Reading this felt like the official obituary for the 90s techno-optimism many of us grew up on.
The "end of history" hangover is real. We went about building the modern stack assuming bad actors were outliers, not state-sponsored standard procedure. But trying to legislate good use into licenses? I don't know how you would realistically implement it and to what extent? That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities.
As an example: formal proofs and compartmentalization are unsexy but they're a solid way we survive the next decade of adversarial noise.
I remember reading a quote somewhere that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, "If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy and resistance to censorship by default, we have to assume it will be weaponized".
I am out of ideas, practical ones, lots sound good on paper and in theory. It's a bit sad tbh. Always curious to hear more on this issue from smarter people.
Text files don't have power. Appealing to old power institutions to give them power is not the way to create new power either. Legacy systems with entrenched power have tended to insulate those at the top, killing social mobility and enabling those institutions to act against broad interests.
Open source has always been a force of social mobility. You could learn from reading high quality code. Anyone could provide service for a program. You could start a company not bound by bad decision makers who held the keys.
Open source always outmaneuvers inefficiency. Those who need to organize are not beholden to legacy systems. We need technically enabled solutions to organize and create effective decision making. The designs must preserve social mobility within to avoid becoming what they seek to replace. I'm building the technically enabled solutions for at https://positron.solutions
This is the real issue. FOSS was born out of a utopian era in 60's-2000s' where the US was still a beacon of hope. That is fundamentally impossible in todays world of ultra-shark-world-eat-you capitalism and global race to the bottom.
If it didn't already exist, FOSS would not be able to get off the ground today. FOSS couldn't start and survive today. Its survival is in jeopardy.
"As an example: formal proofs and compartmentalization are unsexy but they're a solid way we survive the next decade of adversarial noise."
I think you are on to something there. Noise is really signal divorced from tone. Our current consensus protocols are signal based. They demonstrate control, but not rightful ownership. Pairing a tone keypair with a matching signal keypair in a multisig configuration would be compatible with current networks, but also allow a bottom-up federated trust network to potentially emerge?
> NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative.
with the Next Generation Internet thing at the end receiving money/financing from the political supra-state entity called the EU [1] . So I guess said speech-holder is not happy because political entities which are seen by the EU as adversarial are also using open-source code? Not sure how war plays into this, as I’m sure he must be aware of the hundreds of billions of euros the EU has allocated for that.
Yes, this is the real problem when USians and Europeans complain about FOSS/OS safety. They understand deeply that the FOSS system is an extension of US soft power using the tech sector and any indication that the existence of FOSS is a threat to the US' interests means that it's values must be destroyed because these people don't really believe in the things they say they do
I suppose this is relevant to a subset of HN audience who attend FOSDEM. Even the talk abstract is worth discussion as it highlights an important side effect of FOSS goals and the current state of the world.
>AI in its current form has no actual sense of truth or ethics.
This is untrue. It does have sense of truth and ethics. Although it does get few things wrong from time to time but you can't reliably get it to say something blatantly incorrect (at least with thinking enabled). I would say it is more truthful than any human on average. Ethically I don't think you can get it to do or say something unethical.
I'm not saying there's no point to this discussion, but it would bring focus if this was decoupled from the broader topic of open source.
There has never been any inherent political or economic value in open source software. Those things come from deliberate decisions by authors and users such as licensing and mass adoption.
Open source is not synonymous with the GPL and most businesses try to avoid open source software when implementing their core competency.
My worry: that it suddenly becomes treason to commit to or pull certain repositories, that certain repositories become nationalized, or that other nation states do the same. Heinous forks and theft of code en masse for fear of being shot by a drone streaming video over ffmpeg.
Of code becoming a regulated munition, and tools that rat you out if you are designing resistance software.
17 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 39.0 ms ] threadBut the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical:
IMO FOSS is a gift to humanity and as such:
"A gift should be given freely, without obligation or expectation, as a true expression of love and kindness"
The "end of history" hangover is real. We went about building the modern stack assuming bad actors were outliers, not state-sponsored standard procedure. But trying to legislate good use into licenses? I don't know how you would realistically implement it and to what extent? That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities.
As an example: formal proofs and compartmentalization are unsexy but they're a solid way we survive the next decade of adversarial noise.
I remember reading a quote somewhere that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, "If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy and resistance to censorship by default, we have to assume it will be weaponized".
I am out of ideas, practical ones, lots sound good on paper and in theory. It's a bit sad tbh. Always curious to hear more on this issue from smarter people.
This is still techno-optimism. The architecture of your code will not to that. We are long past the limits of what you can fix with code.
The only action that matters is political and I don't think voting cuts it.
Text files don't have power. Appealing to old power institutions to give them power is not the way to create new power either. Legacy systems with entrenched power have tended to insulate those at the top, killing social mobility and enabling those institutions to act against broad interests.
Open source has always been a force of social mobility. You could learn from reading high quality code. Anyone could provide service for a program. You could start a company not bound by bad decision makers who held the keys.
Open source always outmaneuvers inefficiency. Those who need to organize are not beholden to legacy systems. We need technically enabled solutions to organize and create effective decision making. The designs must preserve social mobility within to avoid becoming what they seek to replace. I'm building the technically enabled solutions for at https://positron.solutions
This is the real issue. FOSS was born out of a utopian era in 60's-2000s' where the US was still a beacon of hope. That is fundamentally impossible in todays world of ultra-shark-world-eat-you capitalism and global race to the bottom.
If it didn't already exist, FOSS would not be able to get off the ground today. FOSS couldn't start and survive today. Its survival is in jeopardy.
We reached the limits of societal coherence and there’s no way to bridge the gap
I think you are on to something there. Noise is really signal divorced from tone. Our current consensus protocols are signal based. They demonstrate control, but not rightful ownership. Pairing a tone keypair with a matching signal keypair in a multisig configuration would be compatible with current networks, but also allow a bottom-up federated trust network to potentially emerge?
> NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative.
with the Next Generation Internet thing at the end receiving money/financing from the political supra-state entity called the EU [1] . So I guess said speech-holder is not happy because political entities which are seen by the EU as adversarial are also using open-source code? Not sure how war plays into this, as I’m sure he must be aware of the hundreds of billions of euros the EU has allocated for that.
[1] https://ngi.eu/
I suppose this is relevant to a subset of HN audience who attend FOSDEM. Even the talk abstract is worth discussion as it highlights an important side effect of FOSS goals and the current state of the world.
This is untrue. It does have sense of truth and ethics. Although it does get few things wrong from time to time but you can't reliably get it to say something blatantly incorrect (at least with thinking enabled). I would say it is more truthful than any human on average. Ethically I don't think you can get it to do or say something unethical.
There has never been any inherent political or economic value in open source software. Those things come from deliberate decisions by authors and users such as licensing and mass adoption.
Open source is not synonymous with the GPL and most businesses try to avoid open source software when implementing their core competency.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...
My worry: that it suddenly becomes treason to commit to or pull certain repositories, that certain repositories become nationalized, or that other nation states do the same. Heinous forks and theft of code en masse for fear of being shot by a drone streaming video over ffmpeg.
Of code becoming a regulated munition, and tools that rat you out if you are designing resistance software.