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I think the "loop" is indeed moving on. The last real mini-revolution this side of the line probably were torrents. The whole social web is just wrong. It's
by india 16y ago
I think the "loop" is indeed moving on. The last real mini-revolution this side of the line probably were torrents. The whole social web is just wrong. It's centralized. It's not the web - it is a corruption of it. It is like the great minds who could design truly de-centralized, robust, reliable and truly social structures have all just vanished. There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ??? before the profit step. It is indeed a bit sad.
But there is some real fascinating stuff happening in hardware. We have freaking humanoid robots and private rockets. And nothing excites me more about the future than 3d printers. And there is a real and true to the soul open source like effort going on in there. Reprap, makerbot and that awesome 75k inr 3d printer from china... printers that can print themselves! Hardware specs that are shared and re-shared. Ideas and insights shared with gay abandon. No major patent threats anywhere in sight so far. It is the free world.
- what_happened 16y agoThis sounds like something to look into. Are there any resources in particular that you can recommend?
- india 16y agoSure. [2] talks about reprap's philosophy and is a good a place as any to start. Not many are talking about this yet but this is the new revolution. It has to be! [1] http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] http://vimeo.com/5202148 http://vimeo.com/5202148 [3] http://www.makerbot.com/ http://www.makerbot.com/ [4] http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/06/cheap-portable-perso.html http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/06/cheap-portable-perso.ht... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing#Comparison_of_3D_printers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing#Comparison_of_3D_pr... [6] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350708 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350708 [7] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061260 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061260 [8] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760466 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760466
- snarkyturtle 16y agoI have to disagree with you to an extent about the state of the net today. I look at it as something like a movie studio. You're getting upset at all the big blockbuster stuff. The things that have little to no plot but yet rake in billions of dollars. What you don't get is that it allows studios to invest in things that have more risk, because it has potential to sell and there's a market for it. The same could be applied to the net and to software tech. I mean, look at ycombinator and all their startups. Things like Facebook, Twitter,etc; their popularity is only natural because we all can't design a website. They give the average joe the tools that they need and they go crazy with it. The more money they make, the better, because it gives the little guys the chance to make something better. Maybe not revolutionary, but some original idea that solves a problem and gains revenue from it. And who knows, maybe out of all of that something revolutionary will come out of it. But it's hardly winding down as you say.
- rdtsc 16y ago> There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ??? I have thought about this the other day -- "what has happened to P2P technologies?". There used to be a lot of excitement about it, there was flurry of academic research on distributed consistent hashing, lots of P2P networks appearing, and now, it seems, bittorrent is all that is left of it.
- mindslight 16y agoIt's not that these projects/people have vanished, they've just been eclipsed by the much louder self-promoting "social web 2.0" community. It's much easier to write naive single-actor code than mutually-suspicious distributed applications. (also, you're forgetting at least git)