Decent technologies should leverage the fall of intellectual "property".
CJDNS, IPFS, Dat, SSB, et. al. are paving a way to a parallel crisis for propertarians as Automation is paving one for proletarians / lumpen proletarians.
@fabianhjr how does automation create a crisis for the proletariat? automation will make the propertarians obsolete and liberate the proles!
@gc as long as they remain dispossessed of the means of production, specially including automated means of production, they would be increasingly pushed towards the lumpenproletariat.
@fabianhjr @gc Also proles kept out of the loop of finance, logistics, and everything that goes in the data centre. Which is why decentralisation is so important.
The workers may control the real economy, but they can do little with it if they don't control the means of information.
@h @fabianhjr agreed, power is logistic these days. which is why I think it's so frickin important that we own our servers, btw. if mastodon has slayed fb and birdsite and reigns supreme 20 years from now, it won't mean shit if all the instances are hosted on aws
@gc @fabianhjr Also making our own computers will become more relevant as unencumbered general purpose computing gear becomes increasingly difficult to find.
@h @fabianhjr what??? there are so so so so many unused, perfectly good general purpose computers already lying around and just going to waste that it's not even funny. most people already own several, at least in america. making our own processors is an incredibly difficult thing to do and turning an old desktop into a server is not, so let's save ourselves the trouble and worry about that once/if we run out of all the processors we already have.
@gc @fabianhjr Firstly, that's not easily reproducible for most people. Refurbishing and rehabbing a server to a reliable and useful state takes some specific know-how that is in short supply. Not everybody has the ability or desire to become a sysadmin, and that's perfectly fine, just as most people aren't car repair technicians. But everybody needs, with increasing urgency, to get their own information sorted and under control.
A computing of the people that works for the people is needed.
@h @fabianhjr I'm down, but how exactly do you plan on building this computing of the people for the people? you don't want to use what the people already have, like the countless desktops, laptops and phones lying around, as servers, bc it would be too difficult. are you proposing that we build our own processors instead? bc that's also 'not easily reproducible by most people' and definitely requires 'specific know-how that is in short supply.' like are you just gonna build a chip foundry lol
@gc @fabianhjr A few people are monitoring the progress of IC fabbing, and some integrated circuits comparable to the complexity of an early 8086 processor are on the brink of becoming possible using a process similar to 3d printing, etching on silicon. Still a long way to go, but it will eventually become possible.
Additionally, people like @jjg , @vertigo , @LinuxSocist have the know-how and want to explore collaborative or coop ownership of production.
@LinuxSocist @vertigo @jjg @fabianhjr @gc
If the owners of a coop in the near future begin to produce general purpose computing, and their methods become reproducible for other coops to produce them as well, the potential existence of a cooperative market with no central points of failure emerges.
No different in that from the trust relationships that keep the Mastodon federation together.
@gc @fabianhjr @jjg @vertigo @LinuxSocist
Should a powerful adversarial actor decide to take over a tiny operation like the Raspberry Pi or others like them, the amplified damage would be vast and of repercussions impossible to predict.
The web of relationships that hold this industry together are very fragile, and it's no different from other industries where resilience and decentralisation are needed.
Aiming for anti-fragility.
@h @LinuxSocist @vertigo @jjg @fabianhjr while I absolutely agree that we should aim to develop antifragility as cooperatively as possible, we don't have time to wait 10 years to make shitty homebrew 8086s. we need to start empowering people to have more control over their own lives *now,* before shit really hits the fan, not after.
not only that, but we don't need to wait! we could have luxury communism today if we wanted. all the pieces are already there.
@gc I don't think it's shit and I don't think that approach scales, has ever scaled, or is going to scale, for reasons I have already explained. @fabianhjr @jjg @vertigo @LinuxSocist
@h @LinuxSocist @vertigo @jjg @fabianhjr so I've been heavily addicted to 3d printing and additive/digital fabrication more generally for going on 5 years now, homebrew pcb manufacturing as a technology is really starting to mature. but manufacturing cpus? lol. like, sure, maaaaybe in 15 years, but why would you want to? whether you can matters much less than whether you should. and like, it's just such a wildly inefficient way to manufacture a computer lol
@gc Manufacturing your own chips is like 3d printing was before the first reprap when it was still encumbered by patents.
Someone has to start from somewhere otherwise it's never going to happen and we will remain with the likes of global foundries being the single producer of our chips rather than at least a regional silicon coop for the nm level cpu chips and small production run garages for custom MCU chips.
@LinuxSocist @h @vertigo @jjg @fabianhjr @gc Not going to happen. Chip printing is clean-room only work, not something you can do on a bench top.
@Canageek @gc @fabianhjr @jjg @h @LinuxSocist False. Transistors have already been fabricated in toaster ovens. Someone posted a link on Mastodon recently about homebrew silicon lithography, with a small amplifier on the die. I'd try to look it up if I want limited to my phone.
Point being, basic research is happening right now. With time, scale will improve.
@vertigo @LinuxSocist @h @jjg @fabianhjr @gc I wish I had a quote on me on why that won't work. From someone at IBM in the 70s or 80s when they were making chips. Basically went 'A human hair falling across a CPU is equivalent to a redwood falling across a subdivision'
You can't make chips outside a clean room, as any dust, hair, etc, will destroy the chip.
@Canageek
This is a 50 micron process, but they have made progress since this prototype.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebLQkv1NUKI
If people gave up every time a new impossibilitarian annoyance shows up, we would still be cracking a bone on the ground like the monkey in 2001.
@h @vertigo @LinuxSocist @jjg @fabianhjr @gc I really wish people would just abandon youtube for conveying information. Now I have to take two and a half minutes to read something I could in read in 30 seconds in text.
I would understand your complaint if you have a vision or audition impediment, in which case I would only be fitting that I apologise, and I will do that if this is the case, and I will do anything in my power to correct my mistake.
Barring that, we're not here to perform a service for you that you aren't entitled to, acting as your personal search engine agents.
Your two minutes are up, have a nice trip.
@vertigo @LinuxSocist @jjg @fabianhjr @gc @h It is also possible there is a misunderstanding on my part: I'm assuming you are trying to print CPU and GPU type devices. Which means I don't see the point as you'll never catch up to industry? I'd there something useful about chips on the 286 printing scale I'm not getting?
@h @gc @fabianhjr @jjg @LinuxSocist @vertigo As in, I'm assuming that for this to be useful you have to shrink it from microscale to nanoscale, which I know needs a clean room. Is there something useful you can do with microscale chips that you can't but off the shelf?
@Canageek At this stage it is just proving that 1) can produce a homebrew silicon transistor (done by Jeri Ellsworth) and 2) produce an IC (done by Sam Zoolf this year), the next stages will be to automate the production, developing a reliable clean room/environment, miniaturising the process and improving the yield.
@LinuxSocist @h @gc @fabianhjr @jjg @vertigo Wouldn't a more effective way of doing this be setting up a partnership with universities, who already have cleanrooms available for rent, and sometimes have related equipment already?
