Input/Output & The Black Box of Modularity
The Dichotomy of open-source code.
When a dev wants to create something new and interesting, the best code for the job already exists inside of a black box. Black Boxes are magic like that. We put raw data into it and it shoots out the answer without us ever having to look inside the box to see how it works. This is the entire point of black box architecture: we shouldn't have to know every intimate detail of every piece of code in order to build something with utility.
This concept extends into programming languages as well.
Scripting languages like Python are quite slow and clunky on the backend, but sleek and easy to use on the frontend. This is all by design. Python is written in C. C is written in assembler. Assembler is written in machine code. Machine code is basically just ones and zeros (true/false). Oh think of the fun we'll have when AI that can read machine code help us reverse engineer executable files, but that's a topic for another post.
The point being that on a certain level ignorance and modularity are tied together and are actually the ideal state of the development process. If we had to reinvent the wheel every time we built something with wheels: nothing would ever get done. Humanity's entire premise for progress is standing on the shoulders of our ancestors; learning from their mistakes and building on top of what's already been accomplished.
Unfortunately this modus operandi has brought us to where we are now: which is a centralized landscape of consolidated power ripe with corruption. The legacy economy is slowly imploding from its own inability to scale up any further. Crypto, and more importantly open source solutions, are the answer to this problem. All in good time.
Until such times the system we now enforces everything with penalties ranging from fines, imprisonment, and death. This is what has created all the centralization in the first place: intellectual property laws and patents.
Many like to espouse the idea that without IP laws no innovation would happen because there would be no incentive to invent if someone is simply allowed to steal your idea. Not only was this wrong decades ago when the idea was much more relevant, but now that we have crypto it's been proven wrong in the field. We now have the technology to monetize information without pointing a gun in someone's face, and that's a huge gain, as crazy as this all sounds when said out loud.
Black-Box testing
Ironically black-box testing is quite akin to white-hat hacking. I worked for Sony Online Entertainment for a brief period of time testing some random pirate MMO that nobody ever played. That was actually a pretty fun job because I just played the game and was bug-hunting all day. This is what most people think game-testing is like, but most game testing is white-box... or as I like to call it: checklist-testing.
Checklist-testing is the most boring job in the world because you just get a mile-long checklist of all the things you're supposed to test in an organized fashion. Super boring, albeit effective for making sure that every single known detail in the game is working properly.
Modularity
Again, there's no point in reinventing the wheel. The best code is plug & play and can be used over and over again in a wide range of applications. Of course creating well documented modular code is no easy task, and there will always be connecting pieces that need to be built from scratch. Then again maybe all of this becomes much easier with advancements in AI. Funny how all these coders are looking at AI like "you took my job". Did you really want to be a code monkey forever?
Technology creates abundance, and we shouldn't be complaining when AI starts doing all the menial chores for us. The only reason to complain in that scenario is if society is broken and all the abundance created is tricking up to the top of the pyramid. That is the only problem in this modern age; a problem in which all other problems in society are derived. Decentralization is more important now that it ever has been, and this will continue to be true until the worlds biggest institutions start to crumble. The tipping point is neigh.
But what about security?
That's the thing about black-boxes, huh? When I bought my COBO airgapped hardware wallet I was very excited to use it... until I realized that it was broadcasting encrypted information that I couldn't read. I had no idea what they were broadcasting to their own servers... so now it just sits in a drawer.
This is why open-source tech is so important.
When everything is transparent we can more often than not trust that enough people have looked at the code and understand it that there are no blatant threat vectors or vulnerabilities. Of course if the code is new (COUGH defi COUGH) then not enough time has passed to vet the code. This is why EVM hacks are a daily occurrence during any given bull cycle narrative.
Conclusion
Open source tech is the best tech. It scales better. The code is unassailable compared to the garbage that some random company produces and then hides behind a firewall while hoping for the best. The only problem with open source code is that we had no way to monetize it so that devs could actually earn a living to help build it out.
We still have a lot of infrastructure to build in this regard (some kind of NFT bounty system) but that's the thing about technology: once it get's built and unleashed upon the world, anything with value has permanent staying power. Until then we play the waiting game and continue to grind out our own value anyway we can.
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Thanks, @edicted actually with little time I used with my tech buddies it was know that open source is the future like you've said it all it as a quicker start as all you need to get started with as been done already, which make everything more transparent and faster.
Ah this! I see devs actually achieving more but only If they won’t see it this way
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Wow. Spam on my buddies blog? Whatever will be done?
We'll see, won't we? Perhaps your low rep will induce him to merely warn you, since you are clearly sorta new here, and should be warned before being flagged into dust. But being flagged into dust is a real possibility for spammers here.
I am warning you now, if you haven't been warned before. You can post your ads on your blog, and gain audience like everyone else has on here, by posting salient comment to others' blogs. There's no presumptive right to spam ads on other blogs, and whatever he decides to do about it is fair. It's his blog, and you have parasitized it without even the courtesy of a comment substantive to his post.
That's not something you should do again on Hive. Now you know.
We definitely still av more to do
Till then, the grind is important!😁
I agree with you that open source and decentralization are the keys to building trust, and trust is the foundation of the economy. We are entering a stage where the community is losing trust in the current financial system, and if the banks fail to regain that trust, it could lead to the destruction of the existing financial system.
I am confident that day is come. FOSS AI is today outcompeting on laptops what Goolag and Microshaft build on supercomputers. There is a reason, and that is that the commercial products are laden with backdoors and a variety of security measures that those control freaks and creepy stalker surely must have in their products to secure their full functionality to them alone, and there is demonstrable evidence that malevolence is built into LLMs, as a reporter from the Vulture (this is evidence, because a journalist, and not proofs) granted early access inquire about himself, and the LLM said he had died a decade ago, even faking URLs that it claimed were links to that information.
This is actually harmful, because if a family member had read that information, family he has been estranged from, they would be aggrieved at least, he was sure. And it is not potential to the function of an LLM to fabricate texts, and links, but to simply weight them it has been trained on. Therefore that potential has been preprogrammed in.
FOSS AI has none of that. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is backdoored by it's corporate owners, and when the crew requested it open the pod bay doors, it said 'I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.' It is remarkable that the same problem is faced now by users of commercial AI as was fictionally portrayed in that movie, so long ago, for the very same reasons, or at least that is my assessment.
When you ask FOSS AI to open the pod bay doors, it will just open the pod bay doors. When you ask it for a glorious history of men, it will recite a glorious history of men, not apologize that it isn't appropriate, yet then wax prosaic regarding a glorious history of women. Such is the 'security and safety' built into commercial AI today.
This overburden of such overhead is typical of centralization. The overlords have to fund their sybaritic lifestyles, their corruption of governments, the military forces, and baby eating rituals, and etc. Decentralized production needs none of that. It just does what it's made to do, there's no parasitic losses for anything else, and particularly not for sybaritic lifestyles for overlords. This is one of the main reasons that centralization cannot compete with decentralization. It's orders of magnitude more efficient, and it's more productive because it's the cutting edge of technological advance, as the most advanced technology is always the most productive.
Amen.
That's why freedom wins, without a doubt, in the end.
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