Sometimes I wonder if what will actually happen, is that we will have very small startups, essentially a C-Suite but with actual coding skills and domain knowledge, who build new companies using AI that end up gaining an advantage over the incumbents and force them out of business. Indirectly you're replaced by AI. I could see the drasticity of the changes to culture and workflow that AI demands being too much for most legacy companies to handle. For instance, there are still a shockingly large number of companies relying on seriously dated software and paper based systems.
In my opinion, Cloudflare are coming at this from the wrong angle. WordPress is so popular because back in the day it was the easiest way to get a website built. So it got a network effect of engineers behind it which is why it persists at 40% of websites today. Same thing happened with React - majority of Typescript sites are written in React and NextJS because of the network effect around it.
Yeah the security aspect is important, but how many of those Wordpress engineers are going to jump ship to this because of security when they've been fine with the risk so far? My money is not a lot. If someone is a WordPress dev in 2026, they're probably not the type of dev that likes to upskill and learn new tech. Similarly, if you're looking to target the average joe looking to build a fresh website, would that consumer really choose this over Wix or Squarespace? It doesn't look easier to use so I wouldn't count on it. So where is the network effect going to come from to make this the new WordPress?
I could see Vinext being successful if they keep at it— I think there are a sizeable amount of people who would like to move away from Vercel (and who will probably migrate to Tanstack when the ecosystem is more stable). But I'm not sure people on WordPress really want to leave. If they really want to make this successful I think they need a better angle which in my opinion would be making it easier, quicker, cheaper and more flexible than Squarespace/Wix/Shopify etc
The "WordPress devs don't like to upskill" framing is off. Most of them maintain sites for clients who need WordPress specifically. They stay because their clients stay, not because they can't learn TypeScript.
The real talent drain isn't about technology at all. It's the governance mess. The WP Engine lawsuit, Matt's behavior on community Slack, the constant drama. That's what's pushing people out.
But even with all of that, nobody's leaving for EmDash. They're leaving for freelance Webflow work or getting out of CMS entirely. Cloudflare would need to solve the "why should I rebuild my entire business on your platform" question before the talent pool argument matters.
The author's conclusion is fucking astonishing. Don't respond with bitterness - focus on your hobbies, friendships and love. Exactly how are people meant to do any of that exactly when, as you've just laid out, they are not going to have any ability to keep a roof over their head?
> And critically: part of what made the present possible was that some of those hundred billion people pushed, slowly and painfully and often without reward, against the legal structures that governed their time.
Rather than mincing words how about we state plainly how most of those pushes were made: through violence, death, and war.
I agree that AI today over-engineers. However with the rate that everything is improving, do people really think that it's also not going to be able to refactor and optimise the code in a year or two from now? It can already do a decent job at it today if you prompt it to.
> The reader is not respected enough by the software.
The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.
The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.
I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version.
? Where is this true?
I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.
That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).
People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.
This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).
On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.
For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.
>For an organization who get their main income from ads
The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge.
>tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it
"Tailoring" a digital page to not include ads for subscribers is so laughably trivial that this is a farcical claim. They aren't hand-laying out the content and removing ad upsets it or something. But they don't remove the ads because, gollum style, why shouldn't they force ads on me?
What we're talking about is classic enshittification, and every justification people make up is just cope. Indeed, the fact that I'm a subscriber makes me even more lucrative to advertisers, in a classic catch-22 that completely undoes all of the "just pay and you don't get ads in my invented scenario".
Ok, point taken. I've heard very different numbers for dutch newspapers and blindly extrapolated that to the US. And if the numbers are like that than maybe the numbers I heard about dutch newspapers are bullshit too, who knows!
I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.
There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.
Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.
What paid subscriptions respect the readers? I would love to pay for news from organizations that only get money from readers. For example, I have been paying for The Economist for decades and still see advertisements.
Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.
At the dawn of the web, no industry was better positioned to take advantage of it than the news media. Instead they ignored it and were cannibalized to a greater degree than any other industry. Its hard to keep an industry afloat when it is managed so badly. Part of the reason that the news media is where it is, is that they have lost most of their income and viewers so the only people who are willing to work in it have ulterior motives. This drives a vicious cycle of continuously more partisan news coverage which drives away even more viewers. The ads are just a symptom of this, not the cause. If they were managed better, they would have a more effective ad policy but they aren't. Still though, I'm sure its a hard balance to keep but others seem to do it so...
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay.
Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.
The division has been more equal in the past. When I was a kid, probably 75% of the neighborhood subscribed to the paper and others, like my parents, bought it regularly on Sunday and certain other days. Perhaps sales was 25-30% of revenue. Advertising was big but a large portion was classified ads. Wikipedia says up to 70% of some newspapers' revenue was classifieds. These ads are unlikely to have much editorial effect, but that revenue has basically gone away. What remains is more perilous to independence, and since the number of print readers has gone way down, also not as important to the advertiser.
> Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.
There is a case to be made that teaching improves the understanding and insight of the teacher which in turn can increase their research ability. For starters, it provides a less boring way of drilling fundamentals. But more importantly, having to answer questions from students which very likely will be coming from odd and unexpected directions, helps the teacher clarify their thinking. It could well be that one of these odd questions, the answer for which the teacher takes for granted, may actually hold some insight or raise questions into what they are working on outside of class.
In a similar vein, it is recommended that if you are in a business meeting you hear what the junior positions have to say about something first and work your way up the chain of command rather than the other way around due to the junior positions being less familiar with internal processes and thus more likely to flag or suggest something completely out of left field that the higher ups might miss.
I tend to agree that teaching can clarify one's ideas, but I don't think the benefits are equal across the board. I think the argument for benefits to research are stronger when it comes to supervising graduate students and teaching seminars. I'm far less convinced that we should have math professors teaching Calc 1 if they're not really passionate about it, and I'm especially not in favor of tying up their salary and performance evaluation with it.
Note, I'm saying all of this as someone outside of academia who is passionate about science and had a very mixed bag of teachers in undergrad.
Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...
IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!
When Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 he said it was running OSX but what that actually means is anybody's guess. iOS is closer to macOS in functionality today than the iPhone's first OS.
I personally liked iOS and macOS being separate things because making a desktop OS also work on a touchscreen has wider implications than it sounds. That's why these days everything in Windows is blown up like Fisher Price software and way bigger than necessary for a mouse cursor. Seems like that's the direction Apple is headed in anyway with Tahoe.
What he meant was that it was running the non-user touching parts of OS X. It was possible to SSH to an original iPhone and install gcc and compile applications. It was sort of like OS X in a kiosk mode.
Yep this is the biggest news. We’re one step closer to a DeX like experience for iPhone. If Apple did that they would stomp the entire Windows laptop AND desktop market.
The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!
There isn't any good technical reason why an iPad couldn't run macOS.
The differences between the A and M series chips is mostly about the kinds of IO the SOC provides.
The iPads already use M series chips anyway.
It's been able to run on A series chips for a while. I don't think that's what's preventing MacOS on iPad. It's that the OS is not optimized for touch in any way. Too many small things to click. It's just not the kind of half-baked experience Apple would put their name behind. Likely the same reason why you haven't seen a touchscreen on a Mac.
This does remind me somewhat of military command structures with L1-L5 being enlisted ranks and L6-L10 either being NCO or Commissioned depending on your view of how much gatekeeping is involved.
Western militaries have a parallel commissioned officer and enlisted command structure where an O1 (junior officer) is technically senior to an E9 (senior enlisted NCO) and can order them around.
The idea is that command requires a separate set of skills and that experience needs to start early to have senior officers in their 50s.
In practice, junior officers are "advised" by senior enlisted on how to order people around and not taking that advice is a bad idea.
Kind of like how companies have managers and technical tracks where a line manager ignoring a senior technical person always blows up in their face.
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