The gig workers are still suckers because gig work sucks. But yes the service is most sensible for higher paid consumers.

...only because the company is committing wage theft to subsidize costs. I don't think it feels reasonable to say "Your employer has to meet certain wages, but they didn't so you're a sucker".

If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.

Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.

I'm from the Bay and no longer live there but for how massive the region (functionally: Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz; SF to Antioch+) is the public transit is pretty good. Obviously not perfect and a lot of room for improvement.

I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.

Seems like boiling a frog to me and the users/people haven't started to jump out yet. The website is horrible but basically everyone is still on it because of FOMO or something.

I do not have a linkedin account.

I read the article and it sounds kinda-sorta good at face value but the more I read and look into readplace.com the less things make sense and the more "ick" grows. Oh well just a puff piece... It's a big pet peeve of mine when someone uses a "CEO" title where it's probably very likely there's no Board or any other officers (or is a side project).

Author comes off as diligent, intelligent and dedicated... but might gain some credibility by having real humans read and proof the copy.

> When you could get a 400k/yr job after a 3 month JS boot camp.

I get the point but these numbers are hyperbole and do not happen in real life.

> I'm pretty sure we would find an overall increase in actually useful apps

I think you're probably right but at what point does it become diminishing returns? I have observed the app market to be overly saturated for years and rarely download something other than a mobile-banking update.

It became diminishing returns years ago, long before AI.

But absent a central planner for all human endeavor, people are free to see if their particular brilliant idea will be the one in a million that gets traction.

So let’s stop making new apps then?? What is your point? Looks like you’re just complaining for the sake of it.

Super interesting read

> After performing with his wife for decades, Gus Wagner was struck by lightning in 1941...

I'm glad for Author to write on the subject but think the article was tough to get through due to undeveloped ideas and too many cliches. I was additionally confused where the Kool Aid thing was going because the "drinking it" phrase originates from LSD/acid tests--mentioned in the wiki [1] page but not the post.

Where do we go from here and what is the intermediate ground of leveraging LLMs and Agentic AI? It's odd for me to read about someone going "all in" on AI--to the point of using it for email with humans--and then having a massive reversal.

I think this is a really interesting case study and temporal snapshot of where we are with AI technologies. I have always been wary|skeptical|cynical of the technology and this is affirming but also just confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Thanks for the feedback! When I ran it through an LLM it had some similar feedback that I purposefully didn't action on ;)

"Be excellent to each other" is great.

In my view this first real AI age will plant the seed of us recognizing humans need to treat each other as precious.

The law kinda does that leaving systemic bias and archaic power structures to the other portion. Religion half does that leaving the other half to God.

But with an entity that is AI, infinitely duplicable slaves who're smart, we have GOT to recognize our "otherness" as a Species.

Be excellent to each other, because nothing else in this universe will.

I think the phrase is much more widely associated with Jonestown than with the Electric Kool Aid Acid tests. It certainly took off in popular usage after Jonestown.

The wikipedia page you linked for some reason points out that Flavour Aid, rather than Kool Aid, was used at Jonestown, but I don't see how that matters; flavour aid is effectively the same thing, under a less-known brand name.

> It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.

I'm not familiar with graphql but what would make something "invoke git", is it a technical thing or hyperbole?

My over-simplified explanation: the graphql server will map a field on a request to a resolver. The resolver can execute whatever code it needs to return the value, up to and including calls into libgit.

So asking for the title of a PR might just be an extra column selected on a DB query. But calculating mergability status of that PR might be something else entirely.

> but continue to use AI

Not all humans