It was me. I saw your post from over at lobste.rs "what are you doing this week" [0]. I've had the tab open for a couple days and I thought people over here at HN would like it (and I was right).
Anyway, thanks for the resource. I'm sure people would be interested in the parent page, "Graphics Programming Virtual Meetup" as well:
I'm sorry I don't have better statistics but after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I think it took roughly 15 years for the stock market to bounce back. Though I could be wrong, I think unemployment was also high, including in the tech sector.
There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale.
Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2]
Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3]
A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype.
You're completely forgetting "all your jobs are going to get outsourced to India". There was panic that internet connectivity would make local talent obsolete.
Microsoft was in full swing with trying to strangle the computing space. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" was a term coined from that era. Ballmer called Linux "a cancer". [0]
People were in a panic about Napster and how the internet would steal billions of dollars.
It does seem like people are much more against AI now than the dot-com boom then, but it's all looks and sounds very familiar to me.
> You're completely forgetting "all your jobs are going to get outsourced to India". There was panic that internet connectivity would make local talent obsolete.
That was largely in the latter part of the boom and part of the bust afterward. I recall some words from Carly Fiorina being said (“Forget the engineers”) that seemed to foretell the more extractive future.
Depends on how you define "normies". Sure, students happily napstered away, but a lot of adults (even those with no financial stake in the music industry) seriously believed the claims of the music executives that this "piracy" was going to destroy music and needed to be stopped.
Right before the Millenium, mainstream media like the NYT was blaming the internet and "violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake" for the Columbine Massacre [0] and other similar mass shootings in the 90s.
A lot of those reporters are now leadership at major newspapers like the NYT (eg. Applebome who linked Doom with Columbine and is now the Deputy National Editor for the NYT).
A large amount of reporters (both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists) discussing technology today are literally boomers who have been fighting this battle against each other since the 1990s and taking all the airtime away from alternative younger voices on both sides.
Just seconding this…people have a starry eyed view of the dotcom boom but there was a lot of waste and outright fraud. A lot of theoretical improvements to business processes were lost because…the businesses didn't want to change their processes.
I joined CS education in 2000. There were jobs everywhere. Classmates were leaving after a few months, or working part-time. And this was in Sweden. It was not only creating jobs, but reinventing the IT field, creating lots more opportunities.
Today, the message is that (Dear leaders,) your workers can be replaced by machines. Not that you together can do more with this new tool, but that you can slim down your operation. Maybe I'm just older, but the optimism I saw then is now divided into opportunity (AI consultants) and skepticism (workers.)
This is a narrative the AI industry created, because they want to tap into the huge salary money pool. They tell a story of anti-innovation cost-cutting rather than "do more with these tools."
My main critique is their non-commercial licensing. For example, the linked article is BY-NC-SA4.0.
My critique is pretty minor as most of the technical releases from 100 rabbits, as far as I can tell, is libre/free licensed, with the non-commercial licensing reserved for writing and art. Even so, it means there's effort required to decouple the non-commercial aspects of projects from their libre parts and sends a big signal, to me at least, that I should only ever consider their strictly technical work for use.
When talking about permacomputing, for example, I don't know why one wouldn't encourage, in any way possible, commercial viability that would lead to the stated goal.
I have an affinity for the 100 rabbits folks, and I deeply respect a lot of their work, but their reliance on non-commercial licenses means that they're tacitly supporting copyright terms that are dis-proportionally long that, in most cases, is well over a century at this point.
Note that Stallman also has the same stance, putting his work under a "no-derivatives" license, so it's not like free software folks believe in "free culture", either.
It's a good stance, I commend it. Although, there's a history as to why the license is there.
The license exists there so that we were able to do take down requests on OpenSea. We had to make the asset license explicit for OpenSea to take down the copied works off their network.
In a different world where we are not made to participate in crypto ecosystems against our will, we would not have that restriction.
I know I wouldn't want to restrict the use of my works just because there's a crypto bro out there that might profit from an NFT.
When putting software under a libre/free license, there are compromises to be made to promote freedom. One of them is accepting that the software that's created might be used for purposes that are considered bad by the author, such as being used by military entities for violence [0]. This would be the same argument I would make for artistic works, where I would argue that the benefits of providing freedom in use of the works outweighs the potential for abuse.
Part of my worry is that there's a large part of technology that is artistic (writing, text, pictures, illustration, art, music, etc.) that will be buried under a century of copyright. The overlong copyright terms means that parts of our culture will be restricted from the commons well beyond the window of relevancy.
When it happens to you, you can see how you react. I sure remember having your stance at one point, in the abstract. My personal use of license is reactionary to the situations I've experienced.
I never really looked into the GPL before, their stance on military use includes freedom of usage for institutions whose purpose is surveillance and warfare, my gut feeling is that they might not have asked themselves freedom for whom? the missile manufacturer? I'm not sure that this sounds like freedom.
I'll say this right out, I'll bounce out of open source if I ever see my code used for military purposes. I'll keep releasing works under the MIT until I can no longer in good conscience do so.
Thanks for the clarity, I think I have a more consistent view of your ethics now.
I'm not sure if it's cultural, but in the US there's a strong sentiment for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is most important not when people are saying things that one agrees with, but when they are saying things for which one disagrees.
The FSF's stance on software freedom is almost surely well thought out and deeply ideological. On one hand, it means that for every bad case scenario, the freedom allows the option for other good case scenarios. On the other hand, it identifies how difficult and fickle it is to enforce a purity test for usage and that any organization involved in such a decision is bound to be corrupted.
Note that MIT is one of the more permissive libre/free licenses, allowing for commercial re-use without a copyleft component, network usage without providing source or patent exemption. At the very least, you might want to consider GPL or AGPL as they might help some of the bad use cases you're trying to guard against.
> When talking about permacomputing, for example, I don't know why one wouldn't encourage, in any way possible, commercial viability that would lead to the stated goal.
Because capitalism is what destroys the world. Fucking duh.
There's very little point in spending so much time thinking about C compilers in forth that run on scavenged z80s these days if capitalism is actually viable.
> Because capitalism is what destroys the world. Fucking duh.
The issue is that “commercial” includes plenty of not-necessarily-capitalist entities as well, like sole proprietors and cooperatives (sole proprietors being single-member worker cooperatives).
Of course, a society in which worker cooperatives and individual craftspersons are the dominant forms of economic participation is probably (hopefully!) also a society which has done away with intellectual property and the enforcement thereof, rendering software license terms (including non-commercial use clauses) entirely moot.
> The issue is that “commercial” includes plenty of not-necessarily-capitalist entities as well
I see no issue, and believe me, I have the deepest empathies for people who participate in capitalism under duress.
If you could explain why I or anyone else should need to help some people murder so that those "not-necessarily-capitalists" we are so worried about can use my software without legal threat, I would happily listen to it, but I think you will be unconvincing.
I mean, you have realised that someone could just ask, right? I could listen to them, and if they had a reason that I agreed was good, I could give them whatever they needed for themselves without accessorising myself to that murder that others would do with those things.
Digital artifacts are the modern form of the means of production. Making digital artifacts available under a libre/free is giving these modern means of production to the public by putting it into the commons.
By requiring an interaction and explicit permission, you're putting yourself as a gate keeper to the means of production. In the best case, the uses will depend on your temperament at the time of request. In the worst case, such as a state backed morality commission, this could lead to corruption and abuse.
Part of capitalism is the ownership of private property, including intellectual property. If your focus is on making sure you have control over your work for things you think are moral, then the modern copyright system is in place for you to keep that control.
My focus is on empowering people with tools and making sure those tools aren't restricted in their use by a small oligarchy.
> you're putting yourself as a gate keeper to the means of production.
Liar.
I am only the gatekeeper of my own efforts.
If you had any clue how to code yourself you I could not prevent you from making your own code.
> If your focus is on making sure you have control over your work for things you think are moral, then the modern copyright system is in place for you to keep that control.
> My focus is [on preventing people from exercising moral judgement].
Good for you, and thank you for being a shining reminder of the reason I don't contribute to open source.
2600 is locked into a format that was relevant 30-40 years ago and is nearly irrelevant today. In my opinion, 2600 is pantomiming a hacker aesthetic and have long since abandoned any commitment to an underlying hacker ethos.
I'm surprised that they're now offering a digital format as, at one point, they were taking a hard stance to not provide one. I guess they changed their mind within the last 10 years or so.
Notice how Paged Out is libre/free licensed, making sure that they provide a CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA for their articles. 2600 is locked under copyright.
You essentially have to be in the right place at the right time. The FCC releases LPFM channels every year all over over the country. If you have a 501c3 non-profit within the designated broadcast area you can apply for the channel. They tend to award the channels to more established non-profits. There are no filing fees.
In our case we created the non-profit in anticipation of applying for this license. We got really lucky and no one else applied for the license and it was awarded to us.
When Lorenzo Milam died, i heard about his book "Sex and Broadcasting" that describes this process (as well as other details about running a community radio station). As an avid HAM, i was very interested in the technical side of it, but the political side was interesting as well. I highly recommend reading it.
Take an $n$, chosen from $[N,2N]$. Take it's prime factorization $n = \prod_{j=1}^{k} q_j^{a_j}$. Take the logarithm $\log(n) = \sum_{j=1}^{k} a_j \log(q_j)$.
Divide by $\log(n)$ to get the sum equal to $1$ and then define a weight term $w _ j = a_j \log(q_j)/\log(n)$.
Think of $w_j$ as "probabilities". We can define an entropy of sorts as $H_{factor}(n) = - \sum_j w_j \log(w_j)$.
Heuristics (such as Poisson-Dirichlet) suggest this converges to 1 as $N \to \infty$.
OpenAI tells me that the reason this might be interesting is that it's giving information on whether a typical integer is built from one, or a few, dominant prime(s) or many smaller ones. A mean entropy of 1 is saying (apparently) that there is a dominant prime factor but not an overwhelming one. (I guess) a mean to 0 means dominant prime, mean to infinity means many small factors (?) and oscillations mean no stable structure.
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