> I've long held that open source is one of the world's biggest anarchist experiments. Anarchism, as understood by the likes of Kropotkin, largely believed that we can self organize towards working for the wellbeing of all, that s self organized groups will genuinely build useful and high quality tools.
The paradox of this kind of "anarchism" is that it works really well when it isn't being consciously pursued, i.e. when the "well being of all" is an emergent effect of people pursuing their own well being locally, trying to speculate about "the well being of all" at the macro level. The moment people start trying to consciously work toward specific outcomes at the macro level, it all starts to fall apart.
So it's really more aligned with Hayek than Kropotnik: spontaneous order as a product of human action, not human design.
> Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.
And that's exactly where we begin to falter. Sitting here on HN speculating about how to make the world, as a single unit of analysis, rather people at the micro level observing and replicating what actually works in practice individually, is a recipe for creating obstacles and mechanisms of centralization which will inevitably be abused.
Well, no, there was an actual point there about trying to effect change via top-down intentionality vs. bottom-up emergence. Any alignment with a particular ideological position is necessarily downstream of that.
Consider the possibility that your own extremely intemperate response originated from a reaction to associations that you yourself were bringing into the discussion.
Apologies for the intemperate response but in my experience everyone who talks about capital-H Hayek has the same set of shrink-wrapped opinions, and the open source / free software thing doesn't fit into them very well.
The gaps between our shared reliance on unpaid open source by people doing software for love, and the "Austrian Economics" financialized worldview are really hard to bridge. Why aren't they all rich if they're so useful?
> Apologies for the intemperate response but in my experience everyone who talks about capital-H Hayek has the same set of shrink-wrapped opinions, and the open source / free software thing doesn't fit into them very well.
Perhaps an effect of the particular bubbles/walled gardens you inhabit? Most of the discourse involving Hayek that I've encountered involves people with a wide range of opinions, including many who see the FOSS world as a perfect example of Hayek's concept of spontaneous order.
> The gaps between our shared reliance on unpaid open source by people doing software for love, and the "Austrian Economics" financialized worldview are really hard to bridge.
Austrian economics has little to do with a "financialized worldview"; rather, it's fundamentals boil down to subjective utility as the ultimate determinant of economic value, an axiomatic baseline that preference in pursuit of subjective utility is revealed by observable behavior rather than theoretical doctrines, and recognition of the individual as the fundamental agent/unit of analysis in economics.
Perhaps you're interacting primarily with people working in the financial sphere who are invoking certain ideas from Austrian economics to rationalize their own particular intentions?
If so, a rigorous application of Bayes' Theorem to the associations you've gleaned from your particular experience may be well warranted.
The "bridge" you're seeking is right there in the recognition of subjective utility as the basis of all value: contrary to your point, it's the satisfaction of subjective motivations, regardless of how that satisfaction is quantified or denominated, that generates value.
People who are obtaining the results they desire from the efforts they invest are creating value for themselves, regardless of whether their results have a financial value attached to them.
Ok, that definition of subjective utility is unfalsifiable but meanwhile in the real world we all run on money, like it or not.
This is a post about open source people not getting paid, are you going to argue that their subjective utility of enjoying their work is payment enough?
I think the overuse of .env files is a side effect of the overuse of containers. Working with config files is much more convenient if you're running software normally, but if you're shipping an entire baseline OS along with your application, getting application-specific configuration data into the container becomes non-trivial. Environment variables provide a standardized way of making configuration data set outside the container available from within it.
Not just gas pumps, but any measuring device used to determine the price of a metered product. The scales at the register at supermarkets also have calibration stickers in my state.
Now that you mention it, I've seen them at some grocery stores - but generally not in a place I'd be looking unlike gas pumps where is is right next to the price and so you won't miss it.
> Personally I think this is untrue, and that acting like it's true is a defeatist attitude that sabotages any efforts to build alternative systems that accomplish the goal of age verification without user verification.
It may well be true, and worrying about the possibility that it is is what should motivate people to build alternatives/workarounds.
I guess my point is that if any substantial portion of the people in favor of age verification are actually acting in good faith, then responding to their efforts to protect children with "NEVER! I WILL OPPOSE YOU TO MY LAST BREATH!" isn't really helping your cause.
Find a way to accomplish the stated goal in a way that doesn't erode our rights, and you'll win a lot more people over.
Well, you do have to draw the line somewhere when up against opponents pursuing a salami-slicing strategy. If you keep compromising on incremental measures, you ultimately do lose everything.
True, but I don't think you need to compromise to do age verification; there are plenty of ways to achieve the stated goal without any privacy impact, like the one I just suggested.
Once people start arguing those measures aren't good enough and that you need to start sacrificing some of your rights in order to keep kids safe, then your position will look a lot more reasonable to moderates when you push back.
Only to the extent that the growers who apply deliberate selection criteria are themselves part of "nature". But we generally use that term to distinguish outcomes for which human intentions weren't a causal determinant, so I don't think it makes sense in this case.
But natural evolution is also selective. Animals choose their partners based on looks or features, they eat the fruits that look the best, spreading those seeds, and bees go to the most colorful flowers. Same thing we do
Right, but we typically use the term "natural" in contrast to "artificial", where the latter implies that the selection pressures are intentionally applied by humans in pursuit of specific outcomes, and the former implies that the selection pressures are not being created or curated by humans.
We make semantic distinctions like this in many areas: e.g. if a house burns down by accident, it's just a fire, but if someone deliberately set the house on fire, we call it arson.
There's a lot of this back-to-basics stuff out there: BBSes, Gopher sites, Gemini protocol, etc. A lot of it is very refreshing in comparison to what the modern web has become.
That's true of almost all legislation. Every political initiative that tries to brute force specific outcomes instead of working to align incentives seems to fail miserably, online or offline.
The paradox of this kind of "anarchism" is that it works really well when it isn't being consciously pursued, i.e. when the "well being of all" is an emergent effect of people pursuing their own well being locally, trying to speculate about "the well being of all" at the macro level. The moment people start trying to consciously work toward specific outcomes at the macro level, it all starts to fall apart.
So it's really more aligned with Hayek than Kropotnik: spontaneous order as a product of human action, not human design.
> Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.
And that's exactly where we begin to falter. Sitting here on HN speculating about how to make the world, as a single unit of analysis, rather people at the micro level observing and replicating what actually works in practice individually, is a recipe for creating obstacles and mechanisms of centralization which will inevitably be abused.
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