Life started on earth shortly after the solar system formed. It's a quarter the age of the universe that it took for intelligence and civilization to arise. A long, long, looooong time.

From a numbers perspective, our minds are all shockingly rare. The universe probably doesn't produce many of us through stellar and then biological evolution.

Taking that into consideration, contrast that with the flip side.

If high technological simulation exists that becomes indistinguishable from reality, it could simulate quintillions of minds. It seems like we're on the path to that technology, with a great degree of probability.

Given that, and the fact that historical simulation is likely easy for the future, it seems more probable to me that we're one of the quintillions of simulations rather than the origin timeline.

I'm half joking, but I'm half not. It's a fun thought experiment with absolutely no basis in science.

Do you even really know if you were alive a second ago? Perhaps you were just instanced into existence with a set of memories - memories you are not randomly accessing. A very deliberate version of a Boltzmann Brain.

Again, pseudoscientific tomfoolery, but fun to ponder.

This is all just such crazy coincidence.

Everything is coming together so quickly.

(I needed to be able to post that to HN tonight.)

I'm given a tool that lets me 10x "provide value".

My personal preferences and tastes literally do not matter.

Lots of techies hate things that are popular with the rest of humanity. You see lots of nagging, complaining, and disconnected from reality takes. Hate for Instagram, "Dropbox will never work", "pop culture sucks", etc.

I'll make a mean joke: a lot of y'all better learn a trade. Plumbing, perhaps. I kid, of course, but I also wonder if it might turn out to be the eventual reality.

There are people trying to figure out what this means and where to create value. "Taste is the only moat" is one such hypothesis. "Senior engineers will be fine" is another.

Everything is super frothy right now and we're in for a wild 2026.

I don't think many of you have legitimately tried Claude Code, or maybe you're holding it wrong.

I'm getting 10x the work done. I'm operating at all layers of the stack with a speed and rapidity I've never had before.

And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade.

This isn't just a "cool technology". We've exited the punch card phase. And that is hard or impossible to come back from.

If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong.

I honestly don't like subscription services, hyperscaler concentration of power, or the fact I can't run Opus locally. But it doesn't matter - the tool exists in the shape it does, and I have to consume it in the way that it's presented. I hope for a different offering that is more democratic and open, but right now the market hasn't provided that.

It's as if you got access to fiber or broadband and were asked to go back to ISDN/dial up.

You're just going to have to make peace. I don't know how y'all can cope with being angry at progress all the time. It's not going to stop for you. It's also really awesome that we live to see this come to pass.

We're living in a good dream.

I "don't forgive you" for considering this a lapse in judgment, because you still have some things to learn. (I'm kidding of course. All of this framing is rather silly.)

beej was doing what was best for them at the time. There were no victims. beej sold a service to an enterprise until it didn't make sense anymore.

Moralizing something that happened 20 years ago is wild. It literally does not matter. beej didn't kill anyone, didn't ruin their self esteem, didn't steal. This is not "soul selling".

Money isn't evil. Working for money and selling for money are not evil. You're going to have to do a whole lot more to meet that threshold for most people.

We should stop casting stones at people unless they're really assholes. This is nothing.

How will we know what good software looks like if we no longer write assembler?

> Imagine looking at someone driving a car for 20 years. Will it be enough for you to drive a car yourself?

You don't have to drive stick to be able to drive.

Whatever the economically important functions are, the miracle of capitalism will find a way to staff it and solve it.

People fill all the gaps. No problem goes uninvestigated, no opportunity goes ignored.

At the end of the day we're delivering value. We'll be judged on value creation, and that'll map itself to whatever the tools of the day happen to be.

Big money interests rub shoulders with US politicians, US politicians deal with their overseas counterparts. Therefore, big enough DMCA requests will be mentioned behind closed doors in the same breath as international trade and other geopolitical concerns. Money protects money in deals between close enough friends and allies.

If Codeberg were based in Russia or a US geopolitical adversary, on the other hand, such requests would likely be ignored.

That's beyond exciting.

"We tried to build an even deeper panopticon to enslave you. Drats, you and your Democratic process. We thought we'd pulled the wool over your eyes claiming it was for the kids. We'll get you next time you peons. It's just a matter of time."

It's not software. It's the fact that distribution is owned and taxed by outsized players that live as gods and control the experience for the rest of us.

You might not care about Google and Meta, but your customers and parents will be bound up by them. You'll have to pay a tax to reach them. You'll have to jump through their arbitrary rules and give up more than you wanted.

They're the ones deciding to let privacy encroaching governments continue to erode our rights. It better facilitates their profit making opportunities and helps maintain their high walled moats.

Your little blog might have meant something in 2004, but today it's nothing against the titans.

The internet of 1990-2008 was not "indie". It was "free".

The internet of 2000 was the undiscovered country. The internet of 2026 is 1985 surveillance coupled with Brave New World meets Thunderdome algorithms.

The other reason the author misses - the internet was a much smaller place. A personal website or forum would be seen by a large percentage of the internet. The "indie" web was the web. (Drop the "indie".) Now you have to go live on a platform and be an ephemeral engagement sink.

If you don't obey all the arbitrary rules (no external hyperlinks, no videos under thirty seconds, no website references in your images, no green texts, no edits, no posts after 11AM), you won't be selected by the algo lottery for content farming to the horde. Nevermind that they'll ban you if you're a problem to any important powers.

You're just a consumer now. And if you're a creative person, your wares are content to be algorithmically milked.

Isn't that just a little bit dystopian? Doesn't it fall just a tad shy of the dreams we had twenty years ago?

I think we'll be fine.

This feels more like Y2K panic than grounded in truth. Senior software engineers guide these systems effectively today without creating a mess. I'm sure in some years agents will fill the role of maintainability engineer too. We are not special or irreplaceable.

It's not like we won't be spending an incredible amount of energy to overcome issues with understandably and maintenance. The sheer economic forces will absolutely will this problem solved. It must be solved, because trillions of dollars urgently want it to be solved. That's evolutionary pressure if I've ever seen it.

Also, we ceremoniously ascribe too much value to the software we create. With the exception of a few places, almost all of it gets replaced before our careers are over. At the end of the day, business automation is value creation. It's not sacred. It has a finite life, and then it too dies.

The software artifact just needs to facilitate economic/interest flux long enough to be useful, then it can be replaced with something better or more relevant.

With data, it's an engineering target.

They could just 429 badly behaved clients.

Nothing lives forever. The life of a product is short and over in the blink of an eye.

They're playing this game optimally for their present station.

Slow coding an IDE? We might not even have IDEs in six years.