Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!
It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?
> The unhelpful feedback was a consistent push to dumb down the book (which I don't think is particularly complex but I do like to leave things for the reader to try) to appease a broader audience and to mellow out my personal voice
Interestingly, this was my exact experience when working with a publisher (Manning, in my case), and it was the main reason I decided to part ways when writing my book (The Software Engineer’s Guidebook). While I did appreciate publisher’s desire to please a broader crowd by pushing a style they thought would broaden the appeal: but doing so makes technical books less attractive, in my view. And even less motivation to write!
In my case, self publishing worked out well enough with ~40,000 copies sold in two years [1], proving the publisher’s feedback wrong, and that you don’t need to dumb down technical books, like this specific publisher would have preferred to do so.
Even if it wouldn’t have worked out: what’s the point writing a book where there’s little of the author (you!) left in it. Congrats to OP for deciding to stick to your gut and write the book you want to write!
You might be amused to hear that the only exception for Section 174 is software developers working at oil and gas companies!
From the legislation:
“ Section 174(c)(2) provides that the required § 174 method does not apply to
any expenditure paid or incurred for the purpose of ascertaining the existence, location,
extent, or quality of any deposit of ore or other mineral (including oil and gas).”
Is there an explanation how software developers creating software for oil and gas companies are different than for any other industry?
Or can we assume that the oil and gas industry managed to (yet again!) have its lobbyists where it mattered?
Either Klarna is really good at pulling strings to get media coverage, or mainstream media does not fact checking themselves. About a year ago, the company was everywhere in the media when its CEO announced that it created an AI bot that is doing the equivalent of 700 fulltime customer service folks.
I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.
I was... not impressed?
Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)
I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?
My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)
I think this is in the broader context of Klarna CEO claiming he had stopped hiring for almost a year because of AI. It was a big talking point for a lot of CEOs and LinkedIn influencers. Big enough that incompetent management across the industry was following Klarna’s steps and reducing staffing (Not because AI, but because they could short staff teams with AI as an excuse). That is why when there is a clear evidence that Klarna was completely wrong, it needs to be talked about.
Glen Okun of NYU business school has written about BNPL loan portfolio weakness.
The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort.
The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.
If you default on your Klarna loan, you could pay them back in support hours:
> The pilot has started small, with two of the new breed of customer-service agents live now, but the ambition is to tap into candidates such as students or rural populations. “We also know there are tons of Klarna users that are very passionate about our company and would enjoy working for us,” he added.
This is the primary positioning tactic used across the startup industry . Uber isn't a taxi app, it's actually the "future front end for millions to access autonomous transport". Doordash isn't a delivery app, it's an "on-demand logistics" platform.
Similarly, Klarna isn't a shady payday loan company, it's an "AI-first consumer finance play".
Not that I necessarily disagree with your overall take, but can someone explain how 'financing' your DoorDash order with a credit card is perfectly OK, but financing with Klarna is somehow dubious and shady. Surely the problem is buying stuff you cannot afford, not how you choose to buy it.
I think there is a feeling that klarna, and other bnpl companies just lend without checking or caring of consumer credit, or buying power. I've never used them before, so I don't know if this is a case.
With credit cards there is the "appearance" of them checking credit scores, ability to pay , etc.. before giving a credit card.
I say appearance, because as we all know cc companies will just lend cards to anyone, and then charge huge interest rates.
Ultimately it's another form of credit, and it's a minor change on the current system. But since it's finance and lending, it's a step to make lending easier.
Lending and banking in general is a highly regulated market so they do have to underwrite and do anything in their power to avoid lending money or start contractual obligations with people that are bad creditors. Source: worked for them for 2 years.
> a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio.
I thought they more or less instantly offloaded the risk as asset backed securities to clueless people who didn't know the actual risk profile what they were buying
They are scum, and currently are suffering from increased scrutiny from governments for pushing their buy-now-pay-later exploitative business everywhere. In the Netherlands they are even attempting to gain access to brick-and-mortar stores by partnering with Adyen¹ which provides the payment solutions, but the government is being vocal about that being unwanted. This is in addition to the unabating coverage in the media about how Klarna is about as harmless as vaping — that is, they are enticing young people into buying stuff they don't need² before they can afford it.
Shopkeepers don't want it, but fear they must if big chains start offering it, just as online shops feel like offering it is unavoidable due to the popularity in certain demographics. The financial watchdog doesn't like Klarna, and is increasing scrutiny³.
If Klarna has trouble marketing their value, then that at least is good news, but not unsurprising given the spate of attention it received over the last two years.
1: So much for the ethical side of Adyen (e.g., https://www.adyen.com/impact sounds hollow when you partner with loan sharks).
2: Some people are quick to defend Klarna for offering people a chance to buy their necessities with what amounts to a payday loan, but that is bullshit. Klarna predominantly is not used for daily necessities.
3: Klarna now has to state that they are offering a loan in the Netherlands where they are available as payment option, with the mandatory "borrowing money costs money" tag-line.
Shopkeepers do want it, because it expands their market from those with funds to also those without. Klarna carries the lending risks, for the shopkeeps it’s a risk-free customer base
In the Netherlands no less than twenty trade associations sent letters to the government on behalf of their shopkeeper members urging legal action to prevent Klarna from coming. Part of it is that Klarna is fairly expensive compared to the common payment methods (i.e., cash and debit cards). Klarna charges a whopping 4% of the purchase price, whereas using a debit card (perhaps 95% of payments in physical shops) costs a fixed 17 euro cents, and cash costs just the costs of keeping it around safely and getting it to the bank.
But there is also the realisation that a customer who uses BNPL today, won't be coming back next month when they are paying off their loan.
Dutch shopkeepers do not want Klarna, but if major chains like Primark etc. do it, they fear customers will start expecting it.
> But there is also the realisation that a customer who uses BNPL today, won't be coming back next month when they are paying off their loan.
I don’t think that’s a good argument. For shops and customers that utilize BNPL you are not typically making routine purchases at the shop anyway because the minimums are $50 or more (merchants can negotiate those terms with the provider) but the base tends to be around $50.
If you buy a bicycle using BNPL you’re not like coming back to the shop the next month and buying a new bike again.
BNPL increases sales and merchants really like using it which is why they are signing up for it more and more. Basically the increase in cost is worth it to increase sales.
There may be some bad social dynamics, taking out loans, etc. but generally both merchants and customers like using those products which is why they use them.
Your intuition is wrong. As a simple example, during the months of saving in cash, by the time they have the cash, if they even save at all, they have more options for purchase. So maybe they go with the original merchant, maybe they don’t. Maybe they buy something else.
Instead merchants prefer to lock in a sale right then and there, and they pay for that service.
Surely that averages out with people switching the other way during the save-up period?
Perhaps for an individual shop right now, in a world where Klarna exists but not universally, yes, there's a benefit to using it to lock in that particular customer right now.
It's less obvious to me, in the long run, that widespread Klarnification results in benefits to any particular shop. As mentioned earlier, having Klarna sapping up to double-digit percentages of the portion of customers' money (it's "zero interest" until it very much isn't, and they're in the "subprime" market) they were spending on possible-Klarnables and a few percent of yours on top as fees is easily a bigger impact that the average losses, if any, from the delta between switch-away and -to.
It's a bit of a prisoners' dilemma: you stand to gain money by defecting (to using Klarna) unilaterally, but if everyone does that, you all, plus the customer, collectively lose money (to Klarna).
> Surely that averages out with people switching the other way during the save-up period?
Maybe? I’m not aware yet of any data that would support that hypothesis one way or the other. But we know that some businesses fail and some succeed so it would lead me to believe that hypothesis probably isn’t correct. As you mention though the availability of these offers isn’t universal, some businesses eschew these options and others don’t, and we will see that play out in the market.
If the businesses that don’t offer these services (cash only businesses as an analog) fail or convert you might have your answer.
I will also say that for many businesses they offer more than one BNPL provider at checkout so there is competitive pressure to offer good terms, have good creditworthiness models, and features to attract customers. Platforms like Shopify allow BNPL providers to create easy to use plugins that appear at checkout and merchants can add a few including Shopify’s home grown solution rather trivially.
In general I think your argument that it’s less obvious that it’s beneficial “in the long run” rests on the same logic that credit cards, 0% for 12 month offers, personal loans, etc. do as to whether there are benefits. Right now businesses add these products and see revenue go up, even if margins go down by 6-8% or so.
Your assumption that customers will not buy accessories until they have repaid the Klarna loan is a long way from certain.
Loans like this also encourage customers to increase spend, because adding an extra few dollars (cents, etc) to your monthly payment is psychologically not as big of a deal as waiting another month or two before you can afford the more expensive item.
Yes they do, because they don’t have a decrease in gross revenue, but instead a higher gross revenue and smaller margins. But that results in higher profit for the merchant so they go with it.
OK, merchants do not want a new expense that is 4% of gross revenue.
Klarna’s TOS currently says a merchant can’t surcharge for it… but Visa, MC et al used to do that too.
Never heard of them. I don't think I ever saw these offered in online shops operating in the Netherlands, while Klarna is in almost every online shop. If they offer BNPL they are probably just as much scum.
They might say they want it, but like a wise parent guiding the BNPL spending habits of a teenager, government is right to step in and stop shopkeepers from seeking to cheese their way through business (only in the short term) by relying on a fickle and unsustainable base of new creditors.
Putting a new group of people into predatory debt is a nice way to juice your numbers before you dump your shares, but it's not a good way to sustain an economy focused on producing real value.
You know some businesses are led by people not board rooms, and especially businesses that consider themselves part of a community, and sell to their neighbors, don't want said neighbors to be rat-fucked by exploitative financial products, even if it will possibly benefit them at no risk.
This is generally called "being a person with a soul."
>businesses that consider themselves part of a community, and sell to their neighbors, don't want said neighbors to be rat-fucked by exploitative financial products, even if it will possibly benefit them at no risk.
>This is generally called "being a person with a soul."
Wholesome. So the hole in the wall restaurant that only takes cash was actually trying to save its customers from a lifetime of credit card debt, rather than saving the 3% interchange fee and possibly tax evade?
I mean the hole in the wall burger joint near me that I love openly charges 3% more when you pay with a credit card for the exact reason of not wanting to give away 3% of their sales figure to a credit card processor, since said credit card processor didn't cook the burger. And you can feel how you feel about that, I personally appreciate the transparency and make it a point to bring my debit card.
I don't know if they're engaged in tax fraud though. Not really my department.
I believe in business done for mutual gain, that's how I do mine, and I make it a point to find as many like-minded people to do business with because they're just easier to deal with. I don't feel the need to get second quotes on car repairs because I've gone to the same shop my dad went to. I know the guy, I handle his IT needs. He isn't out to get me for every dime he can, and I'm not out for every dime either: we go to each other when we have problems, and we solve those problems for one another with some on the top to take home.
I'm sure neither of us will be billionaires but I can also sleep at night which is nice.
Sure but it is easier to order genocide from an office than being the guy who has to march the children into the gas chamber.
Humans have come up with wonderful bureaucracy to dilute responsibility.
Your comment doesn't show how people, as opposed to an board, would be any better in this scenario. Both would weigh the pros and cons of such an action before making such a command.
that depends on the deal. Restaurants don't wnat meal delivery services because of the terrible economics but really have no choice if the delivery company captures the customer base.
The restaurants where I am banded together against app based food delivery. The only ones that do are Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and Subway, and those typically have a 25-minute wait since no local Doordash/Uber drivers live close enough. Ergo, nobody uses it.
The local independent Chinese place delivers and the local pizza places also deliver. (Pizza Hut’s own delivery is significantly cheaper than ordering it via Uber Eats.) Ergo, restaurants don’t have to deal with the rent seeking that siphons off profits, and money stays more local.
In a city an hour away, a local guy came up with his own food delivery service and eventually paid a programmer to make a simple app. You can now order from a whole bunch of places cheap. It’s amazing he’s stayed in business, but one thing he doesn’t do is rip off restaurants.
WeWork tried this and it worked out great for their CEO. They were a real estate landlord masquerading as a tech company. Stupid SoftBank bought that lie and made Neumann filthy rich.
But as you say that was ZIRP when everybody was stupid and this is now.
To be fair, admitting their amateur foray into chatbots was an abject failure and rolling it back really does put them at the forefront of the AI movement.
The problem with "AI-first" companies is that they really are just shells for people who want to be "AI-First" engineers, and not "guy who solved my problem affordably and was nice" engineers. The average person doesn't care how you ended up fixing the weird charge on their account, it's how fast and how proficiently did you fix it
> mainstream media does not fact checking themselves.
Mainstream media will print a press release for you if you send it to them. It is very important to understand how limited the fact checking really is. If a mainstream paper prints a statement of the form "X said Y", you can be sure that:
- they are pretty good at checking that person X did actually say Y
- they make no effort whatsoever to fact check the underlying statement Y.
There isn't really the money or interest in actually investigating the claims of every little press release.
> really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue
Yes. This is because multibillion dollar investments are made by people who are easily distracted by the jangling keys of AI.
I liked your comment but don't think the shot at media was necessary. A company replacing workers is news enough and the fact checking need only be to validate that information. The "as good as 700 workers" I assume was presented as a claim, not a fact.
Evaluating the effectiveness of the AI bot is another matter and firmly in the investigative journalism sphere. Coincidentally that is an awesome application of a blog.
If you think the issue of devs using fake identities is a problem limited to the Fortune 500: I talked with a 6-person startup who very nearly hired a person who could have been from anywhere else than they claimed, including North Korea. All they know is the candidate used an AI filter to make them look like a Polish person [1] - and this startup recorded when they caught this faker.
This is a full-remote startup and they have now added a mandatory in-person interview to their recruitment loop.
Amusingly, in their case, using local job boards did not help: they got candidates pretending to from Poland or Serbia, yet not speaking the language.
A little sad to see how each episode like this casts more doubt and uncertainty into full-remote interviewing.
The most bizarre OpsGenie story was how in 2022, this tool was down for 2 weeks for hundreds of unlucky companies that were Atlassian customers. This was at a time when JIRA had an outage impacting a small percentage of their customer base - but still in the hundreds of organizations (with around tens of thousands of users.)
While most companies can operate for some time without JIRA: losing your paging service means you're flying in the dark. And yet, Atlassian did not prioritize restoring OpsGenie.
I covered the details at the time [1]. To this date, this incident is a real head-scratcher and makes me wonder if Atlassian has internalized how much more critical an incident alerting software is, compared to a ticketing software (JIRA) or wiki (Confluent).
Author of the article - and analyzed the likely impact of Section 174 in detail a year back [1], in Jan 2024, when it became clear that it was not being reversed like most assumed it would be.
I originally didn’t mention this because S174 impacts the US and US-HQ’d companies. In this data other countries like Germany, UK, France all see a similar drop. Also, S174 impact likely really started from early 2024, when companies impacted had to pay high taxes and realized the change is here to stay with no end in sight. Doesn’t explain the drop since 2022.
Updated the article to make this clear though. It was not in the original version - thanks for the note!
As someone who was a paid customer of Quartr: they do not offer the ability to look or search actual filings at the $20/month plan. Full text search starts from $500/month, and is an annual contract (so $6,000/month.)
Pricing for these services is not cheap, given it can be very helpful for professional traders.
(I’m no professional trader, and not even a trader. I just sometimes want to search for interesting things in transcripts, when I research a topic. I would pay for a decent service offering full text search for transcript search, to use it a few times per month (or perhaps even less frequently). Still not found a product that does it at a sensible price point for my use case - likely because my use case is not worth building a business on.)
I’m one of the paying Kagi customer who wants to make Kagi my default iOS search engine, but cannot. It’s maddening that even though I paid for both my iPhone / iPad and for Kagi, Apple for some reason makes it impossible for me to make this choice (that I already made by paying for Kagi).
On Chrome at least this is possible, even if it’s additional steps (I have not used the extension though there.)
So far (only an occasional user) it's been solid for me. Though I've only been using it in depth every few weeks, and that's mostly to read manga online while waiting for stuff.
I too am a paying customer. Surprisingly -- at least to me -- it's easy to do with Microsoft's Edge browser on iOS. I use it as default on both iOS and macOS.
They recently decoupled that part (search, but I don't know if they did it for edge too) and made bing in the start menu a store app that can be uninstalled if you don't want it to be available on your system anymore.
The only reason why you can't use google there is because.. Google doesn't care. Just like how they never released apps for the Windows Phone store, they have no intention of touching the one on Windows.
Microsoft has been hit so many times by the EU that they really care to respect our regulations now. Not just the "letter of the law" but the "spirit of the law" too.
The same should (or has already happened, I don't know.. because I actually use Edge and didn't care to look deeper into it) happen for Edge:
Of note, among the things that have changed recently in Windows 11, you can disable the news page from msn on Widgets, and Teams is no longer a part of Windows.
I expect Google will release their implementation when the Windows feature gets into stable. Implementing something 9 years after Windows 10 is released doesn't show "respecting the EU" to me.
Correct. Minute userbase equals no leverage to extract tolls. If they ended up with the sort of dominant position they had at one point with IE on Mac they'd do this very thing and more.
There aren't many shenanigans that MS didn't pioneer in the 90s.
Because the money for it is stuck in weird places. I can't write some small bit of software and just sell that for a decent price. People don't pay for software these days, so my best hope is to give it away for free and then running ads. And then, if it's any good, someone will come by and make an open source clone and give that away for free, tanking sales/ad revenue. So the money in writing software is by working at a huge company that has found money with software, like Google and selling ads.
This is really the most concise (and depressing) explanation of the situation I've seen.
When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a solo programmer that had a few successful desktop programs. Think mIRC, WinAmp, WinRar. Despite the audience for that being >100x larger than it was in the 90s, I'd bet the number of solo shops doing that successfully isn't a whole lot larger than it was then.
I recommend trying out Quiche Browser on iOS, or Orion from Kagi- both will support Kagi as a search option. Spotlight search still goes to Google, but I find that acceptable.
You chose to buy a platform with severe restrictions. It's not like we can blame monopoly power, because Android phones are easy to get. It was legitimately your choice - it seems like for some reason you wanted the restrictions.
Choice seems to be an euphemism for everything related to private IT: For PCs there is Microsoft vs Apple. (I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently.) For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google and its advertising cancer.
What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building houses?
Look no further for evidence than New Zealand. There are two major grocery store chains (Foodstuffs, who own New World, Four Square, and Pak n Save) and Woolworths Group -- obviously we have the smaller Asian marts and produce stores too, but most people only have one of the big stores nearby to their towns.
There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall (Gib) that is easier to get council plan approval for than any other cheaper manufacturers of drywall because they provide some material strength documents that saves the councils some engineering review time and effort.
We technically have 4 major banks, but 3 of them are just offshoots of big Australian banks and siphon the insane profits offshore.
The government keeps making investigation commissions into breaking these up, but doesn't do anything. The companies just point fingers back and forth at each other blaming "the competition" for price gouging. Meanwhile the recommendation from the politicians is we cut back on avocado toast, lattes, and our Netflix subscription.
Finland is nearly as bad. 20 years ago there were only 3 food chains. All domestic and playing the rules "no price competition". So food prices were about 30% higher than in Germany for example (these a very different countries so lack of competition is only one reason). Then Lidl (discounter of German origin) entered the market. The first years the incumbents fought it with unfair practices, but in the end it led to more price competition with everybody having to offer cheaper choices. 2 of the incumbents have since merged (with some regulatory limitations) so we are back to 3 players, 2 playing "according to the oligopoly book" and one doing things different, at least offering some choice.
Banks are not much better. There are a couple of small players additionally to the 3 big ones, but competition is limited to very few products. If you are interested in something else, choices are very poor.
If the choices are substantially different, you have a choice. Windows or Linux or Mac is a real choice - just because you'd prefer Haiku doesn't mean you don't have a choice. There's a huge range of android phones, and many of them have been reverse engineered enough to run non-google versions of Android (find out before buying). I have a PinePhone, but I don't use it regularly. It runs nearly-mainline Linux. Even things like Apache and X11 if I want it to.
I am typing this on a phone running SailfishOS. Still that's hardly a real choice for me who has worked 20 years as a phone or Linux developer. No banks, no public transit tickets, no city bike, no you name it.
Calls a texts work fine. I didn't try MMS, but on the forums people managed to make it work. Battery life is not very long, 4-5 hours of use or 20 hours of suspend.
I'm really happy to be able to run desktop apps (also on a big screen!) and have full control over my phone.
Compromise on your computing freedom, compromise on your attention and privacy, when both providers are out to fuck you it doesn't really feel like you have a meaningful choice to make. Asking for an environment where fucking your customers isn't allowed feels like the only option.
I have a Pixel with Graphene on it. It's not de-Googled though, because Google successfully entrenched their services as a dependency of the majority of apps on the platform. Graphene makes yet another compromise by installing Play Services in a sandbox, which still lets it spy on you (but less) in exchange for enabling most (not all) Android apps to run. You can't really escape the compromises if you want a capable pocket computer. Compromises borne not of technical requirements or limitations, but of decisions that some of the largest companies in human history have made to fuck you.
Big fan of Graphene! The balance I personally prefer is to use Shelter to create a "work profile" and install Play Services in there along with any apps that must have Play Services. Then, I only enable the work profile when I need to use those apps.
I don't know about "factually incorrect" I believe this[1] is what the OP was vaguely referring to.
Apple says they're not doing CSAM scanning anymore, but there's no way to verify they're being truthful. And given everything known about corporate America, it would be foolish to believe them.
Unfortunately, you lose a significant amount of functionality by degoogling. Any app which relies on Google services, which is a large number, will be broken.
But you do. You get to choose to buy into the other platform, which is significantly more open. If for some reason you choose not to, then you obviously don't value openness very much.
In what sane healthy market is two choices enough?
Imagine saying that about everything else in your life. Don't want to buy a Ford car? You can buy a Toyota. There are no other car brands in the entire world. IHG, Hyatt, Choice Hotels, Best Western, Wyndham, Radisson, they don't exit.
Don't want to stay at the Hilton? You're in luck, you can go to the Mariott, that's it.
Don't want to buy a t-shirt at Target? Well, Walmart sells t-shirts, and nobody else sells any t-shirts.
This would be astoundingly ridiculous anywhere else but technoloy. Even credit card processing networks have four options (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express).
As an example of how this works in other industries, US antitrust regulators automatically decline any merger/acquisition US airlines that would put their marketshare above 20%. And that's after deregulation!
IMO any market that has less than ~3-5 viable purchase options for customers needs to have extensive government intervention to keep the market fair and innovative.
If only the world was so simple and one dimensional and we never needed to compromise. Lets have 5 phones, each representing the pinnacle of a single attribute I care about, none of them actually meeting my needs.
Yay, capitalism working as intended. The rational buyer can choose to get kicked in the head or in the groin! Vote with your money!
That’s why even Adam Smith himself said that it only works in well-defined markets! It’s the job of governments to define these, and phones are so essential to our lives that they should be thought of as roads, instead of as an average private company.
Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile OS markets and mobile app markets. The fig-leaf of choice is between two duopolists. That's not healthy competition or an actual choice.
For anyone interested in reading full chapters of the book (all are relatively short!), here are three full ones [1], shared with the permission of the author (Kent Beck) and publisher (O’Reilly).
It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?
[1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...