Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
> It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo
I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority.
There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
the permaculture of: patches in emails; binaries on usenet; releases / of sources on maybe less savoury personal web sites
otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly
depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy
apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways
so maybe biologic systems over industry in space?
maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
TIS-100 was one example of the general context of "programming in games" or "games as programming" which I've actually played and enjoyed. I get that Factorio has a different game loop and broader sandbox than TIS-100, so I can see where you're coming from. Factorio, on the outset however, hasn't quite gripped me. Again, it might be this particular one's art and overall setup, but TBH I also think that outside of constrained puzzling as you say, I'm much more inclined to work on all those little side projects desperately waiting for attention...
In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems).
Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;)
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
Thundering towers blasting into space is a primal thrill... but what if the hackers can do all of that with some aluminum foil, duct tape, and other things found in every garage workshop?
Big and flashy bets are expensive, many small bets are a far, far better way to explore the design space, especially now that we can share all the results with almost no cost.
The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example.
Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying.
Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on!
The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places.
Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
I gotta say, I think I agree.
Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck.
It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema.
tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun.
(p.s. I love factorio now too)