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It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more grass

by rpcope1 12y ago

It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more grass roots, but maybe that's just rose colored glasses. Obviously, things have gotten more sophisticated since the days of simple computers like the TRS-80 and while it's not possible to totally grep everything in a modern OS, I do miss some of the hacker ethos that may have waned when the web went big. That being said, I find it a rather perverse juxtaposition to take about governments and Wall Street abusing the tech industry and then hold up he examples of Uber and bitcoin as movements counter to this. While there may have been some inefficiency in the Taxi medallion system, Uber seems to thrive on skirting labor laws and relying on the perhaps misplaced hype surround the "gig economy." Bitcoin is also not a terribly appropriate choice; while the idea of the blockchain is novel, the technology is kind of wasteful (all of energy required to move the blockchain along, probably coming from non-renewables), it's built on arguably shaky financial grounds (nothing like a sovereign to back it, it's often theorized to be a Ponzi scheme), and Wall Street is getting into it big time. Both of these seem to be part of the "pop tech" the author is rallying against. I would rather see kids encouraged to hack all things (not just web sites and walled garden mobile app) to keep the old school tech culture alive, and I certainly feel the need to make sure things like GNU continue, as it, amongst other things, have provided the means to rally against big corporations controlling access to the interesting bits of technology (like being priced out) back in the day. I personally feel as though copyleft is important from this perspective, though this is probably a somewhat controversial opinion. One thing the author doesn't mention as something we should focus on, is if we want to keep the tech industry from locking us out of technology as we know it, I think we should also work to make sure tech giants and other corporations don't strong arm standards organizations and force development into walled non-free gardens, especially like with Google and Apple's threatening moves with regards to the internet (i.e. iOS locking out competing browsers, Google trying to completely lock out others from gTLDs like .dev). EDIT: Just to be clear, I also find the equating of "pretty people" and the use of "nerd" around a lot of the culture surrounding technology both click-baity and ad hominem.

nostrademons 12y ago
It's actually a lot easier to get started hacking now, in the age of Javascript and the web, than it was 25 years ago. I remember begging my dad to buy me Think Pascal when I got a computer so I could learn to program. Computers cost about $2500 then, and the compiler itself was about $200. Now one of the best languages to learn, Javascript, comes free with excellent developer tools in every web browser, which comes free with a computer that can be bought for <$1000. If you want to play with server side stuff you can put it up on Heroku, again for free. I think the big problem is that this has reduced the barrier to entry to nothing, and so standards have gone way up. To do a professional-seeming webapp, it's not enough to hack out some HTML as a high-school student. You need a professional designer, and professional front-end engineer, and professional back-end engineer, etc.
- michaelmrose 12y ago
  Rasberi Pi 2 $35 crummy usb drive $6 Keyboard from thrift store $2 Mouse from thrift store $3 Monitor from thrift store $10 A functional computer for $56. Not the best but probably a lot faster than the one you paid $2500 for.
sounds 12y ago
That edit is the part I wish had been your thesis. (Because now I feel like I have to write the following:) There _is_ a unifying theme to the trends TechCrunch is writing about, but it's not what TechCrunch says it is. TechCrunch: "the establishment is flocking to the tech industry." That's just the eternal september, ad infinitum. Hate being pushed out? So did the people _you_ pushed out, when you were annoying and first found IRC and you and your peers flooded all the old cool dives, driving hackers ever deeper underground. The easy ways out don't work when you're faced with filtering out annoying newcomers. Some are fundametally wrong (racism is essentially a quick band-aid reaction to newcomers). Using money as a filter (country clubs) doesn't work either--there's always that annoying newly-minted millionaire who wants to break into your circle. Legislation to suppress young upstart competition even fails for the same reason: eventually your industry becomes so totally ossified that the whole thing can be toppled (US automakers). Fundamentally, anybody who doesn't get Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is going to fail. "When voters have three or more distinct options, no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria." I would propose strengthening it to: any pre-specified set of criteria, at all, ever. In other words, you just can't have all three: 1. Purely democratic or meritocratic or whatever 2. Total transparency (of rules and laws) 3. Adaptation of the rules and laws So you get this never-ending cycle: the hackers get together and make something really cool. They are able to work together. Then comes the flood of newbies. After things get overloaded, anybody actually contributing to the original project either sells out or goes deeper underground. The project coasts on autopilot until something breaks, then it crashes and burns. It doesn't matter who the participants are, from simple rule-based sims up to human-level intelligence, the outcome is the same. The exceptions, I think, prove the rule: 1. BSD and the Linux kernel -- essentially ruled by benevolent dictators. 2. Representative democracies -- they can work. I'm deliberately refusing to think about why here, since that's politics. 3. The internet. Not IP or the OSI model or the DNS system, but the idea that anyone, anywhere can conceive of an idea, and then communicate it nearly instantly. This includes a worldwide language (or tools to automatically translate), global comms and the hacks to circumvent state-sponsored net terrorism, the unwritten code of conduct that most netizens are guided by, the ability to search and explore, and on and on. I think any good example would have some element of a social hack in it. The social hacks are the most interesting.

by rpcope1 12y ago

nostrademons 12y ago

It's actually a lot easier to get started hacking now, in the age of Javascript and the web, than it was 25 years ago. I remember begging my dad to buy me Think Pascal when I got a computer so I could learn to program. Computers cost about $2500 then, and the compiler itself was about $200. Now one of the best languages to learn, Javascript, comes free with excellent developer tools in every web browser, which comes free with a computer that can be bought for <$1000. If you want to play with server side stuff you can put it up on Heroku, again for free. I think the big problem is that this has reduced the barrier to entry to nothing, and so standards have gone way up. To do a professional-seeming webapp, it's not enough to hack out some HTML as a high-school student. You need a professional designer, and professional front-end engineer, and professional back-end engineer, etc.

michaelmrose 12y ago
Rasberi Pi 2 $35 crummy usb drive $6 Keyboard from thrift store $2 Mouse from thrift store $3 Monitor from thrift store $10 A functional computer for $56. Not the best but probably a lot faster than the one you paid $2500 for.

sounds 12y ago

That edit is the part I wish had been your thesis. (Because now I feel like I have to write the following:) There _is_ a unifying theme to the trends TechCrunch is writing about, but it's not what TechCrunch says it is. TechCrunch: "the establishment is flocking to the tech industry." That's just the eternal september, ad infinitum. Hate being pushed out? So did the people _you_ pushed out, when you were annoying and first found IRC and you and your peers flooded all the old cool dives, driving hackers ever deeper underground. The easy ways out don't work when you're faced with filtering out annoying newcomers. Some are fundametally wrong (racism is essentially a quick band-aid reaction to newcomers). Using money as a filter (country clubs) doesn't work either--there's always that annoying newly-minted millionaire who wants to break into your circle. Legislation to suppress young upstart competition even fails for the same reason: eventually your industry becomes so totally ossified that the whole thing can be toppled (US automakers). Fundamentally, anybody who doesn't get Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is going to fail. "When voters have three or more distinct options, no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria." I would propose strengthening it to: any pre-specified set of criteria, at all, ever. In other words, you just can't have all three: 1. Purely democratic or meritocratic or whatever 2. Total transparency (of rules and laws) 3. Adaptation of the rules and laws So you get this never-ending cycle: the hackers get together and make something really cool. They are able to work together. Then comes the flood of newbies. After things get overloaded, anybody actually contributing to the original project either sells out or goes deeper underground. The project coasts on autopilot until something breaks, then it crashes and burns. It doesn't matter who the participants are, from simple rule-based sims up to human-level intelligence, the outcome is the same. The exceptions, I think, prove the rule: 1. BSD and the Linux kernel -- essentially ruled by benevolent dictators. 2. Representative democracies -- they can work. I'm deliberately refusing to think about why here, since that's politics. 3. The internet. Not IP or the OSI model or the DNS system, but the idea that anyone, anywhere can conceive of an idea, and then communicate it nearly instantly. This includes a worldwide language (or tools to automatically translate), global comms and the hacks to circumvent state-sponsored net terrorism, the unwritten code of conduct that most netizens are guided by, the ability to search and explore, and on and on. I think any good example would have some element of a social hack in it. The social hacks are the most interesting.