FOSS was imagined as a brotherhood of hackers, sharing code back and forth to build a utopian code commons that provided freedom to build anything. It stayed firmly in the realm of the imaginary because, in the real world, everybody wants somebody else to foot the bill or do the work. Corporations stepped up once they figured out how to profit off of FOSS and everyone else was content to free ride off of the output because it meant they didn't have to lift a finger. The people who actually do the work are naturally in the driver's seat.
This perspective is astonishingly historically ignorant, and ignores how "Open Source Software" was a deliberate political movement to simultaneously neuter the non-company-friendly goals of FOSS while simultaneously providing a competing (and politically distracting) movement that deliberately courted companies.
The Free Software movement was successful enough that by 1997 it was garnering a lot of international community support and manpower. Eric S. Raymond published CatB in response to these successes, partly with a goal of "celebrating its successes" — sendmail, gcc, perl, and Linux were all popular projects with a huge number of collaborators by this point — and partly with a goal of reframing the Free Software movement such that it effectively neuters the political basis (i.e. the four freedoms, etc.) in a company-friendly way. It's very easy to note when reading the book, how it consistently celebrates the successes of Free Software in a company friendly way, deliberately to make it appealing to companies. Often being very explicit about its goals, e.g. "Don't give your workers good bonuses, because research shows that the better a ''hacker'' the less they care about money!".
A year later, internal memos from Microsoft leaked that showed that management were indeed scared shitless about Linux, a movement that they could neither completely Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, nor practice Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt on, because the community that built it were too strong, and too dedicated. Management foresaw that it was only a matter until Linux was a very strong competitor — even if that's taken 20 years, they were decently accurate in their fears, and, to be honest, part of why it's taken 30 years for Linux to catch up are deliberate actions by Microsoft wrt. introducing and adopting technologies that would stymie the Free Software movement from being able to adapt.
Sorry, I beg to differ. A pourover is quick and easy if you wing it on the measurements, timing, etc. As long as the beans are decent and freshly ground, the result is still miles better than the cheap stuff even when I flub the temperature or timing.
Yeah, I do drink cheap coffee but only to remind me what decent coffee isn't.
> "Unions might be able to bargain against h1b..."
Remember, H1-Bs and immigrants, that a union would be not be on your side. They would have a large percentage of pro-nativists that affect their policies, regardless of what they say officially. There's a long, long history of unions in the United States opposing immigrant labor that is worth reading up on and, even on supposedly worldly and well educated HN, you will see that there isn't much pushback against posts with anti-H1-B sentiment.
The tablets that bridge officers were signing reports on from Star Trek TOS, which started airing in 1966, precedes that. They were boxier but clearly electronic.
Some people wanted a multi-polar world, well, this is what a multi-polar world looks like: the poles start competing, including arms races. "History may not repeat itself but it often rhymes." as they say.
Any world configuration that consists of large groupings of fear driven people(nations, etc) will includes nukes. That is the world we live in. Unipolar, bipolar, multipolar, makes no difference.
The only thing that matters is that all people rise up and demand an end to nuclear weapons.
The nuclear arms re-proliferation that comes along with a multi-polar world raises the risk of use of nuclear weapons considerably. Even in traditionally anti-nuclear Japan, some politicians are broaching the idea of acquiring nuclear arms. That very much makes a difference.
To be honest the world is likely safer because of the nuclear deterrent.
If Pakistan and India both didn't have nuclear weapons you can rest assured they would've long fought an endless stream of wars with tens and tens of millions. They hate each other.
Perhaps we didn't realize how much stability the "two powers" model generated. It caused inevitable arms races as the two powers vied to stay competitive, but there were only two. And the USSR was able to de-escalate on its own. If you have three powers, each of them wants the ability to eliminate not one, but both of the others. Could lead to not just incremental, but polynomial expansion of forces. And de-escalation involves multiple parties coordinating, not just one great power.
It's not as if there weren't that sort of people in our profession even before the rise of LLMs, as evidenced by the not infrequent comments about "gatekeeping" and "nobody needs to know academic stuff in a real day-to-day job" on HN.
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