Even if you take it as true that prices have risen recently, and may continue to rise as the VC subsidies dry up, they will fall again long-term. Inference will get more power efficient with model-on-chip solutions like Taalas and God willing we will get cheaper and cheaper renewable energy.
Despite this I don't think engineers should feel threatened. As long as there is a need for a human in the loop, as today, there will still be engineering jobs. And if demand for engineering effort is elastic enough, there could easily be even more jobs tomorrow.
Rather than threatened, I think engineers should feel exposed. To danger, yes, but opportunity as well.
It looks to me like what is called a "container escape" in this context isn't necessarily as bad as it seems. For example, in the advisory for CVE-2025-31133 affecting runc[1]:
> Container Escape: ...Thus, the attacker can simply trigger a coredump and gain complete root privileges over the host.
Sounds bad. But...
> this flaw effectively allows any attacker that can spawn containers (with some
degree of control over what kinds of containers are being spawned) to achieve
the above goals.
The attacker needs already to have the capability to spawn containers! This isn't a case of "RCE within the container" -> "RCE outside the container", which is what I would think prima facie reading "container escape".
I have always thought that running an untrusted image within an unprivileged container was a safe thing to do and I still believe so.
For those install scripts which allow changing the install prefix (e.g. autoconf projects---though involving a built step too), I've found GNU Stow to be a good solution to the uninstall situation. Install in `/usr/local/stow` or `~/.local/stow` then have Stow set up symlinks to the final locations. Then uninstall with `stow --delete`.
They just can't be. Concepts like the soul, the inherent dignity of man, and the orientation of humanity toward a single Good are incomprehensible in the framework of modern psychology or physiology. They are ruled out or at least set aside by the presuppositions used to simplify the world for scientific analysis. And these concepts do a lot of work in the note.