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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)

#201

Post by CryptoPunk »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #195
samatman wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But importantly, a brilliant scholar of humble means is considered a desirable partner. If a brilliant coder of open-source were similarly desirable in our hypothetical future, I'm sure things would work out.

What generally makes men desirable to women is status, which can come from money, influence, or any other power to shape the world around them.

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

#202

Post by ece »

rgbrenner wrote: post #116
sabujp wrote: post #96

general purpose computers will exist, they are literally the building blocks. However, it'll be bad when you as a private entity can't purchase CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, the building blocks for building your own general purpose computing device. I don't ever see that happening since there will always be engineers, students, hackers, startups, how will any new industries form if they can't get their hands on the sourc…

There are a lot of other fields where you need to go to university just to use the building blocks of the field. Doctors cant just acquire cadavers and try it out at home. Those industries move much slower, but innovation in our field might be related to how new it is. There are many cheap computers like rpi, but regulations could demand certain security controls that might eliminate those devices. So I could imagine…

The internet has neutral authorities for managing DNS, SSL, numerous protocols like http, and Net Neutrality exists even if the current FCC doesn't seem to think so.

There should accordingly be a neutral authority for signing apps, and requiring that companies build on neutral connectivity standards like PCIE. The ecosystem can stay open as it matures, but you're right, if the internet remains 4 giant companies, then yeah, even general purpose computing devices can be reduced to iOS, Windows 10 S, and Android with locked bootloaders and no alternative app stores.

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

#203

Post by ece »

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…

Is Filemaker close to Hypercard in some ways? I'm not too familiar with Hypercard.

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

#204

Post by fsflover »

Shared404 wrote: post #196
fsflover wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://thinkpenguin.com/ https://minifree.org/ https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en But the first company (Purism) specifically attempts to change the industry, they state it as one of their goals: https://puri.sm/learn/why-purism-computers-are-better-than-p... .

This is true. Thanks for both the other companies, and the important distinction.

One more: https://tehnoetic.com/

And for completeness:

Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission

https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-c...

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

#206

Post by SuoDuanDao »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #201
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But importantly, a brilliant scholar of humble means is considered a desirable partner. If a brilliant coder of open-source were similarly desirable in our hypothetical future, I'm sure things would work out.

What generally makes men desirable to women is status, which can come from money, influence, or any other power to shape the world around them.

Agreed. So if we wanted to go that route (disclaimer: I think it's our best bet) we'd have to somehow confer high status to the best open-source code monks.

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

#207

Post by FerretFred »

samatman wrote: post #48
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…

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…

We talk about the software a lot, but we mustn't overlook the hardware. Talking about, say, the next 10 years, we need to find a way of making Open Hardware truly affordable: I can't afford a Purism device but I could probably afford a PinePhone. However, that would probably not be powerful enough for me nor the average user. The Raspberry Pi is looking tempting again but it incorporates non-free BLOBs. What we need is a Open Philanthropist who'd be willing to recognise the problems and throw money at them. We recognise the problems and have ideas about solutions, but I get the feeling we're missing the tools to get up on the next rung of the ladder...

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

#208

Post by rektide »

rektide wrote: post #17
matheusmoreira wrote: post #4

> But in general, the poorer and younger you are, the more likely you are to be a tenant farmer in some feudal lord's computational lands. An analogy that will probably define the 21st century...

all it takes is endless zero pay toil living with doesn't just work not all easy open source. to make our own lands. heck yeah let's keep all picking the subsidized to near free consumer experience.

holding at -2.

i do think it's worth asking what the alternatives are, and what we have to do to chase them.

i was very salty above, but i feel like i have embodied the zeitgeist, captured the popular attitude, fairly accurately, to get an escape from capture into techno-feudalism.

i for one also have spent a lot of my life with endless zero pay toil, chasing the better alternatives, basically sure that my life will never reach any kind of techno-culmination, never achieve any kind of useful escaped coherency, but engaged in the struggle none the less. for zero pay, expectations of reward, other than personal satisfaction at having made a go at homesteading myself on the digital.

i'd also say that i don't find open source uneasy to work with, & in fact it feels more comfortable to me, lets me go down rabbit holes but rabbit holes that ultimately, usually, culminate in some kind of ground truth & insight, some understanding gained. my macbook on the other hand started refusing to connect to my wifi 3 weeks ago & there's next to no hope for understanding why the macbook has had this change of heart, for finding out what went wrong. the macbook will remain unknowable, a thing that is unexaminable, outside the scientific process & unadaptable; in some ways it's comforting, getting to a hard wall & having no place further to look, but i for one will take & hope humanity continues to have rabbit holes to dive into & chase down, towards reason, towards understanding, towards betterment.

and it's just so much easier & more interesting to situate myself in such a powerful land, as OSS brings.

i think we should take Cory's techno-feudalism concerns very seriously, and very much consider what we ourselves can do, and assess more honestly the behaviors & perceptions of the options about us.

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

#209

Post by core-questions »

the_af wrote: post #162
core-questions wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. What these people don't know is that we already had all of these arguments, 20+ years ago, on Usenet and Slashdot and a ton of mailing lists and it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll. The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago. The problem…

> The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago. This is what depresses me. It was won, like you said -- yet there's a new generation of tech-minded people, even here (or on stackoverflow, reddit and many other places), who are not Joe Averages and who don't acknowledge the matter is settled, who disregard the old arguments, and who will argue walled gardens and locked down hardware ar…

People don't understand what freedoms are until they see negative examples of them missing from their lives (or at least, portrayals of such).

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

#210

Post by core-questions »

zhte415 wrote: post #155
core-questions wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one can still find plenty of people who will argue in favor of walled gardens and against general computing. What these people don't know is that we already had all of these arguments, 20+ years ago, on Usenet and Slashdot and a ton of mailing lists and it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll. The argument in favour of Free Software was won, philosophically, a while ago. The problem…

> it's all still there; every counter-argument, every riposte, every troll. Is it? Logging into my old Slashdot account after several years of not bisiting /., early 6 digits, I found old posts removed.

You posted this just so you could brag about your account. I bet mine is older
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