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Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?
Ok so gcc and Linux don’t exist in your world.
All the comments here are so negative for such a beautiful essay! This paragraph at the end in particular really struck a chord with me: > In the real world, people associate computers with many different things: corporate dehumanization, overwhelming consumer capitalism, alienation from the material world, shortened attention spans, ridiculously short obsolescence cycles, etc. etc. It is often difficult to tell thes…
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This hasn't been my experience. I'm able to be surprisingly effective on my smartphone. I've constructed trip itineraries, balanced outing budgets, shared shopping lists, designed room layouts, computed food and drink recipe ratios, built DJ sets, laid out wood pieces, and read books using my smartphone. Coding is probably the only thing that I find unparalleled with a keyboard and a seated position than my smartphon…
Really agree. Programming and gaming are the only things I use my laptop for. I have my iPad for CAD and art, everything else I do on my phone. All my trip planning is done on there, all my finances, everything on the phone.
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Or the internet.
Claiming the internet is a net advance for society is a pretty hard sell in the face of the dissolution of critical institutions, proliferation of mental heath issues, and hyper-concentration of wealth it has made possible.
Further, hyper-concentration of wealth is not something “made possible” by the internet. These problems existed before it and will continue existing. Because, if they are any problem at all, they are a social one.
Replace 'computers' with 'open source software' and you are something closer to an uncomfortable truth. Open source has been critical to the advancement of our world but people who go out of their way to use and encourage open source past the basics (even fdroid or Firefox not even getting to hardware and full software stacks) are treated as oddballs even by the tech community.
Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?
I've watched over time as the desktop stopped being the primary computing device of choice for many people. I've grown far too accustomed to the power and flexibility of a nice keyboard and 32" monitor, and virtually endless storage and general purpose compute that I own to fall into that usage pattern, but I understand the appeal. No Wednesday morning headaches from Microsoft, no applications breaking with the new P…
Hah, I'm also "accustomed" like you and always prefer a proper monitor/keyboard first, then a laptop, then lastly a phone even for simple tasks. Obviously things are different if I'm on the street, but if I'm in front of a computer I'd rather use that to check something rather than pull out my phone. It's partially an eyestrain issue (I find the text too small) as well as the fact that the phone shows much less infor…
Web2 and Web3 websites do everything possible to waste as much screen real estate as possible with as little content density as possible.
This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…
One word: Terminals.
Computers are inherently old at this point, the technology harkens back at least the better part of a century.
The old guard in particular cannot and will not let go of CLIs and esoteric flags and arguments, and will berate anyone who would dare suggest anything concerning a GUI.
To them, the only human interfaces that exist are the keyboard and the monochrome monitor, computing is still grey-on-black (or green/orange-on-black) monospace text and running emacs or vim. The rest of the world disregards them as living relics of ancient history.
> Solid-state computer components, on the other hand, have no mechanical decay, so they are practically eternal. I wish. Electrolytic capacitors seem to have a functional lifespan of about 10-20 years, transistors do wear out, electromigration is a problem in chips in the "hundreds of years" span discussed, and there are all sorts of other interesting failure modes of "solid state" electronics that mean they're not g…
I recently had to replace an SSD that was only 3 years old; it's dead-dead, as in, slowed down one day and then wouldn't boot. I've never had an HDD die this fast in my life. I know this is only one example but I'm curious if anyone else has a similar experience.
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-life-expectancy/