Podcast appearances and mentions of eric raymond

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead Trump delays TikTok ban again Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots Starliner's flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: drata.com/weekintech canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT coda.io/twit outsystems.com/twit kinsta.com/twit

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead Trump delays TikTok ban again Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots Starliner's flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: drata.com/weekintech canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT coda.io/twit outsystems.com/twit kinsta.com/twit

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead Trump delays TikTok ban again Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots Starliner's flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: drata.com/weekintech canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT coda.io/twit outsystems.com/twit kinsta.com/twit

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead Trump delays TikTok ban again Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots Starliner's flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: drata.com/weekintech canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT coda.io/twit outsystems.com/twit kinsta.com/twit

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead Trump delays TikTok ban again Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots Starliner's flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: drata.com/weekintech canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT coda.io/twit outsystems.com/twit kinsta.com/twit

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead Trump delays TikTok ban again Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S. China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots Starliner's flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: drata.com/weekintech canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT coda.io/twit outsystems.com/twit kinsta.com/twit

Who created the term "Open Source"? ESR (legendary programmer and author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") and Lunduke (famed Computer Historian & man about town) have very different answers. More from The Lunduke Journal: https://lunduke.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lunduke.substack.com/subscribe

Remember the Free and Open Internet? Tech journalist Bryan Lunduke does, and isn't afraid to write about its demise one institutional capture at a time. We discuss having our hearts broken by our beloved Internet Archive; the Wikipedia Foundation's shady dealings; the Electronic Frontier Foundation's championing “the right for little children to look at porn on the internet”; and Mozilla's “Feminist decolonial lgbtqia+ climate justice using AI event in Zambia.” Like any good journalists, we ask the tough questions: How do you get your name forbidden by ChatGPT? Who is more banned from conferences, Lunduke or Paley? Are we gonna have a free and open internet, or not? (Answer: not.) Whether you love nerds or merely are one, this entertaining episode will have you wanting to get offline more than ever.Links:The Lunduke Journal: Lunduke.comChatGPT Can Not Say “Bryan Lunduke”: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/chatgpt-can-not-say-bryan-lundukeThe Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/Our Kiwi Farms/Josh Moon episode: https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-internet-lost-its-backbone-with-joshua-moon/Cori's Kiwi Farms article: https://corinnacohn.substack.com/p/the-world-should-not-need-kiwi-farmsLarry Sanger Speaks Out: https://christopherrufo.com/p/larry-sanger-speaks-outWomen in tech: https://mimiandeunice.com/2018/11/07/women-in-tech/ Get full access to Heterodorx Podcast at heterodorx.substack.com/subscribe

This is the latest episode of the free DDW narrated podcast, titled “Where are the global breakthroughs, opportunities and developments in cancer research?”, which covers three articles written for DDW Volume 24 – Issue 2, Spring 2023 of DDW. They are called: “Global breakthroughs in cancer drug discovery”, “The Achilles' heel of cancer”, and “Immunotherapy is here to stay”. At the time of writing in the first article, AstraZeneca UK had appointed David Brocklehurst as Head of Oncology in the UK. I spoke with him about how AstraZeneca is innovating to displace chemotherapy and research areas of significance. In the second article, Genoscience Pharma's Philippe Halfon and Eric Raymond share their expertise on targeting the recycling of unsustainable production of palmitoylated cancer-associated proteins.  In the third article, I spoke with Frédéric Triebel, the French immunologist/oncologist who is best known for his 1990 discovery of the LAG-3 immune control mechanism. Triebel shares insights from his career, expands on his experience with the company he founded, Immutep, and comments on the future of immuno-oncology.

Send us a textShow Notes:1:00 Anki Sanhi 1:45 Sahni's background and work 5:00 Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar - essay on open source development 6:40 association with the arts7:45 trademark enforcement work10:00 infringement case between client working in fashion space sued by global brand12:30 origin of the Raghav project16:45 process to use Raghav18:30 Van Gogh's Starry Night 21:00 Raghav = Robust Artificially Intelligent Graphics and Arts Visualizer 21:45 Indian copyright application for “Suryast”25:40 Section 2(d) of Indian Copyright Act, definition of author 34:30 Canadian copyright application for “Suryast”35:35 Notice of Application filed in Canadian Federal Court by Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)  against Sahni over “Suryast” 37:10 US copyright application for “Suryast” 37:35 Sahni's US Counsel, Alex Garens, Esq. with Day Pitney 38:00 USCO decision on “Suryast” 43:30 India's definition of ‘author' - no qualifications 46:50 Parliamentary Standing Committee recommended creation of new right for AI works per Sahni's recommendation47:05 February 2024 -  Union Minister of State Commerce in India's Parliament submitted that there is no need for creation of a new right and current legislation offers sufficient protection 48:45 ambiguity in Canada law on AI 49:40 USCO's Request for Comments52:00 Sanhi's position of need for amendment of US law to address AI53:50 Optimus 54:50 Definition of justice56:30 global harmonized principles on AI57:30 injustice of humans unknowingly competing against AI due to historic suppression of AI use59:00 Sahni's intent to contribute to the change in law to address AI1:00:00 consultation with Ryan Abbott, Esq. 1:00:50 Future projects 1:02:20 shaping issues where art and law intersect1:03:30 cultural impact of the debate over human authorship, AI and art1:04:30 comparison of photography to AIPlease share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.comTo hear more episodes, please visit Warfare of Art and Law podcast's website.Music by Toulme.To view rewards for supporting the podcast, please visit Warfare's Patreon page.To leave questions or comments about this or other episodes of the podcast and/or for information about joining the 2ND Saturday discussion on art, culture and justice, please message me at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com. Thanks so much for listening!© Stephanie Drawdy [2024]

"Synergy!" Find your magical earrings everyone and let Synergy transform you into a Hologram as for the next two weeks, Saturday Morning Adventures becomes totally outrageous as we revisit Jem and The Holograms. The Human Star Wars Encyclopedia, The Padme Amidala of Anime, and co-host of The Socially Distanced and Anime x Pop podcasts Amanda Rivas is joined by her blood rival, real-life sister, and Bridgerton enthusiast Vanessa Gonzales to talk about this animated musical TV series created via a joint collaboration between Hasbro, Sunbow Productions, and Marvel Productions that ran from 1985 - 1988. This series follows the adventures of Jerrica Benton, record company owner, who transforms into her singer alter-ego Jem with the help of her computer Synergy, and the adventures of her band Jem and The Holograms. Vanessa and Amanda reminisce about why they fell in love with the series, talk about the message behind the show, and who was more interesting between Jerrica and Jem. They also talk about the legendary rivalry between Jem and The Holograms and The Misfits, series villain Eric Raymond, and the eternal love triangle between Jerrica, Jem, and Jerrica's long-time boyfriend Rio. Lastly, they talk about the legacy the show left a whole generation of 80's babies with. Join us next week as Amanda watches for the first time ever and Vanessa revisits the 2015 live-action Jem and The Holograms film. Will the movie be truly as outrageous as the show? You'll have to tune in to find out.

How does the Book of Lamentations challenge your understanding of God's judgment and grace?In this episode, Tiffany Coker and Pastor Jeff Cranston discuss the book of Lamentations, an Old Testament text attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. They explore the emotional intensity and sorrow of the book, which reflects on the destruction of Jerusalem and God's judgment of Israel. The conversation includes personal recollections of September 11, 2001, drawing parallels to the national tragedy described in Lamentations. They delve into the themes of sin, forgiveness, and the consequences of rebellion against God, emphasizing the hope found in God's faithfulness despite suffering.[00:00 - 05:21] Introduction and ContextTiffany and pastor Jeff introduce the book of Lamentations.They discuss the emotional intensity and tragic nature of the book.Tiffany and Jeff recall their experiences on September 11, 2001, and its impact.[05:22 - 12:00] Background of LamentationsPastor Jeff explains the authorship and historical context of Lamentations.The book reflects on the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC.[12:01 - 18:00] Themes of LamentationsTiffany and pastor Jeff discuss the themes of sin, forgiveness, and the consequences of rebellion.They mention Eric Raymond's article on the Gospel Coalition website.Pastor Jeff highlights the central theme of hope in Lamentations 3:22-25.[18:01 - 21:47] Theological InsightsPastor Jeff compares Lamentations to the Book of Job.He emphasizes the importance of understanding sin and suffering in the context of God's judgment and redemption.Direct Quotes:"Even in the depths of despair, hope exists when we turn to Christ, our Redeemer." – Pastor Jeff Cranston"Lamentations teaches us that the consequences of sin are severe, but God's grace is always available." – Pastor Jeff Cranston"The hope that we have in God can shine as a beacon in the darkness." – Pastor Jeff CranstonJoin the ConversationWe love your feedback! If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review. If you have any questions or comments on today's episode, email me at pastorjeff@lowcountrycc.org.Visit my website https://www.jeffcranston.com and subscribe to my newsletter. Join me on Sunday mornings at LowCountry Community Church. Check-in with us on Facebook or Instagram @pastorjeffcranstonRemember, the real power of theology is not only knowing it but applying it. Thanks for listening!

The Flat Tops Adventure Trail is a 298 mile overland route in northern Colorado that was developed by Overland Trail Guides.  While lesser known than the San Juan Mountains to the south, the Flat Tops certainly aren't lacking in impressiveness or grandeur. The area gets its name from a series of table-top mountains that dominate the region. These unique geological formations were created by ancient volcanic activity and erosion over millions of years.For this episode, we chat with Eric Raymond of XplorAdventure who explored the Flat Tops Adventure Trail over the course of two separate trips in the summer of 2023.  The Flat Tops Adventure TrailThe 298 mile long Flat Tops Adventure Trail forms a loop just north of Glenwood Springs in northern CO.  Lesser known than the San Juan mountains to the south, the Flat Tops sees a fraction of the trail traffic.  For overlanders seeking alpine views, lakeside camping, and more challenging terrain, the Flat Tops Adventure Trail is the perfect track.  To get the GPX File, complete route guide and more, please visit our website. www.overlandtrailguides.comXplorAdventure Flat Tops Series on YoutubeEpisode 1 - https://youtu.be/Y7RVREC3I_Q?si=gVcirZdY4NItzLDaEpisode 2 - https://youtu.be/mvRrkPaQFzg?si=qMzbM0Hgk9xV9_4pEpisode 3 - https://youtu.be/ubZZh4-Mm14?si=RdaMRuVkPxsyNYJ3Episode 4 - https://youtu.be/1l61pg3HqG4?si=x3WH6pVxEU69tC4_

Episode 248 of the InGoal Radio Podcast, presented by The Hockey Shop Source for Sports, features two great NHL guests: Cayden Primeau of the Montreal Canadiens and Ukko-Pekka Luukonen of the Buffalo Sabres.In the feature interviews presented by NHL Sense Arena Primeau gives us a glimpse into his first full season with the famed Canadiens, including the great job goalie coach Eric Raymond did balancing a three-goalie rotation for much of the season, some great lessons from Jake Allen as a mentor, and the huge impact Pete Fry has had on his mindset as a goalie over the past year. In our second interview, Luukonen, who ironically was drafted the same year and faced Primeau in the World Junior Championship gold-medal game in 2019, shares insights into his fantastic season and rise to being the Sabres No. 1 goalie with top-10 numbers in the NHL, and how he used a 33-game opportunity to identify the changes he needed to make in his body and style that have led to this success.Our Parents Segment responds to a question we get often as parents want to know, “Should I send my goalie to that try out camp a Junior team is holding?”All that, plus a trip to The Hockey Shop Source for Sports for a look at the incredibly light True Project X stick, with innovative shapes and flex points designed to help goalies pass the puck as well as they stop it.

It is fairly obvious that the dominant, i.e. Western mechanism for generating new knowledge is rather different from the traditional Indian mechanism, and this shows up in all sorts of ways. One is that Indian epistemology seems to be empirical and practical, based on observation; whereas the Western tradition seems to prefer grand theories that must then be proved by observation.Another difference is the Western idea that Intellectual Property is a private right that the State confers on an inventor or a creator. The Western gaze is fixed on the potential monetary gains from a monopoly over the use of the IP Right (for a fixed period of time, after which it is in the public domain): the argument is that it eventually helps everybody, while incentivizing the clever. The Indian concept is vastly different. It was assumed that a creator created, or an inventor invented, as a result of their innate nature, their god-given gifts. In a way they could not avoid being creative or inventive, which would be a negation of the blessing they had received from the Supreme Brahman. Therefore no further incentive was needed: benevolent patrons like kings or temples would take care of their basic needs, allowing them to give free rein to creativity and innovation.This seems to us today to be a radical idea, because we have been conditioned by the contemporary epistemological idea that incentives are a necessary condition for knowledge creation. Although this seems common-sensical, there is no real evidence that this is true. Petra Moser, then at MIT, discovered via comparing 19th century European countries that the presence of an IPR culture with incentives made little difference in the quantum of innovation, although it seemed to change the domains that were the most innovative.. In fact, there is at least one counter-example: that of Open Source in computing. It boggles the imagination that veritable armies of software developers would work for free, nights and weekends, in addition to their full-time jobs, and develop computing systems like Linux that are better than the corporate versions out there: the whole “Cathedral and Bazaar” story as articulated by Eric Raymond. Briefly, he argues that the chaotic ‘bazaar' of open source is inherently superior to the regimented but soul-less ‘cathedral' of the big tech firms.It is entirely possible that the old Indian epistemological model is efficient, but the prevailing model of WIPO, national Patent Offices, and all that paraphernalia massively benefits the Western model. As an example, the open-source model was predicted to make a big difference in biology, but that effort seems to have petered out after a promising start. Therefore we are stuck for the foreseeable future with the IP model, which means Indians need to excel at it.In passing, let us note that the brilliant Jagdish Chandra Bose was a pioneer in the wireless transmission of information, including the fundamental inventions that make cellular telephony possible. However, as a matter of principle, he refused to patent his inventions; Guglielmo Marconi did, and became rich and famous. India has traditionally been quite poor in the number of patents, trademarks, copyrights, geographical indications, semiconductor design layouts etc. that it produces annually. Meanwhile the number of Chinese patents has skyrocketed. Over the last few years, the number of Indian patents has grown as the result of focused efforts by the authorities, as well as the realization by inventors that IP rights can help startup firms dominate niche markets. India also produces a lot of creative works, including books, films, music and so on. The enforcement of copyright laws has been relatively poor, and writers and artistes often do not get fair compensation for their work. This is deplorable. Unfortunately, things will get a lot worse with generative AI. Most of us have heard of, and probably also tried out, the chatbots that have been the object of much attention and hype in the past year, such as chatGPT from OpenAI/Microsoft and Bard from Google. Whether these are truly useful is a good question, because they seduce us into thinking they are conscious, despite the fact that they are merely ‘stochastic parrots'. But I digress.The point is that the digital revolution has thrown the edifice of copyright law into disarray. At the forefront of this upheaval stands generative AI, a technology with the uncanny ability to mimic and extend human creative output. Consider two stark examples: the contentious case of J.K. Rowling and her copyright battle with a Harry Potter-inspired fanfic, and the recent Japanese law that grants broad exemptions for training large language models (LLMs). J.K. Rowling's spat with Anna M. Bricken, the author of a Harry Potter fanfic titled "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Wine," ignited a global debate about fair use and transformative creativity. Bricken's work reimagined the Potterverse with an adult lens, but Rowling, citing trademark infringement, sought to have it taken down. While the case eventually settled, it exposed a fundamental dilemma: can AI-generated works, even if derivative, be considered distinct enough from their source material to warrant copyright protection? The answer, shrouded in legal ambiguity, leaves creators navigating a tightrope walk between inspiration and infringement.On the other side of the globe, Japan enacted a law in 2022 that further muddies the waters. This controversial regulation grants LLMs and other AI systems an almost carte blanche to ingest and remix copyrighted material for training purposes without seeking permission or paying royalties. While proponents laud it as a catalyst for AI innovation, critics warn of widespread copyright infringement and a potential future where authorship becomes a nebulous concept. The Japanese law, echoing anxieties around J.K. Rowling's case, raises unsettling questions: who owns the creative spark when AI fuels the fire?For India, a nation at the precipice of the AI revolution, these developments raise crucial questions. With a burgeoning AI industry and a large creative sector, India must tread carefully. Adapting existing copyright laws to encompass the nuances of AI-generated works is paramount. Robust fair use guidelines that incentivize transformative creativity while safeguarding original authorship are urgently needed. Furthermore, fostering ethical AI development practices that respect intellectual property rights is crucial.The debate surrounding AI and copyright is not merely a legal tussle; it's a battle for the very definition of creativity. In this fight, India has the opportunity to carve a path that balances innovation with artistic integrity. By acknowledging the complexities of AI while upholding the cornerstone principles of copyright, India can become a global leader in navigating the uncharted territory of digital authorship. The future of creativity, fueled by both human imagination and AI's boundless potential, hangs in the balance, and India has the chance to shape its trajectory.Disclaimer: The last few paragraphs above were written by Google Bard, and lightly edited. A chatbot can produce coherent text, but it may be, and often is, completely wrong (‘hallucinations'). Now who owns the copyright to this text? Traditionally, it would be owned by me and Firstpost, but what is the right answer now? Would we be responsible for any errors introduced by the AI?On the other hand, the ‘mining' of text, audio/video and images to train generative AI is an increasingly contentious issue. As an example, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that they weren't being paid anywhere near the fair market value of their text that the tech companies mined. This sounds familiar to Indians, because Westerners have been ‘digesting' Indian ideas for a long time. Some of the most egregious examples were patents on basmati, turmeric and neem, which are absurd considering that these have been in use in India for millennia. The fact that these were documented in texts (‘prior art') enabled successful challenges against them.An even more alarming fact is the capture and ‘digestion' (a highly evocative term from Rajiv Malhotra, who has warned of the dangers of AI for years) of Indian personal and medical data. Unlike China, which carefully firewalls away its data from Western Big Tech, and indeed, does not even allow them to function in their country, Indian personal data is being freely mined by US Big Tech. India's Data Privacy laws, being debated now, need to be considered defensive weapons.Paradoxically, there is also the concern that Indic knowledge will, for all intents and purposes, disappear from the domain of discourse. Since the chatbots are trained on the uncurated Internet, they are infected by the Anglosphere prejudices and bigotry therein, not to mention deliberate misinformation and ‘toolkits' that are propagated. Since most Indic concepts are either not very visible, or denigrated, on the Internet (eg Wikipedia), chatbots are not even aware of them. For instance, a doctor friend and I published an essay in Open magazine comparing allopathy to generative AI, because both are stochastic (ie. based on statistics). We mentioned Ayurveda positively several times, because it has a theory of disease that makes it more likely to work with causation rather than correlation.However, when the article summarized by chatGPT, there was no mention whatsoever of the word ‘Ayurveda'. It is as though such a concept does not exist, which may in fact be true in the sense that it is deprecated in the training data that the chatbot was trained on.One solution is to create Indian foundational models that can then become competent in specific domains of interest: for example an Arthashastra chatbot. These can also be trained, if sufficient data sets are created, on Indian languages as well, which could incidentally support real-time machine translation as well. Thus there can be an offensive as well as a defensive strategy to enable Indic knowledge systems to thrive.India is at a point of crisis, but also of opportunity. If India were to harness some of the leading-edge technologies of today, it might once again become a global leader in knowledge generation, as it was a millennium ago with its great universities. 1680 words, Jan 10, 2024 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997The 1968 Software Engineering ConferenceAn objection to the trading zoneFauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002.Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000CreditsRoulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Moloch and the sandpile catastrophe, published by Eric Raymond on April 2, 2022 on LessWrong. It often feels good to slide down efficiency gradients, but they can have tragedies at the bottom. Scott Alexander taught us to name this problem: he called it Moloch. There is war in the Ukraine. The world's largest wheat exporter, Russia, is fighting the world's fourth-largest wheat exporter, Ukraine. Russia's ability to get paid for its exports is under threat; Ukraine's production has been so badly hammered that it will likely be a net wheat importer for years. As a result, there is a very strong near-term possibility that hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will starve. Even where starvation does not kill directly, political unrest and food wars may do it. Understanding how we got here is important. Bear with me, I will get to a rationality heuristic, but there's a story to tell first. Pre-industrial societies were chronically vulnerable to famine because all staple food production was local and could be disrupted locally. Elites might import spices from the Indies but transport costs and risks were too high to allow long-distance food dependency to develop. This only began to change in the 1700s with the mass importation of sugar, tea, and coffee to Europe. Even though these were luxury goods that could have been foregone, one of the consequences of the trade was the first global war - the Seven Years' War of 1756-1753. The globalization of food production took its next major step in the mid-19th century when the developed world became dependent on phosphate fertilizers to perk up tired soils. Minor wars were fought over literal birdshit - guano islands were a critical phosphate source. But the phosphate flowed; none of those conflicts seriously disrupted it. The life-critical consequences of phosphate-supply disruption got consigned to the bin marked "That Will Never Happen". Then came the post-1945 Pax Americana, with the U.S. Navy guaranteeing global free trade. National economies went into a frenzy of optimization by seeking comparative advantages. Places where food production was expensive outsourced it to places where it was cheap. A population boom followed. Peaceful, steady global trade became life-critical to a large fraction of humanity in a way it had never before been in all of history. And nobody noticed this! Nobody noticed this this because the Pax Americana was an actual pax - it successfully prevented major wars involving food exporters for 77 years. (The closest we came to an exception before 2022 was several brushfire wars between India and Pakistan.) Americans would have had trouble noticing it anyway since the U.S. is effectively food self-sufficient - we only import staple foods as a price-taker, not because we don't have plenty of domestic capacity to produce them. But the Russo-Ukraine war has changed everything. It can and will screw up life-critical international supply chains - Russia is the world's largest phosphate exporter, too - but the U.S. can't stomp on the problem because Russia has nukes. Awkward... I said I'd get to a rationality heuristic. Might look like we're far from one right now, but let's look more closely at what could have been done if anyone had seen this coming. There's a answer pushed by various nationalist and populist types that says we should deglobalize, or should never have globalized in the first place. The problem with this prescription is twofold: In much of the world, it's now impossible unless you're willing for your population to die back to pre-1945 levels. Even in places like the U.S. it's politically unstable. The cost of not outsourcing your food production whenever that reduces prices is that your people pay more for food. Especially, your poor people pay more for food. Tha...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Moloch and the sandpile catastrophe, published by Eric Raymond on April 2, 2022 on LessWrong. It often feels good to slide down efficiency gradients, but they can have tragedies at the bottom. Scott Alexander taught us to name this problem: he called it Moloch. There is war in the Ukraine. The world's largest wheat exporter, Russia, is fighting the world's fourth-largest wheat exporter, Ukraine. Russia's ability to get paid for its exports is under threat; Ukraine's production has been so badly hammered that it will likely be a net wheat importer for years. As a result, there is a very strong near-term possibility that hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will starve. Even where starvation does not kill directly, political unrest and food wars may do it. Understanding how we got here is important. Bear with me, I will get to a rationality heuristic, but there's a story to tell first. Pre-industrial societies were chronically vulnerable to famine because all staple food production was local and could be disrupted locally. Elites might import spices from the Indies but transport costs and risks were too high to allow long-distance food dependency to develop. This only began to change in the 1700s with the mass importation of sugar, tea, and coffee to Europe. Even though these were luxury goods that could have been foregone, one of the consequences of the trade was the first global war - the Seven Years' War of 1756-1753. The globalization of food production took its next major step in the mid-19th century when the developed world became dependent on phosphate fertilizers to perk up tired soils. Minor wars were fought over literal birdshit - guano islands were a critical phosphate source. But the phosphate flowed; none of those conflicts seriously disrupted it. The life-critical consequences of phosphate-supply disruption got consigned to the bin marked "That Will Never Happen". Then came the post-1945 Pax Americana, with the U.S. Navy guaranteeing global free trade. National economies went into a frenzy of optimization by seeking comparative advantages. Places where food production was expensive outsourced it to places where it was cheap. A population boom followed. Peaceful, steady global trade became life-critical to a large fraction of humanity in a way it had never before been in all of history. And nobody noticed this! Nobody noticed this this because the Pax Americana was an actual pax - it successfully prevented major wars involving food exporters for 77 years. (The closest we came to an exception before 2022 was several brushfire wars between India and Pakistan.) Americans would have had trouble noticing it anyway since the U.S. is effectively food self-sufficient - we only import staple foods as a price-taker, not because we don't have plenty of domestic capacity to produce them. But the Russo-Ukraine war has changed everything. It can and will screw up life-critical international supply chains - Russia is the world's largest phosphate exporter, too - but the U.S. can't stomp on the problem because Russia has nukes. Awkward... I said I'd get to a rationality heuristic. Might look like we're far from one right now, but let's look more closely at what could have been done if anyone had seen this coming. There's a answer pushed by various nationalist and populist types that says we should deglobalize, or should never have globalized in the first place. The problem with this prescription is twofold: In much of the world, it's now impossible unless you're willing for your population to die back to pre-1945 levels. Even in places like the U.S. it's politically unstable. The cost of not outsourcing your food production whenever that reduces prices is that your people pay more for food. Especially, your poor people pay more for food. Tha...

This Week's ShowSegment 1: Week in Review, Habs News, League NewsCheck out news Headlines posts every week day at http://allhabs.net/ (AllHabs.net).  Roster news - The Canadiens have 24 players and two coaches on the NHL's COVID protocol list. Cam Hillis, Michael Pezzetta, Alex Belzile and Kale Clague are the most recent additions. Assistant coach Trevor Letowski and goaltending coach Eric Raymond are currently in the COVID-19 protocol as well. Cam Hillis made his NHL debut last Saturday in Florida vs Panthers. The NHL postponed the Canadiens' home game on January 15 against the Devils due to attendance restrictions bringing the number of January Habs home games postponed to six. The Canadiens and Rocket extended the pause of all activities through January 8th inclusively. Bob Edmundson, Joel's father, lost his battle with lung cancer on Friday. He was 61 years old. Habs prospect report - Hamilton Bulldogs acquired Habs prospect Arber Xhekaj from the Kitchener Rangers in exchange for Navrin Mutter and draft selections. London Knights defenceman Logan Mailloux played his first game on Friday after serving a 26-game suspension by the OHL. Be sure to read the content at AHL.report and check out https://www.thepresszone.fm/ (The Press Zone - Montreal). Quotes of the week - The Canadiens appointed RDS sports reporter Chantal Machabee as Vice President, Communications. Hockey news and notes - The NHL and 20 of its teams (including the Montreal Canadiens) are suing 5 insurance companies for losses of $1 billion during the pandemic due to loss of revenue.  Segment 2: BIG Topic - The UntouchablesOne of the first challenges for the GM will be to accumulate assets, draft picks and prospects, by moving players from the organization. Who are the players who should be untouchable? Michael and Rick will discuss. Segment 3: Have Your SayCanadiens upcoming events. Canadiens Connection Question of the Week. Listener's texts and emails. Canadiens Connection on Rocket Sports RadioCanadiens Connection is hosted by Rick Stephens (http://www.twitter.com/allhabs (@AllHabs)) with Amy Johnson (https://twitter.com/flyersrule (@FlyersRule)) and Chris G (https://twitter.com/chrishabs360 (@ChrisHabs360)). This talented team of credentialed journalists come together to share their valued insight. Canadiens Connection is a connection between fans, journalists, players, coaches, management to thoroughly discuss their favorite game in an informative, thought provoking, and entertaining way. Get the Canadiens Connection!Be sure to follow @habsconnection on https://twitter.com/HabsConnection (Twitter), https://www.facebook.com/habsconnection/ (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/habsconnection/ (Instagram) Search for "Canadiens Connection" from Rocket Sports Radio on your favorite podcast app and subscribe! You can also listen to every episode on apps including: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/rocket-sports-radio/id1286574860?mt=2 (Apple Podcasts (iTunes)) https://open.spotify.com/show/2SHpmnrTsx8Jll1Yf99qAJ?si=mWDPeR2cSyKHzBvwXugTRw (Spotify) https://overcast.fm/itunes1286574860/rocket-sports-radio (Overcast) https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/rocket-sports-radio (Stitcher) https://castbox.fm/channel/id3054454 (Castbox) https://pca.st/71oN (Pocket Casts) https://radiopublic.com/canadiens-connection-69AMww (RadioPublic) https://tunein.com/podcasts/Sports--Recreation-Podcasts/Rocket-Sports-Radio-p1039405/ (TuneIn) https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmxvZ3RhbGtyYWRpby5jb20vcm9ja2V0c3BvcnRzL3BvZGNhc3Q (Google Podcasts) Share the Canadiens Connection on social media. And we would be grateful for your 5-star rating for the podcast!

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rationalism before the Sequences, published by Eric Raymond on LessWrong. I'm here to tell you a story about what it was like to be a rationalist decades before the Sequences and the formation of the modern rationalist community. It is not the only story that could be told, but it is one that runs parallel to and has important connections to Eliezer Yudkowsky's and how his ideas developed. My goal in writing this essay is to give the LW community a sense of the prehistory of their movement. It is not intended to be "where Eliezer got his ideas"; that would be stupidly reductive. I aim more to exhibit where the drive and spirit of the Yudkowskian reform came from, and the interesting ways in which Eliezer's formative experiences were not unique. My standing to write this essay begins with the fact that I am roughly 20 years older than Eliezer and read many of his sources before he was old enough to read. I was acquainted with him over an email list before he wrote the Sequences, though I somehow managed to forget those interactions afterwards and only rediscovered them while researching for this essay. In 2005 he had even sent me a book manuscript to review that covered some of the Sequences topics. My reaction on reading "The Twelve Virtues of Rationality" a few years later was dual. It was a different kind of writing than the book manuscript - stronger, more individual, taking some serious risks. On the one hand, I was deeply impressed by its clarity and courage. On the other hand, much of it seemed very familiar, full of hints and callbacks and allusions to books I knew very well. Today it is probably more difficult to back-read Eliezer's sources than it was in 2006, because the body of more recent work within his reformation of rationalism tends to get in the way. I'm going to attempt to draw aside that veil by talking about four specific topics: General Semantics, analytic philosophy, science fiction, and Zen Buddhism. Before I get to those specifics, I want to try to convey that sense of what it was like. I was a bright geeky kid in the 1960s and 1970s, immersed in a lot of obscure topics often with an implicit common theme: intelligence can save us! Learning how to think more clearly can make us better! But at the beginning I was groping as if in a dense fog, unclear about how to turn that belief into actionable advice. Sometimes I would get a flash of light through the fog, or at least a sense that there were other people on the same lonely quest. A bit of that sense sometimes drifted over USENET, an early precursor of today's Internet fora. More often than not, though, the clue would be fictional; somebody's imagination about what it would be like to increase intelligence, to burn away error and think more clearly. When I found non-fiction sources on rationality and intelligence increase I devoured them. Alas, most were useless junk. But in a few places I found gold. Not by coincidence, the places I found real value were sources Eliezer would later draw on. I'm not guessing about this, I was able to confirm it first from Eliezer's explicit reports of what influenced him and then via an email conversation. Eliezer and I were not unique. We know directly of a few others with experiences like ours. There were likely dozens of others we didn't know - possibly hundreds - on parallel paths, all hungrily seeking clarity of thought, all finding largely overlapping subsets of clues and techniques because there simply wasn't that much out there to be mined. One piece of evidence for this parallelism besides Eliezer's reports is that I bounced a draft of this essay off Nancy Lebovitz, a former LW moderator who I've known personally since the 1970s. Her instant reaction? "Full of stuff I knew already." Around the time Nancy and I first met, some years before Eliezer Yudk...

For centuries we held that logical reasoning, supported by Revelation, was the way to get to the truth of any issue. At least to the best our finite minds can accomplish. In the last couple of centuries, while we have lost our communal trust in Revelation, we have at least retained the notion that logic and reasoning is the best way to know what is true. Today, we are hearing that logic and reasoning are only ONE way of many to approach truth, and logical fallacies that used to be "points off" in a debate are now allowed, and even encouraged. One of the most recent and prevalent logical fallacies is a combination of "begging the question" and "ad hominem" that Eric Raymond coined "Kafkatrapping." In this podcast, Director Hodges considers the Kafkatrap, where it is being used in our day, and how it might be addressed.

Eric Raymond is one of the early pioneers of the open source software movement, and is the author of a book on the subject, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Drew LazzeriBiographyDrew Lazzeri is a former lumberjack who then went on to get a degree in math and theater from Santa Clara University. From college, he has gone on to be a freelance web developer and full stack engineer. Interviewing.io Referral Code for Develomentor Listeners!While he currently works for another guest of the show, Aline Lerner at interviewing.io, he’s about to take a sabbatical from tech to go to music school in Hungary for a few months.Episode Summary“The rare and valuable skills that enable a lot of people to be successful in either tech or other parts of knowledge work come out of relationships you have with mentors. Mentors who were able to hand down those skills.”“I think its useful to just think about the users. What change you could make for them? It’s always interesting how you could make changes all over the stack that can help with loading time or make a feature easier or harder to implement.”“Hearing the stories and the paths people have taken through in their career is so vital. It leads to success in bringing people in and having good mentorship and all sorts of the relationships that this industry is founded on.”—Drew LazzeriKey MilestonesDrew began to teach himself tech at age 12. He also spent some time as a lumberjack! In college although he started down the path of computer science, he decided to switch majors to abstract math and theatre. ‘How to become a hacker’ by Eric Raymond had a huge influence on Drew.How does Drew approach the role of being a full stack developer? What are some of the key skills to be successful in this role?How has theater played a part of in Drew’s career?Who were Drew’s mentors throughout his career?Why did Drew decide to take a break from tech to go study music? Additional ResourcesRead the article ‘How to become a hacker’ by Eric Raymond – http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.htmlFree online book to learn Python, ‘ How to Think like a Computer Scientist’ – http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/Mike Gamson – CEO of Relativity, Former VP of Sales at LinkedIn (#53)Ep. 14 Duretti Hirpa – Secrets from a Self Taught Software DeveloperAline Lerner – Pro Chef Starts Tech Recruiting Firm, Interviewing.io (#44)You can find more resources in the show notesTo learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/CONNECT WITH DREW LAZERRILinkedInFollow Develomentor:Twitter: @develomentorFollow Grant IngersollTwitter: @gsingersLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

The Open Source Initiative kicks a co-founder from its mailing lists, OBS faces backlash for receiving support from Facebook Gaming, and Collabora launches its version of LibreOffice for mobile.

Audra Russell chats with author Eric Raymond, creator of the sci-fi series, Syndicate 6ix.Eric Raymond started writing at a young age, and continues to stretch his imagination to its limits to this day. He is a graduate of Auburn University, Montgomery, and spends his days laboring away at a keyboard to share his stories with the world. In this episode we chat about the inspiration behind Syndicate 6ix, his young adult novel, Life of a Leo, and the author who inspires him most (Harry Potter, anyone?). Eric also shares some valuable information about self publishing for all my fellow emerging authors out there.So grab your favorite beverage, get cozy, and enjoy!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=29642304)

Nocheinmal widmen wir uns dem Buch "Die Kathedrale und der Bazaar" von Eric Raymond. Einmal gehe ich dabei auf eure Kritik ein und zum anderen beende ich das Buch mit einer kleinen Besprechnung. +++ Weitere Links +++Buch von Eric Raymond als kostenloses PDF: http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdf Erstelle eine sichere Monero Wallet: https://moneroaddress.org/ Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset (Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUWn_TJTrnU +++ Alle Links zu mir und meinem Schaffen: www.alexanarcho.net/links +++ Mich unterstützen (Bitcoin, Lightning, Monero): www.alexanarcho.net/support BTC: 1CyJs3FoURVNoKNkc39R34uRb3Jr9mpYrP XMR: 45ZoRheLkX2H3UjYSFs2wP9yo739nQ7irZA2pX6MQr5FeebkC2n8hABYGQRCcrzJ2AaGbNUyR4EfvanP1G2H5DSrMWi97Sk Dash: XxdYMwoVTEnwiyX9wuLgY1wZDeVWcQ6aLM

Wir betrachten die Unterschiede zwischen einer Kathedrale und einem Bazaar. Zumindest benutzen wir dies als metaphorisches Sinnbild für den Unteschied zwischen Closed Source (Windows und MacOS) und Open Source Software (Linux). Überraschender Weise ist diese Analogie nicht nur in der Software Welt anwendbar, sondern in allen Bereichen unseres Lebens. +++ Weitere Links +++Buch von Eric Raymond als kostenloses PDF: http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdfFFMPEG: https://ffmpeg.org/Tuxedo Laptop XP 1610: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks/15-16-inch/TUXEDO-Book-XP1610.tuxedoJohn Stossel - Spontaneous Order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiXs7oBynYA +++ Alle Links zu mir und meinem Schaffen: www.alexanarcho.net/links +++ Mich unterstützen (Bitcoin, Lightning, Monero): www.alexanarcho.net/support BTC: 1CyJs3FoURVNoKNkc39R34uRb3Jr9mpYrP XMR: 45ZoRheLkX2H3UjYSFs2wP9yo739nQ7irZA2pX6MQr5FeebkC2n8hABYGQRCcrzJ2AaGbNUyR4EfvanP1G2H5DSrMWi97Sk Dash: XxdYMwoVTEnwiyX9wuLgY1wZDeVWcQ6aLM

Thanks to a listener in Los Angeles, Eric Raymond dropped by to talk about his career as a writer and novelist in San Francisco. His first novel, "Confessions From A Dark Wood," is a satire based on his experiences working in global brand management. In this episode, Eric discusses his work and reads an excerpt from his upcoming novel, "Golden Gate," set to be released in March 2020 by Tyrant Books.

A chat with legendary voice performer and Emmy award winning director, Charlie Adler, the man behind Buster Bunny, Eric Raymond, Nat Smurfling, Tex Hex and countless more!

In this episode of Libre Lounge, Serge and Chris go back to the roots of hacker culture starting in the 1950s and 1960s and connecting that with the hacker culture of today, its challenges and how it needs to evolve moving forward.Show links:Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (stevenlevy.com)Free as in Freedom (sagitter.fedorapeople.org)Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic (opentranscripts)The Problem with the Hacker Mystique (youtube)Eric Raymond's Jargon File (catb.org)The Original Jargon File (dourish.com)Hackerspaces (hackerspaces.org)Maker Movement (wikipedia)MAKE Magazine (makezine.com)Life hack (wikipedia)CW Chris's article on depression (dustyweb)CW Mitch Altman on Geek and Depression (bluehackers.org)CW Jason Scott on Geeks and Suicide (textfiles.com)The Microsoft Ad (ispot.tv)Poochie (simpsons.wikia.com)Wargames (wikipedia)Hackers (wikipedia)For the Love of Hacking (forbes)RepRap (reprap.org)Makerbot goes Proprietary (cnet)The Illegal Tattoo (treachery.net)A Portrait of J. Random Hacker (catb.org)

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining. Plus Let's Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs, Firefox 59's new Linux feature, and why Wil Wheaton switched to Debian.

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining.

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining. Plus Let's Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs, Firefox 59's new Linux feature, and why Wil Wheaton switched to Debian.

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining.

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining. Plus Let's Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs, Firefox 59's new Linux feature, and why Wil Wheaton switched to Debian.

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining.

How the term open source was created, running FreeBSD on ThinkPad T530, Moving away from Windows, Unknown Giants, as well as OpenBSD and FreeDOS. This episode was brought to you by Headlines How I coined the term 'open source' (https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software) In a few days, on February 3, the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the term "open source software" is upon us. As open source software grows in popularity and powers some of the most robust and important innovations of our time, we reflect on its rise to prominence. I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group. This is my account of how I came up with it, how it was proposed, and the subsequent reactions. Of course, there are a number of accounts of the coining of the term, for example by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman, yet this is mine, written on January 2, 2006. It has never been published, until today. The introduction of the term "open source software" was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users. The problem with the main earlier label, "free software," was not its political connotations, but that—to newcomers—its seeming focus on price is distracting. A term was needed that focuses on the key issue of source code and that does not immediately confuse those new to the concept. The first term that came along at the right time and fulfilled these requirements was rapidly adopted: open source. This term had long been used in an "intelligence" (i.e., spying) context, but to my knowledge, use of the term with respect to software prior to 1998 has not been confirmed. The account below describes how the term open source software caught on and became the name of both an industry and a movement. Meetings on computer security In late 1997, weekly meetings were being held at Foresight Institute to discuss computer security. Foresight is a nonprofit think tank focused on nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and software security is regarded as central to the reliability and security of both. We had identified free software as a promising approach to improving software security and reliability and were looking for ways to promote it. Interest in free software was starting to grow outside the programming community, and it was increasingly clear that an opportunity was coming to change the world. However, just how to do this was unclear, and we were groping for strategies. At these meetings, we discussed the need for a new term due to the confusion factor. The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage. The problem was not that explaining the meaning is impossible—the problem was that the name for an important idea should not be so confusing to newcomers. A clearer term was needed. No political issues were raised regarding the free software term; the issue was its lack of clarity to those new to the concept. Releasing Netscape On February 2, 1998, Eric Raymond arrived on a visit to work with Netscape on the plan to release the browser code under a free-software-style license. We held a meeting that night at Foresight's office in Los Altos to strategize and refine our message. In addition to Eric and me, active participants included Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, Todd Anderson, Mark S. Miller, and Ka-Ping Yee. But at that meeting, the field was still described as free software or, by Brian, "source code available" software. While in town, Eric used Foresight as a base of operations. At one point during his visit, he was called to the phone to talk with a couple of Netscape legal and/or marketing staff. When he was finished, I asked to be put on the phone with them—one man and one woman, perhaps Mitchell Baker—so I could bring up the need for a new term. They agreed in principle immediately, but no specific term was agreed upon. Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea, so I thought I would try to go ahead and introduce it. In hindsight, I should have simply proposed it to Eric Raymond, but I didn't know him well at the time, so I took an indirect strategy instead. Todd had agreed strongly about the need for a new term and offered to assist in getting the term introduced. This was helpful because, as a non-programmer, my influence within the free software community was weak. My work in nanotechnology education at Foresight was a plus, but not enough for me to be taken very seriously on free software questions. As a Linux programmer, Todd would be listened to more closely. The key meeting Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending—in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me—were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall. The primary topic was promotion strategy, especially which companies to approach. I said little, but was looking for an opportunity to introduce the proposed term. I felt that it wouldn't work for me to just blurt out, "All you technical people should start using my new term." Most of those attending didn't know me, and for all I knew, they might not even agree that a new term was greatly needed, or even somewhat desirable. Fortunately, Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive—a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened. I went on alert, hoping for a response, but there was none at first. The discussion continued on the original topic. It seemed only he and I had noticed the usage. Not so—memetic evolution was in action. A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened. I was excited—it might work! But I kept quiet: I still had low status in this group. Probably some were wondering why Eric had invited me at all. Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this. I didn't say much, letting Todd and Eric pull the (loose, informal) consensus together around the open source name. It was clear that to most of those at the meeting, the name change was not the most important thing discussed there; a relatively minor issue. Only about 10% of my notes from this meeting are on the terminology question. But I was elated. These were some key leaders in the community, and they liked the new name, or at least didn't object. This was a very good sign. There was probably not much more I could do to help; Eric Raymond was far better positioned to spread the new meme, and he did. Bruce Perens signed on to the effort immediately, helping set up Opensource.org and playing a key role in spreading the new term. For the name to succeed, it was necessary, or at least highly desirable, that Tim O'Reilly agree and actively use it in his many projects on behalf of the community. Also helpful would be use of the term in the upcoming official release of the Netscape Navigator code. By late February, both O'Reilly & Associates and Netscape had started to use the term. Getting the name out After this, there was a period during which the term was promoted by Eric Raymond to the media, by Tim O'Reilly to business, and by both to the programming community. It seemed to spread very quickly. On April 7, 1998, Tim O'Reilly held a meeting of key leaders in the field. Announced in advance as the first "Freeware Summit," by April 14 it was referred to as the first "Open Source Summit." These months were extremely exciting for open source. Every week, it seemed, a new company announced plans to participate. Reading Slashdot became a necessity, even for those like me who were only peripherally involved. I strongly believe that the new term was helpful in enabling this rapid spread into business, which then enabled wider use by the public. A quick Google search indicates that "open source" appears more often than "free software," but there still is substantial use of the free software term, which remains useful and should be included when communicating with audiences who prefer it. A happy twinge When an early account of the terminology change written by Eric Raymond was posted on the Open Source Initiative website, I was listed as being at the VA brainstorming meeting, but not as the originator of the term. This was my own fault; I had neglected to tell Eric the details. My impulse was to let it pass and stay in the background, but Todd felt otherwise. He suggested to me that one day I would be glad to be known as the person who coined the name "open source software." He explained the situation to Eric, who promptly updated his site. Coming up with a phrase is a small contribution, but I admit to being grateful to those who remember to credit me with it. Every time I hear it, which is very often now, it gives me a little happy twinge. The big credit for persuading the community goes to Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly, who made it happen. Thanks to them for crediting me, and to Todd Anderson for his role throughout. The above is not a complete account of open source history; apologies to the many key players whose names do not appear. Those seeking a more complete account should refer to the links in this article and elsewhere on the net. FreeBSD on a Laptop - A guide to a fully functional installation of FreeBSD on a ThinkPad T530 (https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/freebsd-on-a-laptop) As I stated my previous post, I recently dug up my old ThinkPad T530 after the embarrassing stream of OS X security bugs this month. Although this ThinkPad ran Gentoo faithfully during my time in graduate school at Clemson, these days I'd much rather spend time my wife and baby than fighting with emerge and USE flags. FreeBSD has always been my OS of choice, and laptop support seems to be much better than it was a few years ago. In this guide, I'll show you the tweaks I made to wrestle FreeBSD into a decent experience on a laptop. Unlike my usual posts, this time I'm going to assume you're already pretty familiar with FreeBSD. If you're a layman looking for your first BSD-based desktop, I highly recommend checking out TrueOS (previously PC-BSD): they've basically taken FreeBSD and packaged it with all the latest drivers, along with a user-friendly installer and custom desktop environment out of the box. TrueOS is an awesome project–the only reason I don't use it is because I'm old, grumpy, and persnickety about having my operating system just so. Anyway, if you'd still like to take the plunge, read on. Keep in mind, I'm using a ThinkPad T530, but other ThinkPads of the same generation should be similarly compatible. Here's what you'll get: Decent battery life (8-9 hours with a new 9-cell battery) UEFI boot and full-disk encryption WiFi (Intel Ultimate-N 6300) Ethernet (Intel PRO/1000) Screen brightness adjustment Suspend/Resume on lid close (make sure to disable TPM in BIOS) Audio (Realtek ALC269 HDA, speakers and headphone jack) Keyboard multimedia buttons Touchpad/Trackpoint Graphics Acceleration (with integrated Intel graphics, NVIDIA card disabled in BIOS) What I haven't tested yet: Bluetooth Webcam Fingerprint reader SD Card slot Installation Power Saving Tweaks for Desktop Use X11 Fonts Login Manager: SLiM Desktop Environment: i3 Applications The LLVM Sanitizers stage accomplished (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_llvm_sanitizers_stage_accomplished) I've managed to get the Memory Sanitizer to work for the elementary base system utilities, like ps(1), awk(1) and ksh(1). This means that the toolchain is ready for tests and improvements. I've iterated over the basesystem utilities and I looked for bugs, both in programs and in sanitizers. The number of detected bugs in the userland programs was low, there merely was one reading of an uninitialized variable in ps(1). A prebuilt LLVM toolchain I've prepared a prebuilt toolchain with Clang, LLVM, LLDB and compiler-rt for NetBSD/amd64. I prepared the toolchain on 8.99.12, however I have received reports that it works on other older releases. Link: llvm-clang-compilerrt-lldb-7.0.0beta_2018-01-24.tar.bz2 The archive has to be untarballed to /usr/local (however it might work to some extent in other paths). This toolchain contains a prebuilt tree of the LLVM projects from a snapshot of 7.0.0(svn). It is a pristine snapshot of HEAD with patches from pkgsrc-wip for llvm, clang, compiler-rt and lldb. Sanitizers Notable changes in sanitizers, all of them are in the context of NetBSD support. Added fstat(2) MSan interceptor. Support for kvm(3) interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Added devname(3) and devname_r(3) interceptors to the common sanitizer code. Added sysctl(3) familty of functions interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Added strlcpy(3)/strlcat(3) interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Added getgrouplist(3)/getgroupmembership(3) interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Correct ctype(3) interceptors in a code using Native Language Support. Correct tzset(3) interceptor in MSan. Correct localtime(3) interceptor in the common sanitizer code. Added paccept(2) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added access(2) and faccessat(2) interceptors to the common sanitizer code. Added acct(2) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added accept4(2) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added fgetln(3) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the pwcache(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the getprotoent(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the getnetent(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the fts(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added lstat(3) interceptor in MSan. Added strftime(3) interceptor in the common sanitizer code. Added strmode(3) interceptor in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the regex(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Disabled unwanted interceptor __sigsetjmp in TSan. Base system changes I've tidied up inclusion of the internal namespace.h header in libc. This has hidden the usage of public global symbol names of: strlcat -> _strlcat sysconf -> __sysconf closedir -> _closedir fparseln -> _fparseln kill -> _kill mkstemp -> _mkstemp reallocarr -> _reallocarr strcasecmp -> _strcasecmp strncasecmp -> _strncasecmp strptime -> _strptime strtok_r -> _strtok_r sysctl -> _sysctl dlopen -> __dlopen dlclose -> __dlclose dlsym -> __dlsym strlcpy -> _strlcpy fdopen -> _fdopen mmap -> _mmap strdup -> _strdup The purpose of these changes was to stop triggering interceptors recursively. Such interceptors lead to sanitization of internals of unprepared (not recompiled with sanitizers) prebuilt code. It's not trivial to sanitize libc's internals and the sanitizers are not designed to do so. This means that they are not a full replacement of Valgrind-like software, but a a supplement in the developer toolbox. Valgrind translates native code to a bytecode virtual machine, while sanitizers are designed to work with interceptors inside the pristine elementary libraries (libc, libm, librt, libpthread) and embed functionality into the executable's code. I've also reverted the vadvise(2) syscall removal, from the previous month. This caused a regression in legacy code recompiled against still supported compat layers. Newly compiled code will use a libc's stub of vadvise(2). I've also prepared a patch installing dedicated headers for sanitizers along with the base system GCC. It's still discussed and should land the sources soon. Future directions and goals Possible paths in random order: In the quartet of UBSan (Undefined Behavior Sanitizer), ASan (Address Sanitizer), TSan (Thread Sanitizer), MSan (Memory Sanitizer) we need to add the fifth basic sanitizer: LSan (Leak Sanitizer). The Leak Sanitizer (detector of memory leaks) demands a stable ptrace(2) interface for processes with multiple threads (unless we want to build a custom kernel interface). Integrate the sanitizers with the userland framework in order to ship with the native toolchain to users. Port sanitizers from LLVM to GCC. Allow to sanitize programs linked against userland libraries other than libc, librt, libm and libpthread; by a global option (like MKSANITIZER) producing a userland that is partially prebuilt with a desired sanitizer. This is required to run e.g. MSanitized programs against editline(3). So far, there is no Operating System distribution in existence with a native integration with sanitizers. There are 3rd party scripts for certain OSes to build a stack of software dependencies in order to validate a piece of software. Execute ATF tests with the userland rebuilt with supported flavors of sanitizers and catch regressions. Finish porting of modern linkers designed for large C++ software, such as GNU GOLD and LLVM LLD. Today the bottleneck with building the LLVM toolchain is a suboptimal linker GNU ld(1). I've decided to not open new battlefields and return now to porting LLDB and fixing ptrace(2). Plan for the next milestone Keep upstreaming a pile of local compiler-rt patches. Restore the LLDB support for traced programs with a single thread. Interview - Goran Mekic - meka@tilda.center (mailto:meka@tilda.center) / @meka_floss (https://twitter.com/meka_floss) CBSD website (https://bsdstore.ru) Jail and VM Manager *** News Roundup Finally Moving Away From Windows (https://www.manios.ca/blog/2018/01/finally-moving-away-from-windows/) Broken Window Thanks to a combination of some really impressive malware, bad clicking, and poor website choices, I had to blow away my Windows 10 installation. Not that it was Window's fault, but a piece of malware had infected my computer when I tried to download a long lost driver for an even longer lost RAID card for a server. A word of advice – the download you're looking for is never on an ad-infested forum in another language. In any case, I had been meaning to switch away from Windows soon. I didn't have my entire plan ready, but now was as good a time as any. My line of work requires me to maintain some form of Windows installation, so I decided to keep it in a VM rather than dual booting as I was developing code and not running any high-end visual stuff like games. My first thought was to install Arch or Gentoo Linux, but the last time I attempted a Gentoo installation it left me bootless. Not that there is anything wrong with Gentoo, it was probably my fault, but I like the idea of some sort of installer so I looked at rock-solid Debian. My dad had installed Debian on his sweet new cutting-edge Lenovo laptop he received recently from work. He often raves about his cool scripts and much more effective customized experience, but often complains about his hybrid GPU support as he has an Intel/Nvidia hybrid display adapter (he has finally resolved it and now boasts his 6 connected displays). I didn't want to install Windows again, but something didn't feel right about installing some flavour of Linux. Back at home I have a small collection of FreeBSD servers running in all sorts of jails and other physical hardware, with the exception of one Debian server which I had the hardest time dealing with (it would be FreeBSD too if 802.11ac support was there as it is acting as my WiFi/gateway/IDS/IPS). I loved my FreeBSD servers, and yes I will write posts about each one soon enough. I wanted that cleanliness and familiarity on my desktop as well (I really love the ports collection!). It's settled – I will run FreeBSD on my laptop. This also created a new rivalry with my father, which is not a bad thing either. Playing Devil's Advocate The first thing I needed to do was backup my Windows data. This was easy enough, just run a Windows Image Backup and it will- wait, what? Why isn't this working? I didn't want to fiddle with this too long because I didn't actually need an image just the data. I ended up just copying over the files to an external hard disk. Once that was done, I downloaded and verified the latest FreeBSD 11.1 RELEASE memstick image and flashed it to my trusty 8GB Verbatim USB stick. I've had this thing since 2007, it works great for being my re-writable “CD”. I booted it up and started the installation. I knew this installer pretty well as I had test-installed FreeBSD and OpenBSD in VMs when I was researching a Unix style replacement OS last year. In any case, I left most of the defaults (I didn't want to play with custom kernels right now) and I selected all packages. This downloaded them from the FreeBSD FTP server as I only had the memstick image. The installer finished and I was off to my first boot. Great! so far so good. FreeBSD loaded up and I did a ‘pkg upgrade' just to make sure that everything was up to date. Alright, time to get down to business. I needed nano. I just can't use vi, or just not yet. I don't care about being a vi-wizard, that's just too much effort for me. Anyway, just a ‘pkg install nano' and I had my editor. Next was obvious, I needed x11. XFCE was common, and there were plenty of tutorials out there. I wont bore you with those details, but it went something like ‘pkg install xfce' and I got all the dependencies. Don't forget to install SLiM to make it seamless. There are some configs in the .login I think. SLiM needs to be called once the boot drops you to the login so that you get SLiM's nice GUI login instead of the CLI login screen. Then SLiM passes you off to XFCE. I think I followed this and this. Awesome. Now that x11 is working, it's time to get all of my apps from Windows. Obviously, I can't get everything (ie. Visual Studio, Office). But in my Windows installation, I had chosen many open-source or cross-compiled apps as they either worked better or so that I was ready to move away from Windows at a moments notice. ‘pkg install firefox thunderbird hexchat pidgin gpa keepass owncloud-client transmission-qt5 veracrypt openvpn' were some immediate picks. There are a lot more that I downloaded later, but these are a few I use everyday. My laptop also has the same hybrid display adapter config that my dad's has, but I chose to only run Intel graphics, so dual screens are no problem for me. I'll add Nvidia support later, but it's not a priority. After I had imported my private keys and loaded my firefox and thunderbird settings, I wanted to get my Windows VM running right away as I was burning productive days at work fiddling with this. I had only two virtualisation options; qemu/kvm and bhyve. qemu/kvm wasn't available in pkg, and looked real dirty to compile, from FreeBSD's point of view. My dad is using qemu/kvm with virt-manager to manage all of his Windows/Unix VMs alike. I wanted that experience, but I also wanted packages that could be updated and I didn't want to mess up a compile. bhyve was a better choice. It was built-in, it was more compatible with Windows (from what I read), and this is a great step-by-step article for Windows 10 on FreeBSD 11 bhyve! I had already tried to get virt-manager to work with bhyve with no luck. I don't think libvirt connects with bhyve completely, or maybe my config is wrong. But I didn't have time to fiddle with it. I managed it all through command lines and that has worked perfectly so far. Well sorta, there was an issue installing SQL Server, and only SQL Server, on my Windows VM. This was due to a missing ‘sectorsize=512' setting on the disk parameter on the bhyve command line. That was only found after A LOT of digging because the SQL Server install didn't log the error properly. I eventually found out that SQL Server only likes one sector size of disks for the install and my virtual disk geometry was incorrect. Apps Apps Apps I installed Windows 10 on my bhyve VM and I got that all setup with the apps I needed for work. Mostly Office, Visual Studio, and vSphere for managing our server farm. Plus all of the annoying 3rd party VPN software (I'm looking at you Dell and Cisco). Alright, with the Windows VM done, I can now work at work and finish FreeBSD mostly during the nights. I still needed my remote files (I setup an ownCloud instance on a FreeNAS jail at home) so I setup the client. Now, normally on Windows I would come to work and connect to my home network using OpenVPN (again, I have a OpenVPN FreeNAS jail at home) and the ownCloud desktop would be able to handle changing DNS destination IPs Not on FreeBSD (and Linux too?). I ended up just configuring the ownCloud client to just connect to the home LAN IP for the ownCloud server and always connecting the OpenVPN to sync things. It kinda sucks, but at least it works. I left that running at home overnight to get a full sync (~130GB cloud sync, another reason I use it over Google or Microsoft). Once that was done I moved onto the fstab as I had another 1TB SSD in my laptop with other files. I messed around with fstab and my NFS shares to my FreeNAS at home, but took them out as they made the boot time so long when I wasn't at home. I would only mount them when my OpenVPN connected or manually. I really wanted to install SpaceFM, but it's only available as a package on Debian and their non-package install script doesn't work on FreeBSD (packages are named differently). I tried doing it manually, but it was too much work. As my dad was the one who introduced me to it, he still uses it as a use-case for his Debian setup. Instead I kept to the original PCManFM and it works just fine. I also loaded up my Bitcoin and Litecoin wallets and pointed them to the blockchain that I has used on Windows after their sync, they loaded perfectly and my balances were there. I kinda wish there was the Bitcoin-ABC full node Bitcoin Cash wallet package on FreeBSD, but I'm sure it will come out later. The rest is essentially just tweaks and making the environment more comfortable for me, and with most programs installed as packages I feel a lot better with upgrades and audit checking (‘pkg audit -F' is really helpful!). I will always hate Python, actually, I will always hate any app that has it's own package manager. I do miss the GUI GitHub tool on Windows. It was a really good-looking way to view all of my repos. The last thing (which is increasing it's priority every time I go to a social media site or YouTube) is fonts. My god I never thought it was such a problem, and UTF support is complicated. If anyone knows how to get all UTF characters to show up, please let me know. I'd really like Wikipedia articles to load perfectly (I followed this post and there are still some missing). There are some extra tweaks I followed here and here. Conclusion I successfully migrated from Windows 10 to FreeBSD 11.1 with minimal consequence. Shout out goes to the entire FreeBSD community. So many helpful people in there, and the forums are a great place to find tons of information. Also thanks to the ones who wrote the how-to articles I've referenced. I never would have gotten bhyve to work and I'd still probably be messing with my X config without them. I guess my take home from this is to not be afraid to make changes that may change how comfortable I am in an environment. I'm always open to comments and questions, please feel free to make them below. I purposefully didn't include too many technical things or commands in this article as I wanted to focus on the larger picture of the migration as a whole not the struggles of xorg.conf, but if you would like to see some of the configs or commands I used, let me know and I'll include some! TrueOS Rules of Conduct (https://www.trueos.org/rulesofconduct/) We believe code is truly agnostic and embrace inclusiveness regardless of a person's individual beliefs. As such we only ask the following when participating in TrueOS public events and digital forums: Treat each other with respect and professionalism. Leave personal and TrueOS unrelated conversations to other channels. In other words, it's all about the code. Users who feel the above rules have been violated in some way can register a complaint with abuse@trueos.org + Shorter than the BSD License (https://twitter.com/trueos/status/965994363070353413) + Positive response from the community (https://twitter.com/freebsdbytes/status/966567686015782912) I really like the @TrueOS Code of Conduct, unlike some other CoCs. It's short, clear and covers everything. Most #OpenSource projects are labour of love. Why do you need a something that reads like a legal contract? FreeBSD: The Unknown Giant (https://neomoevius.tumblr.com/post/171108458234/freebsd-the-unknown-giant) I decided to write this article as a gratitude for the recent fast answer of the FreeBSD/TrueOS community with my questions and doubts. I am impressed how fast and how they tried to help me about this operating system which I used in the past(2000-2007) but recently in 2017 I began to use it again. + A lot has changed in 10 years I was looking around the internet, trying to do some research about recent information about FreeBSD and other versions or an easy to use spins like PCBSD (now TrueOS) I used to be Windows/Mac user for so many years until 2014 when I decided to use Linux as my desktop OS just because I wanted to use something different. I always wanted to use unix or a unix-like operating system, nowadays my main objective is to learn more about these operating systems (Debian Linux, TrueOS or FreeBSD). FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete operating system, i.e. the project delivers kernel, device drivers, userland utilities and documentation, as opposed to Linux delivering a kernel and drivers only and relying on third-parties for system software; and FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux.“ But why do I call FreeBSD “The Unknown Giant”?, because the code base of this operating system has been used by other companies to develop their own operating system for products like computers or also game consoles. + FreeBSD is used for storage appliances, firewalls, email scanners, network scanners, network security appliances, load balancers, video servers, and more So many people now will learn that not only “linux is everywhere” but also that “FreeBSD is everywhere too” By the way speaking about movies, Do you remember the movie “The Matrix”? FreeBSD was used to make the movie: “The photo-realistic surroundings generated by this method were incorporated into the bullet time scene, and linear interpolation filled in any gaps of the still images to produce a fluent dynamic motion; the computer-generated “lead in” and “lead out” slides were filled in between frames in sequence to get an illusion of orbiting the scene. Manex Visual Effects used a cluster farm running the Unix-like operating system FreeBSD to render many of the film's visual effects” + FreeBSD Press Release re: The Matrix (https://www.freebsd.org/news/press-rel-1.html) I hope that I gave a good reference, information and now so many people can understand why I am going to use just Debian Linux and FreeBSD(TrueOS) to do so many different stuff (music, 3d animation, video editing and text editing) instead use a Mac or Windows. + FreeBSD really is the unknown giant. OpenBSD and FreeDOS vs the hell in earth (https://steemit.com/openbsd/@npna/openbsd-and-freedos-vs-the-hell-in-earth) Yes sir, yes. Our family, composed until now by OpenBSD, Alpine Linux and Docker is rapidly growing. And yes, sir. Yes. All together we're fighting against your best friends, the infamous, the ugliest, the worst...the dudes called the privacy cannibals. Do you know what i mean, sure? We're working hard, no matter what time is it, no matter in what part in the world we are, no matter if we've no money. We perfectly know that you cannot do nothing against the true. And we're doing our best to expand our true, our doors are opened to all the good guys, there's a lot here but their brain was fucked by your shit tv, your fake news, your laws, etc etc etc. We're alive, we're here to fight against you. Tonight, yes it's a Friday night and we're working, we're ready to welcome with open arms an old guy, his experience will give us more power. Welcome to: FreeDOS But why we want to build a bootable usb stick with FreeDOS under our strong OpenBSD? The answer is as usual to fight against the privacy cannibals! More than one decade ago the old BIOS was silently replaced by the more capable and advanced UEFI, this is absolutely normal because of the pass of the years and exponencial grow of the power of our personal computers. UEFI is a complex system, it's like a standalone system operative with direct access to every component of our (yes, it's our not your!) machine. But...wait a moment...do you know how to use it? Do you ever know that it exist? And one more thing, it's secure? The answer to this question is totally insane, no, it's not secure. The idea is good, the company that started in theory is one of the most important in IT, it's Intel. The history is very large and obviously we're going to go very deep in it, but trust me UEFI and the various friend of him, like ME, TPM are insecure and closed source! Like the hell in earth. A FreeDOS bootable usb image under OpenBSD But let's start preparing our OpenBSD to put order in this chaos: $ mkdir -p freedos/stuff $ cd freedos/stuff $ wget https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img $ wget https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/sys/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos-linux.zip $ wget https://download.lenovo.com/consumer/desktop/o35jy19usa_y900.exe $ wget http://145.130.102.57/domoticx/software/amiflasher/AFUDOS%20Flasher%205.05.04.7z Explanation in clear language as usual: create two directory, download the minimal boot disc image of FreeDOS, download Syslinux assembler MBR bootloaders, download the last Windows only UEFI update from Lenovo and download the relative unknown utility from AMI to flash our motherboard UEFI chipset. Go ahead: $ doas pkg_add -U nasm unzip dosfstools cabextract p7zip nasm the Netwide Assembler, a portable 80x86 assembler. unzip list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive. dosfstoolsa collections of utilities to manipulate MS-DOSfs. cabextract program to extract files from cabinet. p7zipcollection of utilities to manipulate 7zip archives. $ mkdir sys-freedos-linux && cd sys-freedos-linux $ unzip ../sys-freedos-linux.zip $ cd ~/freedos && mkdir old new $ dd if=/dev/null of=freedos.img bs=1024 seek=20480 $ mkfs.fat freedos.img Create another working directory, cd into it, unzip the archive that we've downloaded, return to the working root and create another twos directories. dd is one of the most important utilities in the unix world to manipulate at byte level input and output: The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output, applying any specified conversions. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output. We're creating here a virtual disk with bs=1024 we're setting both input and output block to 1024bytes; with seek=20480 we require 20480bytes. This is the result: -rw-r--r-- 1 taglio taglio 20971520 Feb 3 00:11 freedos.img. Next we format the virtual disk using the MS-DOS filesystem. Go ahead: $ doas su $ perl stuff/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos.pl --disk=freedos.img $ vnconfig vnd0 stuff/fdboot.img $ vnconfig vnd1 freedos.img $ mount -t msdos /dev/vnd0c old/ $ mount -t msdos /dev/vnd1c new/ We use the perl utility from syslinux to write the MBR of our virtual disk freedos.img. Next we create to loop virtual node using the OpenBSD utility vnconfig. Take care here because it is quite different from Linux, but as usual is clear and simple. The virtual nodes are associated to the downloaded fdboot.img and the newly created freedos.img. Next we mount the two virtual nodes cpartitions; in OpenBSD cpartition describes the entire physical disk. Quite different from Linux, take care. $ cp -R old/* new/ $ cd stuff $ mkdir o35jy19usa $ cabextract -d o35jy19usa o35jy19usa_y900.exe $ doas su $ cp o35jy19usa/ ../new/ $ mkdir afudos && cd afudos $ 7z e ../AFUDOS* $ doas su $ cp AFUDOS.exe ../../new/ $ umount ~/freedos/old/ && umount ~/freedos/new/ $ vnconfig -u vnd1 && vnconfig -u vnd0 Copy all files and directories in the new virtual node partition, extract the Lenovo cabinet in a new directory, copy the result in our new image, extract the afudos utility and like the others copy it. Umount the partitions and destroy the loop vnode. Beastie Bits NetBSD - A modern operating system for your retro battlestation (https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-retro) FOSDEM OS distribution (https://twitter.com/pvaneynd/status/960181163578019840/photo/1) Update on two pledge-related changes (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=151268831628549) *execpromises (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=151304116010721&w=2) Slides for (BSD from scratch - from source to OS with ease on NetBSD) (https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-bsd/) Goobyte LastPass: You're fired! (https://blog.crashed.org/goodbye-lastpass/) *** Feedback/Questions Scott - ZFS Mirror with SLOG (http://dpaste.com/22Z8C6Z#wrap) Troels - Question about compressed ARC (http://dpaste.com/3X2R1BV#wrap) Jeff - FreeBSD Desktop DNS (http://dpaste.com/2BQ9HFB#wrap) Jonathon - Bhyve and gpu passthrough (http://dpaste.com/0TTT0DB#wrap) ***

Open Source! • Eric Raymond, VLC, and Gimp • Kdenlive and Microsoft Office Alternatives --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/hackerculture/support

Whoa, talk about an unlikely success! This lore-heavy episode of Jem is pretty great! Kristen enters a shady lemonade pact with her friends and Joe wonders how Ms Bailey’s day is going. Learn to be as stone cold as Eric Raymond on this week’s CWTAJ! Our weekly Jem song is ‘Starlight', by Jacqui Benton. CWTA Podcast’s intro song is 'Groove Is in the Heart (Instrumental)' by Deee-Lite and the outro is 'Bizarre Dub Triangle' by New Order. CWTA artwork by @ignoretherobot on Twitter.

We’re doing this again, huh? Jem and pals follow a weirdo musicologist to Tibet in order to discover the music of Shangri-La, for the sole purpose of increasing their clout as musicians. Do The Misfits and Eric Raymond follow them there? Of course! Joe hates snow and Kristen can’t remember the band that Fred Durst was in. Let the music play on this week’s CWTAJ! Our weekly Jem song is ‘Shangri-La’', performed by Britta Phillips. CWTA Podcast’s intro song is 'Groove Is in the Heart (Instrumental)' by Deee-Lite and the outro is 'Bizarre Dub Triangle' by New Order. CWTA artwork by @ignoretherobot on Twitter.

Riot wants Jem to leave Rio for him, and Eric Raymond is willing to do anything to get The Stingers to sign with his company. Meanwhile, Pizzazz is still lovesick over Riot and has to choose between him and The Misfits.

In Season 3, episode 1: ‘The Stingers Hit Town,’ “Eric Raymond gets fed up with The Misfits' childish behaviour, so he sells everything he owns to buy Misfits Music from Harvey Gabor. However, he decides to offer a recording contract to a new band called The Stingers. He offers to let them stay at the Gabor Mansion and when Pizzazz meets him she falls in love with him madly. However The Misfits are deeply concerned about the way Riot and his bandmates take advantage of her and think she needs to snap out of her infatuation and start acting like a Misfit again. Jerrica also discovers The Stingers and decides to offer them a recording contract but the lead singer Riot tells her that only Jem can make him join Starlight Music.”

In Season 2, episode 25: ‘Out of the Past,’ “The Holograms find Emmett Benton's old diary. Reading it, they are reminded about how they first met, the origin of Starlight Music and how Synergy came into existence. They also discover that Jacqui Benton, Jerrica's and Kimber's mother, recorded a master tape of her concert in the '70s before dying in a plane crash. But when Eric Raymond turns out to have the only copy of the tape, he asks for a million dollars in return or to have controlling interests over Starlight Music.”

Synopsis: “Jem and The Holograms visit Ba Nee’s pen pal in Alaska. It’s up to them to stop The Misfits and Eric Raymond from ruining the trip and destroying a […]

Eric Raymond turns his sociopathy up to eleven this week as he and The Misfits see how many more limbs need to be lost between the Holograms before they quit their own movie. Does anyone have a spare set of working eyes they’re not using? Asking for a friend. Our weekly Jem song is ‘Universal Appeal’, performed by Ellen Bernfeld and CWTA Podcast’s intro/outro song is ‘Bizarre Dub Triangle’, by New Order. CWTA artwork by @ignoretherobot on Twitter. Email us at cwtapod@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter @CWTApod!

Our hosts discuss Part 1 of "The Talent Search," which introduces Raya, Jetta, a blue-haired dad in a pink polo shirt, and the reason for Eric Raymond's unreasonably high dry-cleaning bills. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is it! The inaugural episode of the ‘Can we talk about…’ podcast. Joe and Kristen are ready to kick things off right with Jem and the Holograms, and who better to talk about this 80s classic than two people that were born in the early 90s? Jerrica Benton must assume the identity of a glamorous rock star named Jem in order to win sole ownership of Starlight Music from the vaguely satanic Eric Raymond. She and her foster sisters (and actual, frequently forgotten real sister) start a band with the help of an Olivia Newton-John-looking holographic computer, because that was the simplest plan they could come up with. Jerrica invites the devil into her home when she meets and insults The Misfits, a trio of troublemakers that’s comprised of at least two felons, probably. It’s ‘The Beginning’ for Jem, and the beginning for CWTAJ (pronunciation: swuh-taj)! Join us, won’t you? Our audio quality is getting better every week, guaranteed! Our weekly Jem song is ‘The Beginning’, performed by Britta Phillips and CWTA Podcast’s intro/outro song is ‘Bizarre Dub Triangle’, by New Order. CWTA artwork by @ignoretherobot on Twitter. Email us at cwtapod@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter @CWTApod!

Synopsis: “Eric Raymond panics when he finds out that Starlight Music is sponsoring the world’s best driver for the Indy 500, Martino Grandzetti. The gamblers he’s dealing with will take […]

In Episode 15 of ShowTime Synergy TFG1Mike, LadyWreck, and BeatlesDiva give you their thoughts on the next three episodes of Jem and the Holograms Season 2! This week we all go down to the Mardi Gas, and then we find ourselves in The Middle of Nowhere, and finally Nicole becomes a Renaissance Woman!!!! So get truly outrageous with us here on ShowTime Synergy!HELP TFG1MIKE IF YOU CAN!Geeks:Mike "TFG1" BlanchardAimee "Lady Wreck" MorganNicole "BeatlesDiva-Hailstorm" HaleSubscribe to us using iTunes or use any other podcatching client by using:http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShowtimeSynergyDownload SS_EP015.mp3The post ShowTime Synergy – EP 15 – Renaissance Woman! appeared first on GeekCast Radio Network.

Our hosts recap “Frame Up,” head to Vegas, meet some oddly helpful catcallers, and begin to seriously question Eric Raymond's hiring practices. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Synopsis: “Ba Nee will go blind if she doesn’t undergo expensive eye surgery within the next few weeks. Unfortunately, Jerrica’s financial options are limited after she learns that Eric Raymond […]

Synopsis: “The Holograms rush to save Synergy from being discovered by Eric Raymond. By the night of the Battle of the Bands, Raymond and the Misfits are desperate for some […]

Synopsis: “Starlight Music’s Jerrica Benton confronts co-owner Eric Raymond over a rigged band contest to promote The Misfits. Posing as singer Jem, she steals the show. Eric challenges her to […]

This week, we are talking to Eric Raymond, co-founder of BenefitVault. Reconciling and paying bills for benefit arrays with a multitude of carrier bills creates a huge hassle for employers and HR departments.  The post-ACA emphasis on voluntary and non-insurance benefits has exacerbated an already nettlesome problem. BenefitVault shaped that shift into a simple and elegant solution that advisors can provide to alleviate this problem - and the objections that come from proposing a multi-carrier benefit array. Get full show notes and more information here: http://bit.ly/1lBmo0M

WWDC2014今天（2014年6月3日）凌晨举行，同日，【狗熊有话说】播客WWDC专题节目发布。等着看iPhone6的家伙完全等错了会了，而真正的开发者们看完这场发布会绝对会激动到尖叫。我个人感觉这场发布会有两个关键词：无缝、开放。在用户体验的层面，苹果终于打通了iOS和OS X两大系统的任督二脉，这意味着一种根据使用场景自动切换设备的全新用户体验，也是目前没有什么竞争对手的领域。而第二个关键字则要重要得多。苹果这家封闭得曾经让人有点担心的公司展现出前所未有的开放性。并且，他们想通了如何从“大教堂”到“游乐场”的转型（“大教堂”是开源运动领袖Eric Raymond的著名文章“大教堂与集市”里的观点，听完节目你就明白了，很长姿势）。WWDC2014四大宝（Metal/HealthKit/HomeKit/Swift）一出，次时代的布局也正式展开。这是所有想要有所作为但却一无所有的年轻软件工程师开创事业的黄金时代，这也是虽然我不是一个coder，却以这个标题作为这期节目的英文标题的原因：The Future is yours to code。未来很让人兴奋，你准备好了吗？ The keynote of WWDC 2014 blows all the develops' mind, include me ( BearbiG ). There are 2 keywords of this event: seamless and open, and I am happier about the second one. Apple chooses the Bazaar instead of the Cathedral ( You will know what I'm talking about when you listen the episode ). That choice will lead all developers and users to a whole new future, a future is yours to code.

Voce del glossario a cura di Marta Marchi OPEN SOURCE Open come aperto – Source come sorgente. Open Source é un software che viene fornito di codice sorgente, ossia della sequenza di istruzioni di cui si compone un programma per elaboratore, in modo tale che, chi lo possiede, possa apportarvi le modifiche necessarie o desiderate. A differenza di un free software, i requisiti di licenza open source, devono rispettare le linee guida della Open Source Initiative, dieci requisiti che ne definiscono modalità di utilizzo e di distribuzione, sintetizzabili in: accesso al codice originale e completo del software, possibilità di modifica del software o creazione di uno nuovo, copia del software originale e sua distribuzione. É il 1998 ed Eric Raymond, utilizza per la prima volta l’espressione open source, rilasciando il codice sorgente del browser Netscape. La Cattedrale e il bazar é il titolo del suo libro – manifesto: la cattedrale della programmazione proprietaria lascia, dunque, il posto al bazar della programmazione condivisa e accessibile. Il software, lasciato alla disponibilità di eventuali sviluppatori che in collaborazione eseguono revisioni e aggiornamenti, raggiunge una complessità e ricchezza maggiori di quanto potrebbe ottenere con il lavoro di un singolo gruppo di programmatori. La logica Open Source si applica oggi a sistemi operativi come Linux, browser come Firefox, ma anche a pacchetti informatici quale Open Office. I campi applicativi vanno dalla Medicina ai programmi di riproduzione audio e video, dalla Grafica alla Finanza, dalla Fisica e Matematica alla Linguistica. Costo limitato, garanzia di sicurezza, update continui e possibilità di personalizzazione fanno dell’Open Source la logica vincente. L’impiego di tecnologie Open Source e di contenuti editoriali liberi e riutilizzabili, Open Content, aprono prospettive di socializzazione di idee e risorse. Le soluzioni open stanno rapidamente diffondendosi in ambiente e-learning: in esso Open Source non può che favorire ed ampliare la condivisione delle informazioni, il lavoro su progetti comuni, lo sviluppo di comunità di conoscenza. Condividere, modificare, migliorare e sviluppare questa la filosofia che sottende la proposta Open Source, un nuovo modo di concepire la creazione e la distribuzione di software, un nuovo modo di stare in rete. (Marta Marchi, 2010)

Eric Raymond is today's guest.  His debut novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, is now available from Sator Press. Sam Lipsyte raves "The world of Eric Raymond's winning novel may be the 'post-idea economy,' but rest assured, the book is never post-smart, or post-funny. It's a rollicking and inventive corporate (and cultural) satire—get in now at the ground floor, people." And Blake Butler says "In a world where cash has become language, Eric Raymond's Confessions from a Dark Wood wastes no syllable in converting cultural mechanisms into a well-oiled, wise-cracking machine. Smart as Saunders, tight as Ellis, but banking waters of its own, after this one we'll no longer 'forget they built the Magic Kingdom on swamps.'" Monologue topics:  December, The Piñatas, the waiting game, seasonal affective disorder, the holidays, gift ideas, TNB Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

developerWork's open source editor Chris Walden and I discuss Eric Raymond's recent blog post that is drawing a lot of attention in IT blogosphere, "Evaluating the harm from closed source."

Oncology Times Broadcast News: Stage IV Pancreatic Islet Cell Tumors: Sunitinib Monotherapy Increased Progression Free Survival Treatment of advanced pancreatic islet cell tumors with sunitinib has doubled progression-free survival in patients whose options have been very limited up to now, according to French researchers reporting their phase III randomized study findings at the World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer in Barcelona (24-27 June, 2009; ABSTRACT: 0-0013). Eric Raymond from Beaujon University Hospital, Villejuif, France, gave Peter Goodwin his clinical interpretation of the findings.

Eric Raymond of Beaujon University Hospital in France discusses his study reported at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer

Eric Raymond of Beaujon University Hospital in France discusses his study reported at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer

Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book--why open source software development has been so successful, the culture of open source, under what conditions open source is likely to thrive and not to thrive, and the Hayekian nature of the open source process. The conversation closes with a discussion of net neutrality.

Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book--why open source software development has been so successful, the culture of open source, under what conditions open source is likely to thrive and not to thrive, and the Hayekian nature of the open source process. The conversation closes with a discussion of net neutrality.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I think happened was that you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective and curious and playful around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse’s company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Rasmus Anderson. 00:00:45 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. 00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And Rasmus, I understand you’re an amateur gardener. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that wouldn’t be very far from a lie. I do have a little front yard, tiny tiny one, and a tiny backyard, and it is a constant fight with nature, but, you know, it’s kind of fun. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: And I always find it funny, weeds are not particularly a thing that there’s no like clear definition other than just a plant that you don’t want to be growing there. So one man’s weed is another person’s desired plant, is that about right? 00:01:22 - Speaker 1: I think that’s right, yeah. I mean, I grew up in Sweden and I remember my parents playing this like really smart game on me and my brother, where we would have these, they’re called mscruso, which are kind of pretty, but they’re definitely weed. There’s these beautiful kind of yellow flowers, and they can break through asphalt. They’re like really strong growers. You know, and as a kid, you know, parents would be like, hey, let’s do like an adventure thing, and like you find all these in the yard, and like for each of them, we line them up and count them and we would just like, Wow, this is cool. And we would go and pick them and light them up. And our parents would be like, you know, behind the corner, that would be like, we totally fooled them. So yeah, they' weeding as a kid without really knowing that I was doing that. 00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Nice one. We lived on a farm just for a little while, while my dad was stationed at a naval station that was kind of in the boonies, you might say, and my mom was a pretty serious gardener growing her own vegetables and fruits, and we had fruit trees and stuff like that. But I certainly remember that some things, the tomato plants grew fast and easy. There was the watermelon plants that we got one summer with me and my brother just ate watermelon and spit the seeds into a nearby garden bed, and then there were some others that were endless frustration for my mom trying to coax out of the ground. So yeah, I think my strategy if I’m ever in the position of being a yard owner, will be to just identify all of the hardiest plants that grow, even if you don’t want them to, and just say these are what I’m specifically cultivating. 00:02:51 - Speaker 1: I like this strategy. This someone once said this. I’m sure that there are like children books and stuff written around this. I’m not sure, but someone said this and I thought it was kind of interesting that there’s a gardening approach to like steering a system, right? And there’s sort of like more of the plan and design approach to steering a system, meaning that if you have this sort of like organic type of system, like a garden, right? Or maybe software. It’s going to just keep changing, and the gardener’s approach is that by doing something like Adam, what you were saying, you kind of identify the things that you want to cultivate, and you give them a better opportunities. And then you look at things like weed or things that you want to move, and you sort of like give them worse opportunities, right? You sort of steer the system like that and see where it goes, whereas the I don’t know if there’s a better word for it, but the planning and the signing of the system from scratch, you’re like constantly trying to hope that it evolves in the direction you want to, which is, I think, never really the case, right? 00:03:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is I use gardening as a metaphor often for those kinds of organic growth things for something like a community where you just can’t directly direct what’s going to happen, what you can do is encourage and nurture and create opportunities, as you said, for the kinds of things you want to see and and discourage the kinds of things you don’t want to see. But that’s part of the joy maybe is you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out. If you come at it from a kind of a builder, engineer, architect perspective that I’m gonna plan down to every last little detail in the blueprint, and then I’ll make reality match that exactly, you’re likely to be frustrated and disappointed. 00:04:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. I think this somehow we just kind of slipped into this, and that’s interesting in itself, but this is kind of what I’m trying to do with my project Playbit. See, we can get into it a little bit more in detail in a few minutes, but I think that there’s this opportunity to encourage, sort of like a different way of building software, not like radically different, but sort of like somewhere in between big scale and tiny tiny scale software, kind of like personal software. But anyhow, I think that a cultural change, right? Sort of like creating this garden where interesting like plants and stuff can grow to kind of spin off this metaphor. It’s a really interesting idea, and that’s sort of like the core of playbit. That is the idea around it. That’s what I’m trying to do with it, rather than to build on a specific type of technology. Now, software is like part of, you know, my strategy to make the change happen, or at least I hope I can. But the goal of play but this is sort of like cultural change or really like offering and, you know, a different or a slightly different at least culture to software building. 00:05:39 - Speaker 2: Culture is so important, certainly for programming communities, but more broadly just creation of any end artifact comes not just from the tools and the materials and the intentions of the creators, but also this ineffable thing we call culture. Yeah, well, I’m really excited to hear more about Playbit, which is a brand new project you’re working on, just for the listener’s sake. It would be great to briefly touch on your background. You’ve got a very impressive resume fresh off of working at FIMA. Before that you did Dropbox. You were early at Spotify, and just looking down that list, you know, I find myself thinking, well, if you were an investor, that would be pretty impressive, and I would assume you’re just sort of leaving the things out that were misses. But as someone that goes to work for companies, you don’t have the ability to do such a portfolio strategy. I’m wondering if you feel like you have a particular knack for spotting high potential companies early on, or is it more a spot of luck or some combination? 00:06:35 - Speaker 1: That’s a good question. I think it’s probably the latter. It’s a little bit of a combination. Really, it’s this kind of idea of intuition, right? You have a lot of experience. I do have quite a lot of experience at this point, and I think that has put up these neurons in such a way that I have some sense at least, at least within this particular kind of industry that I’m in. Someone was asking me this the other day actually, this little Twitter like texting back and forth, but I think that there’s a couple of things you can do that don’t require experience to build up intuition. And one thing is just to like really understand what you like to do, right? And so this is not specifically around, you know, successful technology companies, but I think it’s like a foundational sort of like a cornerstone. To being successful with like, really anything, is to understand like what you really want, right? Not what your parents told you that you should want, or not what like your peers tell you that you should want, but what you really want. No, no, that’s really hard, and maybe that’s the hardest thing in life actually to know what you really want. 00:07:37 - Speaker 2: I’ll echo that as well, which is for me, I had this experience of growing up with video games and that being my passion, and I was just convinced I would go into the game industry, and that was my path, and I actually did that and then I was miserable and I didn’t like it and I what on paper you might say, or hypothetically, I thought I wanted to do in practice didn’t actually work for me. And then when I had an opportunity to join a company. Making basically from my perspective, pretty boring business software. I jumped into that and discovered I loved it and I was much better at a thing that I loved to do or fit with my natural passion somehow. So I think it’s also a maybe coming back to our gardening metaphor, a bit of a discovery and looking for opportunities and noticing what’s growing, what’s sprouting really naturally, and then encouraging. that rather than having some preconceived notion of what you think you should do, which might come from parents, certainly could come from, you know, the tech industry, which lionizes certain kinds of companies or certain kinds of people and instead kind of paying attention to your own internal compass for this is a thing that I could really see myself spending every minute thinking about for the next 5 years, 10 years, or career. 00:08:47 - Speaker 1: That’s just so interesting to hear you say that, but you had that experience, which I think a lot of us have, right? If we had this idea, maybe we want to be a chef or an astronaut, or, you know, a fire person or whatever when we’re kids, right? And like most of us end up not doing that, right? We end up doing something else. And I think that happens a few times in life where, like you, you know, We see this thing, it’s like very exciting, we pursue it, and then we stumble upon something else, and that just, you know, we stumble upon probably 100 different things, right? But one of those things where like, whoa, damn, this is really fun, and this is really interesting. Yeah, so getting back to your question a few minutes ago, I think that if you have that sort of like cornerstone idea of the learning about myself, it’s just something that I should always work on. Then on top of that, I think what you can do is To try to learn about the people that are working at various different companies or like looking for passion in people, like finding out what incentives are driving them to make a change. And with a change, I mean like a technology startup, right, usually exists for one of two reasons, and the first reason is that people want to make a change or want to see a change in the world, right? It can be a very small scale, a very big scale. And the second thing, I think that often you have these ulterior motives, you have power, fortune, you know, impressing other people, like all those things. There’s nothing bad about those things, right? But they are usually then hidden away that there’s this facade of like, no, we’re really trying to make a machine here with this YouTube for cats or whatever. And really like someone just wanted to like build a really cool thing so they can sell it and get rich, right? And again, there’s no judgment here if that’s your thing, that’s cool, but that’s not what I’m interested in. So that’s one of the things that I tried to see and figure out and really spend time on understanding when speaking with a company or a few people who want to make a change, right? Like, are they driven by passion for this change? Like, can they see this world and like, you know, in 3 years, if we have this thing, and people are using it, like, this is how their lives are different. This is how they can like do things that they can’t do before. Like that’s the sort of thing. To me it’s like, kind of rare. It might be surprisingly rare, actually, which is kind of weird. And to find that out, I think the easiest way is just to spend a little bit of time with a lot of different people. So if you’re interviewing for a company, ask if you can spend a few hours with 1 or 2 people on the team, rather than, can I spend half an hour with like 10 different people. 00:11:20 - Speaker 2: Interesting. So it sounds like you’re, you know, come back to that investor kind of analogy I made before where going to work for a company, you’re investing your time rather than your money, which in many ways is even a more scarce and valuable resource. You think of it as less in terms of let me a value. I don’t know, the market opportunity here, whether I think this has the potential to be something good or big or what have you, and instead more is kind of looking into the souls of the people who are working on it to understand their motivation and their drive and their passion. 00:11:52 - Speaker 1: For sure, yeah. This is probably a cliche at this point, but If you have a group of good people that you’re working on, it’s not that important what you’re working on. Right, I think that’s a very extreme way of looking at it. I think in reality it’s not as clear cut as that. It’s not as true as that. But I do think that it does hold true to some extent, right, that if you flip it around, right, if you do some sort of kind of Greek philosophy approach then, you know, you say sort of like, what if everything is good, right? So you start out in like ideal scenario. So it’s every person is amazing on the team. The business is doing great. The mission is something that is so close to my heart, like, I’m just thinking about it day and night, right? And so on. And now you start like taking things away, right? You have this kind of little thing in front of you, and now you start thinking that, OK, let’s see if I take away the mission, right? And I have all the other things still, like, does this feel like something I want to do for 4 years, right? Not in day, right? It’s like, oh maybe, you know, you start taking things away, and I think If you start out in the ideal case, right, you play these different stories out, and you take away the group of people, right? So you replace that with like, people who you would consider, like, not being good, right? Like, maybe they had a bad influence on you, maybe they create a lot of stress for you, maybe they’re just not good at the craft and so on, whatever that means to you. I think for most people, like, it stops pretty early in terms of like, yeah, I would still do this. Like you would be like, well, you know. With making such a big change, and I’m really involved emotionally in this mission and everything, but like the people I work with are paying, it’s like, I don’t wanna do that, right? Life is so tiny, it’s so short, and you look back in the past and the things you remember, it’s not the bugs you squashed in code or like the pixels you made. It’s gonna be the people and like. The change that the company is trying to make and the group of people are trying to make, I think it is very important, right? And this is where it really loops back the first thing that I was talking about a few minutes ago about like learning about yourself and knowing yourself. I have a few friends who are very concerned about the environment of Earth and stuff like that, and choose to leave their traditional tech jobs to go work for, you know, uh renewable energy companies and stuff like that. And for them, you know, the mission is very important, right? And the people are very important. So, I think you want to really like look at all of these different things, like, a group of people who are amazing, who are very unsuccessful at doing what they do, is not gonna be a fun experience anyways, right? So yeah, I don’t think there’s a magic bullet, there’s no sort of golden arrow or whatever metaphor here, but I think one really good thing to look for is this sort of like passionate people, and what drives them to make that change. 00:14:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m a fan of that. Seeking opportunities in my own career and when I’m in the position of giving career advice to others, I usually say something like optimize for the people, find the team that you have that collaboration magic with, and that will be just far greater return than the exact perfect mission. Um, I do think, you know, those things related, probably because if you share values and you share passions around a particular mission, that’s likely to be a team that you work really well with. But yeah, given the choice between a thing that’s slightly off from what I might actually be my ideal, the perfect team, and the other way around, I always go for the team. 00:15:16 - Speaker 1: I’m curious here, Adam and Mark, how you’re looking at this as well. You’re both experienced in the software industry, yes I am, like, kind of flipping the question back to you. What are some of the things you might do or look for in order to understand if this, you know, company group of people are gonna be successful. It’s just gonna be like a fun ride for me, so to speak. 00:15:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d love to hear from Mark on that since he’s actually, now that I think of it, picked some pretty good ones, including for Muse, he was at Stripe. And so, yeah, I guess I never asked, did you see that as, oh, these guys are gonna be huge, I really want to be on board early. My stock will be worth a lot, or was it more, this is an interesting domain, and I want to work with these people who knows the company will be successful, or that wasn’t part of your calculation. 00:16:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough for me to give an answer to that, because to my mind, there’s a lot of, you know, it, when you see it, and to your point about having experience and neurons and pattern matching. I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to work in the industry for a while, so I now I’m able to have perhaps some judgment of that. I do think as a tactical matter, if people actually want to have a better chance of working at a high potential company in the classic sense, you can get a lot of information by asking people whose job it is to know these things. So, Investors and hiring managers will often have a lot of data about companies that will do well. And then it kind of becomes like investors will always say, oh, it’s, it’s actually not hard to pick the company, it’s hard to get the deals. I think there’s a similar dynamic with joining companies where often a big part of it is actually getting hired. But yeah, I think it’s a tactical matter, if you do ask around, you can get a lot of good data points. But I also have similar sentiment in terms of, at a more personal level, what I look for in a company, and I would also say it’s about the people and the mission. And I always go back to this idea of You know, we don’t have a whole lot of mortal life, and it would be a shame to spend the next 2 to 4 years of it working with people you didn’t care for. And when you say it like that, oh wow, you know, really should, uh, make sure that the people that you trust and look up to and want to become more alike, because as you spend 124 years with this team, you are going to basically become more like them. So is that something that you would be proud and excited to do, or that you would be afraid and ashamed of? 00:17:18 - Speaker 2: There’s a great patio. I think it’s even in an article writing about the culture at Stripe. He says, when you’re choosing your colleagues, these are people you’re essentially giving right access in your consciousness to. We don’t realize it, but just the people you’re around all the time, you become like them, whether you like it or not. So surround yourself with people you admire and you want to become more like, and that will come true. 00:17:42 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, I really like that. 00:17:44 - Speaker 3: This also might connect a little bit to our topic of playful software, because to my mind, one aspect of playfulness is sort of undertaking the process and the work for its own sake, without a lot of accountability to the end result and just kind of enjoying the process, you know, doing it for the memes, if you will. And I feel like you can only do that well if you actually really love what you’re working on and the discipline, but I’m curious to hear Rasmus, what your perspective on playful software is. 00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Well, I think for most people playful software, the first that comes to mind is probably games, right? And games, they’re sort of like almost the purest type of playful software. That is their primary and often only goal, right? To just be playful, to just entertain. And so I think playful software that is not games have some amount of that sort of like entertainment that, you know, a privy guest of yours that Jason was saying sort of like fidget ability, you know, the idea that There’s some quality to the software that makes you want to just like, kind of toy around and play around with the software itself, not to produce something necessarily, although that might be the main reason for the software to exist. So I think if we’re looking for a definition of playful software, it’s probably something in the realms of game like entertainment like qualities that are kind of intertwined with some sort of utility. 00:19:09 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really interesting, this nexus of entertainment versus playfulness versus utility. So I feel like actually there’s some relations certainly between entertainment and playfulness, but I feel like they’re also somewhat separable. Like you can have a game where it’s sort of a mindless game where you just plan to get really good at it, like a competitive game. And the flip side, you can have playfulness that is more just about exploring and seeing what you can do and what you can make and perhaps the stuff in the middle, like Minecraft is kind of in the middle there, it’s both entertaining and it’s playful, and I do think people tend to go towards games, but I think there’s another important element around what we’re calling playfulness that’s really important. 00:19:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s good points. 00:19:44 - Speaker 2: I’m suddenly reminded of a book by one of my favorite authors, Virginia Postrell. And in there is a chapter where it asks the question of what actually is the difference between work and play. And it’s one of those things where you go, oh well, it’s obvious, and then when you try to come up with a definition like, well, you get paid to work and you don’t get paid to play, and really quickly, especially if you’re someone that’s, you know, in the tech industry, a designer, a developer, whatever, you find yourself doing things that look very, very similar, maybe in your free time that you do at your work, but it’s hard to pin down really what the difference is and She ends up defining it exactly as you said there, Mark, which is play is something that’s open ended, you don’t have a specific goal in mind, you can start out with, I’m gonna paint the painting of the sunset, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve decided instead to fold the canvas into an origami. Swan and, you know, you could do that if you want, whereas work you have this specific end goal that you need to get to, often in a particular time frame, and even if you find some interesting detour along the way, you kind of have to ignore that because you have made this commitment to deliver some specific result. 00:20:54 - Speaker 1: And I’d say that as a designer, like playing is often a very important part of the understanding part of design, which I think is like a really big chunk of design work, right? You know, you have this opportunity or this kind of problem, like there’s something you’re pursuing, right, with your design project and Before you can make any decisions and any changes, right, in terms of like getting closer to solving it or changing it, you have to understand it, right? And so you take things apart, you put them back together, right? You’ll learn about things as you take things apart, you’ll find new parts so you didn’t see before, right? You’ll find new constraints of the project, you’re like, oh shoot, oh I guess this material is different, right? And so, I think, as you were saying, Adam, if you take a step back and you think about like, well, this kind of looks like play, doesn’t it? And I think in many ways it is straight up play. But it is sort of a semi open ended, closed ended play, right? It’s sort of like play for the purpose of learning. And I think this is where most of us in the tech industry, like, Can relate to playfulness in like the way we use software. So maybe on a weekend you’re like, oh, I’ve heard about this new like rust thing. Maybe I should like take the first bit, right? And you put together a whole world thing and you find a rust compiler and you write some code and you’re like, oh, what is, why can’t I borrow this thing, right, whatever. And the goal here, right, is play. You might not call it play, but unless your goal is to actually like get an output in the end or make a change or something like that, really what you’re doing, right, is learning. And I think that is often the reward, so to speak, the outcome. The product of play is to learn something. 00:22:35 - Speaker 3: Absolutely. I think it’s a great point. And just to reiterate, I think it’s really important to have this play access be separate from work versus entertainment. So that is, you can play in a domain that we typically think of as work, whether that’s design, engineering. Another example that I might throw in there is Elon Musk sending the roadster to space. It’s like, why are you doing that? I don’t know, it’d be fun, I guess. That’s also in a very serious domain where he is in fact learning a lot by undertaking that activity. 00:23:02 - Speaker 2: Also connects a bit to just our humanity, which is, of course, we’re trying to achieve things, be productive in the broad sense of the word, in our pursuits in our work life, but at the same time, we’re all people, we like stuff that’s fun, we like stuff that’s playful, and if you can find ways to do that, that fit in with the work and fit in with accomplishing your ends, I think it makes it more fun and engaging and enjoyable for everyone who’s involved. 00:23:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s something naturally even about play for sure. We can’t imagine our like ancestors running around naked in the woods with clubs, you know, kind of finding a pine cone or something on the ground or a stick and be like, oh, this kind of looks like a goat, you know, and you start playing with those things, and there’s something I think is very interesting, like when I was a kid, so I grew up in the countryside and Me and, you know, the other like 5 neighbors or whatever, and the kids, we would, you know, go into the woods and that’s how we would play, we, you know, build a little like imaginary little airplanes out of a pine cone and stick through it and stuff like that, right? And as a kid, you see a stick, and the stick is like anything. It can be anything you want, it can be an airplane, it can be a rocket, right? It can be a person, right? And as an adult we lose that, and I don’t know why, but I see a stick today and I’m like, oh, that’s a stick, right? And I’m like, damn it. You know, I wanna see the stick and I wanna feel like, whoa, this could be a weird sort of creature, you know, from a different planet that has like multiple heads, that kind of looks like a stick, but it’s not a stick. At some point I listened to someone who was trying to make a point of the educational system, at least in sort of like most of the world. Takes in one end of a machine, right? Imagine people walking in one end of the machine and they come out in the other end and like, in the end you walk in, there’s all these color and difference and, you know, different voices and stuff. And the other end is like this marching uniformed people, right? School kind of prints this pattern onto us, right? This is real, that is not real. This is play, that is not play, this is serious, right? And I’m not sure that’s like good for us, especially not for people in sort of the creative industry. Which I think is like a growing industry generally. 00:25:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Another way to articulate this might be as we get older and as we go through institutional education, we tend to get annealed, that is kind of solidified, optimized, focused, structured, and play in addition to a way to learn, is a way to kind of foam roll your mind, you know, get some plasticity, break up some connective tissue so you can think of some new stuff. And so now that you make that point, I see that as a second key outcome. You know, you learn some stuff and you have some more flexibility in your head. 00:25:46 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that that means that play and imagination have a strong relationship and maybe this, as you said earlier, Erasmus, that like, when you talk about in design, play is very important. You might even say, this isn’t quite solved yet, let me play with it and try some stuff. And that’s connected to a little bit of an open-ended divergent thinking, imagination, out of the box, you know, looking at the stick and seeing the person of the rocket ship, and that actually is what could potentially lead you to the more practical breakthrough in doing your work. 00:26:17 - Speaker 1: It’s so true, so true, I think. If you think about cool stuff that people have made, right, like art or tools or anything, what have you, that you think it’s like, wow, this is brilliant, you know, this is so fun, or this is really smart, whatever. And you start digging into like the history of that in pretty much every single case, you’ll find that it’s a remix of other things, right? And so I think imagination and playfulness. is sort of like at least partially a practice of just exploring things, right? It’s maybe that’s a play part, right? You explore stuff, you see new things, right? And then here comes the imagination part, which is like, oh, out of all these different things, there’s like a new thing that can emerge, right? Like the iPod is a remix of this like brawn handheld radio, right? And then the iPhone is a remix of the iPod. You know, those things are very obviously remixes, because they’re, you know, visually very similar, but I think that there’s also conceptual remixes, and there’s like straight up like the word I’m using a remix, right, like from audio, there’s like, that is a very common practice. 00:27:24 - Speaker 3: This is also reminding me that there’s an important element of intellectual humility in play. So we said perhaps play is when you don’t have accountability for the end work product, but wait a second, we’re in creative fields, our entire purpose is to come up with novel ideas by definition. You don’t know how to get to that work product yet. If you did, you just go right there. So really it’s taking away some of your constraints and preconceptions about what it takes to create a novel work product and and exploring for a bit and saying, you know, press on the other side, it’ll be clear that what you were calling play was in fact work or fed into work, but you don’t know what that path is yet, so who are you to say what is or isn’t gonna have a good result eventually. 00:28:01 - Speaker 1: That is really interesting. So Mark, what level of constraints, or what level of sort of like boundaries do you think you need to define in order for that to not be like this totally open ended sort of quick detour of what I’m talking about is to make sure this makes sense. So like, I’ve seen this happening a couple of times in tech companies where you have a couple of interesting smart people who are playful, and the company recognizes that, and it recognizes the value and innovation and stuff, right? So they say, hey, you know, Lisa and Robin. Would you be interested in sitting in this corner just coming up with crazy shit, right? Maybe we’ll ship it. And I think in most cases that is like a failure, right? That will come up with all these incredible stuff, but there’s never any sort of traction around it. Maybe the constraints are way too vague, similarly to an art class, you know, if you ask someone to just paint anything they want, there’s just this paralysis, right, of like where they even start. So within that framework, like looping back to my question to you, Mark, what and how do you think about like setting up the right amount of constraints to be able to play around within there? 00:29:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question. I I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but One strategy that I like a lot is to follow the energy. So if you’re undertaking this project, let’s say we’re going to relax the constraint about classically measured business output, but we’re gonna maintain the constraint around there needs to be some energy here, which could be, you’re able to get other people excited about it, you’re able to get customers excited about it, you’re able to create something that’s aesthetically interesting. That to me is an important Source of energy. And so we’re not gonna kind of constantly inorganically add energy to the system. We’re gonna give you a little bit of spark and some initial fuel, but then you need to build it up from there and kind of find your own path. But you’re free to not go directly to this end destination. It could be that you go through basically an art project, or a recruiting project or a publication project, and then you go from there. That helps a lot with kind of the mechanics of keeping the project going but again people are living their short moral lives and not gonna want to work on something that doesn’t have a lot of energy on it. So as you have more success, you tend to attract more people and it goes from there. 00:29:59 - Speaker 1: So energy that makes a lot of sense, kind of sense of urgency in different words, the sort of like things are happening. Do you think that Results or milestones, or even just celebrating like discrete moments of success or progress are important as well. 00:30:15 - Speaker 3: So this is a classic atomism back from the Hiroki days to make it real. We can link to the full list of atomisms. But it’s this idea of, even if it’s just a prototype or even a CLI session mockup, something that makes it real and makes it concrete for people, really helps people understand what it is and again build that energy. I also, I mentioned it briefly, but I think this idea of aesthetics is really important. There are good threads to pull when you have an idea that’s aesthetically exciting or appealing. That’s the way that I often draw energy on projects, even like programming type projects. 00:30:45 - Speaker 1: There’s this thing I’m thinking about now, which is And this varies in different parts of the world, but I think the same thing is sort of the financial thing is true. Like, you look at a particular industry, like hairdressers, right, or pizza joints, and you look at like the topography and the colors and sort of like styling they put on their storefronts. And there seems to be these sort of like pretty tight clusters of style, right? You’re like, why are all the pizza joints in this town using hobo for the typeface, right? It will be so much more interesting if like someone used copper Gothic, you know, or comic sense or any of the other sort of, you know, funky typefaces or something, you know, stern like Helvetica. And I think what’s going on is this recognition or this thing to like make it real, right? Imagine that we were starting a pizza joint, right? And we have ambition, right? We want this to be like the freaking best pizza in our town, right? So, you know, we look at other pizza places, and we have this intuition that we talked about before, right? Of what is like a real pizza place, right? We have our heroes, right? And chances are that they use hobo, right? We might not be aware of this, this might be unconscious. So we go to, you know, our local printing press who make a sign for us, and they show us, you know, a bunch of different typefaces, they have an option, and we see the hobo one and we’re like, oh, that just feels right, you know. So you go with that and you reinforce this idea at a real pizza place to use hobo for a typeface. And so I think this connects directly to what we’re talking about with a static being important and to make it real and a good atimus, which I’m gonna start saying now, by the way, so you’re all kind of wow, is that same thing, right? Let’s say you’re building like a MacOS app. And you have this idea for it. If you create a design, just a picture, that’s like a fake screenshot that looks real, I think that there is a similar quality to that pizza you want. People are gonna look at it and they’re gonna feel like, oh damn, this can be real, you know, we can make this happen. That looks like a real thing. I didn’t think of that, right? So yeah, I think aesthetics and presentation, and that mapping that to like your heroes and your ambitions, I think it’s super important for people to feel that this is possible, you know, and to drive the energy you were talking about, Mark. 00:32:58 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of another quick story here of kind of aesthetic and emotionally driven play session. A long time ago at Hiroku, we had an issue with the command line client being very slow, and I was very frustrated with it, and I wanted to have a faster client. So I undertook this playful project of just trying to make a very fast Hoku client that kind of only does Hello World, like it just lists your apps, but does it fast. And that ended up not really going anywhere, but by undertaking that project, I discovered Go, and then eventually will go by example, and now we use Go for some of our server stuff, and that’s a whole world that I never would have been introduced to if I hadn’t just kind of followed my nose up. It would be cool if even with relaxing the constraint that eventually needs to shift to production. 00:33:36 - Speaker 1: Wait, are you behind Gobi sample? Oh yeah, man, I love that. Oh, that’s funny. Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic, yeah. 00:33:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we actually use this as a bit of, I think of it as the mark publishing style, which is static HTML, maybe a little bit of, I don’t know, did you even have some kind of like template or build script for the basic site, but otherwise it’s this very almost I call brutalist HTML but a very effective design in the sense that it has the side by side code and description, if I’m remembering correctly. And yeah, it’s this very kind of sleek, it loads fast because it’s a static site, it probably still works fine now with zero maintenance, and we were certainly inspired by that, both for the you can switch articles and later all the muse stuff. I’m just basically seeing the way that Mark does kind of HTML publishing of these essentially kind of a mini book on the web, was very influential for me and everything I’ve done subsequently. 00:34:35 - Speaker 1: Hm. In an interesting way, I think go by example is playful, right? It seems to be very uniform, right? And I think that uniformity creates this, rather than create, I think it removes some anxiety around navigation. A lot of the web, I think, has this problem of creating anxiety around like, The user interface because everything is different, right? It’s like you you jumping between different planets. Anyhow, I think what makes go by example playful is that I’m guessing here and I’m extrapolating mostly from my own experience with using it. Like, when you’re in the mode of using it or visiting it, you are exploring, right? Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be visiting it, or you are there for entertainment, right, which is kind of playful too, as we talked about. So I think that there’s this category of things that They look and smell like pure utilities. They’re very uniform, they might seem boring, but they really are these like enablers or pieces of a puzzle for playfulness. 00:35:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think that’s often an origin story, so maybe we can use this as a way to learn more about your project where, you know, one lens on these projects is, you know, it’s a way to learn a programming language. That doesn’t sound very interesting. But the other lens is it’s the result of a path that someone walked down around the change they wanted to see in the world. So likewise for your project Playbi, you could describe it as someone’s building a new operating system, another one of those, right? But there’s much more to it in terms of where you’re coming from and why you’re building this and how you’re approaching it. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about Playbit. 00:35:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this, like many things, there was no eureka moments, which is interesting, I think you guys have talked about that on the show previously. The slow hunch, the slow hunch, yeah, exactly. So this very much is what happened with Playbit. So for years and years, probably over 10 years, you know, I’ve been interested in operating systems and systems. This is one of these things that I’ve learned about myself that what I find really fun and exciting to work on in terms of software are things that enable a lot of people to make things with them, right? So tools, in other words, I mean, you guys are there with me. And so I started thinking about MacO 9, it’s so tight, you know, it’s so nice. Windows 2000 came around, I was like, wow, it’s so snappy. Anyhow, fast forwarding a little bit. MacOS 10, I think is just like this wonderful amazing operating system. And this very interesting point in time in 2001 or 2002 or so, when Mac was 10.1 or so is the first kind of usable version of it, started getting some traction. I think what happened was that this is probably mostly accidental, but You got these people who were really interested in kind of moldable, malleable software and like poking at things, hacking at things, and they were using BSD and Linux and stuff, right? And they had to give up a good user experience and sure people have different opinions about this, but this is my opinion. 00:37:19 - Speaker 2: I was a Linux on the desktop user for many years and Many things I really loved about it, but I do not miss fighting with getting the Wi Fi chip working or wake from sleep or editing. I spent so many hours of my life editing XOg.com trying to get the resolution to match the refresh rate of my monitor or whatever. And that’s the kind of pain you’re willing to go through for this hackable interface. And yet, my experience was the same. I landed on Mac OS eventually because it gave me so much of that Unix underpinning that’s very kind of powerful and moldable uh with also good hardware integration. 00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right, that Linux traditionally and still today at least the Linux kernel is most distributions, right, is configuration over convention, whereas Mark, you were talking about Go briefly and Go is sort of like the opposite of that. I’m, I’m a huge fan of Go, like the way it’s designed as a programming language too, but in particular the way it went about the design, where it’s convention over configuration, and we can talk more about that later. But I think what happened was that you have that one part, right, of people who are really interested like you had um of the moldability of software and like the ability to fully customize your computing experience. And then on the other hand, you have people who want to use a computer and be efficient as users of a computer, right? And before MacOS 10, I think you had to make a choice. You had to say, I’m gonna use Windows or Mac OS 9. I’m not gonna be able to do this like multiple hackable stuff. I can do some basic programming or whatever, or I’m gonna do that stuff, but I’m gonna live with all this pain, right? And that quiz 10 came around and it’s like, hey, you know what, you can have both, right? And so, what I think happened was that you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective, and curious and playful around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform in terms of application quality, right? You just go and look at evidence of this, right? You go and look at a lot of web apps that are trying to mimic desktop apps. In most cases you will find them using metaphors and sometimes even a statics from Macan. It’s pretty rare that you find these things that are in the absence of a native host to mimic Windows, right? Anyhow, so that happened. I think that was very interesting. It’s clear to me now that that is a slowly dying thing, right? Macco is 10:15, you can’t use the VM Nets thing unless you have a special signed certificate from Apple that you can. To get if you’re like become a partner with them, right? You actually cannot run it, even as the owner of the computer, you cannot use it, right? Sure, you can be roots, right? You can pseudo and use it, whatever, but you can’t make any apps using it. And Mac OS 11, takes that to the next step, right? And that’s fine. Anyhow. So, in the context of all of these things, I think that there is going to be a need, right, in terms of like allowing people to keep being playful and exploring. Software at this sort of like more, I own a desktop computer. I want to be able to like do crazy shit with it, even if that means breaking it, right? And so I started thinking a few years ago, I was saying to myself that I’m gonna put a bet that in the next 10 years, there’s not gonna be a Mac OS 10 more, and Apple is just gonna be about iOS. And I think that’s, I’m still believing that. And what then, right? Is there gonna be sort of a Linux based desktop thing that emerges? Is Windows kind of like, finally. Start like a skunkworks team somewhere. They’re just like, let’s throw out like 95% of all the crap and build that. I don’t know. So I was like, should I try to do something about this? It’s really hard to build a business, I think, around the idea of an operating system, especially replacing Windows MacOs, which are just so good, right? They’re just so good and asking someone to just replace that with something is a big ask. 00:41:24 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe the way I would characterize it actually is less about good or not and more just the amount of stuff that needs to go into what people would consider a modern operating system today ranging from hardware support to networking to languages and various kinds of input devices and so on and APIs and the ability to run software and browse the web. and so on is just so huge that it is not something that an individual or even a startup can easily undertake. Hence, it’s only within reach of these incumbents that have these large existing platforms and the rare case of maybe something like Google and ChromoS being able to come in and throw quite a lot of resources and quite a lot of time at the problem. 00:42:09 - Speaker 1: But I think even in the case of Chromois, you would end up in the same place, I think, right? You would have business and money driving the main incentives, right, of like, well, if we make this work for everyone and anyone, we can just make a ton of money and then You have these competing incentives, and more importantly, competing sort of like constraints on those, right? You’re gonna need sandboxing, you’re gonna need all of these safety features, right? You’re not gonna allow people to like mess around with the OS because then most people are not gonna like know what they’re doing, right? And so I think the only way to go about this is to not trying to build an operating system or computing environment that fulfills all the expectations we have. But rather to just change our expectations or offer sort of like a, imagine like a picture on the wall, right? It’s a big picture is very complicated. And you’re very familiar with this picture, and now you’re putting a smaller picture, a much simpler picture next to it on the wall. And you say, you know, you can walk around, you can look at the simple picture, still have this big picture. And I think like, offering this idea of like, what if we shift our expectations a little bit, right? Maybe we do that just in the mode of playful software. So where Playbit started out was as more of an ambitious idea of an actual operating system. And ideas of, you know, I have like a GPU and stuff like that on a remote computer and people has time shared this because GPUs, there’s a kind of, I think a very important slightly concerning environmental impact. And right now we’ve seen this with all the foundry issues, right? And, you know, TSM and stuff like that, right? Like having issues creating ships, right? Because rare earth’s limitations, and this is mostly, you know, impacted by COVID and stuff like that, to my understanding, but still, you buy like an Nvidia high-end GPU today, and it’s very possible that a year from now, you’re gonna have to replace it with a new one, right? Because that industry has moved so quickly. And how often are you gonna use all that power, right? Probably not all the time, right? You’re gonna use that in virt a little here and there. So there’s this crazy shirt on hardware, especially if you’re in the PC world, right? Macs tend to have a longer lifetime, I think. And now I’m talking about like high end kind of high-end hardware. So this is kind of where I started and I got a lot of feedback from a lot of people who I was speaking with to try to understand, you know, and try to navigate what this would mean, and if this was crazy, and I think it was kind of like, it’s probably a little too early, and I think the approach to making this kind of change needs to happen differently. And so, through a pretty slow boil and slow process of just doing a lot of iteration, what is playbit sort of like just came out of this. So the very concretely, I think that Playbit is probably more similar to a web browser or Flash, technologically speaking. And, you know, jump in here if I’m taking this too far or there’s any curiosities to it, but I think the web is successful for a couple of different reasons, right? But one of the reasons is this uniform programming environment, this uniform runtime environment. You know, if I make this little like web program, right, and I tossed it over to you, you can use pretty much any OS, any web browser, and I have a pretty good idea that C is gonna run the same way for you. And this wasn’t always true. I think in the last 10 years this is kind of solidified to be like pretty much true. And I think that’s really remarkable, right? 00:45:32 - Speaker 2: I’ll add on to that, that, yeah, not only does it fulfill the right ones run anywhere, it was a dream of a lot of platform technologies including Flash and Java and so on, but it does it in a way that is sort of instantaneous to download and run. And then, by far the most important part of it, I think, is the sandboxing. It really gets that right. I can completely trust my program to download a program from a website. A website is a program now, a very sophisticated one potentially with all the JavaScript can do. And I can trust that I can just point my browser to URL that I don’t know who’s on the other side of that, and it will download and run that because the sandboxing is essentially perfect within that tab. It can’t go out and access the rest of my computing device. As far as I know, no other computing environment has achieved that. 00:46:23 - Speaker 1: Well, I’d say the Flash did achieve that, and I think that Flash was really brilliant in many different ways. The demise of Flash, I think, has reasons that are really unrelated to its user experience or development experience is mostly, you know, kind of a monolith owned by a single corporation, right? But the model, yeah, think about Flash or think about the web, I think it’s kind of the same thing. That model is really interesting to me and I think the one. Piece of the foundation for creating a culture where you feel empowered to play around with software and to make little fun programs is some sort of safety. And I think that’s what the sandbox does. The good part of a sandbox that you’re talking about Adam is I’m never writing perfect code, right? I’m gonna do something and I’m gonna run it and maybe like delete all the things, right? If I run it on a sandbox, it’s just gonna delete all the things in the sandbox, not, you know, my passport from a Dropbox or something like that. So, I think that’s the good part of the sandbox. The bad part, of course, is like, when you want to do something interesting, like, let’s say you have a photo sensor or something connected to a USB and you want to access that, you can’t, and you’re be damn it. And that’s why you have to jump out of if you’re like a web developer, you have to just be, well, I can’t use web for, right? And then usually you’re outside of a sandbox and there’s no sandbox. And in the last couple of years, there’s been this kind of advancement with virtualization, and virtualization sometimes is Mixed up or messed up with like emulation or the idea of like a virtual machine, right? It’s a virtual machine I would think of as a super set of emulation and virtualization. So emulation, when you run a program like let’s say like a Nintendo emulator, right? You have this program that appears to have the original Nest CPU and did they have a co-processor, I can’t remember. And DSP and all these like actual hardware things, right? So the program inside that you load it up things that is running on this hardware and stuff right there. Whereas virtualization is this idea of running the program in a way so that it’s environment, not necessarily it’s hardware, but it’s environment, appears to be that of a unique computer, right? And this is kind of how AWS and Google Cloud and all these things do it, right. And this has been around for quite a long time, probably about 20 years or so as a concept, and probably in the last 15 years it’s been increasingly like common to develop software doing this. Docker is like a popular kind of virtualization environment, right? And now you have these features built into Mac OS since 10.10. You have built into in Windows 10 with Hyper-V, you have it built in in Linux with KVM. And there’s similar things for a couple of other operating systems, right? And this has happened in the last few years. And so I was thinking that why not just make that the sandbox, right? So like, instead of making the sandbox be this, you know, there’s a DOM, right? And you have a JavaScript API and you have a fetch function, you have an array type, and so on, right? That’s sort of like the uniform runtime environment then, you know, you run that in Firefox or Chrome or Safari, that’s just kind of called completely different code, right? Implemented totally different ways, right? That’s sort of like the uniformity. Like what if that’s just like Linux and then, you know. So like when you run a program, instead of running it as JavaScript or something like that, you just run it as whatever programming language you want, you know, Mark can write in Go. And Adam, you can write in Ruby, and it’s like totally fine, you can interoperate. 00:50:01 - Speaker 2: Part of the appeal there is something like Flash. You have to use a very specific programming language and APIs through for the web as well. JavaScript is not a language a lot of people love and yet because you want to be on the web, you need to write things in JavaScript and using the web APIs. And so it sounds like this virtualization method lets you use more of the standard world of desktop computing or server computing tools, uh, but with some of those same benefits of the flash or web style sandbox. 00:50:32 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So you have the ability to think about it as this portable little box, right? As a zip file or whatever kind of metaphor you want to use. This little thing that you can copy, you can send to a friend, you can put it on a server, then you can suspend, and you can resume later. That I think is a very powerful concept. Like the idea that I can open a FIMA file or a notion document or something. And I can make some changes to it, and I just close it, right? I toss it away. I evicted from my computer, right? I clean up my work desk, and a week later I go back and it’s retains most of its state, right? I can pick up where I left off. Like, why can’t I have that on a lower level, like, in my experience on the computer? Why can’t that be like below where the windows are? Why is it just taps, right? Why is it not just entire apps or in my entire desktop? What if I had like, you know, 4 buttons on the side of my screen, right? And each button was like one of my different, this is not what I’m built, by the way, but I think this would be fun to have. What if, like, yeah, each button was mapped to one kind of VM in your computer. When you push the button, it’s instantly, like a millisecond swapped your entire computer to another one, then you have 4 computers at the reach of like a thumb, right? Yeah, so I think there now is a really good time to take this idea for a spin, and this is kind of like the technical approach to Playbit, what it is as a piece of software. And again, the goal of Playbit is not to build this piece of software. The goal of Playbit is to create and encourage like the development of small scale personal software. Maybe we can get into that more a little bit later. So like, when I’m building it right now and what I’m trying to get out in the next couple of months is kind of a Macintosh application, and I’m sure I can make a Windows app and Linux up and stuff. So Macintosh application, you start it up, and what it does is that it uses the the hypervisor of Mac OS and it boots up a Playbit OS which is this kind of based on the Linux kernel. It takes like 2 seconds or so to start it, and once it’s started inside there. You have this feature of Linux called namespaces, which you can use to create these kind of little isolated processes, right? So you can run a program and the program thinks that it’s like ha ha, I’m the operating system, I have all the power, and it kind of appears as that and it doesn’t have to be bothered about it and stuff like that. And those would be the little products that you would build and you would kind of play around with. They can crash, they can write stuff to disk, they can mess with the network. None of that is like leaking out to your real computer and not even to like the playbi OS. So the manifestation of it in the first attempt to creating a piece of software that encourages this playful thing, is this very resumable, very sort of like, Kind of stop and go, pick it up, leave it off type of software that you can play around with like today, like on your computer. And the runtime environment that you have is not the web platform, but it’s the Linux OS. So if you want to write things in in JavaScript, you can do that, right? If you want to write things and see, you can do that too. If you want interoperate between these two different things, you can just like write shit to the file system, right? You can use it as a database or you can build around an actual database if you want to. 00:53:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the reasons I was intrigued by Playbit is it seems to share this aesthetic I have around kind of collapsing the stack down. So I think it’s easiest to explain this in terms of its contrast. I feel like there’s this pathology with modern software systems where we keep adding layers and layers and layers, and that’s a few things. First of all, it tends to make it slower cause you’re going through a bunch of calls. It also tends to reduce your ability to do things because in order to have access to a feature as a programmer, that feature needs to thread through all the layers. So if any layer happens to drop or corrupt a feature, you’ve lost it. This happens a lot with graphics APIs because the original middle layers were designed for bitmaps, and then we changed it out to GPUs underneath. But then the middle layers haven’t kind of fully caught up, so you get this weird like impedance mismatch that means you don’t have access to the full power of the GPU. Anyways. And there’s also this element of you don’t understand what’s going on, because you’re kind of just casting the stone into 19 layers. Of libraries and, you know, who knows what it does, and that to me really interferes with my ability to play because I don’t kind of know what’s happening. I don’t have control over my environment. And I like these platforms, these operating system ideas where you squash that way down, you kind of start from scratch again. OK, we got name spaces and we got the GPU. What can you do now? Well, it turns out it’s a lot if you have a clean slate like that. I’m curious if that aesthetic sense resonates with what you’re trying to do with Playbit. 00:55:07 - Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. It’s so fun to hear you talk about this, Mark. Yeah, I think that this is very, very real, and it’s something that I care a lot about. I was really early on working and using like no JS and I thought that was very exciting. And I think what ended up happening with MPM I think it’s still like fantastic, you know, both a fantastic group of people and culture and all of that stuff. But by making it really easy to pile stuff on top of stuff, people are gonna do that, path of least resistance, right? That’s why you have like someone who says, oh, look at my web server, it’s just 12 lines of code, wink wink, and the wink is like this package adjacent file that says dependencies, long freaking list, and each of those have a long freaking list of dependencies. And it’s a quick deter to the sandbox thing that we were talking about, like, isn’t it kind of bonkers that like, we don’t dare installing this program on our computer and just run it because, you know, it might just go and delete our hard drive, right? But we’re totally fine. We’re just pulling in some like random ass like MPM packages, right? One of those can just go and like delete your whole hard drive or upload all of