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utopiahtoday at 7:45 AM3 repliesview on HN

I called it "software".

It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software.

The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.

We keep on re-discovering the foundations.


Replies

customguytoday at 2:02 PM

To me this doesn't seem like a step towards those foundations, but another layer of of loss of agency. You can run "a" model locally, but you cannot make it locally (at least not for the purpose of just talking software into existence). You need to slurp up all the internet first, so to speak. And even if you could do that, you still depend on people putting new things onto the internet for you to slurp up. So is it really my software? What if it breaks or I want a new feature and AI corp nuked my account? How much did I learn during my time having it done for me?

And before anyone mentions it, I don't think the fact that I need a compiler and a manual and some example software to learn from is quite on the same level. I might be wrong but I would need some convincing.

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MrGilberttoday at 12:43 PM

With the current situation on the hardware market, it makes me sad the we discover it only now. If things continue the way they are, there will be no Personal Computer any longer.

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Ygg2today at 9:02 AM

> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.

I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux.

The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.

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