> Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives
Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food.
I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen before it became obvious that these kinds of information channels are not meaningfully enriching despite sounding like they should be to a casual observer.
As much as I like to watch Casey, Prime, etc. on YouTube, they are not going to teach anybody anything. They are just entertainment for software people with a certain viewpoint.
My one data point is that Casey’s handmade hero series, and his immediate mode gui video from way back in 2005, are what introduced me and some friends to an entirely new way to build graphical user interfaces, and I do feel a great appreciation for that. Guys like Ryan Fleury (of RadDbg) and Vjekoslav Krajacic of Filepilot similarly credit Casey with their “radicalization” :)
To your point though, it was less about specific technical knowledge conveyed by these videos and more about him evangelizing a high level approach that many folks otherwise wouldn’t have considered
I want more things like that old hand made hero to exist in the world, but, from an interview with Casey himself, it doesn’t pay well enough to justify. Someone with the chops to put that together is in a position to be doing something much better incentivized.
> Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.
> Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.
> It's like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It's like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that's open source. You get no power and you get no money.
> It's exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not mean that you didn't exploit them. And for the record that's how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that's exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.
> I really don't see the "we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license", all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there's solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it's the standard "real communism has never been tried" argument. AGPL is the only thing that I've seen so far that's an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.
This is the first I've heard of these critiques from him, and as someone who loves open source/Linux, and belives it makes the world better in many ways, I think they're pretty valid. The model has major issues in at least two distinct ways:
1. Not paying for the labor corporations exploit. GPL is better here, but still imperfect. MIT/BSD is awful here. It wouldn't matter in an ideal post-scarcity society, but we don't live in that yet, so it does matter. Until post-scarcity, a better model would route revenue from exploitative capitalist uses back to the creators and/or their desired sinks.
2. The open source bait-and-switch - startups using open source to get users and then pulling up the ladder and going closed source and monopolistic once they have achieved scale to enforce/ achieve lock in.
Usually when I talk to very staunch FOSS zealots they're bewildered that someone would care what a corporation does with their code... at least as long as the license terms are adhered to.
In fact they don't seem to care about money at all, often believing all corporations/capitalism are bad, and that they and everyone else should just be poor and live in the woods or something.
I feel like if you plotted open-source vs proprietary code percentages against the rate of innovation, it would be a bell curve: once you start giving away too much, the incentive to innovate diminishes.
You are making many assumptions. First of all, he is doing the deep dives by researching all those articles, and of course the resulting presentation will be very superficial. The point is exactly to publish a book to allow the reader to partake in the deep dive.
Secondly, nobody said anything about applying that stuff to your daily work.
Prime is an entertainer first and foremost. He talks with confidence, even when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about - which is very often.
Casey is far more measured, careful and accurate. Casey feels like an engineering educator first, who happens to make YouTube videos. I don’t always agree with Casey’s technical opinions, but he seems like a thoughtful guy who thinks things through.
Yeah I was a sense that some people would be more into serious technical explorations and not just distanced review of the past (even though it can bring some knowledge).
Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food.
I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen before it became obvious that these kinds of information channels are not meaningfully enriching despite sounding like they should be to a casual observer.