These guys aren't aware of all the "impossible" problems Elon already solved. They're too invested in the propaganda about him being a big dumb idiot who accidentally fell backwards into a pile of 1 trillion dollars.
The city doesn't want commercial real estate values to collapse either, since buildings are taxed based on their value. If extend and pretend is ending, tax revenues are about to take a nosedive.
So, it would be morally abhorrent to enslave them if they were conscious, and therefore they must not be conscious? Sounds a bit like "saying the quiet part out of loud", pal.
My understanding is that the various anti-encryption proposals don't prevent the government itself from using encryption, just their subjects. So it's not really an "argument against" from the state's point of view. They will be safe.
Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Uber's not really a good example because they deliberately incentivized their engineers to spend as many tokens as possible, which was silly. But even assuming that every developer uses the full $1,500 a month of tokens that they are now allowing, that's actually not a lot of money relative to the cost of a single developer for them. It's less than 1/10 of a junior engineer's fully loaded salary.
Where I would expect to see people invest in local models is in cases where a company has regulatory requirements to keep data local, or where they're doing some specialized kind of work. Neither of those really apply to Uber. In 2026, it would absolutely be irresponsible for a taxi company to try to build a better Claude than Claude.
Now what this looks like 5 or 10 years from now, it's hard to say. A lot will depend on whether China keeps releasing open weight models and whether people can still run those open weight models on commercially available hardware.
You appear to be assuming that frontier LLM models will be more expensive than outsourced developers. That seems like a crazy assumption to me. Even with current prices of about $1000 a month, that's still just $12,000 a year, which you cannot live on, even in Eastern Europe. Maybe some people in India could live on that, but probably not the people you want writing your code.
You're using the future tense, but all of those things already exist. Google exists, Amazon Bedrock exists, DeepSeek's cloud product exists, etc. etc. But this isn't relevant to what the post you are replying to said, which is that "cloud-based, metered AI being a dominant work mode [is a] fad". Since all of those things are cloud-based, metered AI.
I mean, there's an "enormous incentive" for people to run their own data centers rather than using AWS. And yet, cloud is growing and on-premise is shrinking.
While I hope local AI continues to exist, I'm skeptical that it will take over, for the same reason running your own servers hasn't taken over. It's just hard, and involves spending huge sums of money up front.
It's also not really clear how much tokens are being subsidized. The discussion reminds me of Uber. For years people on HN claimed that Uber was going to collapse once they ran out of VC money. Then... that never happened, and everyone just moved on to discussing other things.
Outsourcing comes with significant costs. One of them is that it takes time to communicate with the outsourced team. For example, if you want to talk to someone in India, you might have to send an email that they read the next day, because they're almost 12 hours separated from you. So exchanges that would have just been 15 minute chats with a US-based developer turn into multi-day back-and-forths. If you are hiring someone to be the architect of your system, don't you want to be able to talk to that person? That's why even the most outsourcing-obsessed companies usually did not outsource architects.
Another issue is that there are cultural barriers. People in India or elsewhere may say "yes" when they really mean "hmm, probably not" because saying no to a superior could be considered rude.
If you replace a big team with a small team and LLMs, you are actually saving money overall because LLMs are much cheaper than humans. But you may actually need more skilled humans than previously, not less skilled ones, because they need to be able to manage a large volume of code being generated. LLMs are not good news for outsourced developers. They are the opposite: a cheaper substitute for the grunt work that they had been providing.
It's cope. People desperately want to believe that AI coding is going away so that they can go back to partying like it's 2020.
So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.
My point is that current-year LLMs are a better replacement for low-skilled developers than high-skilled developers. For example, if your mental model in 2016 was that you would have a senior engineer write a specification, and have an outsourced team in India implement the specification, in 2026, an LLM replaces the outsourced team in India, not the senior engineer. As a bonus, everyone is now in the same time zone, and there are no language or cultural barriers.