Thiel is firmly in the "rules for thee but not for me" camp which means any authoritarianism he isn't in control of is even worse than a democracy. Ironically many people feel this way but most just don't have the wealth to try their hand at oppression.
I'm a professional software engineer and even I get excited about having an ai vibe out some throwaway software for me (two recent examples - a personal recipe site I never made time for and a video game skill tree build tool that isn't worth the time it would have taken to build).
As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream something up then have it exist. This is very cool!
That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community (architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.
There are so many more options than a 4 year administration being hostile to the people it's supposed to represent. Corruption will undermine any collective action amongst honest collaborators regardless of what color their party flag is.
Also, having a baseline of public care and then private as an option on top doesn't sound like the boogeyman this is pitching it as to me. That seems like a great way to reduce the scope of what the state needs to be in charge of.
If the take is that government cannot possibly work for the people no matter what then yeah, all policy is bad.
Free market usefully means both sides can choose to participate in transactions which means price is how they do that. It is a useful concept but it doesn't cover everything, like what you mentioned and things like if emergency patients are shopping around hospitals or if the average consumer is capable of being well informed in such a market.
This is the power of a brand. Kirkland and some private label products are literally the same as the competitor products and yet are perceived differently. Even in your Pepsi vs Coke example, Pepsi routinely wins in blind taste tests but there are more "Coke people".
It will be interesting to see if the LLM companies can establish their own "brand" and how they will do that. LLM voice is a thing but not sure if it's a good thing people will use to hang their self identity on. Distillation of models and constant training also make this complicated. Claude code is winning on harness and ux right now but it seems precarious and also easy to commoditize. I think elon tried to add branding to his chatbot pretty intelligently by being iconically crude/evil/"anti woke" since it's both highly visible and less likely to be copied.
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