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Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've never understood - and if I ever become absurdly wealthy I will try these kinds of random absurdities - is how few of the rich use the power they have to create new definitions of art. For instance, sure you can commission paintings and trade them. But how trite and boring.. imagine commissioning your own RISC-V implementation, or a file system, or something similar that millions of people come to rely on. You could do these kinds of things for a few million dollars each. Without any commercial expectation you could do pretty audacious reaches that would occasionally deliver humanitarian value. Maybe I'm a weirdo..

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You're not a weirdo. This is something I feel similarly about, but here's the thing about rich people:

1. The path to becoming rich puts them in a social class that warps their view of what matters and leaves measuring themselves against arbitrary hierarchies of their own making.

2. The path to becoming rich in modern society is such that the kind of people who would commission RISC-V implementations or security audits of popular open source software or cheap medical interventions simply cannot succeed. It may require too much of a compromise of those beliefs to actually win.

Don't get me wrong it would totally be about ego and about how excellent your own design tastes are. You'd name all the stuff after yourself. That's why it'd be considered art :D

Some of the robber barons did some interesting eccentricities like Carnegie libraries.

The Long Now clock is the most recent thing I can think of.

This is a fantastic idea that I’d guess is one of the selling points of universities and other software foundations.

Maybe they could attract more dollars to their projects by naming them after the main benefactor...

As soon as there's a committee it's almost certainly going to be philanthropy rather than art. The presumption is that you have excellent taste and exercise Steve Jobs-esque tyrannical control over the aesthetics.

I think there is something more to why the wealthy buy art besides just the intrinsic artistic value of it. In my mind I compare it to how in the past a person would gain status by wielding a certain sword, or by wearing a certain crown. I think it could be similar to art -- who has previously owned the piece, or who created it could be a huge part of its value. I also think there is something to it being a sort of currency/store of value that can be exchanged outside of the normal currency system. Maybe it is to avoid taxes, or to have a record of a shady transaction

That is what two guys are doing. One is named Larry and other is named Sergey. There's actually a third one named Elon too. Actually there are two more named Bill and Warren who maybe actually be doing it was well if you don't just look at it from a purely engineering domain (i.e. beyond filesystems, networking, CPUs).

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/12/9140477/google-alphabet-larry-...

Larry, Sergey, and Elon are called entrepreneurship, or at least I've never heard of anything they've done outside that. They are accountable to many people in their public acts, and especially in the case of G almost none of what they do is artful, quite the opposite really. Elon is a visionary, but still very much an entrepreneur.

Bill and Warren are engaging in philanthropy, which is equitable and far more commendable than my suggestion.

What I am suggesting is simply individualist exuberance outside the normal tangible goods and conventional arts.

At least one (absurdly?) wealthy person did something like this. Check out the Museum of Old and New Art[0][1].

Obviously it's not file systems or whatever, but he's definitely pushing the "definitions of art" for stuff he's interested in. Helps to have your own museum.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art

[1]: https://mona.net.au

Or maybe a clock designed to keep time for 10000 years? Or launching your personal automobile into interplanetary space?

People are doing this kind of stuff, just not always in a way that we nerds find interesting.

I would like to orbit durable messages around each of the inner rocky planets such that they form a "Burma Shave" style rhyme, similar to this:

  Life can take a nasty turn,
  If you try to pee
  In a transfer burn.
  Kodos toilets, for zero gee!

Alas, I am not absurdly wealthy.

Forgot about The 10,000 Year Clock (http://longnow.org/clock/). That seems nerdy but somewhat hard to conceptualize.

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