I keep hearing about walled gardens, and not how it’s merely a choice among many. Linux works on tablets and phones. What’s that? It’s a janky mess?

Maybe developers could stop looking at the green grass on Apples side of the fence and bring that polish to open-source.

But I imagine that will simply devolve into the mess it already is, with flame wars, and figurative genital punching to prove how hardcore one is for the obfuscated C they cobbled together.

There was time when Linux distributions were thought of as walled gardens. Cobble together just the right collection of source for you! Don’t let Red Hat control your mind! SystemD is a cage for your soul!

Meanwhile, Apple just got the damn job done and moved on.

If it’s a choice between masochistic elitism or filtered content. Hmmm…

> There was time when Linux distributions were thought of as walled gardens. Cobble together just the right collection of source for you! Don’t let Red Hat control your mind!

No, that's just a garden. A garden is where a single trusted entity cultivates the plants it wants in the way it wants. It has boundaries, but not necessarily walls.

Walled gardens are a strict subset of gardens. A walled garden doesn't let you go out and forage from the wilds to augment the produce of the garden.

Neither does Apple’s App Store; users can pick Linux.

Anyone pushing into the App Store specifically then complaining has their own initial choice to blame. But of course that can’t be right…

Linux distros offer a lower-case "app store", a "garden", while also allowing you to straddle the line between the garden and the outside. On the same device, at your own discretion. They don't make it any more difficult than it has to be.

iOS is a "walled garden" because it requires you to be in or out. Like you say, you can "pick Linux", but that's not tearing down walls. That's just leaving the walled area.

The frustration with Apple isn't the fact that they're forcing anybody to use their stuff. It's that they make a lot of cool stuff, and then they go out of their way to make it difficult to use anything not Apple-sanctioned on their stuff. Most OSes don't do this. I like the Linux distro approach better: Provide a garden, but also allow the installation of stuff from other gardens, or from the wilds.

I don't know why you're being derisive of people who have only "their own initial choice to blame". I choose to live in the city where I live, and that has downsides. I even knew those downsides going in! But that doesn't mean I have no right to complain about the downsides. Maybe the upsides still make it worth it to me, and I'm just pushing for a world where I can have those while also fixing what I think is wrong with the place.

Hey, don't hold back, tell us what you really think!

Agreed. Software is not hardware.

Behavioral patterns for a user are not tethered to one ephemeral implementation.

I ran a huge VMWare cluster in 3 data centers across the globe, not so different from an AWS/EKS pipeline.

Yes, I had to treat the hardware like pets to an extent. But the developers had no problem pivoting between VMWare and what we ran in AWS because the software tooling we provided looked the same.

Some folks believe memorizing YouTube videos = expertise.

At least with the founders I’ve worked for it’s hard to agree they are owed that much more.

They fund raised. Poorly.

They offered zero direction, touted a big number as potential revenue.

They traveled ostensibly to fund raise, but usually just brought back personal stories of fun.

While we all slogged on “their” vision, which meant rearranging deck chairs to the march of some alpha non-contributor who can brown nose.

It was effectively our company with some entitled assholes name on the paperwork.

I’m guessing there’s many more founders like that, as I’ve had the “fortune” to work for 3 in the past, versus the one I work for now, who knows the problem space, has worked directly on solutions for years, and shows up everyday with new customers chomping at the bit to sign up.

So I feel confident saying: Most founders are idea people with no skills. Just a used car salesmen personality and a richer network.

Crypto would be more interesting if the networks offered federated compute capabilities.

Owning crypto would be akin to owning a certain amount of capacity to use the network to do work.

Similar to land to farm or build housing on. A foundation to build applications on.

As is it’s just another shiny thing to convert to real currency.

Also, keep in mind Barry Diller is hardly a non-biased voice.

Edit: My bad; I mean if the crypto traders saw it as more than a casino chip to trade for cash.

That is the EVM (Eth, Bsc, Matic) model (spend token as gas to pay for transactions). The EOS model requires staking tokens for CPU and Network, and you must buy RAM (which is account storage) on the open market.

You have described the economic model of smart contract platform cryptocurrencies.

Even Nakamoto chains work the same way, you require previous UTXOs (unspent transaction output) in order to pay the fee to spend them. Owning bitcoin is the right to spend it, and hopefully all the fees required in order to spend it.

Is Ethereum not this?

There might be some interesting applications, but wouldn't all those applications be fully out in the open, both code and data?

Zero-knowledge proofs and whitebox cryptography can probably help, but both are a far cry from general purpose computing / programming models.

Police forces have protections as extension of the state, it was decided they’re necessary to keep the state from being stuck on a catch-22.

The state can’t bring criminal charges if the violation was due to performing work for the state.

It’s legal to sue government agents as private citizens for violation of rights.

Considering some states have already removed this immunity and others are considering it, I don't think it is required. That is to say that the state can and does bring charges for violations done while performing work for the state.

That’s fair. I should say instead the historical basis for such protections is rooted in logic similar to what I wrote.

I predict the demise of this company when one of their entitled rent-a-cops gets 2nd Amendmented for harassing people without legal authority.