livingsoft

Close, but no. Software is about the mind, and its ability to shape (and be shaped by) its environment. Software was about "people" back when we had to pool our keystrokes together just to keep simple websites running - now we have the technical means to face the true nature of the problem, which is political: just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry, addicted to ruining their own products for profit.

The principles are correct, but what gwern misses is that the paradigm shift required has nothing to do with AI models. The bottleneck is our medium of communication: the idea of the Web as a consensus reality made of human speech is too rigid for a world where code is a self-growing substance. We need a deeper Web where the packets themselves carry smaller Webs, where the unit of info-exchange evolves from hyperlinks (isolated points of server availability) to Hyperspaces (portable container of home-grown interactive web worlds, combining local and public hyperlinks).

yes, but it can be not so grim - we just need to equip everyone with the means to grow their own local webs, and find a way to connect them by p2p. call it Mycelial Web: federation of local webs that grows by processing the dead material of the open web into personal http worlds grown in containers.

Corporate megasoftware suffers from the same structural problems as ancient megafauna; when there is a fixed amount of material to build the organism, it's almost always more efficient to split it into smaller, more coherent, repeatable bodies that project power through coordination, rather than a single large body that imposes its will on the world via sheer weight and size. The bottleneck was, as in the now-extinct branch of evolution, the viability of intelligence in smaller entities; that is now a solved problem. Now we are headed to an Anthropocene of cyberspace, where software is primarily a personal artefact, with optional collaboration, rather than a product designed and distributed from centralized organizations.

I'm with the UNIX old timers on this one; cleanliness is overrated. Life is messy, creation is messy. More uptime means more mess. Uptime is longevity; there are few things more valuable in life than longevity.

Yes, you found it. Blancs is the browser prototype for non-technical users, but the full system, Mycelium, I'm currently working on towards demos and distribution. I'll be sure to update the YT channel, if you want to follow the progress. I'm also on Twitter @livingsoft_

The author is spot on about the paradigm change of software as a lifeform. Living things provide us with genuine interactions and experiences of learning and growing, without forcing us to understand the code - You can learn to work with animals and plants without understanding their genetics at all. I believe this is how our relationship with software must develop, and in order to get there, we'll need to learn to design and develop software in a completely new way. I've been testing this hypothesis in my spare time, hacking together a server-browser system I call Mycelium. It's a bit like OpenClaw, except you can use it to create private local Webs, and print custom 2D Electron browsers to view and work in these webs.