191–200 of 218 posts
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> Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. No, they aren't: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
That laptop has an Intel Management Engine in it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
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> 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.
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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…
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> > "The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying." > Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue. It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over…
I agree with all of that, but the very crude issue here is one of sunk/capital outlays vs. unit costs. Good software requires incredibly investment, even if the 'unit cost' is nothing. Books aren't sold for $25 because of the cost of paper. I think we are wired to think in such material terms, which is why maybe why we have an instinct towards the notion of 'free' software as being somehow special, when really it's n…
True. But with open source that investment is of labor (sometimes it is volunteer labor, in part), and is usually incremental, there is often little in the way of large up front capital outlays.
Most of the exceptions would be a commercial company making a "Big Bang" initial release.
This is just to say that the concept of "marginal cost of producing another copy" needs some contextual adjustments.
For F/OSS, it might be better to think instead of "the marginal cost of making a new release", since at the point of making the release the marginal cost of all subsequent copies becomes zero.
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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.
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Some other interesting companies: https://starlabs.systems/ https://system76.com/ https://www.pine64.org/ Most of these are probably well known to those who frequent HN, but just in case I'll mention them.
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... .
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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 do…
I do think we have some problems in the current incarnation though. Way to much resources are spent on, frankly, destructive behavior. Which I think the word greed perhaps could be used to describe. But I think it’s anthropomorphizing things that are actually structural and institutional deficiencies, not necessarily moral failures of individuals.
I do not agree that intrinsically motivated work is just art though. The public sector can be described as being the kind of scaled up intrinsically motivated production I was thinking of. But thoughts of what is and should belong to the public sector vs the market differ wildly.
On a personal note I might add that I am actually primarily motivated intrinsically. A sufficient income is necessary, but not sufficient.
Now I’m not actually arguing for giving everyone a heap of money and just see what’s built. I do think it would be interesting to study the result though.
What I do argue is that there probably are some interesting, and worthwhile, ways to put more capital in the hands of more organizations that produce things of value for its own sake.
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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…
The problem with that is it breaks the value signalling we get from paying for things. With commercial software, it only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it, proving that it has value to them. How do we know this as against that open source project is worth funding? How do we tell how many users it has, and what value it provides to them? Suppose we already have an open source project developing a sn…
Not exactly. A feature gets developed if it brings in more money from customers, but not always because the customers are happy to pay.
Consider putting ads to the software.
Consider turning software to a subscription service.
Consider preventing other software from interoperating with yours without a license, or at all, and locking users down on your platform.
I agree that when a user votes with their money, it is a great incentive. But the way it currently works with commercial software is a bit far from a meritocratic ideal. Other mechanisms are possible (see sponsorship, Kickstarter, bounties), and I hope they will grow in popularity.
Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…
Tech people don't have this attitude, users do. Have you ever tried to teach someone who wasn't already enthusiastic about tech? Do you really think most users actually care? Since the beginning of the tech industry, users have been presented over and over again with choices of closed and open tech, centralized and decentralized platforms, and each time users have overwhelmingly chosen the more convenient closed & ce…