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robocat | on: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them.

Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?

The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

goekjclo | parent | next
"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong
pjc50 | root | parent | next
Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.
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jasode | root | parent
The other half of the one-liner is "Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything."

- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."

- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)

- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."

Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".

mittensc | parent | next
ideas, sure - "i think we should build an open source OS."

ideas + execution - not really - (Linus Torvalds sharing his work on Linux and that taking off)

exo762 | parent | next
> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.

sph | root | parent | next
Allow me to disagree. GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT/BSD which have been the greatest catalyst towards the establishment of tech corpo giants and the software ecosystem we have today.

GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.

jasode | root | parent
>GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT

The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.

inigyou | root | parent | next
It's failed in that most software doesn't use it. Because of the psyop, people who would be very sad if Amazon stole their software are licensing it MIT so Amazon can legally steal it.
OCTAGRAM | root | parent
For many years GNAT Community Edition has used GPL, including its library. That greatly boosted Ada programming language domination over planet and is a good reference for everyone else to also choose GPL for everything if they struggle at dominating. Tears of joy when programmers got to know that standard library in GNAT CE was licensed under GPL.
krapp | parent
We don't want to share our thoughts, ideas, feelings and art with machines. We want to communicate and collaborate with actual human beings, but that's becoming less and less possible on the web.

Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.

"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.

But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.