Have you seen this?

If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand.

Go ahead. Try it out.

Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep scrolling up. Last time I did this it took me 12 minutes and 51 seconds, but the whole time I had a way out.

We get a button on the screen that lets us punch out any time we want: I quit. But do other Americans get an easy way out of the most extreme wealth concentration in history, piled up together all the way down there at the bottom of this graph?

No. They don't.

That's why we built this website. That's why I supported the updated 2026 wealth inequality video series, because 14 years ago, the original video changed how I thought about the world. I watched it again and again, year after year, because it shows something we feel, but rarely see so clearly — the obscene concentration of wealth and power in this country.

People deserve to see the facts plainly, visually, with sources and methodology attached. Politizane, The Onion and Garbage Day retained full control over their work. I did not tell anyone what to make, what to say, or how to say it. I told everyone involved the same thing I'm telling you right now – this is not for me, or any organization. It is for the public. It is for We, The People.

I used to be very dismissive of so-called "walking simulators", games where no real choice is offered, it's just an experience. But this graph isn't a game – these are people's actual lives. No one is forcing you to visit this website, no one is making you scroll up endlessly. The experience, then, is about endurance in the face of the relentless task of simply living your daily life with almost nothing, surviving as long as you can without reaching for the "I Quit" button. That's the experience the vast majority of Americans are having. It is harrowing.

As we built the website (Geoff Dalgas, my friend who helped me build Stack Overflow, did all the technical work) and tested it, as I obsessively scrolled upwards so many times, I slowly realized the whole thing is supposed to be inconvenient. The further you climb on this vast scale, the longer this seemingly endless scrolling goes on, the more the reality sinks in... how obscene all of it is. In order to understand the suffering of others, you must be willing to endure and suffer a little bit yourself. In this case, suffering is a feature.

Early iterations of the website had automatic scrolling, or rapid jumps, but I felt that wasn't right and should not be allowed. You need to do the work, make a physical action to scroll the entire way. We even stop you from scrolling at certain milestones.

This is a forced stop because no one should blindly scroll past 36 million Americans living in poverty, while at the same time we could eliminate all poverty in this country for $177 billion.

But we, for some reason, choose not to. We choose to let people suffer in desperate poverty. That's also suffering as a feature. In an era of unprecedented wealth, why shouldn't that money be out there doing something, somewhere, for someone?

I've spent my whole career talking about software usability, and I never thought I would design software that chooses to actively punish the user, but the data itself is the pain. Representing the massive numbers of wealth inequality with a linear scale is the only honest way to present this data. Do you have any idea how many pages it would take to print this graph in its entirety, representing both the richest American at the top, and the poorest American at the bottom?

What you should print out is this is 8 page foldable version of the graph, designed to be a relatable 6 feet, 6 inches, the average NBA player height. Show everyone what the most obscene centerfold of all time looks like. Let them see.

I challenge everyone to climb the graph on dreamagainusa.org as far as you want to.

If you do reach the so-called "top", I have a question.

Was it worth it?

Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted:

Hey Jeff,

Hope you and your family are doing well.

Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a stellar engineer at my work. You offered some words of wisdom, wrote me a postcard, which I still have, and stickers (which my kids loved).

I took a leadership coordination role in Tokyo, and it freed me from the interview process I hated, and I'm still programming. Through the public school here my family found our way into a community, which brings me to why I'm writing.

I've been thinking about Stack Overflow drying up and honestly; I feel profoundly sad.

2013 I was active duty in the Air Force. Simultaneously I was also going to college full time remotely. I was deployed in Zamboanga Philippines. The Zamboanga Siege happens. Over 100 people killed, 120,000 civilians displaced. It was warfare in a populated city where nobody should have every been caught up in that to begin with. For 3 weeks this went on.

I was still doing college. I still had homework, tests, projects. All of that needed to be done.

With everything happening around me, missing my projects and homework became a huge risk. Everyday was a fight to do my job and help these people, and do my school. I would cry a lot looking at my textbooks not sleeping. The smoke from the burning city would come in the cracks of the buildings I worked and lived in.

I had a Microsoft Surface because it was perfect for someone who was flying around with equipment on vehicles that vibrated all the time. I swapped the plate out from my vest and slid in my Surface so that I could still do my homework if we had to leave. That's how important this was to me.

Sometimes I would get stuck, and I needed someone to just nudge me in the right direction.

I actually come from a family with a few software engineers. I have friends who were software engineers. I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself".

You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.

That meant so much to me. I felt a connection to people through a community.

And it meant the world.

An LLM would have done exactly what I wanted back then. But would it have given me what I needed?

At the time, I needed to know somebody cared enough to help me.

You, your colleagues, and random strangers in the Stack Overflow Community, really helped me. It was more than answering my questions. You gave me your time. That made me feel like I mattered. The fact my questions could help other people in my predicament made me feel like I was part of something.

An LLM can't do that.

So when I watch communities hollow out, replaced by something that gives answers but doesn't give me a single thought... I get depressed. Because we're losing something that was always there but I didn't notice. It's like losing gravity.

Thanks for everything.
If you ever find yourself in [city] I'd love to say thank you personally.

Hope all is well,
D

Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire. Communities where we regularly stop to help each other, because that's how we learn too. And if we do not stop to help each other... what do we become?

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who lives in Berlin. We both had something important we wanted to talk about, with slightly different opinions, different perspectives.

They agreed to the requirement. This is our presentation, as delivered Friday, July 10th at the CityCube in Berlin.

The heart of this presentation is the human story of how Ben and I met. As I said on stage:

The long version of this story is that we changed each others' lives. The short version is: unicorns.

You should hear Ben's side of the story directly from him. It's remarkable. Also remarkable is that he left Stack Overflow, then came back... and then left again. I told Ben, I'm mostly doing this presentation because I owe you so much.

Not only Ben, but everyone who participated on Stack Overflow. We did it together, under a bedrock Creative Commons license that respected the effort everyone put into their work to build this commons, this hugely influential Stack Overflow dataset.

It's fine that LLMs intercept most (if not all) of the common programming questions; this aligns with the higher level goals of Stack Overflow:

Passively searching and reading highly ranked Stack Overflow answers as they appear in web search results is arguably the primary goal of Stack Overflow. If Stack Overflow is working like it’s supposed to, 98% of programmers should get all the answers they need from reading search result pages and wouldn’t need to ask or answer a single question in their entire careers. This is a good thing! Great, even!

LLMs also cut the gordian knot of constant duplicate questions that I thought was basically impossible.

When you’re asking a question on a site that doesn’t allow duplicate questions, the problem space of a site with 1 million existing questions is rather different from a site with 10 million existing questions... or 100 million. Asking a single unique question goes from mildly difficult to mission almost impossible, because your question needs to thread a narrow path through this vast, enormous field of prior art questions without stepping on any of the vaguely similar looking landmines in the process.

The way LLMs can map a duplicate question using entirely different words to an existing answer is incredibly transformative, and a huge net positive. Less duplication. More answers, faster. That's the point.

But what happens to the commons when everyone is privately whispering to LLMs? What happens to the communities where programmers learn from each other, the very communities like Stack Overflow where Ben had so much fun becoming a programmer, and got hired for doing things he loved?

You can't "vibe code" love.

Where exactly will the LLMs get their next set of training data from, if we don't build for and protect the commons together? How will we continue to share knowledge – and love – with each other?