The good things in the current age in tech

Putting Jitsi aside for the moment, Zoom and other video call systems saved lives during the pandemic. It enabled fewer in person gatherings, staved off depression/suicide by maintaining social connections, and enabled remote work.

Less momentously but significant to me, my kids have learned an insane breadth of technologies by watching science and maker Youtube channels, presented in a very accessible way to kids. At 7yo, I didn't know what a lathe or welder was, let alone excitedly insist that my parents get one.

3D printing wasn't mentioned but hot damn, it's satisfying to fix the unfixable by printing a new part. It wasn't too long ago that "broken plastic doohickey" meant throwing the whole thing in the trash.

And another one for kids: cheap and individual computing devices. No more time sharing of a modem on the single computer in the house! In fact, touch interfaces and responsive graphics has kids learning skills before they can even read. Watching elementary kids work on and submit homework on a Chromebook is kind of interesting, compared to my education.

My unfiltered additions:

* SpaceX. I have lots of reservations about the company but the fact that they are consistently doing things previously thought impossible is very important for humanity in general.

* The new Dune movie was downright amazing. The CGI was believable and an important part of the story.

* AI-generated art. Fascinating.

* Wikipedia. Wow.

* I can invest in lots of different assets relatively easily.

* Playwright and Puppeteer. I have automated a lot of workflows thanks to those projects. Pressing a button and watching those workflows run is an empowering experience.

* Raspberry Pi and Arduino. A month back I built little hack projects for the pure joy of exploring. Very rejuvenating experience.

* Electric cars. I'm particularly excited about the F-150 Lightning. They really leaned into the whole electric thing and tried to find some compelling use cases e.g. the generator and the massive front storage (Disclosure: I have some Ford stock, less than 1% of my overall portfolio). The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful.

* Wind + solar + nuclear energy. And a nod to geothermal and hydroelectric. Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.

You bring up a great point: how do we deliver high-quality software to the general public that is stable, easy-to-use, and secure, yet respects user privacy? Ad-tech and other forms of surveillance technologies have become quite prevalent in consumer technology in recent years, such as the proliferation of smart TVs with ads. I find free, open source software to respect my privacy and generally be stable and secure, but I find it harder to use than proprietary alternatives, and I think the reason it's harder to use is because there's no money being poured into making it easier to use. With the exception of Firefox it's hard for me to think of a commercially-backed desktop FOSS project, while when it comes to system software (e.g., operating systems, compilers, databases, Web servers, Web frameworks, etc.), I can list plenty of examples of commercially-backed projects. I don't think it's a coincidence that FOSS has done so well in the server room (where big companies have backed the development of Linux, MySQL, Node.js, LLVM/Clang, and many other projects) and in computer science academia (funded by grants from industry and government, as well as the free time of students and faculty; heck, RMS himself had an office at MIT and won awards with large monetary prizes), yet it has struggled to gain a significant foothold on desktops used by the general public except for LibreOffice and Firefox, the latter of which was quite popular during the interregnum of Internet Explorer 6 and Google Chrome.

There are two possible avenues to improve the situation on the desktop:

1. One challenge is the sheer complexity of modern desktop software. Take a program such as GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox, and consider how many lines of code these programs are written in. Even for a senior-level software engineer it will take some on-boarding time to become familiar with the codebase of one of these projects. Modifying the program could become quite an effort. If even experienced software engineers struggle to find the time to contribute code to FOSS projects, then making such a contribution would be almost impossible for members of the general public, the vast majority of whom have no coding experience.

I'm wondering how much of this complexity could be pared down such that it would lead to a FOSS software ecosystem where it's easier for users, technical and non-technical, to make contributions. The easier it is to make contributions, the greater the likelihood we'll have a thriving ecosystem of FOSS for desktop computing. Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute's STEPS project (http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf) appears to be an interesting starting point.

2. Another challenge is thinking of new funding mechanisms for FOSS that don't rely on unpredictable donations, the backing of large corporations, or licensing changes (such as the moves that MongoDB made a few years ago in an attempt to stop cloud service providers like Amazon). For example, there should be other business models Mozilla could use in case Google shuts off its funding, but the challenge is I'm struggling of thinking of them.

If you're a parent of a young child, check out https://www.starfall.com.

It'll teach your kids phonics even if their teachers aren't.

> You bring up a great point: how do we deliver high-quality software to the general public that is stable, easy-to-use, and secure, yet respects user privacy?

You have an honest business model where people pay for things.

"Free" is the cornerstone of surveillance capitalism.