Tech went from free love to pay-per-click

It's still "free love". Open source can do so many things. Ad-supported sites are still ridiculously plentiful. Even audio and video is supported by ads. There are high-quality games with ridiculous amounts of content that are free.

Do people also charge money for things and make a living? Yup. That shouldn't be a surprise. And people shouldn't be painted as bad for wanting to make a living providing things that other people want.

does this article have a thesis? the article seems to be a random bag of lukewarm takes.

it starts off being sad about some attendees at a developer conference existing?? note that the conference itself specifically reserved and invited an "AI track", so concerns on that side seem ridiculous. on the other side, sure, cryptocurrency is a little tangential but what is cryptocurrency if not an attempt at a decentralized open-source store of value? I'm certainly no cryptocurrency fan but this venue doesn't seem particularly far off.

then the article meanders around about how technological development has rapidly reduced costs in the space and adds some general concern porn about standardization. the whole thing is some dumb background level of nostalgia for a world that never existed.

it's not like open source is dying because of profit motive. if anything, a lot of open source is kept alive because of companies with a profit motive investing in it. you can claim the contributions from corporations to open source are insufficient, but you can't claim... wait, again, what exactly is this article claiming?

Why wouldn't it, look at everything else? Humans will destroy old growth, irreplaceable rain Forrest just to make a few million dollars. There is very little if anything stopping us from ruining nice things.

“Like an archer and arrow, the wise man steadies his trembling mind, a fickle and restless weapon. Flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground, it trembles all day -- Siddhartha Gautama"

The important part of the message there is "the mind is a fickle and restless weapon, flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground". People's minds are seething to fill a void, which often manifests in mindlessly grabbing money to buy things we don't need and acquire power for a brief period of time.

The only way to a better future is to better educate children about their minds.

Easy to be "free love" when you are getting investor money from all over the world thrown at you for 20+ years. Tech was always going to have to face reality. Heck things aren't even that bad yet.

One possible avenue is making interfaces to basic services so complicated that we'll need AI to negotiate them on our behalf.

We've done it before. Kids in 1985 knew what files and directories on their computers were. I went to a bad segregated school on the South Side of Chicago, and I knew, because we had a class. Kids these days don't know. Maybe 15 years from now they'll call the kids who can navigate their phones through touch "techies" because all they'll know how to do is to politely ask their phones to do things. Maybe that will be the adults.

During the PC era it was making big technology accessible and it had a spectacular success on Wall Street due to this big shift. I believe no other Silicon Valley development has been as focused on actual tools for humans to use.

We are now left with Wall Street expectations that are out of scale for the usefulness of the technology being developed. The technology seems to be developed with a focus on being a service with the widest possible addressable market and the lowest possible cost per click.

Most of the world's problems don't fit those parameters. Luckily most tech news is white noise. There is a lot of good work and it doesn't get much oxygen. The recent thread on the paper "What goes around comes around and around" is a good window on how to do good work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846883

On the surface it is surprising that the 1990/2000s (often ex-hippie) free software writers or entrepreneurs got so greedy.

The worst people are those who fight over the control of old free software projects, usually using DEI as a shield to a) establish a tyranny b) silence all opposition and c) secure their $250,000 jobs at Google, Facebook, Microsoft since they now have gotten rid of vast amounts of competition while pretending that they want to "grow the team".

This kind of behavior is not limited to software though. It was the Hippies of 1970 who slowly grew more powerful, and in the 1980s/1990s sold out entire manufacturing economies to Asia and Eastern Europe while pretending that The West is now a knowledge economy. And they got rich in the process of dumping IP while at the same time destroying local workers' livelihoods by replacing them with cheaper immigrants.

How much of this is related to interest rates? The fed rate is simultaneously the minimum ROI for the owner to continue running the business instead of selling everything and buying treasury bonds

I built this and never sold out:

Web2 open source tools: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform (https://qbix.com/ecosystem)

Web3 open source tools: https://github.com/orgs/Intercoin/repositories (https://intercoin.org/applications)

Anyone is welcome to get involved or sponsor the projects. But frankly my experience with most VCs I have met has been that they try to avoid deep, decentralized open source platforms like this, so they can make quick wins on the latest fad. Mostly individuals here and there get it. But 95% of the time it turns out they have no money or liquidity, and I don’t have time chasing and finding out who does. That’s the nature of these things. It’s a lonely job.

Honestly, even though it’s completely free and open source, and gives people the tools to do what until now they could only do with Big Tech platforms, I expect many people on HN here will ding all of it — because that second project (Intercoin) is about blockchain-based applications.

So you can see the fate of open source free projects by how this post does.