This is my one of my favorites for exactly this reason. Agreed, other than the triumph of what little humanity Ted has at the end there’s not much in the story.

But despite being a famous asshole it always seemed Ellison loved this story, right down to actually re writing a happy end to the “I have no mouth…” adventure game in the early 90s.

Speculation on my part, but I always thought for a famous pessimist he thought his warning might make a difference, which is its own kind of hopeful.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

Thank you for this, been hunting for a decent gesture typing option for awhile. Floris board had been decent, but the lack of actual suggestions was brutal to work around.

If you have the patience letting the drip of communities surface through your instances ‘all’ feed has been a good way to take in the growth.

I have an account I don’t normally comment from I leave all the memes unblocked for killing time, otherwise it’s been a lot of negative filtering and following interesting comments.

If you’re self hosting that’s a different problem.

I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.

I’d just like to have an honest conversation about the minimum standards every human being is entitled to, and then deliver and expand that, to everyone. These days I’m not picky how. The Nordic model is fine I guess, but it’s going to make compromises, and those aren’t always good ones. For instance I don’t think capital had any business being tied to necessities like food, but money is still the easiest way to ration it. UBI would be a decent start.

Im afraid technical models are in short supply, but if you want a philosophical model it’s the fundamental orientation towards positive social obligations I’m after. I can’t find too many recent examples, they tend to emerge out of conflicts. For one I’m sure doesn’t work everywhere due to unique circumstances check out Rojava, the grannies carry out patrol with AKs because that’s what their precarious society demands. The podcast ‘the women’s war’ was fascinating.

It’s funny you bring up the phone company, because it’s a great illustrator. It connected a country with subsides (sometimes over barbed wire), but in the end anything but it’s original purpose got locked behind bell labs iron grip until it was broken up. We wouldn’t have the modern Internet without both of those things happening, along with some Captain crunch whistles. Not every construction benefits from being totally institutionalized forever and ever amen.

The ideal is that everyone is fed, clothed, housed, receives medical care and is educated I’m totally open at this point on the how, all I know for certain is capitalism didn’t have the answer despite the greatest wave of prosperity the modern world has known.

Welcome to the part of the Internet with a soul.

Seriously if you’re old enough to remember the Internet in terms of users weird passion projects you could do a lot worse than hanging off any part of activitypub.

There’s a lot more people than the old days with technical backgrounds, so there’s a lot more practical stuff.