[hdgvhicv]

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance

Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years

The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun.

Today it’s all about side hustles.

[jodrellblank]

It isn’t about the hacker ethos; in the 1970s Pong was the arcade game. In the 1980s there was room for Pong in the home, on Atari and Amiga and Commodore64 and Spectrum. In the 1990s there was room for Pong on PC, in CGA, in VGA, in multimedia, on CD-ROM. In the 2000s there was room for Pong online and mobile Pong and Pong in emulators of older systems.

Pong is a placeholder for all software, there.

Anything one person could do, has been done over and over. Except things that only Fabrice Bellard could do, progress now needs a team of people and a longer time horizon and a large budget. nobody is satisfied with Pong anymore and if they are they already have as much Pong as they need.

We’re already in Vernor Vinge’s age of programmer-archaeologists.