Social Mobility Is Publishing Your Shit on Github, Except When It Isn’t

My problem with software is that you can't make money with it, to the extent that that's actually true. It's not lack of regulation. It's not lack of protection.

There are only two imperialistic attitudes in software, depending on which side you stand: either you want to push your advantage because you already have the market, or you want to pull everyone down with you because you're already losing – and who's to say whether you deserve it, regardless of which camp you belong to. That is to say, the content secretly matters frighteningly little regarding the outcome.

Sure, it's an obvious overgeneralization, but on a field where the winner takes all, you'd be surprised how often it ends up being correct.

My own opinion on these things is rather plain. I believe in only three things really: sustainability through distribution, empowerment through simplification, and equal market visibility. Anyone who doesn't advocate these is probably lying to you.

I mean think about it; if you think competition is paramount, then that must mean you're against differentiation. Meaning, rather than maximizing the variance to some sustainable level, you'd find the one that's able beat all the others (at this very moment in time at least). Is that a long-term strategy, do you think?

My Problem with Software

Personally, I don't mind seeing American software dominate the market, presuming they really deserve it and the software is high-quality. That, and any security considerations besides, which go both ways. But is the playing field really level? To me, "the Europeans" sometimes sound utterly moronic, when pushing for more regulation or putting more software under European control. I mean, is office software really that difficult to get right? Is funding really that tight? Come on. What about LaTeX, eh? Ever heard of that? And that's just one example.

If there's something you need, then name it. Announce it publicly somewhere and give the companies something to do. Don't just hide behind secret deals and your insider relationships...is what I'd like to say but I know people put their survival first, and idealism second.

If you can open a file in an application, then it's highly likely you can export it somehow in a format that's compatible with practically anything anyway.

The thing is, Microsoft can't compete on price against open source. But neither can you. Neither can anyone else. So is it absolutely impossible that the market itself would somehow lower the prices to a sustainable, affordable level without killing everything? I don't know.

That being said, I understand open-source contributions often do come from companies, sure. But what about the incentives? Don't you care about those? Think about the millions of future coders who'd like to develop their skills and design something new. You'd rather kill it either via digital sovereignty mandates or free and open proliferation and display of your solutions, just the same. It's like who comes up with this stuff? Some moron? Think about the sustainability. Think about where the sovereignty comes from exactly. And about where it flows. It's either down the drain or right into the pockets of big tech, relatively speaking. Really no alternatives, are there?

The one place it doesn't flow is to the young ambitious coder him-/herself. In other words, for open source to matter, it needs to matter. Otherwise it just sits there, ripe for the taking.

By the way, GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Yes. But you could run your own personal Git repositories if you wanted. Did you know that? I did, and I am. Git is not just "the official GitHub client software". In fact, if you wanted, you could develop your own version control. But you're not going to, are you? Because in your mind, there can be only one.

The culture sure has changed from what it was twenty years ago.

And one more thing. You are not really protecting anyone by removing cryptography. If anything, it's the opposite. And you know, I'd argue you really couldn't do it either, even if you wanted to. It would not really matter whether you'd require the complete destruction of cryptography by law or whether you'd require your OS to take periodic screenshots of what's happening on your display, because we already have open-source software. All you'd need to do is fork it. All you'd need is to route your traffic through someone who lies on your behalf. It's a can of worms.

You know, I've been wondering, whatever happened to real nerds? Where are the classic computer guys who know about the real stuff? They're so few and far between now. When computer science became such a popular, hot topic after the AI boom hit, now suddenly everyone has these weird opinions and everyone is a "systems thinker" or whatever. I almost don't even want to know about it. It really does seem the 2000s were the golden age, and now it's all in decline. Now it's like you have to defend all that's good against people who haven't even thought it through. And I really don't know if time is on my side, no matter which side I happen to stand on.

Suddenly impressions matter more than real solutions, more so than ever before. And yet, your screen is the bottleneck. You only need one.

If only you could choose the best product, or at least the one you like, so that the money goes where you want it to go. If only the incentives rewarded good products, and not just ads and those products that are compatible with what's already popular, boxing you in, eh? But there are standards already in place, so what's the problem exactly? Besides, text files work everywhere, dammit.

I'll tell you my interpretation. Here it comes: the main problem is ineptitude. The domain knowledge isn't where you want it, and there's nowhere you can go get it. And to make matters worse, if you just want to make some money, you don't really need it either.

That's because after all that's done and said, people still understand that knowledge is power, and they like to hoard it for themselves. If you could make everyone think you're doing all you can to help the situation while you're in fact subtly and covertly preventing anyone from rising to your level, would you do it? If you could silence everyone by giving them what they want in exchange for ultimate power, would you do it?

You can see the dilemma in action on several fronts. For example, about machine learning and LLMs, would you like to contribute into training those to be better or more empowering for the regular Joe? Would you publish your code on GitHub, advertising it as the best-in-class that it is despite it being free of charge to use and download? Would you be some unnamed CEO for a moment and freely shout from the hilltops how you don't even need university-level education? Because you don't.

So wait a minute. If sharing isn't caring, then the value must not be in the payload. That's it exactly.

And besides, I'll tell you, if you're a psychotherapist, for instance, then you probably would rather like to argue that a machine learning model can never replace the unique human touch you bring to the table, that chatbots are actually harmfully addictive, or that algorithms could end up making devastatingly destructive errors in their judgments (computations). That could very well be, but to what extent? And how can you really say any of that without any real empirical research into a specific algorithm, for example?

Not that you need any research in order to fire your employees.

Where are the incentives? Just an honest question, that's all.

I guess the incentives are to do something radical or attention-grabbing on a popular platform, with special importance on video. Not even traditional media are safe, especially if the format is video.

My best guess as to why that is is that normal people are still as normal as they were 15 or 20 years ago. And whatever contributes to that must work the same way today.

Complexity always looks like genius to the uninitiated, and so it's probably better to never initiate anyone, right?

But regardless, as I've already implied or even said directly in some earlier ramblings of mine, the current incentives actually cause a stalemate of sorts, wherever they may actually be (because remember, mine was just a guess). There's no real benefit to be had (for yourself) without destroying something else. The destruction comes one way or another: people find it more difficult to compete; people find it difficult to sell their products; people don't have any money left to purchase non-necessities. You could call that something funny, I bet. Like a deadly triangle or something.

I can see that a specific kind of cynicism is tremendously tempting: the belief that the greatest resource humanity has today is actually dumb people. It's so tempting, because turns out every single human being thinks themselves smarter than average. And the personality cults aren't really helping that perception either.

I don't dare to analyze what I think about that.

But it's why I've resorted to forcing myself into this laissez faire-kind of attitude in software, and life in general – you let people work as they want, and things will roll nicely, or stop rolling altogether, that's fine too. I say forcing, because I've been reluctant. But you have to have social mobility, I think it's called. Some speak of "equal opportunity", but what equal opportunity is there? How have you analyzed it? Where is the nerd-level research on this? And not just some papers that clearly game the system, because turns out, researchers too just want to make a career for themselves. Because we live in this dystopian world where everyone is now some kinda doctor at the very least to even utter a word publicly. Even when it's something that's been said before many times, leading to a peculiar situation where some important things are almost always left unsaid.

But, before you think that I haven't thought about this, let me oppose my own view immediately. There's a problem intrinsic to software that goes against the very foundations for market competition. It's this: if you have two pieces of software that do the exact same thing, which one do you choose? Maybe there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences, like the one being a bit faster under certain circumstances, or the other being prettier and more fun to use. But let's say you don't really know what's under the hood anyway. You don't even care about programming to begin with. So which one takes the cake? X or Facebook? Dibbledabble or the other one?

Let me tell you how I see it. As time moves on, presuming one or the other does not become abandoned, both will be fast and pretty enough. That goes on a while until you have a monopoly-like situation, with both parties recognizing it, and then the quality starts to decline across the board because the developers start having "ideas" and the original userbase has grown bored of it anyway. And at that point, they might not even be the same developers that started those projects to begin with, and so the magic slowly drains away. In this sense, software truly is like art. But it's a special kind of art. It's caveman art.

It's somewhat high-risk, and a skewed reflection on the participating developers' collective taste.

You see, people benefit from problems the same way they benefit from solutions.

But that just goes to show that the one problem is the same across the board: the problem that you can't make money with it, and that's what you need to solve. You just need to find the proper parallels. Can you make money with music nowadays? What about writing books? And the solutions should be similar, as well.

Indeed, that's what scares and confuses me about it. So for example, if you consider a statistician, how often do you think those guys have had to learn something new just to keep abreast of the newest developments in the field? A few times I bet. But how many programming languages do they need to know to actually work as statisticians? How many statistical techniques to land a job? And do they do the thing where they'd rather hire someone from a hyper-competitive Indian university rather than locally, because they know they'll get more bang for their buck that way? Don't answer that.

Because I know that globally, nothing has in fact changed in hundreds of years at least. It's just now become more visible in all its stupid glory.

It's tempting to think that maybe I should've been a farmer, except those guys barely make money to live, so on second thought, I guess that's just another stupid idea.

So how did the field of medicine solve their problems? How are psychotherapists still in business? What about the music industry; how's that even work?

Now, I know what the ultimate solution is. And the big tech probably hates it. It's the age of personal computing all over again.

That's because otherwise your data is always going to be "somewhere else". Means the one thing that gives tech giants the brunt of their income, the Cloud, is the one thing diminishing local power. Everyone knows that. So is that a problem or no?

Depends. Just how bad is European software anyway? Does it suck? Because remember, the biggest companies in the world are essentially software companies, yes? Maybe you think the exception is NVIDIA, because they sell GPUs, but no. Even they benefit tremendously from CUDA, which is practically the only general GPU compute software everyone supports; you should be damn paranoid about why other GPU manufacturers can't keep up.

You should have some responsibility as a software engineer, especially if you've any personal influence, because turns out, the effect software has radiates everywhere, to every single country in the world.

In any case, I only know for a fact that most software I've ever seen is authored by someone living far away somewhere else.

My Solution

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the best administrative decision you could make is to artificially limit communications so as to make selling digital products on DVDs seriously viable again.

I know that would piss the ISPs and the rest of them off. But you don't have to take me seriously. Consider this your dose of entertainment.

But tell you what, it would also piss off child pornographers and internet pirates. So if you disapprove of those, then I'm not sure why you'd disapprove of this.

And with the compression algorithms we have now, who can say what the real impact would even be? It could raise the bar to do nasty stuff, but that's about it. Namely, the big companies would probably still use everything at their disposal to just make more money.

Equal Visibility

So what about equal visibility, what's that all about?

It's about the fact that I'm old enough to remember a world with no Patreon or OnlyFans. It's about understanding that once upon a time what determined your clientele was basically all about how to move your physibles there, into the local store, because that's where everyone went to look at what was available. If it wasn't there, it didn't exist. Practically no e-commerce, nothing. Only the closest shops and stores.

So, your visibility was automatically constrained (or helped) by the fact that all representation was there.

But let's think critically again, cuz that's fun. Do you think OnlyFans or Patreon help the visibility problem or do they actually hurt? That's a question I've been struggling with for a while now. Because on the surface, you'd think that it would be difficult to find monetization for your...activities unless you had a wide international reach. You'd think that Patreon helps just that, and with its aid, you can get the funding for your projects that you so desperately need. Sounds great. But are everyone actually represented equally and to the same degree on Patreon? Or is it rather more constraining than a traditional store would be? That's somewhat of a mystery to me, unless word-of-mouth pretty much fixes all problems regardless (probably doesn't).

But there is one difference, to be sure, and that's risk. With the traditional shop model, you craft your product and bear the brunt of it if it doesn't sell. On Patreon, if you speak pretty enough, someone will surely pay, and then it's not so much a risk for you after all. Plus, you get to basically ask others what they'd like to see, so then you get to blame them too for not asking for the right thing. So can there be any real innovation then? I don't know. But I'll tell you what I do know, and it's that we live the age of remakes and sequels now. Even the popular machine learning models are basically remakes of what has been scrounged online. But all of that's just the attempt to minize risk in yet another form.

You'd think the more people you show your stuff to the more likely it is you can sell it. But everyone's not there, are they?

So one theory I have about the thing is that online presence actually disrupts more than it aids the market. The reason is somewhat counter-intuitive. It's about where the money doesn't go. And the money doesn't go to criticism anymore. Instead, it goes to buying stuff that you might or might not be disappointed about after the fact.

It's about pushing the decision to buy something further down to your subconscious while exploiting the fact that it's relatively difficult to undo what you did.

So, when you have sex without a condom, what happens?

Still, I know that sometimes, genuinely good ideas get undeservedly shot down. That's true. So therefore, online presence is a good safety valve, at least. But I challenge you, friend, to ask yourself, what's the best shit you've ever seen, eh? Was that because of online monetization engines or was it invented at the fricken stone ages, around the time when I too was born? Just to get a grasp of what was possible already back then.

The really counterintuitive thing, the mystery, behind all of this is the realization that sometimes less is more, and constraints make things feel much more interesting and meaningful. But, at the heart of the mystery lies this: which constraints?

The ones that benefit me or the ones that benefit you.

The Pattern

Have you ever wondered why it is that when you know more about the world, you in fact also notice more of what you don't know? I bet that's because in the context of what you already know, later facts require more and more complex explanations to fit them in.

So to spell it out: you're constrained in the sense that you have to use what you already have to explain anything further.

You have to use the guys and gals in your team to make your product.

You have to use the brain cells you got right now to work right now.

You have to live with yourself.

The Paranoia

I think it's good to be a little paranoid from time to time, as long as you yourself recognize what's paranoid and what isn't. That's because otherwise there's a chance of psychopathology. But a paranoid thought might not be intrusive, and you have to have some measure of plausibility. Personal responsibility and all that. But anyway, as it so happens, there is one particular, paranoid question that really drives me nuts these days about software and robotics. It's this one: who benefits now from increased robotics and automation? And especially: who benefits from talking about these things in a certain tone, projecting ideas of inevitable technological advancement? That is, why is this stuff driven so hard down our throats? Is it just for the sake of views on YouTube, because the influencers have found their meager cashcow, or is this messaging all a part of some psychological grooming operation, to make you behave differently or accept certain things you otherwise wouldn't?

"Kenen leipää syöt, sen lauluja laulat" – a brilliant Finnish saying, directly translated: "whose bread you eat, their's are the songs you sing." But for how long, eh?

Consider especially the possibility that you could be one of those AI-reluctant people. The kind of a guy who feels genuine alienation and depression from hearing those deadly words that "your skills are already redundant" and that "humankind can easily accept, without qualms, that you'll be one of those who'll just die like it's an inevitability", coupled nicely with some fancy comparisons between the invention of the wheel, electricity, or maybe coal factories or something. Cuz you know, stupid people deserve to die just like that, am I right?

I'll tell you one thing though, and it's that if the singularity comes and we'll all be on universal basic income, I'll lose my shit. That's because I've fought too long and too hard for dreams that will never be fulfilled, all because of some greedy bastard, who decided for me that this was going to be a brilliant idea.

And I still remember a few years back these things were sold to us under the premise that now humankind wouldn't have to work the jobs they don't want to anymore. I guess that must be true if you're dead or because those jobs don't exist, because then the statement of having to work jobs you don't want would be categorically false anyway. I'd wager that's exactly how some rich, privileged kinda guy would think about it, the kind of language that passes for cleverness in some circles.

The Senses

So, despite actually heavily using and experimenting with various AI algorithms, I still remain really, really skeptical, and I wholeheartedly believe most of the AI boom is lies caked with deception, with the possible exception of actual, proper nerds using it for science. Especially any claims that project algorithm development to reach such heights that the results could someday become categorically different. Let me briefly explain.

Let's say you start out with your ears, for the sake of example. You have your ears and you'll hear things. So, what about eyes; do eyes help you in knowing things your ears would never tell you? The answer is yes.

Let's keep adding some senses on your brain stack. Next, you'll receive touch. Touch helps you get some information you never would with just your eyes or ears, but some of it's redundant. Still, touch is really special, because you can encode touch to give you all sorts of pleasure, if only you wire your touch cells dense enough, giving you the ability to gate those experiences inside your brain in a really fancy way.

So you just keep adding senses to the stack now. You add warmth, you add cold, you add smell, you add some weird balancy thing, all of it. Next thing you know, you're a goddamn human.

So now, your senses all intact, you ask: let's say I create an algorithm using text data first, and then add a bunch of senses on top; is there something that algorithm's going to know that I couldn't, even in principle? Setting aside the classic imitation game aspect of it, the fact that it would be pretty difficult to convince a human otherwise, what about the mathematical line of thought? Well, if your sense-dimensions are anything like axioms, then you're constrained by those.

That is, if you start off with the senses, anything further must literally make sense in the light of those. Otherwise it's the same as merely imagining something supernatural; the only difference is that the disconnect with reality is now elsewhere.

Disconnect with reality equals disconnect with the senses. The fact that you don't know everything means you don't know what you could sense, or at what point in time.

But notice too that the space of possibilities is already vast, regardless.

So, the proper question isn't so much whether you can, but whether there's any point in doing so. Whether a targeted approach wouldn't be more cost-effective, plain and simple.

The Simplicity

Anything they tell you about AI in public is almost as a rule going to be overly simplistic and plain stupid. I just watched yet another online video, this time in Finnish, where someone whom I shall not name was picking up those sweet low-hanging fruit, exclaiming how AI is going to "change everything".

I've had enough of this shit years ago, and now I'm just growing more and more pissed everytime I hear someone lauding or even so much as mentioning AI. Allow me to explain yet again.

AI is exactly like programming, do you understand? It gives you the ability to program more stuff. And indeed, you always had that same ability ever since the inception of programming, except there were so many corner cases that no one had the patience to code all of them in. Sure, you could argue that no one had the breadth of focus to be able to recognize all the patterns in vast amounts of data either, but look here: you actually don't have that now. Any AI algorithm could show you anything you want to ask it, but it may not lead you into making the best decision for you, and definitely not for anyone else.

This is actually because of something I've kept talking about in various ways on my blog here. It's about context. The one asking the questions is always going to influence the direction where the answers are found. It's really simple.

And the most important thing of all, the one reason to be critical, is return on investment. Because everything's a tradeoff, and we gotta be careful about which AI algorithms we're talking about.

If your work was already really easy to begin with, what the hell do you think AI is going to bring to the table, qualitatively speaking? Except an opportunity to screw other people over, either for you or your boss. I mean, for Santa's sake, do you really need yet another solution just for making websites? If you want to, go ahead, don't let me hold you back I guess.

And don't you mention agentic AI to me. Don't even go there.

Whenever people say online that companies are only hiring vibe coders now, I feel enraged about it. I would skin the heads of those companies alive if I could. And yet, the truth of that statement probably doesn't matter. For all I know, it was posted there just for clicks, and the reason some companies do indeed only hire vibers might as well be to provide fuel for more clickbaits. That's the kind of stupid society this is now.

It's because there's no place for people to go except online anymore. That's why the web is being saturated with shit. It's only natural. So you have to make it rewarding for people. That's what incentives mean.

The Will

Some say you have to state what you want or you'll never get it. I wonder about that.

What I really want is business as usual. I want to create and maintain a system that allows for certain continuation, and a career trajectory for humans in the future. And no matter how hard I think about this, that system really resembles the 2000s and the 2010s more than anything else. I seem to recall that around 2012 there was some talk about the world ending. And you know what? I actually think that in some sense, it did end. Because back then, I think humanity already reached the approximate limit of what the human race can accomplish without overt calamity – well, when I say overt, I guess I should really define that as "overt relative to where I was at that time". But that would already concede some ground to cynicism, wouldn't it?

I guess when you look at it globally, there's always something happening. There's always this sense in the back of your mind that makes you want to grab your enemy by the balls and squeeze so hard it's all going to turn into moist mush. It's the feeling of power. The one thing that's going to sate your desperate thirst, because you know of course that you alone should be king.

What I'd really like is for the feeling of psychological exploitation to be replaced with the really quite nice feeling of being allowed to do all these cool things for other people; the feeling that you can express yourself and still somehow survive without someone crawling from underneath that rock there and imposing their own hierarchy on your face. For the competitiveness to cool down and for everyone to just drop this idea that whoever masters new and improved technologies is going to fuck everyone else in ass so hard they'll limp home.

Who among us can choose?

Secretly, I dream of the simple life, somewhere else. I know it's a cliché of course, but you've got to have some hope. You've got to have a reason to wake up the next day.

But I suppose here too I really should be careful, because if someone interprets the simple life to mean a life poverty and sickness, then I'm sure they'd be all too glad to give it to me.

That, I believe, is the very reason why some people are rich and some are poor. Can you see it in your mind's eye, the inevitable disappointment? And how little you have to fight it. How it subdues you under its spell.

"You could be one of the lucky ones."

Is killing and murder, and wiping out your enemy's seed completely off the face of the Earth the only way out? Am I supposed to take one woman after another to spread my powerful, dominant genes until they cover the entire cosmos in redundant biomass? Is absolute and total dominance the only way? Perhaps. It depends on whether you think this is all inevitable, regardless of what's best long-term. But I'll tell you, the enemy is never where the industry tells you. Nowadays, it's no longer where the state tells you either.

But you'll figure that out sooner or later. I know you have a strong survival instinct. A checkmate is a checkmate, you see. I sincerely hope you understand what I mean.

So is it the will to power, the will to pleasure, or the will to meaning? Nothing has changed, and humanity has not progressed anywhere.

Life

What does it mean to be human? And is there a more advanced lifeform somewhere out there in the vast expanse? Maybe in my next life things will make more sense.

In closing, here's a question I just happened to think about that seems interesting: "you can't really have emotions without thinking, but you could have thinking without emotions." Is it so? Then you know the arrow of improvement.