301–310 of 467 posts
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but not everyone wants/is capable of buying a 150lb NEC tv made to resist vandalism and such, they just want a flimsy plastic panel that takes hdmi from their laptop and pushes it to an appreciably large 1080p panel
I just had look on Amazon and there are 42 inch dumb TVs available for about $220. A 32" one is $175
The whole tech universe is opaque & unobservable. Free software exists, but a user using kde desktop isn't really that much more likely (beyond their higher likelihood to self selecting in & find out) to get good at computing over time.
There's been so few efforts to make computing visible, to make it real. HyperCard is still nearly the only famous example of a technical environment where you could "turn the object over" and see what it did. I adore open source, but its not enough. Live code environments, with strong modularization sandboxing and snapshotting are required baselines for users to exercise freedom. Making computing accessible - making it easy to see what's happening - and making it safe/fun to muck around in are the frontier past opening the source that we - the citizens of planet earth - need to begin to experience digital freedom.
We need a bolder way for the computing environment to be Augmenting (computer) Intellect. Freedom expands itself if folks can exercise it, and the barrier to really using your will is - even with open source - too high, too many barriers. Those positive cycles are missing today, so we don't notice a lack of freedom. The best base I know of today for this realization & the effort to open up computing to the rest of the world is https://malleable.systems .
> The user wants open software, software that can be modified, and that can participate in a progressive improvement process. - J.C.R. Licklider
Prehistory: We lived is small groups. No privacy. About 1/3 or males die by being killed by their own species. Say something against the alphas and risk death.
1600s. trials for heresy etc. Brits sail for the new world to get free speech and freedom of religion. Their colonies do ok.
1960s computers coming but things still pretty locked down in much of the world, secret police, much of the world like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
2020s mobile computing everywhere. Free exchange of information largely possible everywhere even if you have to use VPNs in China, Russia etc.
2030s - optimistically totalitarianism crumbles a bit more (https://ourworldindata.org/democracy) especially if Russia collapses some after it's recent adventure - it's been one of the strongest forces on the Big Brother side of things.
So even if our devices get a bit locked down against malware I think the trend's positive. Our instincts evolved in the prehistory stage and so are perhaps a bit out of adjustment for the present day.
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Looking at this list, open source software is the only thing that can help save us from this future. Whenever a corporation takes control of a widespread open source software (eg Oracle buying MySQL) it is forked by the community (MariaDB). If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software.…
What's the alternative to "I built it, I own it"? Seems like forced open sourcing under threat of government force would be worse than what we have now. Also Meta these days is open sourcing more ML tools than any other corp, so I'm not sure the claim that "killing ... all open-source tendencies" is supportable.
> ... you should be thanking [Zuckerberg’s] open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI [would] belong to only a select few ...
You’re right that such sympathies weren’t exactly “killed” (instead “discouraged”) by advisors but pressing this mistake in phrasing is certainly a bit of a straw man argument.
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Your and others' comments on this thread remind me of a though I had lately. In the "before times", you would buy things that would last. So naturally, the companies that made them could not sell new products. Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment th…
> I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Regulation. Fun fact: this is still possible! It's a little harder – it'll have to be steadily introduced, in multiple countries at once (so we don't break international trade), starting in the areas where it's cheapest to produce lasting equipment (so enforcement doesn't take…
Easy to nay-say, though. To me, a solution starts with spreading those values that make it possible for _consumers_ to stop sliding down the growth-over-everything slope. Mittelstands, shinise, Patagonia, yada yada. Can you as an entrepreneur make a sustainable business that isn’t just for well-off conscious consumers? What’s the product where longevity is inextricable from the core feature set, not just a trade-off with cost?
Right-to-repair is a decent example of where regulation has enough support across the ideological spectrum to get a foot in the door. It would be cool if a company who made profit on service now decides it doesn’t want to compete on service and instead takes more profit upfront with a higher-quality product. Forcing USB-C on phones feels like a small thing to me, but if it sets a precedent where interfaces are standardized for sustainability, that could be amazing. (No, I’m not worried about governments slowing progress. Locked ecosystems are doing just fine at that.)
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> I've yet to hear a counter proposal to drm to protect the artists work > Instead you'll hear anecdotes or idealistic arguments for why an artist have to gamble with getting money for their work. This is the current state for nearly every single artist even with DRM, because things like DRM seem to almost exclusively benefit a handful of people at the rest of the world’s expense.
Yes, but those are factors that does not involve piracy/forgery. My point is that no drm doesn't give any advantage to the artist from a monetary pov. Drm at least makes it less likely an artist will lose out on potential sales. Hence why I make the point that if we want a drm free world, we should focus on coming up with better alternatives to what we have.
Agree.
But the best alternative might actually be one where artists (Disney included) can’t “own” their art and where you can’t make money selling copies of digital files.
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If the ecosystem is based on open source software, the community will fork it like it always does when someone tries to control it. You’ll end up with a fork of Chromium/Blink that doesn’t have WEI. And it will be used to surf web sites. While the official browser from Google would be used to access sites that require WEI attestations. Just like the Bank of America app would. Corporate power in pushing Chrome for eve…
Sure, but if netflix, your bank, your power and water service, and a chat app, where 80% of your contacts are only support chrome, what will you do? Many banks already require hardware attestation from google for mobile apps and mandatory 2FA via that app is a pain on a rooted phone and workarounds are painful. I mean sure, you can just not-use those services and not chat with everyone else, but that's a bad solution…
And the rest of the web can be accessed using the fork of Chrome
What’s the big deal? People have been using Popcorn Time to view movies that they couldn’t access, and so on.
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We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will. Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.
Do you know what drives democracy? People. Do you know what drives people? Targeted brainwashing from companies like Facebook.
Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach.
20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated, slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy you? vote now"
Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to accept the model of how the world works thet you are operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my own"
The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute everyone put in their favourite untested political world view.
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I just had look on Amazon and there are 42 inch dumb TVs available for about $220. A 32" one is $175
I just looked at amazon and a 42" monitor is about $500 (for a decent quality one). Where do you find these "dumb TVs"?
This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"? We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom. The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change. If we are worried that digital freedom will be t…
No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting anyone , including individuals, treating you differently for anything you've said. Which is clearly impossible. Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something that can be…
Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an effect on how your neighbours talk to you.
That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome them.
But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world - i am not sure why it's a good idea online.