It’s all about fostering community again, and that’s more than just shared calendars and town events.
It’s “third places” where folks can just hang out and work, play, share, and commiserate without having to pay money to do so.
It’s bringing back establishments that promote lingering and loitering, like food halls or coffee shops, rather than chasing out folks.
It’s about building community centers inside apartment complexes, more public green space, more venues and forums.
Giving people space that doesn’t require a form of payment is the best approach, because humans will take advantage of what’s out there naturally. Sure, structure helps, but space is the issue at present I believe.
Is it? There are a number of third places around here that sit effectively vacant. The few who are passionate about seeing those spaces thrive will tell you that the problem is getting anyone to come, not finding space to host them.
I live in a major metro renowned for its green space, but we absolutely still have a space issue.
* Outdoor spaces close at dusk for the most part, restricting sociability in the winter months when it’s darker, sooner, and longer.
* Winters are cold, making outdoor spaces less usable during those months
* Indoor spaces are exclusively fee-oriented. Coffee shops evict customers after an hour or so, movie theaters can run upwards of $30 a person for a ticket and a snack, malls eject loiterers, gallerias harass anyone clearly not there to do business.
* The few places NOT fee-oriented - like public libraries - are either saturated with use and lack capacity for more folks, or are under-used due to requiring a car to access them.
* Youth in particular lack third-spaces to explore within, fee or no-fee. One roller rink serves the entire north portion of the city and isn’t accessible except by car. Ice rinks are co-opted by hockey teams year-round. Bowling alleys can run $15/person/game, at times, and dwindle in number. Schools are closed except to those involved in extracurriculars after-hours. Arcades are non-existent, the sole skate park closes at dusk, and cops or security harass any group of teenagers they find, especially in parks or public spaces. It’s bad enough as an adult with a car, it’s downright hostile to anyone young or unable to drive.
* The few genuine community centers that do exist, generally operate solely in rich towns that restrict access to citizens, or in impoverished areas and tied to specific special interest agendas for access - many of which may be good, but many more attempt to convert visitors to religions or political groups.
* Even if someone has space in their apartment to host, landlords have gotten so sleazy that parking for visitors is either non-existent or costs money to utilize, thus reducing the ability to host at all without spending more money.
But you’re right, it’s not necessarily a space issue.
It’s a money issue, in that we’ve built a society where you’re barred from enjoyment, self-discovery, or group fulfillment unless you’re spending $20 an hour or white and old enough to be invisible to cops and Karens.
It is not. While said third places obviously do need resources to operate, that has already been figured out by those passionate to make a go of having the third place. Generous donations, grants, and fundraising go a long way.
I do buy that it is somewhat of a marketing problem. I expect a lot of people don't even know they exist. I was once talking to someone who literally lives just three doors down from one of those third places and it never occurred to him that he could even go in. But he also hasn't even now that he knows he can. That's quite telling.
I can also agree that there is a bit of a bootstrapping problem. If you show up and there is only a couple of other people there, you're not likely to return. If it was full of people, that'd be more compelling.
But these third places did thrive once upon a time. The bootstrapping problem was solved. The marketing problem was solved. It all fell apart because people found other things to do. The reality is that the population at large does not see a need for third places (of the type you speak) anymore. Houses nowadays are way bigger and more comfortable than they used to be so there isn't as much feeling of pressure to get out, there are more activities going on to occupy one's time[1], of course technology has become a significant distraction, etc.
[1] For example, my grandparents' generation would have never heard of putting their children in sports. My parents' generation would take their kids to a sport about once a week. Nowadays parents are carting their kids off to sporting events every single night of the week! That doesn't leave time to occupy a third place[2].
[2] The sporting event venue is technically a third place[3], granted, but if you've been to one you'll know they aren't particularly social for the parents. They mostly just sit there watching their children (or phone, quite often), not to mention that the considerable time spent in the car travelling from far off place to far off place to get to the competition is not social at all. I don't think that is what you have in mind with respect to the greater conversation.
[3] Open to the public, free of charge. If I am wrong above and this is what you did have in mind, then it serves as another example of the space being there with no need for you to open your wallet. All you have to do is show up. But will you? I already know the answer is "No." The actual parents don't even look like they want to be there most of the time.
Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.
If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
Frustratingly, while I sympathize with their very real plight, I also have to agree with OP’s ultimate decision.
OSS was exploited by hyperscalers to build trillion-dollar industries atop of, but without ever suitably compensating, the creators of much of those tools for their work or sharing in the profit. Before AI, the community was already at a breaking point between private enterprise spouting “supply chain” bullshit at them to demand fixes and attention, or steamrolled small devs to prop up a big corp’s trademark or product, all the while never actually paying enough for the proper development and support of those products - look at NPM (leftpad and kik) as prime examples. Now you have these same big tech ghouls scraping small sites into oblivion with hostile bots, making token predictors that are deliberately engineered to never, ever direct someone to a primary source or site except as an absolute last resort (to keep folks “in app” for engagement metrics), and openly pitching AI coding agents as replacements for human coders forever.
In that context, it’s no fucking wonder that the OSS community is becoming increasingly hostile to the very norms that have left most of them broke and increasingly destitute. Hell, for up-and-coming devs emerging from bootcamps, the mantra of “contribute to OSS” makes zero sense in a Capitalist marketplace that’s pivoting hard towards AI-as-human-replacement; as the OP points out, why bother training your own replacement?
OSS won’t die, but this is a particularly painful chapter that emphasizes it cannot support itself through the (non-existent) generosity of Capital. Alternate funding schemes and organization models are needed to prepare and support it for the future, be they government grants, Academia sponsors, or outright Gov-funded Private or Public Corporations (e.g., BBC, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP), etc). Updates to OSS licensing schemes barring use-cases or with more substantial teeth for commercial use are also needed, toeing the line between empowering users of general computing and extracting reasonable payments from businesses or enterprises.
My thoughts exactly. As someone who has generally learned better and faster through labs or real world work, this is exactly how I intend to teach myself Ansible while also migrating some stuff to containers: throw at my current VMs, identify configs, and then migrate or enroll accordingly.
Guilty party, here. I feel I can explain myself though, or at least offer context about why I own about a dozen records and no way whatsoever to play them.
I’m a recovering audiophile. I got into the hobby because I enjoy technology in its myriad aspects, and had discovered that good speakers can make things sound better. As I began accruing CDs and re-ripping into lossless audio, I also began collecting vinyls via Record Store Day events of bands or artists I found interesting at the time, or the odd Collector’s Edition bundles of albums or games. The thinking was that when I finally settled into my own place, I could invest into some Hi-Fi kit to play them back.
Well, I fell out of the audiophile sphere when I got into data analysis, physics, human biology, and psychology: I had become inoculated against the bullshit that permeates the space, but still recognized the value of my album collection. I’d also pivoted into preservation, and so I began accepting relatives’ collections of older formats, like 78s. I still lacked playback mechanisms, though I now had the space and budget - just more pressing projects than a record playback setup.
And so here I am in 2025, in an apartment that transmits energy between units, with an upstairs neighbor that does somersaults and tumbles all day (thus shaking the space slightly). The cost of everything has skyrocketed, but it’s no longer a matter of a turntable and a phono stage to get going (need isolation as well, and that ain’t cheap). I’ve also - shockingly - got other, more pressing projects in front of me, one of which is a bedroom Hi-Fi setup that has physical controls for music streaming instead of smartphone apps - again, not remotely cheap.
Right now, my meager collection sits in a crate under the sofa, languishing. One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
>> One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
I've got news for you: you won't. Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough. Also it's 2026, and being the first day of the new year the PERFECT time to just go ahead and do it. You could probably buy a used record player today for < $50 and be listening to a record.
> Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.
As someone with OCD: guilty!
In all seriousness though, I do have bigger, more important projects that consume the limited Capital I have first: finding new employment for one, replacing the sagging IKEA furniture and wobbly Amazon TV stands with something more resilient and long-lasting (eyeballing Salamander Designs for that), likely a new mattress for the bedroom, the list goes on.
That said, you're right in that I should be keeping a list of components updated with pricing and watching for deals. I know what I need, I just haven't chosen it yet, and that's the first step in any project build.
To second the other commenter, just go for it! Music doesn’t have to be blaring to be enjoyed. Just buy some turntable and begin enjoying your collection. Heck, you could even use headphones. I have a pair of open back headphones with a cable that is like 15 feet in length. So I can easily connect to my receiver and sit back and listen on the couch.
Other than the greenhorn (who is clearly baiting), you and skeeter did rightly call out my waffling and delaying. The kicker is that I already have 99% of the kit, and all I'm missing is a phono stage and turntable to get going. The issue remains that real life keeps jumbling my priority list, and thus I delay and delay it for other things.
At the very least, I need to sit down and choose the turntable and phono stage I want, at a price point and feature set that matches my current kit. I can then setup deal monitoring to help me reprioritize that project upward if something good emerges.
You are not a recovering audiophile at all, you are still fully in that rabbithole. Instead of enjoying music you ramble about your neighbor shaking and isolation etc.
You also didn't pivoted into preservation, it just happened because of whatever 'audiophile' thinking you think you have.
At the end you just stream music as everyone else.
I mean, yeah, but the parallels OP is drawing really kinda feel like the lingering whispers of the “gold standard” crowd rather than anything more substantial.
For the working classes, the peak was the dotcom bubble - everything after that has been repeated speculative bubbles attempting to create explosive growth from nothing of substance, as much a deliberate decision of Capital to weaken the working classes while extracting wealth as it was a desperation gambit by an increasingly stable (but not yet stagnant circa mid-2000s) western hemisphere and its governments. Gold alone isn’t an indicator of this, so much as all asset prices skyrocketing to the moon while worker wages remained relatively flat and precarity increased. Metals, securities, housing, land, all of it has appreciated faster than working wages have kept pace, reflecting a siphoning of that wealth into fewer hands.
Gold just makes the story “neater” to tell to folks lamenting the heyday of Breton Woods.
Fuck yes I love this attitude to transparency and code-based organization. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going in the morning for work, the kind of organization and utility I honestly aspire to implement someday.
As many commenters rightly point out, this doesn't run the human side of the company. It could, though, if the company took this approach seriously enough. My personal two cents, it could be done as a separate monorepo, provided the company and its staff remain disciplined in its execution and maintenance. It'd be far easier to have a CSV dictate employees and RBAC rather than bootstrapping Active Directory and fussing with its integrations/tentacles. Putting department processes into open documentation removes obfuscation and a significant degree of process politics, enabling more staff to engage in self-service rather than figuring out who wields the power to do a thing.
I really love everything about this, and I'd like to see more of it, AI or not. Less obfuscation and more transparency is how you increase velocity in any organization.
I am wary of the long-term prospects of GOG, but then again, I've always been wary of that since they launched - and they consistently prove me wrong.
GOG remains my first choice when I go looking for PC titles. I think it should be everyone's first choice, if I'm honest, even if Steam currently operates in a relatively consumer-friendly way. Having those offline patches and installers is a freedom you just cannot match on Steam or any other platform, and they're highly relevant to households like mine where game sharing is being cracked down upon by major publishers (looking at you, Nintendo).
This. Folks trying to nullify his current position based on his recent work history alone with Google are deliberately trying to undermine his credibility through distraction tactics.
Maybe its me but I had to look at the term sealioning and for context for other people
According to merriam-webster, sealioning/sealions are:
> 'Sealioning' is a form of trolling meant to exhaust the other debate participant with no intention of real discourse.
> Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.
A person trying to learn doesn’t constantly disagree/contradict you and never express that their understanding has improved. A person sealioning always finds a reason to erode whatever you say with every response. At some point they need to nod or at least agree with something except in the most extreme cases.
It also doesn’t help their case that they somehow have a such a starkly contradictory opinion on something they ostensibly don’t know anything/are legitimately asking questions about. They should ask a question or two and then just listen.
It’s just one of those things that falls under “I know it when I see it.”
One of the best things I read which genuinely has impact (I think) on me is the book, How to win friends and influence people.
It fundamentally changed how I viewed debates etc. from a young age so I never really sea-lioned that much hopefully.
But if I had to summarize the most useful and on topic quote from the book its that.
"I may be wrong, I usually am"
Lines like this give me a humble nature to fall back on. Even socrates said that the only thing I know is that I know nothing so if he doesn't know nothing, then chances are I can be wrong about things I know too.
Knowing that you can be wrong gives an understanding that both of you are just discussing and not debating and as such the spirit becomes cooperative and not competitive.
Although in all fairness, I should probably try to be a more keen listener but its something that I am working on too, any opinions on how to be a better listener too perhaps?
I definitely try to work on my listening every day, though I would say at best it’s been a mixed bag ha. Just something I’m always having to work on.
I like the “does it need to be said by me right now?” test a lot when I can actually remember to apply it in the moment. I forgot where I learned it but somebody basically put it like this: Before you say anything, ask yourself 3 questions
1. Does it need to be said?
2. Does it need to be said by me?
3. Does it need to be said by me right now?
You work your way down the list one at a time and if the answer is still yes by the time you hit 3, then go ahead.
Of course, it's also the opinion of someone who had expressed no interest in debate in the first place when confronted by hordes of midwits "debating" them with exaggerated civility... starting off by asking if they had a source for their claim that the pope was a Catholic and if they did have a source for the claim that the Pope was a Catholic, clearly appealing to the authority of the Vatican on the matter was simply the Argumentum ad Verecundiam logical fallacy and they've been nothing but civil in demanding a point by point refutation of a three hour YouTube video in which a raving lunatic insists that the Pope is not a Catholic, and generally "winning debates" by having more time and willingness to indulge stupidity than people who weren't even particularly interested in being opponents...
(I make no comment on the claims about Rob Pike, but look forward to people arguing I have the wrong opinion on him regardless ;)
The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.
Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
It’s possible, yes, for someone to change their mind. But this process comes with sympathy for all the people who haven’t yet had the realization, which doesn’t seem to be in evidence.
Cognitive dissonance is, again, exactly my point. If you sat him down and asked him to describe in detail how some guy setting up a server rack is similar to a rapist, I’m pretty confident he’d admit the metaphor was overheated. But he didn’t sit himself down to ask.
I don't think he claimed that "some guy setting up a server rack" is similar to a rapist. I think he's blaming the corporations. I don't think that individuals can have that big of an effect on the environment (outliers like Thomas Midgley Jr. excepted, of course).
I think "you people" is meant to mean the corporations in general, or if any one person is culpable, the CEOs. Who are definitely not just "some guy setting up a server rack."
I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.
I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.
"Fuck you I hate AI" isn't exactly a deep statement needing credibility. It's the same knee jerk lacking in nuance shit we see repeated over and over and over.
If anyone were actually interested in a conversation there is probably one to be had about particular applications of gen-AI, but any flat out blanket statements like his are not worthy of any discussion. Gen-AI has plenty of uses that are very valuable to society. E.g. in science and medicine.
Also, it's not "sealioning" to point out that if you're going to be righteous about a topic, perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.
That still doesn't make him credible on this topic nor does it make his rant anything more than a hateful rant in the big bucket of anti-AI shit posts. The guy worked for fucking Google. You literally can't be on a high horse having worked for Google for so long.
It’s “third places” where folks can just hang out and work, play, share, and commiserate without having to pay money to do so.
It’s bringing back establishments that promote lingering and loitering, like food halls or coffee shops, rather than chasing out folks.
It’s about building community centers inside apartment complexes, more public green space, more venues and forums.
Giving people space that doesn’t require a form of payment is the best approach, because humans will take advantage of what’s out there naturally. Sure, structure helps, but space is the issue at present I believe.
reply