41–50 of 95 posts
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A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness. How do you compete with that?
Linux?
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The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.
Muh safe spaces
In a world where my rights are debated, my family is attacked, where I've been afraid for my life and well being in public spaces, where some of my acquaintances have been murdered in public spaces, and where some of my safe spaces have been bombed, I don't understand why my request for a place where I don't have to fucking deal with that shit is so bad.
This is a good idea – but impossible. Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. How do you compete with that? The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause. But t…
A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness. How do you compete with that?
Do you seriously think Torvalds, Stallmann and a few dozen enthusiasts could maintain all of the Linux ecosystem?
This is a good idea – but impossible. Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. How do you compete with that? The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause. But t…
This same argument has been made countless times. "Linux has no chance in the corporate world. HP has thousands of paid devs working on HP-UX." It turned out there were a greater number of devs NOT at HP... and today, there are more devs NOT at Facebook.
So which company would have the resources and reasons for contributing to an entirely open social network, with no way to monetize it?
This is a good idea – but impossible. Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. How do you compete with that? The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause. But t…
What blows my mind is how much money Facebook gets from ads. I've never clicked a Facebook ad except by accident. And yet they get paid more for my presence than I'd ever be willing to pay for a social network. That's the real rub for me. I mean, we imagine the ideal "decentrialized but user-friendly web". Like, there's an online open architecture of servers where you have a cryptographically-controlled "account" for…
>If the closed web is a place where hate speech, harassment and bullying thrives, the open web can be, needs to be an experience where it does not. I am strongly against this appeal to censorship. Luckily in the real open web, where you host your own content the incentives and mechanisms for censorship are few and difficult to achieve. No, my dream of the open web is diverse. Full of things people hate and full of th…
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If you want a book that uses national polls conducted over the past 40+ years, plus a little bit of anecdotal evidence to make the data tangible, I recommend iGen by Jean M. Twenge[0]. There's a noticeable trend that the kids of this upcoming generation are ill-prepared for college and expect the authorities to protect them. In highschool, they're less likely to go out without their parents or work a part-time job (A…
Yeah, about that: > For instance, Twenge argues that young people have become increasingly self-absorbed since the advent of the Internet. One piece of evidence she uses is a search she ran through Google's Ngram (which searches through printed books) for the phrase "I love me." She found a sharp spike in the phrase in the last few decades. But "I love me" sounds slightly off — surely most people say "I love myself."…
I think the main issue is that we're trying to measure changes over a long period of time across a wide swathe of people. Those are two very difficult areas to study.
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This same argument has been made countless times. "Linux has no chance in the corporate world. HP has thousands of paid devs working on HP-UX." It turned out there were a greater number of devs NOT at HP... and today, there are more devs NOT at Facebook.
But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it. So which company would have the resources and reasons for contributing to an entirely open social network, with no way to monetize it?
Who says this won't happen as well to an open collaboration platform? Who says companies wouldn't benefit from it, or that they need to monetize it directly? Companies contributed to Linux because they got benefits by participating in the operating system. Open source works like that; adding to a common resource is beneficial for oneself and the community at the same time.
Similarly, an open platform like matrix.org can provide huge benefits for internal communication in a company; and making public the tweaks that you create internally is a great way to influence the direction of the software, as well as making it easier to integrate the improvements made by others. This is how Linux grew to what it is today, after all.
>If the closed web is a place where hate speech, harassment and bullying thrives, the open web can be, needs to be an experience where it does not. I am strongly against this appeal to censorship. Luckily in the real open web, where you host your own content the incentives and mechanisms for censorship are few and difficult to achieve. No, my dream of the open web is diverse. Full of things people hate and full of th…
The reason we're in the mess that we are is the shit show the open web was. People were delighted to have a walled garden where they only communicated with friends, instead of random drive-by trolls in the open. And frankly, it's understandable. A place that justifies bullying and hate speech as a good thing, with mumblings of "b.. b.. but free speech", is not a place where anybody wants to spend their time. (Except…
I spend most of my time on the open web, and don't see many drive-by trolls. I don't think that is the reason the web became closed.
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Muh safe spaces
I started to explain why safe spaces are necessary, but I realize that "Muh safe spaces" isn't an argument. In a world where my rights are debated, my family is attacked, where I've been afraid for my life and well being in public spaces, where some of my acquaintances have been murdered in public spaces, and where some of my safe spaces have been bombed, I don't understand why my request for a place where I don't ha…