Collapse or no collapse I just hope that somebody sets up a HN equivalent in Europe. Discussing technology in a meaningful and fun way becomes impossible when moral values diverge beyond recognition and this is now becoming our reality.
Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil.
Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.
Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).
Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
You are probably right. I would not discount the importance of many open source tools for making viz more widely available (and far more powerful than excel graphs) but its indeed tooling, not conceptual and in any case already available for more than a decade. Stagnation indeed.
Visualization seems to have stagnated in the AI craze era. Lots of androids touching holographic screens and what not, as metaphors for the almighty "AGI" coming any day now, but cant recall a major new development in the last five years?
One area that might be "pregnant" for some new approaches is the visualization of large datasets, eg large graphs. Extracting useful (and objective) information instead of ovewhelming with the sheer number of data points. That is indeed the art of visualisation.
Hard to know how significant this is because its impossible to know what the political class (and many others) mean by "AI" (and thus its potential risks). This is not new, similar charades a few years ago around "blockchain" etc.
But ignoring the signaling going on on various sides would be a mistake. "AI" is for all practical purposes a synonym for algorithmic decision making, with potential direct implication on peoples lifes. Without accountability, transparency, recourse etc the unchecked expansion of "AI" in various use cases represents a significant regression for historically established rights. In this respect the direction of travel is clear: The US is dismantling the CFPB, even more deregulation (if that is at all possible) is coming, big tech will be trusted to continue "self-regulating" etc.
The interesting part is the UK stance. Somewhere in between the US and the EU in terms of citizen / consumer protections, but despite brexit probably closer to the latter, this siding with dog-eats-dog deregulation might signal an anxiety not to be left behind.
In the longer term various alternatives are conceivable if people put their minds to it. Politically, economically, technically this is very much like the energy transition: There is immense current dependency that cant be just switched off (and vested interests will resist for as long as possible, using every possible means), but there is sequence of low hanging fruit which in time can be expanded. The trick imho is to always apply the highest amount of pressure that wont burst the kettle.
Remarkable story and a glimpse at how nasty vested interests can become as the world starts to second guess the sustainability of an entire century's worth of "growth" at all costs.
Its not black and white, without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two, but the pressure to contain the collateral damage to environment and people will not go away.
On mastodon I noticed an interesting approach: to warn in a visible manner that a topic is "sensitive". Not sure if that triggers less aggressive behavior, maybe its even the opposite? But just as there are instinctive red dots that grab our attention there might be digital blue dots to calm us down.
Most science papers are only read by a tiny circle of experts, maybe a dozen or so. The process still works out. The critical challenge is to have some quality human readership (instead of the AI bot brigade and random zero second clicks).
Theoretically the internet would have enabled the long tail, making tiny domain focused niches viable. In practice discovery is the most gamed algorithm in existence. Unless you have the resources and inclination to spend quality time towards useless "SEO" nobody knows you are alive.
There is a certain amount of "convergence" of good practices thats happening despite the exhausting trend following. E.g. people happily(?) wrote c++ code for decades but today there is strong pressure from the success of ecosystems like rust and python. Open source accelerates that competitive evolution as it improves transparency and lowers the threshold for adoption.
Software is a cultural artifact. It reflects the society and economy that produces it, just as much as music, literature, urban design, or cuisine.
So you cannot "destroy" software. But you can have fast food versus slow food, you can have walkable cities or cars-only cities, you can have literate or illiterate society etc. Different cultures imply and create different lifestyles, initially subjective choices, but ultimately objectively different quality of life.
The author argues for a different software culture. For this to happen you need to create a viable "sub-culture" first, one that thrives because it acrues advantage to its practitioners. Accretion of further followers is then rapid.
Not sure its my filters working to remove nuisance news but the "singularity" plot and "AI safety" seem a bit less prevalent these days? Maybe the nature of these algorithms is finally diffusing to wider audiences?
> Folk music is enmeshed in a particular culture. It is knowledge transmitted across generations, but which evolves to meet the challenges of the times and changing sensibilities.
This is a beautiful and unexpected connection. Drawing analogies between software and other forms of cultural expression is a long overdue mental shift. The use of linguistic expressions such "tech" and "engineering" highlights the prevailing desire to think of software as some sort of thing apart, less social, less political (and thus something we can profitably pursue with fewer moral qualms).
The switch from the original mentality of software as a product (literally shipped in a box), to the current business model of "user as a product" and software merely being the bait and hook is so profound that we are not really talking about the same industry anymore.
Not clear where the strange and twisted journey of software would lead. The infinite reproducibility at zero cost is not something current economic systems can handle. The enshittification might continue, further enshittifying society or open source becomes the norm.
Imagine if the amount of ingenuity that went into building the elaborate speculative digital game that is crypto was actually used to lift underdeveloped countries from their misery. Fighting corruption, enabling healthier local economies, reducing the siphoning of wealth to offshore centers, improving financial literacy etc. etc.
Solving real problems is hard. Being distracted by snake oil salesmen, whether they sell digital scarcity or AGI only makes things worse.
The problem is that whatever esoteric motivations technical people have to join the FOSS movement (scratching an itch, seeking fame, saving the world, doing what everybody else is doing etc.), does not translate well to the domain of designing user experiences. People with the education and talent to have an impact here have neither incentives nor practical means to "FOSS-it". You could Creative Commons some artwork (and there are beautiful examples) but thats about it. The art and science of making software usable thus remains a proprietary pursuit. Indeed if that bottleneck could somehow be relaxed, adoption of FOSS software would skyrocket because the technical core is so good and keeps getting better.
> Then the upswing, when even the most fashionable users realised that desktop office suites would never die and would coexist with the cloud.
Libreoffice in combination with local ML/AI owns the future. Whats missing is to orchestrate an API for the vast and growing open source data science ecosystem to be more readily available to non-technical end-users.
When that happens it will be another "Sputnik moment" :-)