IMHO it's the best outcome.

Not surprisingly, I get slight hints of Claudism in the text.

AI "opening" the source of software is one of the best things I've seen going for it so far.

By the 70s, which is what I have, they were already much better, largely due to big shock-mounted bumpers and very long front ends that make for a gradual crumple zone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6DCWhjdjE

... although certain models were still much worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgOxWPGsJNY

This was already the level of integration 13 years ago: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/the-12-gongkai-phone/

Observe how the SIM card socket is the biggest part on the board: http://bunniefoo.com/ntw/dozendp_8.png

My daily driver is 220 inches long and 80 inches wide, weighs around 4000 lbs and over 50 years old. Most cars of that era were roughly the same size. It is definitely larger than most other cars I see today, although it also has much better visibility.

It's odd how the experience differs so much; I clearly remember successfully resuming a download less than a month ago, and I don't remember any time Firefox had any problems with them. My network.http.response.timeout is the default of 300.

There are reasons, but until someone actually publishes an article that's more detailed than the vagueness here, there's nothing anyone can really do about it.

...and meanwhile, here we have (mostly smaller) supermarkets with decades old "dumb" equipment which would be completely unaffected by such things.

Exactly. The argument against these clones not doing X or not doing it well is simply "then tell the AI to do X and/or optimise it."

This was my eye-opening moment regarding whether vibe-coded software can be efficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923

The delusion of Imaginary Property is evaporating faster than ever. Those who try to desperately cling to it are going to lose.

It ruins the incentive to create

Only to those who believe in the delusion, that somehow everything they create is absolutely original, without realising how they gained that knowledge to create in the first place.

Meanwhile remixing (in the form of fanfiction, mash-ups, etc.) has always been part of human culture, and now AI is boosting that like never before.

We are effectively approaching post-scarcity in software and entertainment.

This 4-year-old article and its comments are worth reading again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859106

Look at "the war on general-purpose computing" for a good perspective.

[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.