Oh No, Technology!
Friday 10 November, 2023
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What's going on?
Updating my blog. Cursing the ietf for ever inventing computer networking.
NaNoWriMo
In a recent vlog brothers Hank Green talked about an offshoot of NaNoWriMo to instead of write a novel, finish a draft of your book. I have not done NaNoWriMo or this offshoot, and I don't have a book to write or draft, but I notice the overlap between this and the memex method from the post yesterday, namely that putting thoughts to paper (or digital) with any consistency eventually creates a large volume of useful and thoughtful work, useful for both curation into something good on it's own, and as a point of self reflection, as you can look further back in your life as you go on. So I guess this blog will constitute my running thoughts, while the main blog will be reserved for longer form essays I want to leave there.
There is immense power in simple continuity. Exist for long enough, ply your craft and eventually you will find yourself become at minimum the de facto expert of your craft. Take, for example, the case of the art critic who drew the ire of the most famous artist in the world:
https://news.artnet.com/opinion/devon-rodriguez-parasocial-aesthetics-2380960
This is not to say that Ben Davis is respected solely because of his longevity, but rather that his station, the power he has to reduce Devon Rodriguez to posting threatening insta stories is the fact that he shows up. He is regarded among those who continue to pay attention through periods of mass interest and little interest.
We have to get weirder and stick with the things that are important to us.
"Just as GitHub was founded on git, today we are re-founded on Copilot"
In one of the funnier moments from a year of corporate silliness from a decade of corporate irrationality in search of bubbles, this quote from microsoft about the future of one of their flagship businesses--GitHub--struck me as especially funny. Not because it's plainly ridiculous, though it very obviously is, but because it lays bare I think the corporate conception of value. The monopoly doesn't care about what is useful or good, or even what they can sell, the monopoly only cares for rents. GitHub is a profitable business (or at least it's competitors are) because it provides a convenient and well known place to host your git repositories.
But a git repository is just a folder with some metadata that helps the program git order and organize the contents and changes to them in a way that is highly distributable. It takes plain text (or binaries, although it is less suited for that) and stores changes to that in single line chunks: every time you change a line, a new line is recorded plus some metadata indicating where and how and when the change was made.
Critically, git is open source, you can download it at
and git is not a very resource heavy application to run, for a project the size and scale of an entire linux distro, the resources required to build it in a couple hours are met by a mid tier desktop, and really even less if you were willing to wait, and that includes all the tools required to do it, not just git.
So you can see the problem: microsoft is not, strictly speaking, necessary to the whole arrangement. It only provides a convenient platform to do it on, so anyone who hosts their projects there can trivially remove them and put them somewhere else. This is the doomsday scenario for the monopolist, who above all else desires the ability to extract rent regardless of how terrible their service is. Don't like your ISP? Too bad, it's the only game in town.
Which makes AI the savior of microsoft, since microsoft created it (with more than a little help from the huge mass of open source code everyone was so kind to give them) microsoft sets the terms, and if microsoft gets you hooked on copilot--and it seems many young programmers do rely on it--then they can extort you for any amount of money they see fit.
What takes all this to transcendental comedy for me is that I don't think their product works all that well. AI boosters love to pontificate about how it will allow a developerless future, as much as bosses want to pretend they can fire all their employees and hire chatbots, but it's instructive how few of them have actually done so.
Instead I think the AI tools have been a great help to young developers trying to get the hang of new technologies or features, which is great! In that role I think AI has a lot of potential, but from what I've seen so far it doesn't understand actual nuance, reality, or what working is. So my worry is primarily for the developers who are growing to rely on these tools becoming locked in by one of the big monopolies and being abused by their fraud and theft.
Check this out:
Well earned crticism of corporate news media
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/journalism-free-press-gaza-extremism-20231105.html
Pentax's attempt to create a modern film camera
https://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/pentax/filmproject/
Ed Zitron's blog about how Changpeng Zhao might live to regret throwing sam
bankman-fried under the bus, or: why fraud is unustainable and corrupting
https://wheresyoured.at/p/moving-fast-and-breaking-things
Tags
#monopoly #worker-protections #corporate-bs #writing #text