Tech went from free love to pay-per-click
theregister.com
theregister.com
Do people also charge money for things and make a living? Yup. That shouldn't be a surprise. And people shouldn't be painted as bad for wanting to make a living providing things that other people want.
A healthy society both needs a venue for people who want to provide things at no cost - the payment being the enjoyment of doing it when other sources of income exist - and for people to charge for the fruits of their labor.
it starts off being sad about some attendees at a developer conference existing?? note that the conference itself specifically reserved and invited an "AI track", so concerns on that side seem ridiculous. on the other side, sure, cryptocurrency is a little tangential but what is cryptocurrency if not an attempt at a decentralized open-source store of value? I'm certainly no cryptocurrency fan but this venue doesn't seem particularly far off.
then the article meanders around about how technological development has rapidly reduced costs in the space and adds some general concern porn about standardization. the whole thing is some dumb background level of nostalgia for a world that never existed.
it's not like open source is dying because of profit motive. if anything, a lot of open source is kept alive because of companies with a profit motive investing in it. you can claim the contributions from corporations to open source are insufficient, but you can't claim... wait, again, what exactly is this article claiming?
Part 3 is a bit more speculative and I am not sure when it'll follow.
“Like an archer and arrow, the wise man steadies his trembling mind, a fickle and restless weapon. Flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground, it trembles all day -- Siddhartha Gautama"
The important part of the message there is "the mind is a fickle and restless weapon, flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground". People's minds are seething to fill a void, which often manifests in mindlessly grabbing money to buy things we don't need and acquire power for a brief period of time.
The only way to a better future is to better educate children about their minds.
But it scales to a few thousand or a million people. A global population of 8 billion empty, needy "fickle and restless" minds "flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground"... we can't sustain that. There is not enough excitement, adventure, wild frontiers, amusement and frippery to satisfy it.
Which is why religion, and the arts, and things people do to find meaning beyond toil and low pleasures not only travelled to America, they prospered there like never before.
It's only relatively recently that we've started to use technology to undo that and work against creation of meaning rather than towards it.
It's only relatively recently that we've started to use technology to undo that and work against creation of meaning rather than towards it.
Examples?
A fairly clear one would be widespread "over-zealous use of intellectual property technology to stifle culture". It's getting easier to do with all kinds of digital handcuffs, TPMs, and mechanisms that take agency and meaning away from the owner of a computer and place it in the hands of who really controls the computer. It's concomitant with "surveillance capitalism" but I think marks a qualitative change from computers as enabling tools in the 20th century, to systems of social control in the 21st. That marks a significant change in the "meaning" of computers qua purpose, optimism and opportunity (for everyone not just geeks and developers.) I feel quite sure artists who worry about AI would say similar but in a different way.
We've done it before. Kids in 1985 knew what files and directories on their computers were. I went to a bad segregated school on the South Side of Chicago, and I knew, because we had a class. Kids these days don't know. Maybe 15 years from now they'll call the kids who can navigate their phones through touch "techies" because all they'll know how to do is to politely ask their phones to do things. Maybe that will be the adults.
We are now left with Wall Street expectations that are out of scale for the usefulness of the technology being developed. The technology seems to be developed with a focus on being a service with the widest possible addressable market and the lowest possible cost per click.
Most of the world's problems don't fit those parameters. Luckily most tech news is white noise. There is a lot of good work and it doesn't get much oxygen. The recent thread on the paper "What goes around comes around and around" is a good window on how to do good work.
The worst people are those who fight over the control of old free software projects, usually using DEI as a shield to a) establish a tyranny b) silence all opposition and c) secure their $250,000 jobs at Google, Facebook, Microsoft since they now have gotten rid of vast amounts of competition while pretending that they want to "grow the team".
This kind of behavior is not limited to software though. It was the Hippies of 1970 who slowly grew more powerful, and in the 1980s/1990s sold out entire manufacturing economies to Asia and Eastern Europe while pretending that The West is now a knowledge economy. And they got rich in the process of dumping IP while at the same time destroying local workers' livelihoods by replacing them with cheaper immigrants.
Can you provide an example where someone, using DEI, took over an open source project, ruled tyannicly, ended people's rights to speech and then used that to get a 250k job at Google, Facebook or Microsoft?
"Only maximally fuzzy claims that align with my vibes are allowed, facts are for haters"
Definitely a good sign when your model of the world cannot be allowed to ever touch actual reality. Or grass.
Web2 open source tools: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform (https://qbix.com/ecosystem)
Web3 open source tools: https://github.com/orgs/Intercoin/repositories (https://intercoin.org/applications)
Anyone is welcome to get involved or sponsor the projects. But frankly my experience with most VCs I have met has been that they try to avoid deep, decentralized open source platforms like this, so they can make quick wins on the latest fad. Mostly individuals here and there get it. But 95% of the time it turns out they have no money or liquidity, and I don’t have time chasing and finding out who does. That’s the nature of these things. It’s a lonely job.
Honestly, even though it’s completely free and open source, and gives people the tools to do what until now they could only do with Big Tech platforms, I expect many people on HN here will ding all of it — because that second project (Intercoin) is about blockchain-based applications.
So you can see the fate of open source free projects by how this post does.
Here’s one I just did https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wbMUiksMO8wHkbe-ySNL2ad0Gso...
EDIT: please try it now, I think I fixed it!