It's common for people to assume that if IBM didn't use a simple, open architecture with off-the-shelf components for the original PC, then we'd never have had the PC ecosystem as we know it.
But this view neglects the fact that an organic ecosystem of interoperable open hardware converging to de facto standards and running a common OS already existed prior to IBM designing their PC. By 1980, there were already many independent vendors implementing their own variation on the 8080/S-100 design pioneered by MITS, all running CP/M from Digital Research.
When IBM released the PC, the CP/M world was still going strong. The fact that it was an easily cloneable architecture based on the 16-bit 8086 caused a lot of disruption, and led to the market dynamics that were already present in the 8080-S100-CP/M world pivoting over to x86-ISA-DOS.
If IBM had kept their PC proprietary, it might have led to a bit more fragmentation in the short-term market for business microcomputing, but at the same time, the CP/M world would have continued on without that disruption, and something else would have ultimately catalyzed the move to a common 16-bit architecture. DR was already working on CP/M-86 at the time IBM was developing the PC, after all.
Eventually, the same forces that led to the collapse of vertically integrated, proprietary platforms and the dominance of open-standards system builders would have asserted themselves, and IBM itself would still have been subdued by them. Modern computing would likely be in a similar position with or without IBM. The PC was a major ripple, but didn't really change the current.
Agreed. I consider traditional "virtual communities" (lie Usenet, IRC, BBSes, web message boards, etc.) to be something quite different from modern "social media", and I find the former to be far preferable to the latter.
The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment.
IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse, so gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
Yes. Far to the left of Carter, who I'd consider a moderate conservative, and marginally to the left of the more centrist Obama.
I'm construing left-wing as (a) seeing an expansive role for the state -- and in the US especially the federal government -- as being a prime mover in social and especially economic matters, (b) willingness to use political power in novel and unprecedented ways to address perceived social and economic problems without being constrained by established legal and constitutional norms.
You're confusing authoritarian vs libertarian ideology with left-wing vs right-wing ideology. They're two different axes, with debatable degrees of correlation. "We're going to give the government absolute power in order to best benefit everyone" comes from a very different belief system than "We're going to give the government absolute power to benefit the dictator, or my position under him".
Under your model of the world, Anarchists (the communist ideology) and Libertarians (the radical free market ideology) occupy the same place on the left-right spectrum. Which is... definitely not where any serious political theorists would put them.
> You're confusing authoritarian vs libertarian ideology with left-wing vs right-wing ideology.
I'm certainly not. In the US, there is a significant overlap between libertarianism and conservatism, due to American political traditions themselves being rooted in constitutionalism and suspicion of centralized power.
Rather, I believe it is you who is confusing "conservative" vs. "progressive" political philosophies with whatever haphazard accumulation of policy positions have coalesced in the Republican and Democratic parties due to the tactical incentives of the immediate moment.
> "We're going to give the government absolute power in order to best benefit everyone" comes from a very different belief system than "We're going to give the government absolute power to benefit the dictator, or my position under him".
I don't think the latter statement applies to any particular political ideology -- rather, it describes the incentives of a particular type of functionary that exists under all dictatorships; all dictatorships are publicly justified by some doctrinal system aimed at improving "society" in some way, and all institutional systems consist of a mix of people pursuing the outward-facing goal of that ideology and those pursuing their own aggrandizement while paying lip service to that ideology.
And if your starting point is a constitutional system that's designed to avoid concentration of political power, and one that draws clear boundaries around the state and its role in society, then it's impossible to classify any ideology that aims to wear down those boundaries and use the political state to force any kind of social change as any sort of "conservatism".
This is the definition of radicalism; there are many flavors of radicalism, and those may be at odds with each other on account of pursuing different ideological goals, but the lack of regard for the established order them puts them on the same end of the left-right axis, only distinguishing themselves from each other on another, perpendicular axis.
> Under your model of the world, Anarchists (the communist ideology) and Libertarians (the radical free market ideology) occupy the same place on the left-right spectrum.
I don't quite agree with that, on account of the "radical free market ideology" you're attributing to libertarians not actually being a prescriptive ideology at all, but rather a defensive posture against other people's prescriptive ideologies. The communist "anarchists" you're referring to have a detailed vision for how everyone else should live, and aim to impose that vision through force, while the libertarians are fundamentally just opposed to anyone forcefully imposing any particular vision. So that pretty clearly puts the communists on the left and the libertarians on the right.
Yes, it describes everyone who aims to use unrestrained political power to reshape society, i.e. the precise opposite of what "conservatism" actually means.
Perhaps conservatism doesn't necessarily fit into a left-right spectrum neatly. I recently saw fascism described as a version of collectivism that caters to the right.
> I recently saw fascism described as a version of collectivism that caters to the right.
Yes, I think that's its definition.
> Perhaps conservatism doesn't necessarily fit into a left-right spectrum neatly.
While conservatism is right, right isn't necessarily conservatism. Conservatism more describes a center-right party, the extreme right often is what is called fascism, with one alternative being fundamentalism. I think conservatism and fascism are pretty much mutual exclusive.
Nothing in Russel Kirk's concept of conservatism implies any of the specific policy positions you're attributing to conservatism per se.
Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
> Someone whose political agenda is to force society to confirm to a doctrinal ideology that in opposition to the established broad status-quo norms of that society is by definition not a conservative.
Conservatives believe that the status quo may violate the transcendent order and that they are duty bound to restore it. Neither conservatives nor liberals believe the status quo is sacred.
Do you think the rolling back of Roe vs. Wade was not a conservative act because it was a "status quo norm" ? They never liked it, so perhaps it was not a norm?
They are conserving what they think the world has been all along. When you define conservatism as being a status quo a single "leftish" government, makes every conservatist not a non-conservatist and the parties in power conservative. That makes it a useless distinction as it then means the people currently shaping the laws.
> They are conserving what they think the world has been all along.
No, they very clearly aim to change things to conform to what they think it ought to be.
> When you define conservatism as being a status quo a single "leftish" government, makes every conservatist not a non-conservatist and the parties in power conservative.
Well, no, not quite, because the government is still a specific institution in society, not something coterminous with society itself. Those who seek to restrain the government in its attempts to expand its influence into the broader society count as conservatives; those who seek to expand that influence in pursuit of making the broader society conform to doctrinal prescriptions -- regardless of the specific content of their doctrines -- are not.
The left-right spectrum is not a dichotomy between competing dogmas, all of which seek to subjugate society to its rule. If it's anything, it's a dichotomy that celebrates dogmas at one pole and is deeply suspicious of them on the other.
Lumping religious fanatics and nationalists together with genuine conservatives is an error caused by all of these groups having a common arch-enemy during most of the past century. Their alignment is beginning to unravel now.
> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime
Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?
> but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse,
“Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.
> gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?
(I guess it was also just after a midterm election where the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.)
> Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?
Tariffs. Deficit spending. Federalization of law enforcement. Hyperpoliticization of social questions. Government ownership/direction of private industry.
> “Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.
They've not been about actual policy domains until relatively recently. These issues have been marginal with respect to actual policy considerations for decades.
> 30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?
GOP candidates in certain regions invoked various wedge issues on the campaign trail in order to put them over the top in elections for contested seats. Upon election, they then did nothing whatsoever to shift the actual policy needle in relation to these issue, and focused precisely on "neoliberal consensus" economic issues of the exact sort that the current administration is diametrically opposed to.
> but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.
But no, it actually is the "essence of conservatism" where conservatism is an actual political philosophy, and not an empty term that refers to the haphazard policy preferences of whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.
> Tariffs. Deficit spending. Federalization of law enforcement.
None of those are left wing (or even “more frequently associated with the less right wing of the two major parties in America”)
In fact, in the period where the GOP has been the more right-wing party, deficit spending has been associated more with them being in power.
> Government ownership/direction of private industry.
Fascist corporatism is not left-wing (state ownership as a proxy for and in the interest of the working class is a feature of some versions of leftist theory, but this isn’t something that Trump’s industrial intervention even makes a rhetorical appeal to.)
> > [...] the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.
> But no, it actually is the "essence of conservatism" where conservatism is an actual political philosophy, and not an empty term that refers to the haphazard policy preferences of whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.
No, you’ve confused libertarianism/minarchism with conservatism. Conservatism, as an “actual political philosophy”, or rather a broad political orientation which is not a single unified philosophy but is conprised of distinct philosophies tending in the same broad direction, arose in response to and is exactly resistance to the downward, equalizing, leveling drive of enlightment liberalism.
The on-and-off rhetorical appeal to libertarianism by the Right especially when out of power is, exactly, a matter of “whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.”
> None of those are left wing (or even “more frequently associated with the less right wing of the two major parties in America”)
These are quintessentially left-wing in the context of the past century of American politics.
> Fascist corporatism is not left-wing
Of course it is. It was deliberately designed as an alternative means for achieving socialist ends by socialists disillusioned with Marxism. It's always characterized itself as a "third way", but still one that seeks to radical change society through political force, and in opposition to those who want to conserve the status quo and admit change only through gradual development. The former is the traditional definition of "left" and the latter of "right".
> No, you’ve confused libertarianism/minarchism with conservatism. Conservatism, as an “actual political philosophy”, or rather a broad political orientation which is not a single unified philosophy but is conprised of distinct philosophies tending in the same broad direction, arose in response to and is exactly resistance to the downward, equalizing, leveling drive of enlightment liberalism.
It should be clear that in a US context, I'm referring to specifically Anglo-American conservatism, which does differ from other varieties in its devotion to particular forms of constitutionalism and to economic liberalism, i.e. the Burkean variety, and not to continental forms of conservatism which have had little historical significance in America.
> The on-and-off rhetorical appeal to libertarianism by the Right especially when out of power is, exactly, a matter of “whatever faction a particular political party happens to be pandering to at any given moment.”
The problem is that you're presumptively conflating party with political philosophy even in levying this criticism. In terms of US presidents in my lifetime, I'd regard Carter, Reagan, and Clinton as conservatives, both Bushes and Obama as moderates, Biden as being on the center-left, and Trump as being on the far left.
Actual political philosophy cuts across party lines -- the parties themselves are just coalitions of factions that are mainly aligned due to mutual tactical opposition to the other coalition, and not by any shared worldview. The nature of these coalitions has far more influence on what rhetoric they employ on the campaign trail than it does on what actual policy positions they take once in office.
The problem of how you organize content in desktop user interfaces is far from solved. Often I have 6 virtual desktops, and maybe 5 Firefox windows and maybe a Chrome and an Edge (testing and the occasional app that doesn’t work with Firefox, a problem made worse by my employer forcing us to use the ESR) and those all have tabs. Not to mention various IDEs and distraction generators like Slack and Outlook that have enough urgent and important content that I can’t just get rid of them.
Adding a new kind of window or tab has the potential of organizing some little bit of this universe at the expense of there being more things to look at globally, I badly want to be able to hit a button and see not just the windows I have open but all the tabs and that counts browser tabs but also IDE tabs and ideally these sort of sub windows inside of browser UIs.
Reminds me of the startup I worked at where somebody got up at each standup meeting and said “we can’t find anything in the N different places (Slack, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Docs, …) places stuff could be so we need to add N+1 places.” For a while I pushed back against this obvious fallacy but nobody else did and management would approve another monthly subscription…. Until at some point the investors pushed back in the disorganization and added the distraction of OKRs and people thought “maybe we need a subscription to some service that reminds us to cancel subscriptions we don’t use”. One ring that would rule them all never seriously considered, I guess people didn’t actually expect “enterprise search” to actually work.
> The problem of how you organize content in desktop user interfaces is far from solved.
Strong disagree. Mature conventions have been established for decades, and while there are always edge cases and new incremental features that need to be worked into desktop UIs, the core desktop UI paradigm has been stable since at least the mid-'90s, and modern deviations away from it have almost invariably reduced usability and discoverability.
The modern trend of trying to shoehorn web or mobile UI design tropes into desktop applications has resulted in little but regression.
I think you’re mostly right, particularly when it comes to the settings dialogs in Windows which have been a state of ferment since Windows 8 such that I expect many of them to be reworked in several faddish ‘mobile’ phases while some will still look like they did in the Windows 95 era.
Comparing the various nag windows on MacOS and Windows, as much as they are annoying, the MacOS nags look like a 1999 rework of the modals from the 1984 original Mac whereas the web-based ones in Windows are easier on the eyes. I have looked long and hard at x-platform UI frameworks and they are generally pretty awful and with all the affordances the web platform has Electron looks good in comparison both in terms of UX and DX.
My beef is with the tabs-inside-of-windows, windows-inside-of-windows and the frequent need to have a large number of ‘items’ open and wanting some synoptic view of all the items open in all the applications on all of the virtual desktops a modern machine can have. I try pretty hard to keep it organized but if I am listening to music in YouTube it should be trivial to find the browser tab involved to close it and it’s not.
Which was big in the Windows 95 era, particularly with Office that now seems largely forgotten. When Netscape 4 hit the streets Netscape changed their home page to use <layers> which were like absolute positioned <div>(s) to get an MDI effect like the page that started this discussion. Trouble was it didn’t work and they had to revert it quickly. I told my professor that I thought I wouldn’t understand how web pages worked in six months it was changing so fast but JavaScript supremacy took at least another 12 years even if Microsoft rolled out AJAX circa 1999 it took forever in internet time for people to get the significance.
> I try pretty hard to keep it organized but if I am listening to music in YouTube it should be trivial to find the browser tab involved to close it and it’s not.
If you use Chrome, there should be a music note icon in the top right, just to the left of your avatar, that shows when media is playing. You can control the media from there or click it to find the tab.
I don't think Vivaldi (what I use) has that exact feature, but the favicon switches to an animated speaker so its much easier to spot.
But I like to create shortcut-apps out of any apps (like YT Music) I use frequently, so they get their own OS-level window. It has other benefits too.
... if I am listening to music in YouTube it should be trivial to find the browser tab involved ...
A key reason why I tend to access media through a media player (usually mpv in a terminal, occasionally others), and would favour a Web model which divides textual content, media, retail/commerce, and apps into their own apps.
That is, not an app per retail site, but a retail app which manages payment, reputation, identity, and related tasks. Shoehorning everything into "the Web browser" is a category error IMO.
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues.
So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
> Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
> Another political solution? Not going to happen.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.
Huh? Apple absolutely does not want this to happen. That's why it doesn't happen. It's not that they do not have the resources to do it. Not really sure how you think that 2 of the most valuable companies on the planet do not have the resources.
> Huh? Apple absolutely does not want this to happen. That's why it doesn't happen.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here -- how does Apple merely not wanting a competing product ecosystem to emerge explain why it hasn't? Especially considering that it is happening, though slowly and haphazardly.
> Not really sure how you think that 2 of the most valuable companies on the planet do not have the resources.
I mean, it seems observably true that the foundation layer of both of their products comes directly from FOSS projects. Claiming that the FOSS world doesn't have the resources to develop an alternative product ecosystem, given that the proprietary solutions are already based on that ecosystem, seems a bit incorrect.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue...
That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people.
Why does the same not apply to your other data?
Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better.
But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.
> It is not defeatist drivel to argue for political action rather than trying to hit everything with a technological hammer.
I'd say it's actually worse than defeatist drivel, since it actively discourages an entirely feasible strategy of making bad laws difficult/impossible to enforce, and instead encourages people to squander their efforts and resources on fighting all-or-nothing political battles in the context of utterly dysfunctional institutions riddled with perverse incentives that no one at all in the modern world seems to be able to overcome.
The "political, not technical" argument is equivalent to telling people concerned about possible flooding that instead of building levees, they should focus all their efforts on trying to drain the ocean.
Right, you need an end-to-end ecosystem. Delivery, ease of use, trustable code and audit, good math, community, financial incentives. Still much more enduring solution than an eternal political battle, IMO.
The developers and the FOSS community generally; F-Droid is a good app store for FOSS, but there's no inherent need for app stores in the first place.
Duplicating the tremendous success of the Linux ecosystem is a worthy goal, but even at the outset, the idea is to reach the 1% of users who want such a solution and are willing to invest thought and effort into it, and let it gradually become viable for incrementally wider adoption. Trying to target the 99% who don't care in the first place wouldn't make much sense.
How is an LLM making stochastic inferences based on aggregations of random blog pages more likely to be correct than looking things up on decidedly non-random blog pages written by people with relevant domain knowledge?
Is the above comment a genuine question? I’m concerned it’s a rhetorical question that isn’t really getting to the heart of the matter; namely, what is the empirical performance? One’s ability to explain said performance doesn’t always keep up.
How about we pick an LLM evaluation and get specific? They have strengths and weaknesses. Some do outperform humans in certain areas.
Often I see people latching on to some reason that “proves” to them “LLMs cannot do X”. Stop and think about how powerful such a claim has to be. Such claims are masquerading as impossibility proofs.
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. Hold your claims lightly.
There are often misunderstandings here on HN about the kinds of things transformer based models can learn. Many people use the phrase “stochastic parrots” derisively; most of the time I think these folks are getting it badly wrong. A careful reading of the original paper is essential, not to mention follow up work.
I'm not making a blanket statement against LLMs for all use cases. I'm certain that LLMs are, for example, much more performant at indexing already-curated documents and locating information within them than humans operating manually are.
What I'm skeptical about isn't LLMs as a utilitarian tool to enhance productivity in specific use cases, but rather treating LLMs as sources of information in their own right, especially given their defining characteristic of generating novel text through stochastic inference.
I'm 100% behind RAG powering the search engines of the future. Using LLMs to find reliable sources within the vast ocean of dubious information on the modern internet? Perfect -- ChatGPT, find me those detailed blog posts by people competent in the problem domain. Asking LLMs to come up with their own answers to questions? No thanks. That's just an even worse version of "ask a random person to make up an answer on the spot".
TheServerStore.com often has good deals. I actually bought a brand new 64-core EPYC 7702 server with 256 GB RAM and 8TB NVMe storage for about $3K fully assembled earlier this year.
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