Not to mention its a lot easier to learn Go concurrency over Elixirs whole ecosystem. Also Go has a job market while Elixir job market exclusively consists out of senior level job postings that get handed over from Elixir job hopper to another Elixir job hopper. There is barely any reason to learn Elixir except for being fascinated by it.
Comparing learning one language's concurrency model with learning another language's entire ecosystem is incommensurable.
Having learned both Go and Elixir, I found Elixir easier to learn and a lot more enjoyable to work with. I'm not alone in this opinion. According to Stack Overflow's 2025 "admired" languages, Elixir scored 65.9% compared with Go's 56.5%; Phoenix was the most admired web framework of 2025 at 79% and has held that spot for the past three years.
Erlang is dynamically typed, so many of the performance costs are similar to a JS runtime and always fully deciding typing ahead of time is an undecidable problem.
In practice, this is why many such languages have JIT's (unless targeting a subset or an type-information enhanced superset like TS), there was a seminal OOPSLA paper in 1995 by Agesen and Hölsze (who worked on the JVM Hotspot compiler) that compared JIT's to AOT compilation in practice (the Agesen CPA algorithm isn't perfect but it's pretty good for the time and others have probed that it's an undecidable problem).
That said, they also had a historically bad performance story due to misjudgments in development direction, the interpreter was default and they twice tried to make "HPC JIT's", ie.. complex JIT's that tried to be "perfect" and focused on numerical code gains, they'd be good for optimizing a matrix kernel, yet fairly useless or even negative on more common code patterns.
OTP 24,25 and 26 took learnings from the JS runtimes and also added compiler hints (since they already had binary precompiled modules).
What still saves the OTP runtime is that many basic operations that would suck without a good performance story is handled by built-in functions, so like Python most practical programs works well enough even if the runtime is behind.
Well to use Elixirs concurrency model you kinda have to use the rest of the langs ecosystem and learn a shit ton more compared to familiar feeling langs like Go. For Go I dont have to learn its execution model, some VM specifics and whatnot.
Tech specialists ignoring human feelings about AI and the future of tech, while also looking at the amount of downright evil tech out there makes reconsider about wanting to continue to work in this profession over and over again.
Before I knew how to program I used to think software developers were smart wizards capable of creating cool stuff out of thin air but the recent years proved me differently given how many of them outright water out of their mouths at the mere thought of replacing the human in the loop with some bullshit parrot we call AI.
Especially on this website I rarely find people having human first thoughts and it makes me despise software engineers.
The OS is neutral (I don't like forced ads and things like that, but that's just how they probably deem they can be profitable today. You can place that as a negative yes), the browser is neutral, well it was at least nice to have some competition before they caved to Chrome. The gaming systems are well liked generally. C# is well liked.
If you mean things like being overly agreeable to government requests or aiding Israel in Palestine, then I can agree.
- Not listening to user feedback for years until people started leaving the OS, at which point they started "listening" to add back things like taskbar location changing, things that were present in previous Windows versions. Also seems like every update breaks stuff, they clearly don't care about testing the stuff they put out.
- Every keystroke or button you click on Windows sends telemetry to their ad partners. Probably same on all their other products, too
- Built-in ads on PAID products
- Spying on everything you do with things like Windows Copilot and Recall
- Filing patents to monitor your activities to show ads, black mirror style
- Force-feeding their own agenda to their users instead of listening what users want (look what they did to Github after buying it)
- Their own Edge browser is horrendous spyware. If you go and download Google Chrome, it will tell you with a popup that Edge is better and you shouldn't download Chrome. Not to mention that many screens of dark pattern popup you have to "yes|later" before you can even use the browser
And the list goes on. Honestly I don't know if they've done anything user-centric in recent memory at all. And if they have, it's usually only because the media has villainized them to the point where their PR team says they can no longer ignore it. They don't seem to ever proactively care about their users, only retroactively when abusing their users has crossed some public line.
The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.
Yes that too. Can't really say who is wrong in a denied claim without considering both sides. The one denied is naturally sour and wants to complain regardless of whether the reason was valid or not.
Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.
I am giving you honest feedback exactly how I feel my life improved from big tech. If you want to ignore me, then you are free to. "Big tech is evil/harmful" then can be made only if you agree to ignore and discriminate against people who are honestly believing otherwise. Thats okay if you want to feel so, nobody is stopping you. I am being completely honest in how I absolutely hated it before Amazon and how shops have improved in their behavior.
If this is your genuine belief then try this exercise: put yourself in the shoes of the shopkeeper who owned his own means of production directly and sold his wares to his immediate community before Big Tech. Would you rather have his job, or would you prefer to be working in an Amazon warehouse where you're obliged to relieve yourself in a bottle for want of toilets while being surveilled in a manner a Soviet political officer might consider excessive?
I'd rather not be an asshole shopkeeper. If I were, I'd try to be a punctual and good shopkeeper. But without market pressure why would I want to be? Maybe working conditions in Amazon warehouses are not so nice, but even if they slowed it down a bit, I'd still buy from them because my city doesn't have a given item. Pissing in bottles is what it is, if you think you can make a better business than Amazon than you can try to attract those workers.
From the buyer end, you do see the problem right? You can have a slower and more expensive business, how many buyers would want that? That in itself is a luxury only people with sufficient money can afford.
I am not opposed to welfare schemes which would therefore incentivize amazon to pay more than that or improve working conditions.
I am glad it has, and I think that recognizing the affordable access to welfare, goods, and food has been a valuable gain.
Call me a problem person, but I would say the tech companies you are referring too are perpetrating significant harm, but maybe you do not directly experience this. As an exercise I can use terms that we normally restrict to governments.
Google controls arguably the worlds most advancement propaganda system^1 ever created, has monopolistic control over information access worldwide^2, has farreaching influence on academic research^3456 and can perform censorship on major communication and education sites without overshight or juridicial control^7. They are a dictatorship with liberal capitalism as their ideology.
A world controlled by these businesses may have been beneficial for you so far, but they systematically disempower us. By yielding power and influence to them, we lose the ability to decide how we wish live and how we shape the systems around us.
I get the arguments like Google has more money than many countries GDP's and that they are one of the most used services on the internet. But I think unlike governments, they won it fair and square, not by forcibly imposing it on the populace with guns like governments do but by people naturally liking their services. I do like liberal capitalism and I think its one of the best systems of government, but I completely get the point about needing more diversification. I would argue it is also good for Google itself that alternatives exist. Otherwise Google itself might get stuck in an unrecoverable rut.
But at least I would thank you that you considered the benefits I felt, the other responses were just downright discriminatory and refusing to see someone could honestly feel their life improved by big tech.
You are whining because you are either one of those lazy businessmen who got upended by Amazon or you just like to complain about big tech without giving reasons why. It has its harms but on the overall balance I find it immensely positive.
Why would I bother with anything but Laravel for small CRUD apps? Not having to think about concurrency is neat, having tons of abstractions built by people with 50x my experience is neat, just being able to get going is neat.
Building the things I've built using Laravel with Golang would probably take 10x the development time as I have to handcraft everything Laravel already natively provides. Or I have to trust 100 packages from 100 different random devs to simulate the Laravel experience in Golang.
With LLMs the language DOES NOT MATTER. The framework DOES NOT MATTER. This is the thing we are talking about here. Laravel is 100% useless for a LLM first project. I can pretty much do anything in vanilla Go i can in Laravel and be 100x more performant, 100x more typesafe, and produce 100x more maintainable systems.
This is why dynamic languages, and even more so BAD ones like PHP are just useless going into 2027 and the future. Its simple, the language gives you what it gives in perf, builtin RUNTIME features, and COMPILETIME features.
From that you pick the best for whatever you are building, be it Go, Rust, Ocaml etc. The language does not matter.
Go has 90% of stuff builtin, you rarely need any dependencies. Look at Laravel ITS A HUGE CODEBASE and a high risk for any real software project. I would stay FAR away from it.
LLMs would need way more tokens using langs/frameworks that dont have native features already built in? Even with LLMs I would take 10x the amount of time/tokens until I have something I could've just done with Laravel in the first place.
A more concrete example: Laravel has a built in rate limiter, with Go I'd either have to tell Claude to install some rate limiter package from some random ass dev or implement its own which would consume tokens/time...
Also your argument about PHP/Laravel being risky is pretty funny as everything is risky and most of the internet runs on PHP...
What I do not understand with the "languages do not matter"/"frameworks do not matter" is ultimately the following:
What a good language or a good library (and to a lesser degree also a good framework) does is to pre-compress ideas into well understandable and composable chunks.
Examples:
`printf("foo %d, %3.2f %s", ...)` abstracts/compresses a general strategy of shuffling bytes into the correct ascii/utf-8... format.
An LLM could also write the raw assembly or bytecode for doing the same thing, but for one it would take much more tokens and to apply this pre-invented concept, and second without the concept already invented there would be no "information pattern" in existence that the LLM could have learned or refer to.
`list.map(...).filter(...)...` are patterns that (when applied strictly in a functional sense) go hand in hand with laws like `map` not affecting the number of elements, and filter producing no new elements etc...
These are also patterns that are already invented and depending on the language these restrictions are checked. Just reading `map` somewhere can tell you (and the LLM) a lot, and writing `map` instead of while, for or jmp will capture and express much more information. LLMs would not have been able to learn these concepts if they did not already exist. And even if such a general pattern would be discovered by an LLM somewhere inside its learnt parameters, it would not haven given this pattern a name that it could/would tell you. And if you do not know the name for such a concept how have a much harder time prompting the LLM.
Expressing computations in a well understood algebra allows for symbolic manipulation and simplification. like `5 + 3 == 3 * 5 == (1+1+1) * 5 == (5+5+5)...`. But algebraic manipulation requires a symbolic language with precise rules to describe what manipulation is allowed. In AI-speak you could say the language itself is a harness or a sandbox to guide and restrict whats possible. Doing advanced math proofs is only possible for LLMs because languages like LEAN provide a strict guideline to build upon.
In short, two extremes: If LEAN is so great at proofing correctness and LLMs are so good at LEAN, why is not from today on everything (windows, linux, basecamp, hey, gcc, rustc, blender...) translated into LEAN? Why bother with rust at all? On the other hand if languages do not matter anyway and LLMs are able to recognize all the pattern on their own, why not let the LLM output and iterate on the binary bytecode to generate a self contained binary directly?
That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.
I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.
Windows also is unnecessary complicated for a singular install but works kinda well for a network and central administration by someone who likes to read the docs (or whatever you read for windows)
I dont think people who would consider a full vegetarian/vegan diet without supplementary products that look like "meat" are the target consumer base for these products. The money is in a consumer base that does not want to fully commit to a certain diet, know that the meat industry is bad for the planet and is unsure on how to go about it.
Personally I'd rather eat highly processed soy beans over parts of a dead animal.
Eating is something one does several times a day every day of their lives. It must be done regardless of how broke or in how much of a hurry you are. I applaud anyone who chooses to add this stress to their daily lives voluntarily till the end of their days, but I'm not going to demonize someone for choosing to reject the time-intensive thing in favor of an alternative that's completely normal, cheaper, and faster.
I wouldn't have an issue with consuming meat if people wouldn't neglect how wrong the state of the industry is at scale. Eating meat might have been normal throughout humanity, but the industry scale meat production is everything but normal. Its ruining peoples health, normalizes the atrocities happening in farms on a daily basis and generally treats animals horribly. If you eat meat at least do it with a consciousness.
Used to think the same when joining the field and now I despise every minute I have to work on software I don't care about. AI even made it worse as I joined the field due to liking the coding part, not the results. Well, there isn't really an alternative for me either as there are basically no jobs I could learn that pay equally well...
Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(
I wont be able to retire early with a measly 2.5k net wage in Germany. Still, job market is dead here. Its all Java and basically zero interesting projects. I appreciate the kind words though!
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
I am constantly thinking about it, trust me. The issue is I already earn below median wage, but just enough to live comfortably. Other jobs would likely make me go back into poverty or make me hate my life even more.
I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.
I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.
Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.
I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.
Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?
From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.
So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.
One of my best memories from an art class in high school was that a student organization came into our class and asked if any of us would be willing to design a poster. I ended up designing and silk-screening their poster for them and it was a fantastic experience.
I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.
They said: "I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations." What do you think how many student organization have the excess money to hire a professional designer for a one-off poster? Of course they needed someone to do it for free, or else it wouldn't have been done at all!
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Try reading their comment in its entirety, and not just as individual fragments taken out of context: They most likely didn't have the budget to hire a professional designer and no one else would do it for free, so they had to do it themselves. They didn't enjoy it, and they would've gladly passed that work to an AI, had one existed back then.
For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.
Because people assume u need to actually hire someone to make art. Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant. It's more pleasant to look at for people who didn't yet sell their soul to AI.
> Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant.
Wait, we've gone from "pay the local artists" because AI shows you're "lazy and cheap" and "don't care about your brand".
And now whatever my 7-year-old draws is good enough.
My only conclusion reading these threads is that folks come in with their mind made up, and will argue absolutely anything so long as it amounts to "AI bad".
the point of advertising is to communicate something. If your kid draws your menu, you signal family values. If you pay a local artist, you signal investment in the community.
If ChatGPT churns out your ad you've signaled nothing. And that's obviously why you can criticize AI for every imaginable reason. That's indeed the difference and why people, regardless of how 'good' your AI art will be, will attempt to hide it, because it defeats the purpose of advertising as such.
And every person I talk to has a different take. In one case, it's that you don't respect the brand and you're lazy and you're cheap. In another, it's that you're signaling your values.
Maybe the reality is a lot of people have different feelings about this. Most people don't care and I'm mostly engaging with the loudest detractors, each with their own reason for hating AI.
>Maybe the reality is a lot of people have different feelings about this.
yes that is the reality, but what I was saying was is that the abstract reason for that is what's called costly signalling in economics, biology or even religious studies.
When you want to display, advertise or communicate to earn yourself trust, it must cost something. Whether that's proof of work, or money, or reputation or skill, what all AI criticisms have in common is that AI costs nothing. Signalling values isn't 'another thing', it's what underlies every motivation for an ad or display and the better your AI tools get the less of a costly signal it is.
Maybe every person you talk to is autistic with no sense for creativity at all. Thats what most of this dogshit website consists of. Programmers with no values, no creativity, no friends, no life and no self awareness. People who actually should be replaced by AI because they lack human values.
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