political topics.

If anything, we need much more politics in software, ideally exercised by those who write that software instead of "apolitical" software writers who end up executing the political software of those who pay them.

If you meant to scope your statement only to FOSS, then this still applies (in fact, FOSS is inherently political), plus I suppose some people who invest their time to write software want to also use the same effort for political activism and there is nothing wrong with that. This can be expressing their political views via that software (e.g., vim and the support to children in Uganda) or can be using a license that only allows co-ops to run their software, or many other ways.

The idea that software even could be apolitical stems from the idea that technology can be neutral, which again, in 2026 is really a tough idea to support.

So the free expression is considered by everyone according to their own ethical and moral values.