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Vegans can talk all they want But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did Government tried antitrust for decades w telcos But the costs of long

by EGreg 2y ago

Vegans can talk all they want But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did Government tried antitrust for decades w telcos But the costs of long distance calls dropped to practically zero when open VoIP protocols came out The Web disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe, TV, Newspapers, Magazines etc. Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta The answer: open source must get good enough that people can switch from big tech corporation-controlled solutions and then they will be in control of their own software !! :)

wdh505 2y ago
I love this answer. I don't have a large enough graphics card to host a local open sourced gpt 4o yet. I like seeing the options grow though
kbenson 2y ago
Caring about privacy has always been a rich person's game, since the poor have little to pay with other than their data. That's worth keeping in mind.
- mindslight 2y ago
  But the products we're talking about "paying" for here are continually dropping in price - email, media sharing, social networking, etc. A basic cloud host that can take care of a whole family can be had for $5/mo. Perhaps that's still too much for your exemplar poor to spend on a hope. But the amount extracted by the surveillance industry is always increasing, and eventually that levee will break. I'd say there are much bigger impediments - needing to invest time for setup, needing trust a given solution won't turn out to be a lemon or even backfire, and lack of straightforward packageable solutions to many of the technical problems.
  - kavalg 2y ago
    It's not the cloud cost that is stopping people from doing this. It is the installation and administration cost. That requires time and expertise that most either don't have or are not willing to spend.
    - mindslight 2y ago
      "Poor" on its own generally refers to monetary cost, which is what I responding to. I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
      - kbenson 2y ago
        Poor, as I intended it, was meant to encompass many things. Working poor people have less money, but they also often have less free time because they have less money. If you have plenty of money you can shop around for jobs that fit your schedule better, or if your job allows for it take time off, or outsource some work you would have to do yourselves (housecleaning, maintenance, landscaping, child care when you're unavailable, cooking, etc). Additionally, if you're in a family, there's a higher chance that both parents will need to work full time, meaning there's less free time for all those things mentioned above, which if one parent worked part time or not at all could allow for a lot of those things to be done while one is working, leading to more free time in the evening for both. Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them? Time is money, and the working poor have neither.
        mindslight 2y ago
        It feels like you're stretching to fit this into some memetic narrative of "poor" when most people are time poor until you get to the upper class. While middle class people are more likely to pay for things that need skilled repair (due to knowing fewer people who can do such work informally), they're not paying for things they can do themselves like housecleaning, landscaping, etc - paying someone else for ongoing large chunks of time is an indicator of being an upper class. The point isn't to discount anyone's struggle, but rather to look at the actual mechanisms that hinder adoption of libre software. And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those. The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
- huygens6363 2y ago
  The “poor” seem to scrape by just enough to get access to Netflix, sports.. I don’t think this is a money issue.
  - jononor 2y ago
    Having to choose between those things and privacy is definitely a money issue! It is not surprising that privacy looses in that case - it is opening up another huge can of worries. Entertainment is a source of relaxation, de-stressing as well as social connection (notice how much people talk about and group around the topics you mention).
    - huygens6363 2y ago
      Having to choose between what is actually good for you and what is “relaxing” and then deciding to divert all available funds to “relaxation” is not a money issue.
      - jononor 2y ago
        I think privacy is very important. But a social network is definitely more so! And many have that via sports, for example. And if someone thinks it best to spend money on Netflix over Fastmail, I definitely am not gonna shame them and say "that is not good for you"! Especially not if they are poor.
- freehorse 2y ago
  The only reason that privacy issues exist online in the first place is the advertising business. The advertising business increases the costs of everything. So, enjoy your "free youtube videos" that contain advertisements for which you pay through the products you buy and are advertised. Privacy being "rich people's game" is BS because essentially everybody pays for the advertising costs in a rather horizontal fashion.
  - sambazi 2y ago
    tracking for advertising can also be seen as a stop-gap measure against surveillance because the financial incentive for quantity corrupts the quality of the data
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    If it were just about targeted advertising offsetting the platform costs, I’d be fine with it. What torques me off is that my digital footprint is being sold to anyone and everyone with two nickels to rub together.
scarface_74 2y ago
And if you want to be noticed on the web, you have to go through Google. If you want to sell anything you either have to go through Facebook or Amazon. The web is “open”. But Google and to a lesser extent Apple control the browsers to access it and they can control the platforms. Meet the new boss…
- jononor 2y ago
  You do not have to. But, there is a considerable cost to shying away from the dominant actors. Adding on top of the existing difficulties... But it probably can be done. It would be very interesting, especially in HN community, to build some entrepreneurial practice around "succeeding without surveillance capitalists organizations". As a parallel to the "succeeding without venture capital" practices that already have been building up (bootstrapping, tiny teams) the last years. We can be the frontrunners.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    And how will your alternative get users without advertising? Where are you going to advertise if not Google and Facebook? Ben Thompson talks about “Aggregation theory” all of the time. The companies that have the power have that power because that’s where the users are. How do you compete with “free with advertising”? We talk about how the web killed TV networks. But streaming services are making deals with cable companies to bundle their ad supported tier with regular TV and with their internet only packages. Oh and the largest cable company owns NBC. When “cord cutters” get rid of pay TV and use YouTube TV where most of the money still goes back to the same providers - how is this any different?
    - jononor 2y ago
      Possibly via organic, physical, viral and direct marketing techniques. I would never try to compete with free. Probably not anything B2C at all, if I were to have avoid the surveillance capitalists as a constraint.
reverius42 2y ago
2024 will be the year of the Linux Desktop.
antifa 2y ago
> But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did TBH, nah, I don't believe the impossible burger has really done anything truly notable, as far as vegan causes go. Now, if you were to end beef subsidies leading to something like 25% of beef farms changing over to a more vegan friendly or environmentally friendly alternative uses, or developed protein alternatives that reduced food costs for the average person, then yeah. Impossible Burger isn't a bad product, but as far as the big picture goes, it's a slightly tastier virtue signal than black bean burgers.

by EGreg 2y ago

wdh505 2y ago

I love this answer. I don't have a large enough graphics card to host a local open sourced gpt 4o yet. I like seeing the options grow though

kbenson 2y ago

Caring about privacy has always been a rich person's game, since the poor have little to pay with other than their data. That's worth keeping in mind.

mindslight 2y ago
But the products we're talking about "paying" for here are continually dropping in price - email, media sharing, social networking, etc. A basic cloud host that can take care of a whole family can be had for $5/mo. Perhaps that's still too much for your exemplar poor to spend on a hope. But the amount extracted by the surveillance industry is always increasing, and eventually that levee will break. I'd say there are much bigger impediments - needing to invest time for setup, needing trust a given solution won't turn out to be a lemon or even backfire, and lack of straightforward packageable solutions to many of the technical problems.
- kavalg 2y ago
  It's not the cloud cost that is stopping people from doing this. It is the installation and administration cost. That requires time and expertise that most either don't have or are not willing to spend.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    "Poor" on its own generally refers to monetary cost, which is what I responding to. I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
    - kbenson 2y ago
      Poor, as I intended it, was meant to encompass many things. Working poor people have less money, but they also often have less free time because they have less money. If you have plenty of money you can shop around for jobs that fit your schedule better, or if your job allows for it take time off, or outsource some work you would have to do yourselves (housecleaning, maintenance, landscaping, child care when you're unavailable, cooking, etc). Additionally, if you're in a family, there's a higher chance that both parents will need to work full time, meaning there's less free time for all those things mentioned above, which if one parent worked part time or not at all could allow for a lot of those things to be done while one is working, leading to more free time in the evening for both. Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them? Time is money, and the working poor have neither.
      - mindslight 2y ago
        It feels like you're stretching to fit this into some memetic narrative of "poor" when most people are time poor until you get to the upper class. While middle class people are more likely to pay for things that need skilled repair (due to knowing fewer people who can do such work informally), they're not paying for things they can do themselves like housecleaning, landscaping, etc - paying someone else for ongoing large chunks of time is an indicator of being an upper class. The point isn't to discount anyone's struggle, but rather to look at the actual mechanisms that hinder adoption of libre software. And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those. The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
huygens6363 2y ago
The “poor” seem to scrape by just enough to get access to Netflix, sports.. I don’t think this is a money issue.
- jononor 2y ago
  Having to choose between those things and privacy is definitely a money issue! It is not surprising that privacy looses in that case - it is opening up another huge can of worries. Entertainment is a source of relaxation, de-stressing as well as social connection (notice how much people talk about and group around the topics you mention).
  - huygens6363 2y ago
    Having to choose between what is actually good for you and what is “relaxing” and then deciding to divert all available funds to “relaxation” is not a money issue.
    - jononor 2y ago
      I think privacy is very important. But a social network is definitely more so! And many have that via sports, for example. And if someone thinks it best to spend money on Netflix over Fastmail, I definitely am not gonna shame them and say "that is not good for you"! Especially not if they are poor.
freehorse 2y ago
The only reason that privacy issues exist online in the first place is the advertising business. The advertising business increases the costs of everything. So, enjoy your "free youtube videos" that contain advertisements for which you pay through the products you buy and are advertised. Privacy being "rich people's game" is BS because essentially everybody pays for the advertising costs in a rather horizontal fashion.
- sambazi 2y ago
  tracking for advertising can also be seen as a stop-gap measure against surveillance because the financial incentive for quantity corrupts the quality of the data
- chuckadams 2y ago
  If it were just about targeted advertising offsetting the platform costs, I’d be fine with it. What torques me off is that my digital footprint is being sold to anyone and everyone with two nickels to rub together.

scarface_74 2y ago

And if you want to be noticed on the web, you have to go through Google. If you want to sell anything you either have to go through Facebook or Amazon. The web is “open”. But Google and to a lesser extent Apple control the browsers to access it and they can control the platforms. Meet the new boss…

jononor 2y ago
You do not have to. But, there is a considerable cost to shying away from the dominant actors. Adding on top of the existing difficulties... But it probably can be done. It would be very interesting, especially in HN community, to build some entrepreneurial practice around "succeeding without surveillance capitalists organizations". As a parallel to the "succeeding without venture capital" practices that already have been building up (bootstrapping, tiny teams) the last years. We can be the frontrunners.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And how will your alternative get users without advertising? Where are you going to advertise if not Google and Facebook? Ben Thompson talks about “Aggregation theory” all of the time. The companies that have the power have that power because that’s where the users are. How do you compete with “free with advertising”? We talk about how the web killed TV networks. But streaming services are making deals with cable companies to bundle their ad supported tier with regular TV and with their internet only packages. Oh and the largest cable company owns NBC. When “cord cutters” get rid of pay TV and use YouTube TV where most of the money still goes back to the same providers - how is this any different?
  - jononor 2y ago
    Possibly via organic, physical, viral and direct marketing techniques. I would never try to compete with free. Probably not anything B2C at all, if I were to have avoid the surveillance capitalists as a constraint.

reverius42 2y ago

2024 will be the year of the Linux Desktop.

antifa 2y ago

> But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did TBH, nah, I don't believe the impossible burger has really done anything truly notable, as far as vegan causes go. Now, if you were to end beef subsidies leading to something like 25% of beef farms changing over to a more vegan friendly or environmentally friendly alternative uses, or developed protein alternatives that reduced food costs for the average person, then yeah. Impossible Burger isn't a bad product, but as far as the big picture goes, it's a slightly tastier virtue signal than black bean burgers.