3 ms·

> They mostly seem to be sour grapes. "I want to buy X product with P, Q, R features and nobody is making one, we should force them to by law". No, that's not h

> They mostly seem to be sour grapes. "I want to buy X product with P, Q, R features and nobody is making one, we should force them to by law". No, that's not how that works. I think it’s closer to: I bought a 10% black box (90% open) widget in the 1990s, and now in 2020 that same widget (with a few more functions) is 80% closed. And: why can I no longer use a generic computer for what I want to use it for? We’ve forgotten that an open distributed learning web is possible, and how instead computer literacy (programming) is very low because most of us can no longer follow our curiosity and look inside technological systems; only ‘experts' are allowed to do that (someone wrote about that recently, that whenever he talked to older/earlier computer hobbyists, how most of them mention that they are pretty disappointed by today‘s black box world/web). And no they’re not ‘sour grapes‘, they’re just sensing the painful ways in which the commons has been plundered, and feeling frustrated by the way people such as yourself pretend that there are still many benefits to be found in locked down/black box platforms and devices, which there aren't. The completely ludicrous part is how normalized all this is today. How much our tools are now over-engineered, non-modular and non-repairable; how much black box shit we produce. Literal shit. Single use shit. Biological systems have no waste, yet our current production systems produce the most toxic, anti-life sludge the world has seen (see Baotou -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_UdqZdFr-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_UdqZdFr-w). Today we produce coffee machines that have iPads sitting in a dock with virtual buttons to choose options. An iPad. What the fuck. What is that? Infinitely less complex technology was used to send people to the moon. What a complete and total waste of valuable resources and laborers' time! I'm talking about how we could have so many more open standards and decide to produce only high quality stuff. But no, our culture teaches us to discredit those who came before and to commoditize tiny incremental updates, slapping our own names on them (‘branding’) to please our neglected and alienated souls. I’m so tired of this false story of the need for competition. Humans are copying machine. It’s ok to copy! It’s how we learn and grow. Anyways, to get closer to a 'universal basic inheritance' - a commons that respects actual scarcity, and thus also the abundance of digital resources (scientific knowledge and technological blueprints), we need a new system for accounting. I believe http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws can offer us a very possible way forward https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14: they are radically distributed supply chain systems using the Resource-Event-Agent ontology, built on fully distributed tech, e.g. holochain and activitypub. To see an exciting future that has been buried yet not forgotten (it's a new Cybersyn documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

simonh 5y ago
This is so out of touch with the actual real world it's a bit concerning. There are plenty of open computing platforms kids can learn from these days, and schools are full of them. PCs are still pretty open, Linux is easy to install, Raspberry Pi and similar devices are cheap and accessible. My kids learned about all that stuff at school here in the UK. In most developed countries almost every kid in school gets to learn how to write at least simple programs. I taught my kids Python on their iPads. >...pretend there are still many benefits to be found in locked down platforms and devices, which there isn't. Now you're in lala land. People derive enormous benefits from ubiquitous access to easy to use computer technology all the time. They're just not the benefits you personally seem to value or understand.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure where this incredibly open world of 1999 (to say nothing of 1989 or 1979) existed. Telephony has always been very closed--fringe phone phreaking notwithstanding. Heck, some of us have been around long enough to remember when you had to rent a phone from a regulated monopoly. And in the 90s, Windows was mostly your choice in a computer. You could build your own PCs but you mostly had to run Windows. (Linux was still quite early days at that time.) Access to computing under the hood is much more democratized than it used to be even if the vast majority of people choose to use effectively appliances for certain tasks.
  - danaris 5y ago
    And, if I recall correctly, in the '90s, you had to pay for developer tools for Windows. (Or Mac, but Windows was, indeed, mostly your choice in a computer.) Today, every mainstream computer shipped—Mac and Windows—has a dizzying variety of free-as-in-beer development environments available for them, many also free-as-in-freedom.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Yes. Developer tools (and consumer software generally) were quite expensive. A typical compiler from Microsoft was hundreds of dollars. (Borland drove pricing down somewhat.) I forget what an MSDN subscription cost but it wasn't cheap.

simonh 5y ago

This is so out of touch with the actual real world it's a bit concerning. There are plenty of open computing platforms kids can learn from these days, and schools are full of them. PCs are still pretty open, Linux is easy to install, Raspberry Pi and similar devices are cheap and accessible. My kids learned about all that stuff at school here in the UK. In most developed countries almost every kid in school gets to learn how to write at least simple programs. I taught my kids Python on their iPads. >...pretend there are still many benefits to be found in locked down platforms and devices, which there isn't. Now you're in lala land. People derive enormous benefits from ubiquitous access to easy to use computer technology all the time. They're just not the benefits you personally seem to value or understand.

ghaff 5y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure where this incredibly open world of 1999 (to say nothing of 1989 or 1979) existed. Telephony has always been very closed--fringe phone phreaking notwithstanding. Heck, some of us have been around long enough to remember when you had to rent a phone from a regulated monopoly. And in the 90s, Windows was mostly your choice in a computer. You could build your own PCs but you mostly had to run Windows. (Linux was still quite early days at that time.) Access to computing under the hood is much more democratized than it used to be even if the vast majority of people choose to use effectively appliances for certain tasks.
- danaris 5y ago
  And, if I recall correctly, in the '90s, you had to pay for developer tools for Windows. (Or Mac, but Windows was, indeed, mostly your choice in a computer.) Today, every mainstream computer shipped—Mac and Windows—has a dizzying variety of free-as-in-beer development environments available for them, many also free-as-in-freedom.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes. Developer tools (and consumer software generally) were quite expensive. A typical compiler from Microsoft was hundreds of dollars. (Borland drove pricing down somewhat.) I forget what an MSDN subscription cost but it wasn't cheap.