KDE started doing a similar thing in 2024. They pop up a notification asking for donations once yearly. Whether you click "Donate" or "No Thanks" on the pop-up, it will go away until the next year. I don't mind them doing this, as it clearly works (see https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-n... and https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ ). Historically, contributions to KDE mainly came from companies/government agencies funding work on specific technologies/parts of the desktop, and volunteers working on their special interests. This meant there was a giant blind spot for work on areas that weren't relevant for corporations/governments and weren't fun to work on in someone's free time. All the small individual donations make it possible for KDE to act independently of these large companies/government bodies and hire its own developers to work on tasks that may not be commercially relevant or fun, but are important to the project.
IMO it's only fine as long as it respects the user's choice and doesn't keep on asking. If I choose to not donate, do not nag me about it the next year either. If I choose to donate, do not remind me to do it again. I will do it myself if I decide to.
Perhaps it's cultural - where I live repeatedly asking for money is highly frowned upon and only lowers the reputation of the non-profit doing it. The non-profits who only ask once are much more likely to receive multiple donations from the same person.
Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
Did more software ship in 2025 than in 2024? I'm still looking for some actual indication of output here. I get that people feel more productive but the actual metrics don't seem to agree.
I'm still waiting for the Linux drivers to be written because of all the 20x improvements that AI hypers are touting. I would even settle for Apple M3 and M4 computers to be supported by Asahi.
I am not making any argument about productivity about using AI vs. not using AI.
My point is purely that, compared to 2024, the quality of the code produced by LLM inference agent systems is better.
To say that 2025 was a nothing burger is objectively incorrect.
Will it scale? Is it good enough to use professionally? Is this like self driving cars where the best they ever get is stuck with an odd shaped traffic cone? Is it actually more productive?
Who knows?
Im just saying… LLM coding in 2024 sucked. 2025 was a big year.
Really depends on your workflow. Many, many successful musicians are entirely or almost-entirely "in the box" and use mouse+kb for everything. Doubly true when you're talking about mixing and mastering workflows where you're not usually going to be using a MIDI controller at all (but doing plenty of knob-tweaking).
A boss once asked me "is there a way to tell if an image has been Photoshopped?" and I did eventually get him to "yes, if you can see the image it has been digitally processed and altered by that processing". (The brand-name-as-generic conversation was saved for another day.)
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