Using computers more freely and safely (2023)

Summary

How can we use computers more freely and safely? the punchline Prefer software: with thousands rather than millions of users that seldom requires updates that spawns lots of forks that is easy to modify that you can modify These are my suggestions. Prefer software with thousands rather than millions of users, that doesn't change often, that seems to get forked a lot, that can be modified without specialized tools, and, ideally that you can make small changes to. Yourself. In a single afternoon. You don't have to do all this. Their benefits are additive, but acting on even one of these suggestions is better than nothing. The suggestions are arranged roughly in order of increasing effort and skill required. Trying to follow one suggestion will pave the way for the others, should you choose later to continue down this path. Software without constant updates is easier for forks to keep up with. Forks are signs of easily-modified software, and testimonials from nearby programmers can be promising signs that, hey, maybe making a change yourself won't be very hard. The most important step is the first one. Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures. Gravitating away from monopolies is a way everyone can help improve software, regardless of our abilities or needs. outline Problems Suggestions ↔ Examples That's the whole argument in a nutshell. In the rest of this talk I want to show how to apply these principles in small ways in your day-to-day decision-making, making the world a little better in the process. I'll show this by drawing on my own journey over the past year for examples. I'll first back up to some problems I was responding to at the start, then show how I responded fairly directly to these problems and ended up with the above suggestions. expensive So, problems. The first problem is: software is expensive. We like to think the incremental cost ...