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Obituary for Ward Christensen

“Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78”:

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today. Prior to creating the first BBS, Christensen invented XMODEM, a 1977 file transfer protocol that made much of the later BBS world possible by breaking binary files into packets and ensuring that each packet was safely delivered over sometimes unstable and noisy analog telephone lines. It inspired other file transfer protocols that allowed ad-hoc online file sharing to flourish. While Christensen himself was always humble about his role in creating the first BBS, his contributions to the field did not go unrecognized. In 1992, Christensen received two Dvorak Awards, including a lifetime achievement award for “outstanding contributions to PC telecommunications.” The following year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored him with the Pioneer Award.

(tags: bbses history computing ward-christensen xmodem networking filesharing)

Brian Merchant on “AI will solve climate change”

The neo-luddite author of “Blood in the Machine” nails the response to Eric Schmidt’s pie-in-the-sky techno-optimism around AI “solving” climate change:

Even without AGI, we already know what we have to do. […] The tricky part—the only part that matters in this rather crucial decade for climate action—is implementation. As impressive as GPT technology or the most state of the art diffusion models may be, they will never, god willing, “solve” the problem of generating what is actually necessary to address climate change: Political will. Political will to break the corporate power that has a stranglehold on energy production, to reorganize our infrastructure and economies accordingly, to push out oil and gas. Even if an AGI came up with a flawless blueprint for building cheap nuclear fusion plants—pure science fiction—who among us thinks that oil and gas companies would readily relinquish their wealth and power and control over the current energy infrastructure? Even that would be a struggle, and AGI’s not going to doing anything like that anytime soon, if at all. Which is why the “AI will solve climate change” thinking is not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.

(tags: ai climate eric-schmidt technology techno-optimism techno-utopianism agi neoluddism brian-merchant)

Capture less than you create

I’ve disagreed with David Heinemeier Hansson on plenty of occasions in the past, but this is one where I’m really happy to find myself in agreement. Matt Mullenwegg of WordPress went low, laying in digs about how DHH didn’t profit from the success of Rails; DHH’s response is perfect:

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever. So don’t! Don’t let the success of others diminish your satisfaction with your own efforts. Unless you’re literally Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, there’ll always be someone richer than you! The rewards I withdraw from open source flow from all the happy programmers who’ve been able to write Ruby to build these amazingly successful web businesses with Rails. That enjoyment only grows the more successful these business are! The more economic activity stems from Rails, the more programmers will be able to find work where they might write Ruby. Maybe I’d feel different if I was a starving open source artist holed up somewhere begrudging the wheels of capitalism. But fate has been more than kind enough to me in that regard. I want for very little, because I’ve been blessed sufficiently. That’s a special kind of wealth: Enough. And that’s also the open source spirit: To let a billion lemons go unsqueezed. To capture vanishingly less than you create. To marvel at a vast commons of software, offered with no strings attached, to any who might wish to build. Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.

(tags: open-source success rewards coding software business life gratitude gift-economy dhh rails philosophy)