I still think it's correct. Execution is the part that matters.
Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.
Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
In university in 1995/96 I remember having to put my bank card details into a website to pay for something. I hated the idea that some third party would probably be storing these details and could in theory abuse them or leak them.
I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.
Most people (and most companies) can't tell bad ideas from good ideas. This is also true of LLMs to some degree. They need post-training in specific domains (e.g. coding) to become competent in that specific area.
> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.
Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.
Allow me to disagree. GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT/BSD which have been the greatest catalyst towards the establishment of tech corpo giants and the software ecosystem we have today.
GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.
It's failed in that most software doesn't use it. Because of the psyop, people who would be very sad if Amazon stole their software are licensing it MIT so Amazon can legally steal it.
For many years GNAT Community Edition has used GPL, including its library. That greatly boosted Ada programming language domination over planet and is a good reference for everyone else to also choose GPL for everything if they struggle at dominating. Tears of joy when programmers got to know that standard library in GNAT CE was licensed under GPL.
No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.
Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.
We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.
We don't want to share our thoughts, ideas, feelings and art with machines. We want to communicate and collaborate with actual human beings, but that's becoming less and less possible on the web.
Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.
"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.
But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.
Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?
The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.