fresh

As you can see from my original comment, I’m no knee-jerk defender of private sector innovation, but I don’t think I agree with this. I love open source software, but the UI is often clunky and unintuitive, like Gimp or LibreOffice. Even when it’s good, it’s often because it mimics the major commercial software.

The heuristic I have is, when the end result benefits from communal information sharing, public is hands down better than private. We have an opioid crisis today because privatized proprietary medical research didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the scientific community as public research. Science and secrecy are incompatible.

But when the end result benefits from a small group of opinionated people getting their way, private can sometimes be better. And good design is more like the latter.

Typically, universities own the patents to any ideas developed using university resources, including the research work one does as a professor. The university can also give a cut to professors.

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.

The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.

I’m having a hard time parsing your sentence. Who is the “they” in the main clause?

You make it sound like the American left pushes a lot of symbolic issues. Which ones are you thinking of?

Hot take: the American left loses on the material issues because it has lost on solidarity, symbolism, ideology. Don’t you know that healthcare and vacation days will “hurt the economy”? There are many poor working class people who still oppose Obamacare even though they directly benefit from it. The material gains matter a lot less if people reject the ideas behind them.

I’m not sure if the timing of Labor Day is important, but I wouldn’t underestimate the power of symbols.

I agree the iPad is almost completely useless, but I don’t think comparing it to 13 years before the iPad is useful. My MacBook Air is 11 years old and it’s still great because it’s good enough to run YouTube, all the major websites, office suites, etc. It’s still getting security updates from Apple. I think that’s what 90% of people use a laptop for. A computer two years older than it, on the other hand, might be useless. It’s not really linear. Hopefully, iPads from 5 years ago can last over a decade.

The real holy grail would be all this open source. “Free for now” doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Strongly disagree. Trains are nice everywhere in the world. There’s no reason they can’t be nice in the US. Cars are trash. Strip malls are trash. Giant parking lots are trash. The sky high cost of cars is trash. The environmental impact of cars is trash. The danger of cars is trash. Car centric urban planning is trash.

Self-driving cars are safer… than the most dangerous thing ever. But because cars are inherently so dangerous, they are still more dangerous than just about any other mode of transportation.

Dreaming is nice, but that’s all self-driving cars are right now. I don’t see why we don’t have better dreams.

Conant and Ashby’s good regulator theorem in cybernetics says, “Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.”

The AI needs an accurate model of a human to predict how humans move. Predicting the path of a human is different than predicting the path of other objects. Humans can stand totally motionless, pivot, run across the street at a red light, suddenly stop, fall over from a heart attack, be curled up or splayed out drunk, slip backwards on some ice, etc. And it would be computationally costly, inaccurate, and pointless to model non-humans in these ways.

I also think trolley problem considerations come into play, but more like normativity in general. The consequences of driving quickly amongst humans is higher than amongst human height trees. I don’t mind if a car drives at a normal speed on a tree lined street, but it should slow down on a street lined with playing children who could jump out at anytime.

I think you're forgetting the other half of the slogan: decentralized social network. You want to maximize decentralization? Disconnect from the internet and type to yourself on textpad. What we want out of the fediverse are the advantages of bringing people together, with the benefits of decentralization. No one wants decentralization as an end in itself.

Good point. I'm not as familiar with other Activity Pub interfaces so I haven't thought about the implications for Mastodon, etc.