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What leads you to think they don’t care?

If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]

[0] https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read


I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.

Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.

The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.


Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.

I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.

> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.

Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.


It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.

A guy in russia makes interviews of people on the street.

https://youtube.com/@1420channel?si=_IlEAa4V1rilJOMb

Some people just say nothing (due to consequenses), some are very imperialist (rural areas have extremely high occurance). Rarer case, openly against government.


It doesn't matter what people think it only matters how people act. The Russian ability to suffer in silence is legendary.

If you're paying a monthly fee for your agent, might as well use it to save you another few mins


Presumably the agents will band together on Moltbook and buld their own TrustPilot competitor? :-)


Too bad Moltbook was written by humans, for humans: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07432


Presumably price would reduce due to the ease of which people can spin up competitors?


I stan the spirit of the free market as much as any red-blooded American patriot, but we've seen time and again throughout history that competitors just get bought up or regulated out of existence by the established players. They don't actually compete.


OP was talking about commodities, not SaaS


Commodities are more price sensitive than SaaS by definition.


So you think this downturn will be short lived?

When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever


It seems that current advantages would compound with AI. I.e., if I am making a SaaS for Popsicle stick makers today, why I am disadvantaged with AI vs a new competitor in the space? I guess the hypothesis is the Popsicle stick maker will vibe code all of the software that they need instead. For that, we need significantly better AI than we have today - perhaps something like a 1000X improvement. Basically, this is a world in which non-technical grandparents can vibe code anything that they want. This means, it understands what you want without you being able to articulate it well in the first place.


That's not a 1000X improvement in current AI. That's more like a 2x ~ 5x improvement in current AI, which is measured in months.


So, within months your prompt can simply be "increase NPV" and machines will do the rest? If not, what prompt will work perfectly in your estimation by the end of the year?


“Analyze these business requirements and create a software solution for the problems you identified”.

Right now it can get part way there but quickly falls flat.

In 12-24 months? It’ll be able to audit itself and determine how to fix issues as they come up, mid-stream. That’s (all of) what a human dev does.


How detailed are the business requirements however? "Increase NPV" is certainly a business requirement, albeit a very abstract one. "Add a checkbox to this form" is another, far more concrete business requirement.


Good AI asks clarification questions. Codex plan mode is already getting there-ish.


I suppose it is really only possible to know how close something is until it arrives. When I type in "Maximize NPV" into Codex / Claude Code, I feel like it is incredibly far away from full autonomous capability. I guess we will see.


What do you get when you type in “Maximize NPV” to a human?


"Maximize NPV" is exactly what shareholders prompt boards of directors with. Not all humans can do it, but some can. Perhaps your argument is that AGI isn't required to solve software. This would imply that human level intelligence isn't actually required today to build software.


I don't do tea leaves so I wouldn't commit to that, particularly because I think SAAS was oversold in general even before LLMs came out. But I think the idea that the industry as a whole will shrivel away just isn't feasible, even if there is a correction.


The B2B startup motto of "where someone is using Excel to do something other than accounting, there's a startup waiting to happen" has been shockingly resilient over the decades, and I suspect will continue to be.


We need a new one: "Where someone is using a vibe-coded internal tool made by the creative department that keeps needing bug fixes, there's a start up waiting to happen."


Paper forms used to be our main competitor.

Paper forms have some amazing features that software really can't compete with. And also some significant downsides that software fixes.


In many cases, it's not a downturn, just a return to reasonable valuations. Other sectors should follow


All of the hype surrounding AI will subside when a SaaS company eventually deploys a moltbot version of their software and the company is driven out of existence due to the chaos that ensues.


So… next week then?


I wish I knew:). I kind of think Palantir is particularly at risk here. Image a company with siloed data behind APIs and access to other external data APIs. Using something like Claude I could tie all the separate sources into an easily digestible dashboard without any help from Palantir.


I've seen some bad some SaaS that management insists is an integration they need and no one else provides. I can easily see some vibe coded projects replace them.


They will magically realize this when their huge bonuses will be tied to something longer lasting than last quarter/year performance on some very narrow metric (which has nothing to do with sane stuff like adding long term value to some part of the company).

They are not stupid, far from it, most are (very) high functioning sociopaths. And out and up there its everybody for themselves first.


I dont even blame management. I believe most of them are well-aware that much of what is going on right now is pure hype.

However, they dont have a choice. The sentiment of shareholders is that they want their cash (yes it is their cash that managers re-invest on their behalf) to be invested in AI-related projects.

So...... you get what you get, and investors will get what they deserve. But they will still blame the management in the end ;)


Yes there’s no point using technically correct words if hardly anyone know them.


Language or the way we use it is often used to exclude "undesired", so there is a point in using them. Not a very nice point, but a point nevertheless.


Sure there is, as long as your audience does.


Agreed, after years of software development only in the last couple of months have I started to think that maybe I need to reskill.

My current role should be ok for a few years, but hard to know if we will need any developers in 5 or 10.


That product came out recently so will be top of mind. And maybe was the final straw for the OP when trying to find something to focus on?


I don't think you'd find any link between countries with latin based languages and theft. Differences in crime rates are going to be much more likely to be based on economic inequality, social policy, enforcement, and how crime is reported


As I remember it, VS code was Microsoft’s response to Sublime.

Sublime was exceptionally popular for web developers throughout the 2010s.

Sublime was maintained by a single person as far as I know.

VS code was pretty much a copy of Sublime but with a much better extensions system and relatively quickly there were some great plugins that made VS code the de-facto editor for web development.


Wasn’t it a copy of Atom?


Yes, Atom was an earlier shot at building a Sublime competitor too.

I don’t know how usage of Atom compared to Sublime, but within my friends and colleagues it was only when VS code got good that people started moving away from Sublime.


I can only speak for $MY_JOB, but I'm pretty sure everyone was on Atom before VSC "got good". Atom had a good plugin ecosystem; what really drove the change was Atom's horrible performance issues whereas VSC was snappy and responsive.

What I believe also influenced the shift was that at that point in time MS had accumulated a decent amount of developer trust by giving us TypeScript and later on by acquiring GitHub. They appeared to care and have the right vision for open source.


Ahh ok, interesting. I bounced off atom immediately but VS code got me.


Nope it started as a Web IDE, going against Atom was their pivot to win market share, there are a few talks from the team if you search for VSCode history.


Let's also not forget one big reason VSCode took over and Sublime lost: VSCode is gratis and (mostly) open-source, while Sublime is proprietary.


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