Yes but not every dev is an Amazon coder.

I have the privilege of working for a robotics company small enough that I (a SW dev) can walk a few doors down the hallway and talk to anyone from mechanics, to electronics, to sales, to the people who actually operate the robors on customers' sites. And I have a lot of respect for people who pull a 16 hour shift in freezing cold or with water pouring down their necks.

For the company to function, it requires a lot of people with different skills to come together and each do what they're best at.

As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.

> How is it different now?

Most cases, it was either:

a) a new technology unrelated to the original job, which made the job redundant - the printing press was not made by watching scribes doing their mechanical movements faster, it was a fundamentally different principle. It was fair competition between independent 2 options, neither of which exploited the other.

In contrast, LLMs cannot exist without programmers first writing immense, astronomical amounts of code as training data.

b) people coming together and making something for free which was paid. Wikipedia is not just subsidized by some corporation which makes money from ads, it is made by people who willingly spend their time to make the world a better place for everyone. And none of them, neither a megacorp stand to become rich from it.

In contrast, LLMs are trained on people's work without their consent, quite offer against explicitly stated wishes. And it's not a common good, it's a for-profit business which ultimately funnels the gains to the top.

---

I am not even against LLMs, they are a tool - neither good or bad. I am against how they are created - LLMs trained on AGPL shoud be AGPL and their output should be AGPL. And I am against how they are used - they extract value from people and redirect the reward for work to people who didn't contribute any work.

Fundamentally, people should (collectively) own the product of their work and should negotiate how the reward is distributed on equal footing.

A year later, do you see it now?

I always say humans are not smart enough. First they came for the communists... You know the rest but how many of you would pick up a rifle and stand against evil?

Well, first they came for the manual workers and many on HN were happy to help. Now they and their autocompletes came for open source devs, taking our work without consent, credit or respecting the licenses and almost nobody stands up against it. They expect me to pay for me own stolen code and most devs are OK with it because it's not their stolen code and they can get their job slightly faster.

So how long before they come for you? Because by then you will be economically irrelevant and unable to do anything about it.

> it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy

What if many people want to buy a copy but nobody wants to be the first because he'd pay the full cost and the others could get the next copy for free? What if they instead agree to share the cost equally?

But then this group doesn't wanna be the first because the next group could get it for free? So what if they get the whole country together and agree to share the cost?

How much? They agree to determine that by supply and demand.

Congratulations, we're just reinvented copyright laws.

Anarchists and especially ancaps never game things out in their heads because they'd arrive at some variation of the current system. Sad because they usually could come up with an improved version. But they choose to throw out the baby with the bathwater.