The difference is that it's pretty acceptable for you to reject family requests for money, it doesn't make you a pariah and being a pariah doesn't carry the same consequences when non-family institutions govern society.
The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.
Corinne Hofmann is a Swiss woman who married a Kenyan Samburu warrior named Lketinga Leparmorijo and had a daughter. She opens a shop but they lose money because Lemalian gives too much credit to friends and neighbors, and because they have to pay bribes to the mini-chief. Lemalian argues that this is no problem because she has more money in Switzerland. The mini-chief demands that Carola hires his teenage nephew as a shop assistant. She has to accept this although she does not need him and he does not work hard. After some time, when he is just drinking beer and not working, she fires him. Later he returns and attacks her. A local judge rules that she has to pay two goats for firing him, but the boy's family has to pay her five goats to compensate for the attack.
The article's description of kinship sounds a bit like family based governance and taxation. Only with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed, and those who resist being violently dragged jailed typically find a fate even worse.
The western version then of being a pariah for not paying up is violence rather than ostracization and shame. Of course until you get rich enough that you can corrupt the government itself.
> with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed
Big difference between taxation and patronage is when the rules are known. You generally know ex ante what you should owe in taxes. With patronage, if you have a windfall, the rules adjust to require you give it away.
I doubt software development will stay as "low skilled prompting", or that it is even low skilled prompting right now. Productive LLM usage goes beyond typing in better prompts and involves things like improving guardrails (eg type definitions and tests), context (docs and "skills" and MCP servers), and management strategy (instructing specialized agents together). It seems natural that there will be high skill AI coding to differentiate engineers, at least until superintelligent AGI emerges and kills us all.
If you think any programming task at hand one must have at least some reasonable grasp of formalism, boolean logic, predicate logic, then understanding the software developing concepts, your APIs frameworks, language constructs etc and finally the domain knowledge.Most of this goes away when changing from coding to prompting.
I was just doing some computer graphics work myself doing Signed Distance Fields and Claude just literally regurgitated code that I could just adopt (since it works) without understanding any of the math involved.
I'd say that prompting is at least two orders of magnitude easier than coding.
Isn't that what is implied by the toughest job market yet for junior level candidates? Author is very confident that the answer to his question is "no".
I think the implication is that even though the technological landscape is evolving, it's not as if people born in the 60's couldn't foray into computer science because they arrived too late to study the ENIAC first.
Android has about 2/3 worldwide market share and it hasn't had anything like this before. Many people, myself included, chose it exactly because it allows the installation of modded, pirated, or otherwise non-store-worthy apps.
The 2/3 marketshare must be almost entirely due to Android being cheap and accessible, not because those people need to install arbitrary software. A lot of mobile plans don't even give you GB/mo, they give WhatsApp messages/mo.
There two main mobile OS in the space, one moron-proof but limited, the other a bit more permissive, but slightly less secure for it.
The problem is that most apps target only those two, and the second is trying to moron-proof, loosing most of it value to part of its users, while the apps are still locked in.
I think the key metric to good software has really changed, the bar has noticeably dropped.
I see unreliable software like openclaw explode in popularity while a Director of Alignment at Meta publicly shares how it shredded her inbox while continuing to use openclaw [1], because that's still good enough innit? I see much buggier releases from macOS & Windows. The biggest military in the world is insisting on getting rid of any existing safeguards and limitations on its AI use and is reportedly using Claude to pick bombing targets [2] in a bombing campaign that we know has made mistakes hitting hospitals [3] and a school [4]. AI-generated slop now floods social networks with high popularity and engagement.
It's a known effect that economies of scale lowers average quality but creates massive abundance. There never really was a fundamental quality bar to software or creative work, it just has to be barely better than not existing, and that bar is lower than you might imagine.
{
date: "2026-02-28T02:56:35.000Z",
title:
"OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in classified network",
source: "https://x.com/sama/status/2027578652477821175",
sourceLabel: "Sam Altman on X",
},
{
date: "2026-02-28T01:24:31.000Z",
title:
"Anthropic: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth",
source: "https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-war",
sourceLabel: "Anthropic",
},
{
date: "2026-02-27T22:14:43.000Z",
title: "Dept. of War: Anthropic is a supply chain risk",
source: "https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20",
sourceLabel: "Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on X",
},
{
date: "2026-02-27T21:47:00.000Z",
title: "U.S. government blacklists Anthropic",
source:
"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/trump-anthropic-ai-federal-agencies",
sourceLabel: "The Guardian",
},
{
date: "2026-02-27T14:12:04.000Z",
title: "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation",
source: "https://x.com/sama/status/2027386252555919386",
sourceLabel: "Sam Altman on X",
},
Not this, because this is completely unprecedented? In fact, the Pentagon already signed an Anthropic contract with safe terms 6 months ago, that initial negotiation was when Anthropic would have made a decision to part ways. It was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.
Government always has the option to cancel contracts for convenience, they knew what they signed up for or else they were clueless and shouldn’t be playing with DoD
If they made a completely private nuclear reactor and ended up with a pile of weapons grade plutonium, what do you think the department of war would do? It was completely obvious it would happen, as it will be not surprising when laws are passed and all involved will have choose between quit or quit and go to jail. There are western countries in which you’d just end up in a ditch, dead, so they should think themselves lucky for doing the ai superintelligence thing in the US.
The US government clearly doesn't take seriously the claim that AI is more dangerous than (or even as dangerous as) nukes, because if they did they wouldn't allow anyone except the military to develop or use them, they wouldn't allow their export or for them to be made available for use by foreigners like me, they wouldn't allow their own civilians to use them, they would probably be having a repeat of the cases in the cold war where they tried to argue certain inventions were "born secret" and could not be published even if they were developed by people who were not sworn to secrecy.
I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging out and where they could actually find your content.
This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.
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