> "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman
> Essential reading [...] People with similar ideas: [...] Vaguely related: [...]
I'd guess nobody sat down and said "Here's the target demographic profile for the new UI, so let's rework our messaging, people!" It's just a funny accident of maintenance over time that the result looks like that.
Each subreddit's mod team gets to style the subreddit (within some limitations). There's presumably a separate set of style rules for the main and "old" sites; and the latter is legacy that most mods (and most users) have not even thought about for years. (Probably most current users have joined the site after the switch and never seen the "old" domain. I'm honestly surprised it still works at all.)
Pretty much. And that seems to reflect changing sentiment of the mods over time (e.g., no information, no inspiration, no trying to emulate, only emoting).
But what I thought was funny was, if you didn't know that, it would look like the two "experiences" were tailored separately: OG redditors get the constructive messaging in the spirit of RMS's mission, but modern social media redditors get the modern social media simplified passive consumption.
On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?
I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.
They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.
RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.
That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)
I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.
I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.
> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.
One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.
In a parallel universe RMS read Ayn Rand, joined her cult of selfish greed and the world is running a closed source UNIX clone developed by JLU (Just Like Unix), the $5T corporation funded by him.
All of this to say, it's amazing how this man's personality had such a profoundly positive effect on the computing landscape of today and how different things might have been otherwise, especially because he's more the exception than the rule in terms of personalities in the hacker space.
Point taken, but as an aside, I'm just guessing that RMS was way too smart and knowledgeable to fall for Ayn Rand, for long.
Some people with no other frame (e.g., very insulated teenagers) might accept the given values she proposes (because, why not), but if you read when she tries to make a direct argument, it's clearly shoddy and manipulative, with confident big leaps of logic that she's trying to sneak past the listener.
1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.
I think if Richard Stallman had no qualms about proprietary software, he would have remained in the Lisp machine world, either working for Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc., or perhaps starting his own thing. Stallman was a Lisp hacker before starting GNU, and even when deciding on cloning Unix instead of creating a free Lisp-based OS, one of his first projects was GNU Emacs.
An interesting thought experiment is what Stallman would’ve done in that alternate timeline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lisp machines were killed off by advances in commodity hardware and compiler technology, the end of the Cold War (the US military was a large customer of Lisp machines), and the AI winter (Lisp used to be synonymous with AI).
So you're saying time travelers came back in time, and caused the end of lisp architecture, solely to prevent an AI singularity years before we could possibly cope with it.
Funny: maybe it's my ad blocker, but if go to https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (old-school Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:
> "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman
> Essential reading [...] People with similar ideas: [...] Vaguely related: [...]
> Rules:
> 1. Memes and shitposts allowed only on Mondays
> 2. Try to flair your posts
> 3. WWRMSD?
But if I go to https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/ (new-style Reddit UI), the right sidebar says:
> Stallman was Right
> Nobody listens to him. But he was right all along.*
> r/StallmanWasRight Rules
> 1 Memes only on Mondays
> 2 no-spam-brigading
Is the first UI for hackers, and the second one for mindless doomscrolling?
Two different systems; on the mod side there are two different UIs (one to set each) as well. Yeah it's weird.
I'd guess nobody sat down and said "Here's the target demographic profile for the new UI, so let's rework our messaging, people!" It's just a funny accident of maintenance over time that the result looks like that.
Each subreddit's mod team gets to style the subreddit (within some limitations). There's presumably a separate set of style rules for the main and "old" sites; and the latter is legacy that most mods (and most users) have not even thought about for years. (Probably most current users have joined the site after the switch and never seen the "old" domain. I'm honestly surprised it still works at all.)
Pretty much. And that seems to reflect changing sentiment of the mods over time (e.g., no information, no inspiration, no trying to emulate, only emoting).
But what I thought was funny was, if you didn't know that, it would look like the two "experiences" were tailored separately: OG redditors get the constructive messaging in the spirit of RMS's mission, but modern social media redditors get the modern social media simplified passive consumption.
Seeing Wozniak and the Macintosh team in the same room as Stallman is kind of like the beginning of Game of Thrones.
When the Starks and the Lannisters are eating and drinking in the room together. Before they go their seperate ways and fight and all that.
Interesting thought.
On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?
I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.
They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.
RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.
That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)
I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.
I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.
Apple was definitely not into sharing code with users.
Their vision after Lisa and Macintosh has always been computing as an appliance.
The only thing open about them were the great Macintosh Internals books, that Apple documentation team has forgotten how to write.
> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.
One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.
That's not how the Apple II -- Woz's machine -- was. It was a very open and pro-hacker device.
If we're talking about Woz specifically, it's just a different generation of Apple than after the Macintosh.
Yeah, but then Steve Jobs took over the vision how Apple was supposed to be.
Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOP1LNr70aU
The bushy eyed fellow is Bill Budge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Budge
Wozniak and the Macintosh team in there, as well.
If you want to see the full documentary search for "Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age".
This was a great watch with my family - thank you!
I was pleasantly surprised to see my former CS professor Brian Harvey at 0:18. What a cool dude!
In a parallel universe RMS read Ayn Rand, joined her cult of selfish greed and the world is running a closed source UNIX clone developed by JLU (Just Like Unix), the $5T corporation funded by him.
All of this to say, it's amazing how this man's personality had such a profoundly positive effect on the computing landscape of today and how different things might have been otherwise, especially because he's more the exception than the rule in terms of personalities in the hacker space.
In any timeline, software, as a frictionlessly distributable commodity, would have become effectively free just as music did.
Point taken, but as an aside, I'm just guessing that RMS was way too smart and knowledgeable to fall for Ayn Rand, for long.
Some people with no other frame (e.g., very insulated teenagers) might accept the given values she proposes (because, why not), but if you read when she tries to make a direct argument, it's clearly shoddy and manipulative, with confident big leaps of logic that she's trying to sneak past the listener.
I don't think the point was taken. Whether someone found Rand illuminating and convincing is more about path dependence than intelligence.
This would be a better comment with an example.
1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.
Well, a UNIX clone that was proprietary wouldn’t have become popular like GNU did. If you have to pay for it why not just use the real one?
UNIX originally wasn't closed source anyway, and most people like nowadays, only cared about the freebeer parts.
GNU only took off when Sun created the split between user and developer UNIX SKUs, which other UNIX vendors were quick to follow as well.
Suddenly having access to UNIX no longer meant having development tools around, if the server wasn't to be used by developers themselves.
Thus installing GNU became a common workaround to pay for a UNIX developer license.
I think if Richard Stallman had no qualms about proprietary software, he would have remained in the Lisp machine world, either working for Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc., or perhaps starting his own thing. Stallman was a Lisp hacker before starting GNU, and even when deciding on cloning Unix instead of creating a free Lisp-based OS, one of his first projects was GNU Emacs.
An interesting thought experiment is what Stallman would’ve done in that alternate timeline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lisp machines were killed off by advances in commodity hardware and compiler technology, the end of the Cold War (the US military was a large customer of Lisp machines), and the AI winter (Lisp used to be synonymous with AI).
So you're saying time travelers came back in time, and caused the end of lisp architecture, solely to prevent an AI singularity years before we could possibly cope with it.
The `metadot' idea lives on in emacs and future AI should amp that to the max behind magical design.