Next up: DOGE cancels leap seconds. /s

The article expresses what a lot of us are feeling. I appreciated the read.

It conflates purpose with outcome. I don't accept the premise that software's purpose is to "automate away other jobs". That may be an outcome, but software's purpose is to enable completely new possibilities. Think bicycles of the mind.

The Apollo guidance computer didn't replace astronauts. It made the missions possible in the first place because no human can continually correct the spaceship trajectory every 250ms for 10 days on end.

We're not receiving some cosmic karma. We're more like cotton pickers after the cotton gin. Someone still has to plow and plant.

It just reads and writes the hledger file format. It doesn't use the hledger binary or source code.

The formal engineering disciplines are not defined by the construction vs design distinction so much as the regulatory gates they have passed and the ethical burdens they shoulder for society's benefit.

https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/its-time-to-license-software-...

I did it with Tauri. ~14MB Windows, macOS, and Linux exe, browser app, iOS, and Android.

https://code.slater.dev/doug/praylist/