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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

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Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#181

Post by mullingitover »

salawat wrote: post #82
mullingitover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, Richard "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" Stallman is totally nuts (although I'll give credit where it's due, he finally walked back his stance on pedophilia). A stopped clock is still right twice a day.

First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened. One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more." If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human specie…

> First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened.

Yes, I pointed out his backtracking on that.

> After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.

I don't think of Stallman as an enemy, just a very creepy guy who happened to make some important contributions. Regardless of his backpedaling, I would have extreme reservations about leaving him unsupervised around children. That doesn't mean his ideas were all bad, just that he shouldn't be put on a pedestal. Lots of great ideas came from very flawed people.

- Fritz Haber is responsible for the Haber process that unlocked atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer, and saved multitudes from starvation. He was also responsible for horrific suffering thanks to his other project, chemical weapons.

- Hans Reiser was a brilliant engineer who created a widely used linux filesystem. He's also a convicted murderer.

- Wernher von Braun was a brilliant rocket maker who was responsible in large part for putting Americans on the moon. He was also a Nazi who made weapons that killed many innocent civilians.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#182

Post by scroot »

Zak wrote: post #177
linguae wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I largely agree with you, and I share many of the same sentiments. Personal computing is supposed to be about user empowerment; the ability for users to not only communicate with other people and to get work done, but to also automate their tasks through programming. Early personal computing was about achieving this vision, and while it may not have fully attained this vision, companies in the 1980s and 1990s at leas…

Your mention of Hypercard is nostalgic for me. That was my first real introduction to programming. I had seen a BASIC prompt on an Apple II, but that lacked sufficient discoverability given my age and available resources at the time. Hypercard, on the other hand came with some example stacks (its name for a self-contained application), and it was just a couple clicks to see how anything worked. It was, of course too…

> Nothing has really replaced it, and Apples most popular current platform now would forbid anything with equivalent functionality.

I think a lot of us will agree that it's a shame Apple allowed Hypercard to wither and die. What you might not know -- and what I only learned about a year ago -- is that there was an effort within Apple's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to make more of the whole system (and programming generally) "Hypercard-like" called SK8 [1]. It seems like it was received with confused stares from the more traditional developers in the company. And, as with much of the really interesting ATG work, it was tossed out eventually.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#183

Post by the_af »

Nextgrid wrote: post #178
the_af wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pragmatism is short sighted though. Don't exchange convenience now, with shackles, for freedom later on. In any case, not being able to install whatever he wants, or being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM is a very immediate limitation even Joe Average will notice and complain about -- unless we, the people who know better, "train" him to accept this is the way things are and there's nothing…

> being forbidden from sharing things with friends because of DRM Is it? When it comes to media, it used to be that you would have a collection of music/movies ripped from physical formats or pirated, both of which are time-consuming. It is indeed a problem that media nowadays can't be easily shared, but is it a complete loss? You could argue that the widespread availability of near "all" media (at least when it come…

I don't disagree with some of what you say, but I'm depressed about these points:

- Free software is better in many areas. The internet as we know it wouldn't exist without it. If you feel passionately about a piece of free (or open, whatever) software that in your opinion is lacking in some regard, why not contribute to it?

- If people aren't aware or "don't care" it's our job as tech-minded people who read HN and other technology related sites to make them care. Yes, it's our job, as important -- or more important -- as creating the next fancy startup to disrupt this or that. It's our job to push back whenever someone here or anywhere argues that walled gardens are convenient and we can't have users actually owning the computers they paid for because of malware yadda yadda.

- If you are not personally aware of the battle-tested arguments for users' rights, the right to tinker, and for general purpose computing, it's your job to educate yourself. Yes, it matters that much.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#184

Post by samatman »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #158
samatman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other optio…

Traditional Judaic society has a caste of people who do nothing but study sacred texts, and they've got a decent track record - I think it comes down to how much public admiration there is for the best open-source coders, if there's a lot it would attract a lot of talent.

Rabbis aren't the wealthiest members of traditional Jewish society.

But they can afford large families, and good marriages for their children. Monks they are not.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#185

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

jariel wrote: post #129
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other But we can. One Thing that is absolutely evident from the fantastically vibrant open source communities forming around every conceivable niche, it is exactly how much energy and enthusiasm to do just that is out there. We “just“ need to scale it up.

"I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other" Hmm, maybe we could 'exchange' our services and creative works for some kind of 'credit system, or currency' - not controlled by a 'central source' - but, you know, acting as 'free acting agents and groups of agents' - freely exchanging our products services for one another, setting our own prices and te…

I imagine some form of market economy will always be an important part of organizing human endeavors. The driving force in a market economy is _extrinsinc_ though. Or as some in thread put it, “greed”.

What we are talking about here is carving out a complementary arrangement scaling up _intrinsicly_ motivated production.

One interesting thing that happens when trying to use extrinsic rewards to encourage some behavior is that it tends to suppress any intrinsic motivation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory

Also for more on the intersection of open source development culture and economic systems I warmly recommend to checkout “The Wealth of Networks” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#186

Post by einpoklum »

Guthur wrote: post #115
mjevans wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want. The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many. This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should und…

Interest, will or passion are not "greed"; you're over-generalizing its meaning.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#187

Post by einpoklum »

> Opponents of DRM like the slogan, "You bought it, you own it."

Not really. Capitalist opponents of DRM like that. Many of us are against ownership and property as such - but do support autonomy, privacy, decentralization of power and the breaking of the dichotomy between user and designer/programmer, between producer and consumer.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#188

Post by Zak »

scroot wrote: post #182
Zak wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mention of Hypercard is nostalgic for me. That was my first real introduction to programming. I had seen a BASIC prompt on an Apple II, but that lacked sufficient discoverability given my age and available resources at the time. Hypercard, on the other hand came with some example stacks (its name for a self-contained application), and it was just a couple clicks to see how anything worked. It was, of course too…

> Nothing has really replaced it, and Apples most popular current platform now would forbid anything with equivalent functionality. I think a lot of us will agree that it's a shame Apple allowed Hypercard to wither and die. What you might not know -- and what I only learned about a year ago -- is that there was an effort within Apple's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to make more of the whole system (and programmin…

I had not heard about that. It was written in Lisp, for extra awesomeness.

I fear the opportunity to popularize such a thing has passed, though I suspect the discoverability not quite as valuable in an era where information is orders of magnitudes more available.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#189

Post by benlivengood »

the_af wrote: post #165
benlivengood wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've seen over the last ~25 years is that general purpose computing is a double-edged sword for normal people. The most straightforward reasons for most of the walled gardens are malware, adware, spyware, and ransomware. Android probably comes the closest to a free market for software that gives normal users some measure of control over their own devices. It requires TPM and secure boot so that there's a viable…

> The most straightforward reasons for most of the walled gardens are malware, adware, spyware, and ransomware. These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much. I think the real reason is DRM and control over the platform; malware gets used as the stick in this argument, and is mostly a red herring. There used to be a time tech-minded people widely considered…

> These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much.

With respect, the threats are real. I spend plenty of time removing unwanted software from my relatives' PCs. Antivirus/antimalware software is not much better; it slows the systems down significantly and doesn't protect against adware.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#190

Post by jariel »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #185
jariel wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other" Hmm, maybe we could 'exchange' our services and creative works for some kind of 'credit system, or currency' - not controlled by a 'central source' - but, you know, acting as 'free acting agents and groups of agents' - freely exchanging our products services for one another, setting our own prices and te…

I imagine some form of market economy will always be an important part of organizing human endeavors. The driving force in a market economy is _extrinsinc_ though. Or as some in thread put it, “greed”. What we are talking about here is carving out a complementary arrangement scaling up _intrinsicly_ motivated production. One interesting thing that happens when trying to use extrinsic rewards to encourage some behavio…

I disagree.

A market economy is not based on greed, it's based on the willingness of people to provide services for one another whereupon actor's first motivation may be individual wealth creation, but the side effects of trade, division of labour and especially competition create massive surpluses, usually for the buyers, i.e. consumers.

Most importantly, companies are only successful if they focus really hard on doing things that others (i.e. 'the market') believe is valuable.

Paradoxically - it is 'intrinsically motivated' behaviour that is 'greedy' or purely self-oriented. To think that someone - anyone - deserves some kind of high standard of material living because 'they want to do whatever they want all day' - irrespective of the net utility they create for the community ... is selfish.

'Intrinsically motivated work' already has a name, it's called 'art'. And in that I would lump the vast majority of OSS which was designed to meet the makers view of what is useful, not 'the market's view', which is why most of it is not used.

Nothing could be less healthy on the whole than letting Engineers build 'whatever they want' because most of it will be completely useless, and projects will generally not produce enough material input to be able to do anything at scale.

Another bit of paradox is that if there were more efficient means to fairly license and maintain software - 90% of OSS makers would happily do that. I don't believe they are ideologically tied to OSS - if they could tool away on their favorite bit of software and earn what they though was a 'fair living' by selling it - they would do it in a heartbeat.

Intrinsically motivated initiatives are important, and frankly, nobody would do Engineering if they didn't like it on some level, but it's only one ingredient, and not the primary driver.

And of course, most labour has zero possibility for intrinsic motivation: 40-80% of jobs would instantly be vacated if that were the only motivator as they're just too grinding, boring, difficult for someone to do mostly on that basis.

The market forces people to 'serve others' and that's ironically want people don't want to do ... because it's a grind. What people really 'want to do' is 'whatever they want' which probably won't bode well on the whole for having a broadly high standard of living.

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