The cognitive dark forest

Comments

• t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You are creating your cool streaming platform in your bedroom. Nobody is stopping you, but if you succeed, if you get the signal out, if you are being noticed, the large platform with loads of cash can incorporate your specific innovations simply by throwing compute and capital at the problem. They can generate a variation of your innovation every few days, eventually they will be able to absorb your uniqueness. It’s just cash, and they have more of it than you.

  So the safest bet again is to stay silent, or at least under the radar. Best bet is to not disrupt - succeed at all … ?

  Except that ‘success’ in this interpretation seems to assume money, which the big company will beat you at obtaining. Success can just be about a FOSS version of a tool being out there for anyone who wants it, and no company is going to pay the AI costs to build tools they immediate MIT-license (and even if they do, there are then TWO new pieces of FOSS software!), so they may be able to beat you in creating a commodified product, but they aren’t and won’t and arguably intrinsically can’t beat you in bettering someone’s life by having a tool they didn’t before, for free.

  We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.

  This is a sad reaction to capitalism capitalism-ing. You can’t beat the profit machine by trying to make your profit in the cracks it can’t see, you beat it by giving the thing it wants to profit off of away for free.

  The vibrant public ecosystem that created all the innovation and moved it around the world will decline - the forums, the blogs, the “here’s how I built this” will move to local, private spaces.

  I highly doubt this. I’ve seen no such shift in any tech space around me. If anything, I actually noticed that every Con I regularly attend has mentioned in their RFP emails that they are being flooded with proposed talks, so people should submit early before they fill up. If private spaces are also growing, that’s great!

  I know this is ostensibly an article about Technology, but it’s also an article about Resistance, and frankly I think a lot of people run to models of competitive resistance instead of exploring disarming or evasive resistance. You can’t beat Capitalism at commodifying something, but you can prevent Capitalism from commodifying something by removing the characteristics (like cost and scarcity and control) that make something a commodity.

  Code is one of the few things that can actually be freely and un-limitedly distributed and re-distributed, which makes it uniquely resistant to commodification, but only if the person making the code is not themself trying to commodify it.

  There’s a reason that Linux has only gained ground over time.

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  • tetrislife@leminal.space ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Your point seems to be “open-source-with-monetization now has a problem, but altruistic-source doesn’t”. Maybe the linked blog was that narrow in focus on open-source, and you force-expanded it to altruistic-source.

    I think projects with principles are in the same quandry as those with a monetization objective. Software under GPL-like licenses has a problem, LLMs slurp up Linux and GCC source code and spit out non-compliant derivative work. It is no longer possible to promote principles by contributing in the open. There is also no hope of software authors winning damages from companies the way book authors seem to have won in court.

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    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Damages for what? They’re not making money if it’s free. It’s fine if it’s copied, the only time there would be damages is if they’d lost money.

      Contributing in the open is the principle.

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