It changes the likelihood of the veracity of the document. If HN has done some sort of vetting, great. But there is no reason to take at face value anything that comes from Veritas.
A discussion on censorship is a great thing to have. Just not starting with this guy.
...As opposed to all of the other media outlets with their stellar records of truth-telling.
The "publication of record" ship has sailed and we're left with competing agendas and increased need for personal vetting, which many have done on this leak--a fact which is easily searchable.
Someday ill make it out to even furthur. Don't forget Intellephunk, future classic and system parties and everything in between :) The mpls scene is like the classier version of Detroit.
Doesn't every developer eventually alias building to 'b' or maybe 'm'? It's like a law of nature. Or you can just rebuild automatically every time you save a file, like js people do.
I was 19 when this came out and this essay single-handedly changed my life and led me to Ray Kurzweil, Minsky, the Unabomber Manifesto, Naomi Klein, and then ultimately to spirituality through Hawking-trained-physicist-turned-cave-dwelling-monk Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time."
The rest of my life quite literally flows from reading this essay over and over when it came out. Genuinely happy to see it here.
I never heard any of theses terms or texts, can you provide more background? I tried to search for the one "the Unabomber Manifesto" and it seems to be linked to a "mathematician/terrorist", and in the archive.org there is an article about "bad things of industrialization" and some weird characters, what that means?
Can you explain what i'm missing? I'm young and non-american, maybe i'm missing context.
Yes, the Unabomber was a mathematician-gone-terrorist who had a manifesto of sorts published decrying industrialization and technological profress. His academic career was pretty short. There's a Wikipedia page if you want to read up on it.
I believe this article references the Unabomber. If it doesn't, then Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" definitely does.
It's a fascinating line of thought--though I obviously don't support the actions taken by its author.
To clarify a little further, Bill Joy in this essay refers to Kurzweil who refers to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind." I became a technological utopian until reading Naomi Klein's "No Logo" later that year, as well as the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.
This ultimately led me on a sort of existential quest that led to the book "Waking Up in Time" by Peter Russell and then I began to have a much more spiritual orientation towards life and reality and now try to be as practical as possible while working towards a positive technological future.
> Jacques Ellul (French: [ɛlyl]; January 6, 1912 – May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor who was a noted Christian anarchist. (...) The dominant theme of his work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
I’ve just finished reading his “Illusion of politics”, where he explained (back in the 1960s) how the West lives in a technocratic world only focused on efficiency and why this causes politicians and political decisions (and ultimately democracy itself) to become sort of obsolete, because all the decisions taken by them (the politicians) should ultimately answer to only one and most important criteria: they should be efficient. And as only the technocrats can tell/approximate which decisions may or may not be efficient, the politicians end up being just “puppets” rubber-stamping the decisions actually taken by the technocrats.
I’m now just about to start reading his “Le bluff technologique” (it’s in French) and I’m very, very excited because of it. Again, I recommend Ellul to all those interested about us, humans, and about how we function, reading him reminded me of when I first read Hobbes, Rousseau or Tolstoy, i.e. other great literary and philosophical figures from the past that did a great job of describing how our species “operates”. Only that Ellul exposes us confronting this new and modern world, which said authors didn’t have the chance to do.
Later edit: For those down-voting this, I urge them to reconsider. Not the down-voting itself, which I don’t care about, but Jacques Ellul himself. Someone mentioned Ted Kaczynski, it turns out Ellul was his favorite philosopher (https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/06/08/the-unabo...). I’ve just finished the introduction of the book I said I was about to start reading, and it’s haunting how he prophetised the “missed chance” represented by the dream of a de-centralized society promised at some point by modern computer networks. He “warned” us (in the 1970s and the 1980s) that we had a very short window of opportunity for making this new technology work in our best interest by making things less centralized. It turns out both the www and more recently crypto-currencies are such missed chances.
> Kaczynski claimed in all humility that half of what he read in The Technological Society he knew already; he discovered in Ellul a soul mate rather than a teacher. “When I read the book for the first time, I was delighted,” he told a psychiatrist who interviewed him in jail, “because I thought, ‘Here is someone who is saying what I’ve already been thinking.'”
Also check out Ellul's "Propaganda", where he says that it's actually the intellectuals who are most susceptible to propaganda, as they feel they have to investigate competing claims and decide for themselves.
Ellul was an interesting thinker. But, to my knowledge, he never advocated violence. I'm not sure where Kaczynski got the idea for using violence to achieve his ends, but it wasn't from Ellul.
alternate theory. people who have money are desperately looking for things with potential for big returns. if you are one of those things or create one of those things there is more money looking for you than has ever looked for anyone in the history of the world.
The issue though is that a lot of the people mentioned in the original article don't think trying is worthwhile. So advice to "just try" is always going to fall short.
As advice it also ignores the structural issues that make trying easier and harder for various people. One way of encouraging people to try is to break down the real barriers that exists and make it harder for them than others.
If it's a paid Linux though, then you can get a team that:
-Appreciates design.
-Makes choices.
-Supports the most powerful and popular hardware.
-Yes, focused first and foremost on tinkerers and geeks, who are the main people losing out in the current environment. It's all a group that's increasing in size and will likely continue to for the foreseeable future.
"Makes choices" and "focused on tinkerers" are at tension with each other.
Because tinkerers want choice, such as with multiple window managers, sound subsystems or what have you. If you have N window managers, now you need to build and maintain all of them at a high bar, which is N times as much effort as one.
Plus the combinations: window manager X doesn't work with sound subsystem Y.
An awesome Linux would have just one supported window manager, filesystem, sound subsystem, and all the rest.
You will also need one dictator who understands eng, UX, product design, sales, marketing, and so on. The dictator listens to everyone, and people can present information and perspectives and debate as much as they want, but at the end of the day, it's the dictator's decision.
If you do all this, yes, you can succeed, in theory.
And I have yet to hear from pmarca or anyone else an answer to this puzzle that is even slightly convincing.
Which gives me pause.