Read a thread about hiring processes and corporations etc. It make me think about how incredibly much smaller the ideal company size is than the companies we work for today. Has anyone ever noticed how incredibly productive Anarchist groups of open source software developers are compared to... Google/Facebook/IBM/Microsoft/Whatever? Like, the Slashdot software was written by a couple of guys, Mastodon by a couple of guys, Git was created by Linus Torvalds and passed off to a few tens of people?
Minecraft built by a few people... But then you look at Meta + Metaverse, and they spent like tens of billions of dollars and got 6 users all of whom were in the testing department at Meta.
In tech, Instead of enormous companies employing 300,000 people, we need like 10,000 companies employing 30 people each. Most tech is public goods that we try to pretend are "property". Most of it should be funded by grants and donations and then be open-source and Free.
Ok, so I got a chance to watch that video. Yeah, the guy has drunk a lot of the Kool Aid. But he's not entirely wrong either. I mean, stuff does fall apart when there isn't someone funding it. So his role is to cheerlead that funding... which is crazy to be honest, but at the moment also really important in many cases.
given our current "system" it's hard to fund a lot of non-profit public goods production. But public goods stuff is an enormous part of real economy
it's just not measurable by dollars! How much real wealth would you just completely nuke if today you could wave a wand and erase every compiled Linux kernel and its source code? Fucking every Honda vehicle made in the last 10 years runs Android! The entire movie industry relies on video distribution... via Linux. The entire stock market falls apart. The entire internet stops routing.
Linux is a piece of software you can download at Kernel.org for free. You can't measure it's importance by the total volume of sales per year... it's not sold!
I could list major projects all day long alphabetically from archive.org's grateful dead archive to Zabbix and everything in between if you nuked it all of the face of the earth we'd instantly be transported to a level of living that was pre WWII
@GhostOnTheHalfShell 90% of vehicles on the road would likely stop working (probably running RTOS or something similar in the engine control unit). Same for lots of airplanes, traffic lights, telephone systems (erlang was designed for phone switches, calls get routed via SIP these days), the entire way we prescribe medications has already fallen apart due to a security breach, imagine those computers just don't have an OS or a functional internet.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Yeah, anyway, dweebs like this hedge fund guy want to take credit for all these cars and telephone systems and whatever but they're all critically reliant on open source software invented by guys like you and me working in little 3-50 person collaborations and the thing that he's really responsible for (at best) is wrestling enough cash together to keep the production flowing. It's not nothing, but it's really not anything amazing either. Sigh...
The part that kills me is his assertion that only people like him have ideas. It’s ahistorical crap and warmed over Great Man theory. The megalomania is the cringey element.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
It's survivorship bias. Ideas are everywhere, but only ideas + massive infusions of cash lead to large businesses. It's not the fucking ideas it's the grubby green stuff that's different. If I gave any random masters student in engineering a billion dollars they'd have a very useful business at the end of it, and if not, we could do that like 40 times in a row just for the cost of the Metaverse or whatever.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
For sure we could have stuff like Mastodon multiplied by 100x if we just had grants to produce useful public goods... I can't even imagine how much better society would be if in the US 50M people were working for $100k/yr govt grant money to do music, educational videos, open source software, books, movies, etc
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Ooh, those institutions though... They have been corrupted so badly, tripling the administration, replacing full faculty with adjunct teaching staff... Look at how quick they were to send head-breakers after peaceful campus protesters... Universities resemble hedge funds more than learning institutions. So, in spirit I agree but in practice I'd rather see some innovative competition than fund them as is.
The commercial imperative advocated by neoliberals (mainstream economists) cause it. The commercial imperative impels them, then seduce them. Ivy leagues are financial engineering institutions with a university attached, just as GE , GM and the airline industry became because of mainstream economist policy. It’s not just blind ideology, it’s a deadly toxic one that’s already destroyed so much and will continue to do so.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Literally if we had taxed Elon Musk 40 billion dollars and then just given 40,000 grants of $1M each via the SBIR program we'd have vast more useful productivity than what yielded from his Twitter buyout. Like, VASTLY better.
@dlakelan The way he got to his wealth is mostly luck and a willingness to lie.
Too many people want to believe a Tony Stark exists. Even Steve Jobs’ legendary reality distortion field was of a different temperament driven to “insanely good”. His ego was wrapped up in doing something and was quite manipulative to get it.
Add comment