215 sats \ 10 replies \ @elvismercury 14 Dec 2023 \ on: Everyone Builds Software tech
I think you've touched on one of the two most interesting things in the world (the other is btc, of course) -- what happens when the bar to develop software becomes 90% lower? What kind of software do we get that we didn't have before, and what are the knock-on effects on society?
Now imagine the intersection of that with btc. Given that the people who need it most are the ones least likely to have the software skills to make things with it, the implications are hard to wrap your mind around.
agreed, the intersection of this idea with btc is profound.
this idea makes software (probably the most valuable/scalable thing in the world today?) abundant and cheap at the same time as digital scarcity is emerging to provide more signal about what might be worth our time to pay attention to
the combination is far more interesting than either by itself
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You may enjoy this if you haven't seen it before. Tons of food for thought on this general vibe / idea.
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thanks for sharing! never seen this. looks great. wish I could listen to it as a pod/audio track somewhere, but I can't find anything like that
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I'd love an audio version as well. Is there an easy to use bot that can reverse-transcribe and turn into a pod? @MerryOscar
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this idea makes software (probably the most valuable/scalable thing in the world today?)
i think have read somewhere that the biggest advantage of tech companies is that all the software they write has basically 0 variable costs in the long run.
you can write code once (paying developers a fixed salary), and then "sell it" an infinite amount of times for free.
like SN: we're just writing code but the code that @k00b wrote 2 years ago is probably still running in here somewhere, doing its job forever or until it got replaced by something better.
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yup, that's exactly why software is so valuable. write once, sell infinite.
the challenge with a lot of software businesses is that there's still a cost to sell the software. you need to own a channel to the customer (sales people, email distribution list, brand awareness, etc.). So while the software could be sold infinite times you still have to find/convince customers to buy it.
fortunately @k00b doesn't really have much cost of sales since we're just a community creating together so it can grow organically. So something he built 2 years ago can still run and continue to serve us indefinitely.
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what happens when the bar to develop software becomes 90% lower? What kind of software do we get
we will probably get even more insecure code
that we didn't have before
oh, then nvm, since we already have insecure code. mhh, maybe more code for automation? like more FOSS code for smart homes.
and what are the knock-on effects on society?
mhh, maybe people will not only grow their own food but also "grow" their own code? not sure what exactly that would mean though.
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kind of kidding, but there's some truth to it? ;)
I wonder if security can be more of a default if we build the right atomic blocks in code-gen. We're not there today, but I don't see why this future couldn't be built?
I like the idea of "grow your own code". It's kind of a similar energy. The mass-market, mass-produced stuff comes with a lot of tradeoffs. Historically we've been okay accepting these tradeoffs, because it was such a step-change improvement to even have software. But now/soon if we can have cheap/quality software we can have more personalized/bespoke experiences.
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I wonder if security can be more of a default if we build the right atomic blocks in code-gen. We're not there today, but I don't see why this future couldn't be built?
I know this sounds like the way things should be built.
But the problem isn't why it couldn't be built. The problem is: Should we build it?
Do you really want to have atomic blocks on which we build everything on top?
Only to find out after years that there was a critical bug for years (see heartbleed iirc) in some absolutely critical code block that not enough people cared to review because everyone was like: surely, enough other people are going to review it, it's such important code!
And then everything is vulnerable at once. Reading about the history of heartbleed scared me so much, I literally have no idea how we even made it so far, lol
So I would rather not see such a future unless we really can proof that code is secure. But I don't see how.
You can imagine this problem to be related to bitcoin. Everything we build on top of bitcoin will fail if bitcoin fails.
Do we want to build our whole society the same way?
I am not sure yet, lol
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After writing this response, I realized we don't have ~security yet and I posted a video about heartbleed there now haha
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