202302050000, February 5, 2023

The iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary has pivoted to an audacious new challenge: developing artificial general intelligence—a form of AI that goes beyond mimicking human intelligence to understanding things and solving problems. Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen.

Today, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced it has joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as a new member. The DPGA is part of the response to the United Nation’s call to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere.  The announcement was made as part of the opening keynote at the Free and Open Source Developers Meeting (FOSDEM) and celebration of OSI’s 25 year anniversary.

I was curious to get an update about Fastly’s Fast Forward program, which launched in November to support open source internet projects. It turns out, one of the programs Fastly is financially supporting is Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative.

Despite there being many winners and losers over the course of more than six decades, we can identify a clear pattern that led to the formation of each cohort of technology companies: major technology breakthroughs can act as platforms for new companies and business models.

leaps in software coinciding with leaps in hardware have always led to much bigger markets than an advance in software could create on its own.

As a heuristic, our Platformization Conjecture could be written that the environment for a successful technology startup, over decades, can be simplified as follows:

• Company success is more likely when founded to exploit a new leap of technology.
• Company success is more likely when founded during a period of higher-than-average interest rates.
• Company success is even more likely when companies are founded to exploit a technology innovation that involves both software and hardware during periods of higher-than-average interest rates.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that platformization transfers attention away from the tool and its uses to a growing space around the tool – from the sword to the blacksmith shop to the surrounding town square, eventually the whole bustling town – torch-wielding mobs and all. ==Tools want to be used; platforms want to be hung out in.==

The Rust community has a popular concept of “fearless X”. Fearless concurrency, fearless refactoring, etc.

Rust GUI should be fearless, for the reasons I’ve described. And fearless GUI is GUI that has other virtues:

An A plus would be implementing Bret Victor’s learnable programming. #Bret Victor

Chaos pilots are people who can creatively lead a project through uncertainty. They have negative capability, but they also have other critical skills, such as the ability to create structure within chaos and take action. Leaders who are chaos pilots are able to drive a team forward on a project even as the environment around them fluctuates.

Contributing to open source, in a long-term, productive way, is hard. It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires learning a lot of general skills and specific quirks about your chosen project. The only way for most people to get there is to have long term relationships with people who can teach them. Those relationships can be started at a sprint or a hackathon, or via a random comment in an issue tracker, but they can’t be nourished there. That’s a much longer process.