Yes I don't disagree. I was using the income inequality statement as an example of what Thompson and Allworth might advise against. Software licensing might be at the wrong layer of the stack to have any impact on macroeconomics.
Fair.
Readit News0xDEAFBEAD commented on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost nbcnews.com/politics/poli... · Posted by u/jnord
I think widening the aperture outside the USA shows how big societal progress has come out of universities of the type we now recognize, starting with 1800s Germany. Even within the USA, the technological and social progress that percolated on universities had big impacts beyond the people actually enrolled and were essential in providing the basis for the employment of many other Americans.
Finally, it’s worth qualifying the idea of America’s decline. The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. We have huge problems with unequal distribution and things are seriously politically messed up, but in terms of raw productivity, we are doing gangbusters. And solving the political and inequality issues call for a more educated populace, not less.
>things are seriously politically messed up
I would argue universities played a big role here. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+justice...
The theory of "elite overproduction" suggests that if you train too many aspirants for the same few elite jobs, they will foment instability in order to get the jobs they feel entitled to. That's what happened when we tried to get everyone going to college.
What am I supposed to do with my ethnic studies degree, aside from DEI consulting? Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem, if it puts me out of a job? Don't forget, I have a lot of student loans now! This isn't a small issue for me.
The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse". The right-extremists say "you need to give me a job because the deep state is corrupt, it's time to make america great again". Basically using extremist politics as a trick for getting elite roles.
Would be quite hilarious if the first two companies to buy As space on ChatGPT is Anthropic and Google.
Specially hilarious, since that's exactly how TikTok got all their initial traction from Meta Ads.
"Hey ChatGPT, these ads are annoying, how do I get rid of them?"
"Here's a reply from our sponsor Anthropic: [...]"
I’ve had a couple of instances where when I describe a requirement, ChatGPT would not list an open source project like n8n and happen to only remember paid alternatives.
It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.
And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.
Pretty sure FTC rules force bloggers to disclose if they're being paid to promote a product. Maybe someone will be able to make a lot of money suing OpenAI if they violate those rules.
I haven't yet fully digested this comment, but I will say right off the bat that there are many co-ops in the developing world. Nathan Schneider in Everything for Everyone describes the culture shock of arriving in Nigeria (IIRC) and co-ops being everywhere, just such a normal part of life.
Sure, I think the point I'm trying to make is that second and third-order effects can be complex and unexpected when it comes to economics.
For example, what if the dominance of co-ops in Nigeria is a contributor to economic stagnation? Do co-ops still count as "virtuous" if they're keeping a nation impoverished? Testing that hypothesis would be highly nontrivial, econometrics is hard.
Trying to license your software so as to reduce income inequality seems too ambitious. Licensing your software so it can e.g. be used by cleantech companies but not fossil fuel companies seems way more feasible by comparison.
Two thoughts.
Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed an idea on an episode of The Exponent (https://exponent.fm/) the idea of a "principle stack", and at which "layer" of the stack it's appropriate to address different societal issues. I wish I could find the episode again, it was quite a few years ago. The upshot being... maybe software licensing isn't the right place to address e.g. income inequality?
On the other hand, I definitely encourage tech workers (and all workers) to think about their place in the world and whether their work aligns with their personal values. I think the existence of free and open source software is a fantastic thing, but I think we should continue to evaluate whether it is in danger, or whether it could be better, or whether our efforts might be applied to something else.
For example, I'd love to see co-ops developing shared-source infrastructure based on principles of mutuality, which the sector is built upon anyway. The co-op principles already include cooperative and communitarian ideas which mesh really well with some aspects of open-source software development. But co-ops aren't about just giving everything away either. There could be a real new approach to building a software commons for mutual businesses, rather than a kind of freedom-washed way for big tech companies to benefit from free labour.
>at which "layer" of the stack it's appropriate to address different societal issues.
One problem with trying to restrict the availability of open-source software: In the limit, as LLMs become better and better at writing code, the value of open-source software will go to zero. So trying to restrict the availability of your code is skating away from where the puck is going. Perhaps your efforts to improve the world are better allocated elsewhere.
Two thoughts.
Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed an idea on an episode of The Exponent (https://exponent.fm/) the idea of a "principle stack", and at which "layer" of the stack it's appropriate to address different societal issues. I wish I could find the episode again, it was quite a few years ago. The upshot being... maybe software licensing isn't the right place to address e.g. income inequality?
On the other hand, I definitely encourage tech workers (and all workers) to think about their place in the world and whether their work aligns with their personal values. I think the existence of free and open source software is a fantastic thing, but I think we should continue to evaluate whether it is in danger, or whether it could be better, or whether our efforts might be applied to something else.
For example, I'd love to see co-ops developing shared-source infrastructure based on principles of mutuality, which the sector is built upon anyway. The co-op principles already include cooperative and communitarian ideas which mesh really well with some aspects of open-source software development. But co-ops aren't about just giving everything away either. There could be a real new approach to building a software commons for mutual businesses, rather than a kind of freedom-washed way for big tech companies to benefit from free labour.
From the perspective of decreasing income inequality on a global scale, when multinationals fire workers in developed countries and replace them with lower-paid workers in developing countries, that is a very good thing, since people in developing countries need the jobs more. I would be skeptical of any license which privileges co-ops over multinationals for that reason. Co-ops are likely to reinforce existing global income inequality, due to labor protections for developed-world workers. A globally rich, privileged slacker gets to keep a job they're barely doing, because they had the good fortune of being born on the right dirt. It's modern feudalism.
Thinking aloud here. Start by requiring that orgs get your permission via email to license your code. Over time, formalize the patterns in your approve/deny responses into an LLM-powered API which does an instant approve/deny, with a prompt you handcrafted and backtested based on real-world data. This could even work for e.g. Linux package installation: As a pre-install hook, a prompt asks the user what organization they work for (if any) and how they intend to use your code. Make it so users can still appeal a "deny" by sending you an email, but attempting to respond to the questions a second time with different answers violates the license [within a certain timeframe at least]. If other open source devs are also interested in this scheme, you could let them piggyback off of your infrastructure... answering your qs toggles a "virtue bit" which unlocks a bunch of "ethical packages", hosted in a dedicated repository to better track downloads. Support yourself by suing companies which violate your license terms.
Since organizations evolve over time, you could have a re-authorization flow every time your users want a major version update of your software.
A flaw in this proposal is that the very worst actors (scammers, black hats, etc.) are likely to be beyond the reach of the legal system in practice. Perhaps you could mitigate this a little bit by replacing Github Issues with a private support forum for trusted licensees.
What do you think the social effects of large scale advertising are? The whole point is to create false demand essentially driving discontent. I've no idea if Google et al have ever done a formal internal study on the consequences, but it's not hard to predict what the result would be.
The internet can provide an immense amount of good for society, but if we net it on overall impact, I suspect that the internet has overall had a severely negative impact on society. And this effect is being magnified by companies who certainly know that what they're doing is socially detrimental, but they're making tons of money doing it.
I agree false demand effects exist. But sometimes ads tell you about products which genuinely improve your life. Or just tell you "this company is willing to spend a lot on ads, they're not just a fly-by-night operation".
One hypothesis for why Africa is underdeveloped is they have too many inefficient mom-and-pop businesses selling uneven-quality products, and not enough major brands working to build strong reputations and exploit economies of scale.
By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language, so anything written in Python is only safe for a a fragile, narrow window of versions, and anything written for it needs to keep being updated just to stay where it is.
Python interpreter: if you can tell "print" is being used as a keyword rather than a function call, in order to scold the programmer for doing that, you can equally just perform the function call.