>And then there was the Amish community in Pennsylvania. Eva had to fly out there to negotiate for the “Cyberia.com” domain name they had bought. “It was a proper barn with horse carts and a wall of modems as they were running a bulletin board and an early ecommerce company. Apparently, there was always one family nominated to be the tech support,” she remembers.
That is one of the most profoundly interesting little tidbits of internet history I’ve ever seen
It’s worth noting that I think Microsoft lost a significant share of the personal use market, not just to Linux or Mac, but to the apple ecosystem and mobile/tablet computing as a whole.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I buy a broken down camaro. The windshield is gone. The sheetmetal is rusted. The frame is bent. The motor needs rebuilt. I patch/replace the sheetmetal, and paint it. I straighten the frame. I rebuild the motor, and put a supercharger on it to boot. It’s a pretty nice little hot rod, and it was busted before. But you tell me, did I buy it or build it?
Belaboring the point: you should have SOME working understanding of the physics of your homes use of energy. You should be able to fix your home when something’s wrong with it, so long as it’s not something catastrophically wrong that requires professional help (such as the fire brigade).
The point: computers are different from everything else. Pre-writing man is a fundamentally different character to literate, historical man. (I do believe there’s an Egyptian dialogue on the matter.) And in the same manner, computing man is a fundamentally different character from pre-computing man. However, most people, despite their USE of computers, cannot really compute, because they can only get their computers to do what other people have told them to do, and not what they themselves have told their computers to do. In other words, to them the computer is an appliance. Now, not everyone can read Ulysses, or Durants history, and I don’t think it would be fair to expect that of people. But most people can read, and they can read the whole book if they choose. The qualitative shift of computational man finds that what he has read can be made into action, simply by it having been written, yet this does not hold true for a person who is handed Durants history of the world, or Livy’s history of Rome (before having been taught Latin, even!) and being told, you have knowledge, even though you can’t get through it all.
You start people with shorter books. Even picture books. You start them with simpler computers, with simpler software, and then more complex computers which do more complex things. And even in the professional world, of fully literate adults, you only break out the really complicated stuff for the really complicated things.
Software should be comprehensible, because it is meant to be comprehensible, it is not just execution but elocution, and is the explanation of its own intent.
He built huge amounts of wealth by building rocket ships and electric cars because he's worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and thinks we need to be an interplanetary civilization. This is a dude who's dedicated his entire life to (in his mind) save all of humanity from certain doom.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
Not the poster in question, but I think some of it might just be the "big ball of mud" of long maintained software, and some of it may indeed be the managerial structures around software, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and find problems for them to solve, regardless of the need of either the growth of team size, or the so-called problems.
And we all know bored developers will make up work for themselves and bikeshed themselves to death.
> a strategy
I don't think it's conspiratorial, so much as emergent. All structures which persist have means of ensuring their persistence. Institutions (including open ones) will push for things that further their existence, status, funding, and ultimately their power. They will make themselves indispensable, regardless of their actual value-added.
>because the size and complexity of modern software is far beyond the ability of individual users to reason about it based just on the source code and without any augmentation
I feel this. You should be able to understand your computer.