About Us

The software tech industry has lost its purpose to humanity. The latest craze that tech corporations are pushing onto everyone else is the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs). They desperately try to sell it as an inevitability despite being extremely unprofitable and having yet to find a use for it that doesn't involve trying to displace entire fields of human labor that should have them. Under the hood LLMs are not much more impressive than being statistical models autocompleting the next most appropriate thing to output, differing in the sheer amount of information and computation provided to them to give the illusion of intelligence and sapience. And no, LLMs are incapable of these qualities; if you have strong beliefs that the chatbot you are talking to is real, you may want to check with your doctor if you're suspectible to psychosis.

While there are interesting components that drive these models such as encoding tokens in semantic vector spaces, the resulting technology that is being peddled to the consumer is a machine that fabricates information and is statistically improbable to be verifiably correct regardless of how many guardrails are put in place to guide its output. The adoption of GenAI by the public has allowed even more fabricated imagery and information than what the internet was already plagued with, given the average person who does not understand how to write software a dangerous power tool that can create a hazard to their self and others, and perfectly aligns with the mindset of a corporate manager so distanced from the real world to enable them to continue pretending to be valuable. The problem with writing software was never the ability to produce more of it, but in being able to verify the correctness of it, and the lack of direction and design thought from LLMs exacerbates the tech debt in an industry whose entire motto is to "move fast and break things."

The good news in spite of everything is GenAI companies seem doomed to fail due to a severe lack of profits that don't ultimately come from investor groups, compounded with GenAI models being far too expensive to sell to consumers at a price they are willing to pay for. This appears to be another fad that will fail and end up becoming a niche, adding to the growing pile of past failures from the tech industry such as the metaverse, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and NFTs (perhaps it's a success if you scam people for a living), quantum computing, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, and more. For how you can better inform yourself about generative AI and how to discuss it with other people productively, check these two videos out. To be clear, generative AI is merely a symptom of a much larger systemic issue, and the scope of our concerns is not limited to GenAI, but the proliferation and nature of the tech is an apt representation of the problems with the direction of the software industry.

The current trend for software is a world in which the richest tech corporations own all of the information, computation, hardware, and software, and you rent it from them and own none of it. They transform their documentation and processes to be for the consumption of GenAI agents, pushing for a future in which the computer is more important than the person, and their collective disdain of humanity becomes more evident each passing day. Nettybyte is a counterculture to such a movement, focusing on authoring software that is stable, understandable, meticulously designed for correctness, and respects and empowers the user.

We have an intimate understanding of our tech stack and are comfortable with writing full implementations of projects from scratch without the need to ask a chatbot how to write it. Our focus is creating software for hobbyists and those who want to self-host, and creating long running servers with low complexity and low resource consumption on computer hardware. We believe you should be able to own and understand your software, and we hope you will find immense value in our up-and-coming projects.