It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries.
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
Sorry about the link, chrome was showing some old auto fill suggestion near where the clipboard contents appear. It looks like I can't delete posts that include text content and a link, as it creates a comment right away and blocks deletion. Recreated the post with the correct link, but I guess this now sits here as a sign of my shame for using my phone wrong while complaining about my phone
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What the fuck is this, if you hold the home button on android it now enters a special search mode that refuses to let you run a search without sending your whole screen along with the search. And it is rather difficult to even get it to not do it. There is an "x" to leave, but if you miss that touch target it assumes you are highlighting some part of your screen you want to focus the search on and send the whole thing. My background image and things I keep on my homepage are not public data, fuck off Google
What the fuck is this, if you hold the home button on android it now enters a special search mode that refuses to let you run a search without sending your whole screen along with the search. And it is rather difficult to even get it to not do it. There is an "x" to leave, but if you miss that touch target it assumes you are highlighting some part of your screen you want to focus the search on and send the whole thing. My background image and things I keep on my homepage are not public data, fuck off Google.
I've written a short 2.5 hour class for tech newbies to walk them through wiring together their own game consoles in breadboards. So far I've taught it to 90 people in the Twin Cities, I'm looking to see if I can get it spread to new communities. If you might be interested in teaching the class where you live I'm open to sharing my class materials.
I also have a related project I'm working on to make a follow up class about programming games for the consoles with the MIT Scratch platform. I have an in-progress Scratch to Arduino C++ converter.
https://community.arduboy.com/t/first-arduboy-game-programme...
Also the Arduboy project that the class is based on it very cool, consider buying one of the new editions of the hardware, now with USB-C and link-cable support! (I'm not sponsored, I just want to support the project that made the class possible)
https://www.arduboy.com/
Adding new openly licensed learning resources to the Kolibri offline learning platform. It is designed to be deployed in communities that lack consistent access to the public internet. They currently have a significant amount of English language content, but are limited in what they have available in the dozens of other languages they have translated the core software into. I'm trying to bring in new resources and then try to lead an effort to do translations of the best materials I can find to make the platform more useful to more people.
Also trying to recruit people to teach tech newbies how to build their own handheld video game consoles. Let me know if you might like to run a class where you live and i'll share my class materials.
Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.