streamofdigits

this does not address the OSS / proprietary choice though. e.g., there are companies providing support for Moodle. it is service that must be paid somehow, whether through internal staff, external partners or a proprietary software vendor as an additional offering.

The mystery is why they wouldn't amortize the development costs of the platform across the vast number of institutions, creating an ecosystem where smaller edtechs could provide niche customizations via plugins etc.

Maybe its just a phase towards maturity. Functioning / reliable OSS support models are important. "Suing" is just a metaphor for needing reliable partners: running a banking institution or an educational institution or a local government is not a hobby.

But the outsourcing to proprietary vendors mentality might be a far bigger risk. If all you are doing is processing information those vendors will eventually eat your lunch and you will have financed them every step of the way.

The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors.

In any case, given the huge upfront investment required for a quality platform this doesn't seem like something an edtech startup can bootstrap. An education platform is not a CMS and its not a social media platform. I think especially now with the pandemic experience it has become very clear how rich, complicated and demanding the educational process actually is. The "archaic UI and features" comment hints maybe at too narrow and technical view. It may be a very relevant aspect (eg if young students puke at the UX it is not of much help). But from an education perspective what matters are not smooth appearances and gimmicks but "educational outcomes".

If you dive into the Dougiamas/Moodle team's thinking you'd see what permeates the design/architecture is to be able to translate the huge body of educator experience and infuse it into software. Somehow we need to move to the next chapter of the book they started writing.

its not just stocks. besides the real estate effect being discussed here you have like 500 different cryptocurrencies all shooting for the moon, streets laced with supercars, NFT crazyness, you name it

all this amidst rising geopolitical tensions as the pax sino-americana and its supply chains are being dismantled

it all feels quite unhinged and who knows what hidden liabilities have been created

central banks are in a bind:

* raise rates -> the whole house of cards collapses as 10+ years of easy money have created a monster.

* keep rates at zero (actually negative) -> the monster keeps growing as people are basically forced to speculate

how this hairball will unwind is anybody's guess. in a sense the pandemic was a reprieve cause basically all risks globally have been absorbed into government liabilities through the massive and unprecedented support to the private sector

a return to biological "normalcy" may actually become an economic (or at least a market) abnormality...

Yep, that makes sense. It doesn't give us a timescale for when such a "jump" might happen but suggests that it could be "big" in the context of our heretofore discoveries

My best guess at timescale (following up on the cosmology theme) has to do with our rate of utilizing the inner solar system as a clean and quiet laboratory for ultra sensitive observations and experiments (whether LISA) or extremely sensitive telescopes or any other probes.

So be patient for a few more decades :-)

I mean from a technical server / client perspective.

I agree that from a user perspective it can create very different "illusions" and (over the long run) even modify people's behavior - which is scary if you think about it: simple choices at the technical level can change society

How different is really microblogging from forums? Given how simple this entire domain (we are really talking about different database views of rather simple sets data points) it should be really easy to structure things so that people get the "slice" and experience they are interested in and comfortable with.

The problem is that from an experimental / observational technologies perspective we have been for many decades now in some sort of "evidence desert" that pushes against fundamental technology boundaries and that is not conducive to solving big "mysteries".

Unifications, re-interpretations, new conceptualizations (new forces etc) are the mental tools through which we solve previous "mysteries" (and create new ones). Right now there are alive more physicists than ever and even a tiny piece of important news could lead to a revolution - in like a couple of years. But what you really want is a firehose of new data points, "a new window". This has not happened and it may not happen for generations (for the attentive reader: gravitational waves are at the very, very edge of the detectable).

As Feynman might say, the Universe doesn't owe us a continuous stream of gee-wow moments

But if I had to bet where the breakthrough might come from I'd say it would probably be cosmology rather than elementary particles...

Anything you stockpile will break down after a while. So you need to stockpile some electronics repair/manufacturing capability.

Its an interesting theoretical question what is the absolutely lowest digital tech level required for one to preserve functional access to e.g. text-only wikipedia and what kind of resources are required to maintain that level indefinetely.

If they can agree on carbon emissions, they could probably agree on some coordinated infrastructure. (It doesn't actually have to be common, rather coordinated.)

I am sure if politically unencumbered engineers were to sit down they would come up with more or less the same topology...

If we condition on people taking the energy transition seriously the past might not be a good predictor of the future. But whether there will be a strong pull towards "optimality" might depend on what is the total cost of sub-optimal alternatives. I would think that a well distributed grid would also minimize (beside losses) also storage costs and would also have various other redundancy benefits...

Hopelessly naive, I know, but shouldn't there be a global grid to optimally distribute electricity from solar irradiation rather than laying idiotic lengths of cable for political reasons?

You want to connect the Pacific rim for that grid to work but I can easily imagine some intermediate "links" that seem to make more sense

or maybe there was something in the air that didn't quite feel right :-)

could be, but it seems the correction signal only kicks in once there is a threshold discrepancy. I guess studying many such tracks could give some hints and correlated with what is known about the physiology of how these birds orient.

Incredible navigation skills too, though not quite "perfect" the paths seem to have occasionally some fairly large deviations

Nature's benchmarks for economy of resources are still so very far ahead from anything human made

Over time I've come to conclude we are not optimizing for language features, we are optimizing for the community around a programming language or stack.

Sure, features are important and if critical ones are missing it might be a show stopper. So there is an initial thresshold that all candidates must pass.

But problem solving is not a one-off exercise. It tends to be both dynamic (=facing unpredictable challenges) and recurring over long time horizons. Which means having a healthy, engaged, resourced community that will invest in adapting / solving future requirements is essential.

So the "optimization" problem includes quite a bit more than the presently known developer team, its software stack its hardware and current problem definition / user requirement.

I think you see this dynamic in several cases (including python) where you might not think that it makes rational sense.

the young male demographic was well known but there seems to be some interesting dependence on ethnic background

Its a simplistic solution to a serious problem that plagues all social platforms. If anything we need more qualifiers not fewer: The like/dislike choice is creating an artificial binarity that doesn't exist in real life.

Organized like/dislike campaigns motivated by whatever commercial or political or other reasons are facilitated by a sense of impunity and unaccountability.

To understand the ramifications without geopolitical biases and pink glasses think of the headline:

"X spy hacked Y, company stayed silent"

where X is any (quasi)state actor that feels agrieved or entitled, and Y is any giant data collector

The net as it has come to be used is a fractal of bad design in practically all conceivable ways: economic, social, geo(political)

"This makes not an epsilon of (meta)sense, but I am paid to try to find logic and determinism in the highly idiosyncratic and inbred Siliconia and that's what I am about to do"

I actually don't see chaos, or mixing or any real competition between alternative DNA pools. What I see is a very orderly exponential expansion (into a regulatory vacuum) of a viral tech mode that successfully short-circuited many parts of the old "system" to finance its growth and in the process renormalized and redefined what is moral business (or actually any business) in the digital age.

It is possible that countervailing forces will eventually show up. But I am not holding my breath. The new pattern is now entirely systemic. There are some loose ends here and there as people must "adjust their expectations" around e.g., financial and medical privacy, but you'd be surprised what innovative types of smoke and mirrors you can cook up when you are swimming in a fresh multi-billion wave every per quarter.

We are stuck in the twilight zone. I have never seen a serious defense of the dystopic status quo of current tech. I would have loved to. If you read an honest, intelligent argument (that comes from a recognizably human psyche, not a lawyer, or a cynical, amoral capital accumulator) it can "open your eyes". It can convince you that your view is missing an important angle. That can be liberating, exhilarating even as it enlarges the "universe".

Alas there is no such position because the status quo is essentially... evil. Deceit, greed, exploitation is baked in so deeply in the dominant business models it is impossible to square with what one might term "common morality". There is no other legal industry that is predicated on so much ignorance and impotence of its peculiar class of "users-consumers-products". Tacitly the actual argument is: "the world sucks and you can do nothing about it. Wear those goggles and joint our happy metaverse or live as a poor and socially awkward pariah".

Countless people have sketched what "good tech" looks like. It is as distant today (Aaron Swartz memory day) as it was in 2013. But I will never accept that this distorted reality is somehow our natural or deserved state.

The video is a great tribute to a rare combination of integrity, perception and technical talent.

The digital world is much, much poorer with his loss.

agree, its not entirely true but if you look at the size of the financial industry (like > 10% of global GDP) its contribution is tiny.

actually besides the tech industry itself I can only think of the bio/medical industry being an important contributor (E.g the entire R ecosystem)

what would be the implication wrt external banking services that use open source software? (echoes the cloud databases story...)

> Investment banks have a one-way approach to open source software: (some of) it can come in, but none of it can go out

I'd say thats how they see society and their role in it more generally. Doing God's work is a surprisingly directed graph. It applies also to the broader banking world, but investment banks being the most lucrative (when not bailed out) attract talented people that in principle can close the loop and return something important back (much more so than the "sleepy" commercial bank or credit union).

It would interesting if the above (potentially biased) view could be backed up by computing an open source leech ratio per industry sector. The amount of open source code used versus the amount contributed.

NB: a high leech ratio does not necessarily make you the worst offender. If your business model is evil no amount of open source contribution will wash it out

Haven't even started exploring everything (hope to find the time to do so), but in random dive I see lots of handcrafted js

https://ciechanow.ski/js/gears.js

I guess this site should be sent to anybody saying javascript should be blocked in web browsers... In the end whether a technology is used to track and exploit or educate and delight is entirely up to us.

Imagine what kind of vector visualization we would have if the meta-man would create 10000 positions to work on GPU accelerated SVG 3.

There must be a law that says that the most interesting technology can never win because that would make the universe too nice.