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Build Unix, Not Uber
- sklargh 4y agoIt's always interesting to me how little credit is given to GPS in Uber's story. The existence of space-based, free and ubiquitous semi-precise navigation was an enormous subsidy.
- thesephist 4y agoThat's interesting! I think GPS falls in the category of "works so reliably that I don't perceive it as technology" for me. But yes, GPS an underrated piece of infrastructure, even more impressive as it's globally available (edit: as in, US tech infra made available beyond US).
- lattalayta 4y agoIf you want to appreciate GPS, check out this article and explanation of how it works. It's been posted to this website a few times now: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
- fetzu 4y agoWhat a fantastic deep dive ! Thanks for (re-)posting this, never had stumbled upon it here before.
- zrail 4y agoAtomic clocks! In space! That's the epitome of modern technology for me.
- tmp_anon_22 4y ago> how little credit is given to GPS in Uber's story Uber would not exist without GPS. I wonder how many other of the unicorns: * Twitter without Rails * Facebook without PHP (I think this is fair but maybe not) * Reddit without Python * Tesla and Solar City without huge government subsidies Crazy to think how many Lake Tahoe vacation homes were transferred thanks to these projects.
- axblount 4y agoMaybe this is apocryphal, but I think I remember hearing that Reddit was originally written in some kind of lisp. Not to say it doesn't owe its success to python.
- Phrodo_00 4y agoVery early versions, but they were already using python before you could create your own subreddits, for example (which is around the time when it started becoming more mainstream)
- KMnO4 4y agoIIRC, they were able to fully rewrite it in Python in a weekend. I guess that shows the (small) scale of what it was at that point.
- cosmotic 4y agoThere are a lot of alternative programming languages that those companies could have used. There's no GPS alternative for Uber.
- aunderscored 4y agoGLONASS, But that's splitting hairs
- abathur 4y agoI listened to a podcast this week (https://why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-g-word-with-adam-conover-XBCivh1P https://why-is-this-happening-with-chris-hayes.simplecast.co...) where GPS featured prominently. It's about an upcoming ~Netflix show (called The G Word), so I assume there'll be a whole episode on it?
- Gunnerhead 4y agoSeems like the show is already out? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_G_Word https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_G_Word
- jayd16 4y agoI wonder if Uber is feasible with wifi and cell tower location routing alone and if not how close you could actually get.
- mrtksn 4y agoI think it should be feasible with combination of odometer, mapping and wifi/cell signal database. The traditional metering happens through the odometer only and the mapping is only needed for orientation and optimisation(i.e. which car should be redirected to the user).
- dylan604 4y agoat the end of the day, it's just a stationary location with a permanent address. GPS just allows for turn-by-turn navigation so any body can find that location without being intimately familiar with an area. so, yeah, it's nice that the rider can see the route the driver is taking to feel like they are not being "taken for a ride", but I've been in rides where the drive did not take the same route my app was showing. however, is this the only thing that makes moder ride share apps a thing?
- throwaway14356 4y agoone use to stick up the thumb and get a ride. detours to be negotiated
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoNot once you get outside cities. I can drop a cell call by walking across my living room.
- pj_mukh 4y agoI want something that doesn’t operate on scarcity (like the corporation), but can work at the velocity of a corporation. Things like GPS and the internet would’ve been deployed much faster by a private corporation but then they would be dumb monopolies as opposed to the public good they are now. Also we need a space to work on big dumb ideas and toys[1] and neither Unix, Uber or GPS fit in that category. What is that sweet spot? [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3U-why-build-toys https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3U-why-build-toys
- zmgsabst 4y agoI think the answer is corporations — but with a different culture. Social purpose corporation with crowdfunding and transparency seems like it would accomplish much of what you want.
- cauthon 4y ago> Things like GPS and the internet would’ve been deployed much faster by a private corporation but then they would be dumb monopolies as opposed to the public good they are now. 1) at least in the USA, access to the internet is not a public good, it is provided by an oligopoly (and in many circumstances a functional monopoly, where service at a given address is only available from a single ISP) 2) why do you believe that either GPS or the internet would have been deployed faster by a private corporation?
- pj_mukh 4y ago
- systemvoltage 4y agoUber wouldn't exist without Government™ built roads as well. It is an expectation that we get good services based the taxes we pay.
- LVB 4y agoAnother element of the GPS story is the profound impact of the US flipping a veritable switch and turning off Selective Availability in 2000 (https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/ https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/), taking accuracy from perhaps 50m to a couple of meters.
- kortilla 4y agoThat’s not a subsidy. A use of a non-rivalrous good that would exist with or without Uber is not a subsidy. That’s like saying the English language and calculus are a subsidy. They are definitely shoulders we all stand on, but not a subsidy.
- abathur 4y agoAt the risk of saying something dumb and meta... it's ideas all the way down (for a really long time now). The individual corporations are ideas, and then of course there's the idea of the corporation itself. As the post notes, corporations only work because of other ideas about property rights and scarcity. But more fundamentally they only work because they're an idea quite a few people already believe in. I'm a little fuzzy on the level at which the post means "autonomous ideas" will steer society--do they mean autonomous ideas like Unix? Or autonomous ideas like governments and corporations and pope-less religions? I think the post helps draw a latent curiosity out of me that I probably wouldn't have put quite like this, but: can we better identify and allocate resources towards good ideas that don't make market sense?
- andrewxdiamond 4y ago> good ideas that don't make market sense I think this is incorrect framing. You have to shape the market, not the idea. Capitalism’s fault is not accounting for externalized costs, like climate change. The market allocates resources very effectively, but the costs the market uses to allocate resources are lies. They omit costs that producers can ignore or otherwise avoid paying for. If these externalities were captured and embedded into the price of the good/service, the market could actually account these issues.
- andrewxdiamond 4y agoI guess you could also have “Tragedy of the commons” good idea. Those could be adapted to capitalism with subsidies or other government funding, or VC funding Not much of an expert in any of this, just openly postulating to invite conversation
- wbsss4412 4y agoIf I could make one change to popular parlance (or perhaps I should say technical jargon), it would be the usage of the word externality. While it is a technically correct description, the framing implied leads to analysis that I don’t think is fundamentally sound. Markets optimize for products. If something can’t be made into a product wherein the full value and cost to society is express captured within the transaction itself, you generally end up with less than ideal outcomes. Capitalism is the best system for optimizing for productive efficiency, but creating an abundance of material wealth isn’t quite the same thing as making society as a whole the best that is can be.
- armitron 4y agoUnix was a terrible idea that probably set us back multiple decades not to mention fueling the computer security circus and the trillion dollar cybercrime industry it spawned. But yes, we need more ideas like it <s> I’d prescribe the author multiple courses of The Unix Hater’s Handbook but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a cure.
- vanjajaja1 4y agowhat's the tldr on a proposed world where the unix mistake didn't happen? how could have computing played out and iterated better?
- EddieDante 4y agoGP should be grateful we didn't get stuck with Multics, ITS, or TOPS20 instead.
- beej71 4y agoNo kidding. The playing field wasn't super great, and Unix was and is still a top contender even today. CP/M. OS/2. MS-DOS. OS/2 Warp. Windows. Windows NT. Mac OS. VMS...
- krmboya 4y agoYeah, maybe we optimistically speculate that Smalltalk or Lisp Machines would have won instead, but it may have been the poorer alternatives that would have won if not UNIX
- coderdd 4y agoI think https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html "2.1 The Rise of Worse is Better" is as good a comparison as one can get. (I'm neutral but I like the historic context)
- lotw_dot_site 4y agoLord, this post is speaking my language... big ideas about Unix/Linux and the Web*! *I've been hacking away on something called "Linux on the Web" for the past decade of my life... https://lotw.site/ https://lotw.site/
- yandrypozo 4y agodoes the author know that Unix was a private software made by AT&T bell lab (a big company) with clear intentions of making revenue, although I agree it was and it is still a great idea, it was created because it would generate value to people and we appreciate value and we pay for it. it's obvious the author made a good reflexions with good intentions, but poetic/utopic futures are not the solution and are dangerous in fact.
- dredmorbius 4y agoUnix was created by two rogue engineers as a side project at a time AT&T were operating under a 1956 US DoJ consent decree which forbad the firm from entering into the computer market. (There was no independent software market as such.) AT&T Unix as a commercial product did not become a possibility until after the 1983 break-up settlement, which lifted that restriction. But at the time of Unix's creation, there was absolutely no possible route to commercialisation, which is a chief reason the operating system was freely distributed (for cost of media, in most cases), often with the note "Love, from Ken" (Thompson). System V appeared shortly after, as well as a set of legal disputes known as "the Unix Wars" beginning around 1988, most especially against BSDi (1-800-ITS-UNIX). On January 14, 1949, the government filed an action in the District Court for the District of New Jersey against the Western Electric Company, Inc.[3] and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Inc. (Civil Action No. 17-49).[4] The complaint alleged that the defendants had monopolized and conspired to restrain trade in the manufacture, distribution, sale, and installation of telephones, telephone apparatus, equipment, materials, and supplies, in violation 136136 of sections 1, 2, and 3 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2, and 3.[5] The relief sought included the divestiture by AT & T of its stock ownership in Western Electric; termination of exclusive relationships between AT & T and Western Electric; divestiture by Western Electric of its fifty percent interest in Bell Telephone Laboratories;[6] separation of telephone manufacturing from the provision of telephone service; and the compulsory licensing of patents owned by AT & T on a non-discriminatory basis.* https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=United+States+v.+AT%26T,+552+F.Supp.+131+(DDC+1982)&hl=en&as_sdt=3,47&case=12093892347857939076&scilh=0 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=United+States+v.+A... http://www.cybertelecom.org/notes/att1949.htm http://www.cybertelecom.org/notes/att1949.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1970s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#1970s
- Animats 4y agoAn alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that's needed by competing entities. That's exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It's an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn't issue cards. It doesn't handle money. It just transmits transaction data between point of sale, merchant's bank, and card issuer's bank. It's in the interests of all the banks involved that it work well, be a neutral party, and not cost too much. A chaord is useful when you have something that's a natural monopoly, but the customers don't want it charging monopoly rents. It's not idealistic. It's a practical solution to that class of problems. Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.) His optimistic book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", is still available. There used to be a "chaord" article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock's article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.
- spideymans 4y agoThere might be potential for this chaord idea in telecommunications and utilities.
- bitwize 4y agoOther examples: UL, arguably AT&T before the breakup, the Queensland public bus system which does privatization "right": the government establishes common routes and a common fare system, private carriers drive the routes and compete on quality and price. Chaordic entities are a good choice for government administration of public services without being too heavy-handed with state intervention.
- benreesman 4y agoI don’t love this conclusion, but looking around it seems that people generally keep competitions after their lives have become post-scarcity because the related concepts of status and preferential mating are determined by relative rather than absolute abundance. When a mega-yacht doesn’t stand out in your social/sexual set? Build a fucking rocket ship that we all know damned well isn’t going to colonize Mars.
- kdbeall_ 4y agoWow, this was a puff piece
- kris-nova 4y agoI love this article
- wwarner 4y agoThe concentration of big tech has become so intense it feels like a terrible defeat of the free software principles espoused in this post. Freedom is the main casualty of the current computing environment, which consists of a phone, which legally prohibits its owner from controlling it, and a cloud which is always coaxing programmers to its most proprietary solutions.
- danieldevries 4y agoRather convolution article. First mentioning economic scarcity then moving onto 'good ideas' like Unix. I'm missing the central thread that ties it all together. If anything it was the antithesis of Unix, namely GNU with its specific license that protects the users freedom, that was really the revolutionary idea, thank you RMS. Of course Unix, the work by Thompson, Ritchie etc brought extensibility and endless creativity to the development/app space. Ie write programs that do one thing well and able to connect those through pipes and ultimately through networks. The cli interface is ancient, but its here to stay for a very long time indeed. Not sure of the point that my comment is making. Meh. Happy Friday.
- throwoutway 4y ago> because companies are only ultimately beholden to customers. Excuse the narcissism, but MBAs disagree (shareholders) and Wall Street disagrees (profits) and activist employees disagrees
- AdieuToLogic 4y ago> UNIX was a good idea. It was free to spread widely across the tech ecosystem, and eventually some corporate players like Apple and Sun captured a lot of the value, but Linux stands out as the UNIX “winner” in 2022. Neither the core ideas of UNIX-style operating systems nor the Linux open-source project grew solely because of corporate stewardship. They spread and won because they were good ideas. The author neglects to mention that before POSIX[0], the "core ideas of UNIX-style operating systems" were very much proprietary. For example, there was no easy way to get arbitrary System V[1] or BSD source to easily compile on the other, let alone lesser known Unix variants. So I posit that the ideas spread not due to the merit of each version of *nix, but instead because a standard which allowed (reasonable) portability was agreed upon and largely supported. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V
- sam-s 4y ago> ...companies can’t expect to capture most of the value they create... One does not have to capture "most of the value" to be profitable. In fact, aiming to capture _most_ of the value is what creates customer ill will because _some_ of the value has to go to the customers.