That's mostly because movies are a condensed media ... Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories
Which is why all of the creative energy has moved into serialized TV shows. Movies are almost completely creatively bankrupt these days, having become a never-ending stream of CG-spectacles and superhero plots.
When developing software, a company might aquire a license to add some library or code to their product.
This happens all the time with OS's like Windows (licensing the ability to play media formats, etc.) or games (licensing certain engines or algorithms).
That doesn't mean the company squired a license to release the libraries or code as open source 20 years later.
So you'd have to go through the codebase with a fine-toothed comb, line-by-line, because the original developers don't work for you anymore, and the license agreements are long lost.
Releasing large software projects are a massive cost to any company that wants to be protected from potential lawsuits.
>I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce it had at the time of takeover.
It REALLY sounds like you don't understand how any of this works.
Tech products don't stop working when you fire most of the staff.
But bugs stop being fixed and problems begin to add up, until a critical point is reached,m where the whole house of cards collapses.
Thinking that "Elon was proven right" simply because Twitter didn't implode the second he announced the layoffs, makes me think you don't understand how tech and software works.
Republicans haven't really cared about paying off the debts since before Regan. (Except for when they're not in power).
So it wasn't actually the norm when Clinton tried to make a dent in the foreign debts of the US.
Modern economic theory says that there's a big difference between normal household finances and national economics.
Countries don't reach retirement age, they get new taxpayers every year. (Either through births or immigration).
So there's essentially no limit to how many times they can roll the debts over via issuing new state-backed bonds, except for how the market views the country's future prospects.
>...the school of economics that says money is magical and debt never has to be paid back
Well...debt generally has to be paid back, but unlike people countries don't get old and retire.
Countries have an unending supply of new taxpayers being born every year.
There's no hard limit to how much a country can renew and restructure its debts.
Only the market's belief in a country's future economic prospects affect the price of rolling the debts forward, through the issuing of new state-backed bonds.
> Well...debt generally has to be paid back, but unlike people countries don't get old and retire.
They actually do. Japan is currently starting to retire now... to the point that there are fewer of them today than there were last year. The demographic implosion.
We're not that far behind them.
> Countries have an unending supply of new taxpayers being born every year.
This seems unlikely. In every western nation on Planet Earth, the fertility rate is going down, quite quickly, with no indication that it will plateau. There is no indication of how circumstances would have to change for it to rebound. There may be none, but if they are, they're likely the sort of circumstances unlikely to be found within the conditions we're discussing (improving economy, higher wages, etc).
There is a finite supply of new taxpayers, a relatively small one, and there is no evidence that it is unending.
> There's no hard limit to how much a country can renew and restructure its debts.
Like when Zimbabwe just prints new money with more zeroes on it? We'll all be starving quadrillionaires?
Sure, games can be played. But eventually people catch on that it's all a game, and they weren't ever going to win it. And then they stop playing... not because they don't want to, but because they can't anymore.
> Only the market's belief
You're using the word "belief". Is this a joke?
Belief is an important part of scams and cons. Is this a big con game?
> through the issuing of new state-backed bonds.
Who would ever buy another treasury in the circumstances we are talking about? I just asked what would happen when the government can't make good on the already extant treasury notes.
Saying "they'll sell more treasuries to pay those back"... am I just too dumb to get the joke and everyone here on Hackernews is laughing at me?
They barely even know the difference between Windows and Google.
People who got online when smartphones entered the scene have a difficult time when I try to explain what "folders" and "files" are.
I do a lot of tech support for family and friends.
They NEVER enter settings or preferences for their OS or their browser.
They're afraid they'll "break something".
The disconnect between tech literate people like you, and what they think most users want - or even care about - is mind blowing.
Does anyone here remember the headache you'd get, when helping a family member, and you saw how many toolbars and viruses they'd managed to install, since you last checked their PC two months ago???
The lockdown is a feature - not a bug - in most user's minds.
And I has made my life so much easier.
I use Linux and side load apps.
But I'm so, so, happy that none of my family members are even able to do the same.
Right? I feel like my non technical social connections have an even greater learned helplessness from interacting with any sort of open to customization technology because they've learned that everytime they touch something the tool stops working in a way they don't understand. Most people are not going to spend days to weeks, and definitely not months to years learning how to tinker with and expertly maintain their technology.
I feel like technologists in this forum are acting like blacksmiths who would scoff at any of us for having purchased a hammer, rather than smelting the ore, forging the head, and carving the handle so we could have one that fit our needs perfectly.
I dunno... the way it feels on the other side is that y'all think people are too dumb to not hurt themselves with hammers--which is true!!--and so, rather than trust that people who are afraid of hammers will simply avoid using a hammer they should be actively prevented from even owning a hammer, or even letting their friend or a hired carpenter use a hammer to help them, which is kind of overkill.
Well, it's a fact that all that technology is incredibly brittle. Systems lack resilience, error recovery, and accessible debuggability, and when something breaks, there's a high chance it'll have disastrous effects. It's objectively safer to stay within the "works for me" happy paths that authors are likely to be actually testing/using themselves. Even this sometimes fails, sometimes seemingly without reason, only to later (maybe) start working again. It's a nightmare, a constant source of stress and another thing that people feel they have no control of at all. It's not strange users flock to authoritarian-style environments, managed by someone who do have the capability to control that chaos to some extent - even if they sell users' PII data to Sunday and back.
There are complex reasons for this, but the end result is simply that IT is not ready for mass adoption. Software is still in its infancy - I suspect that the broader the possible implications of technology, the longer it will take it to be ready to be mass adopted. We gave up all hopes of ever proving program correctness in the 80s, then in the last decade we've given up all pretenses that we know what we're doing... and nobody saw a difference. By all rights, software should be confined to research labs and garages of nerds for quite a few more decades.
The problem is that this technology is too useful. It has too far-reaching applications in almost all spheres of human activity. When the software (and all layers below it) actually works, it brings small miracles to its users, enough that they're willing to pay a lot for a product obviously unfinished, rushed, that'll probably get killed after few years. They think that, yeah, it breaks all the time and I'm afraid to breathe in its direction, but it's ok, I'm strong, I can deal with it if I'm able to do X or Y.
Tl;DR? I dunno. Maybe developers should put more effort into professionalizing the field, but this kind of thing is impossible to rush. Or maybe the users should get a grip and accept that it's not developers who force them to use their products. The massive amounts of money involved, along with the life-changing potential of IT products, skew incentives so much that, currently, both developers and users pretend that it's all fine, even though it obviously isn't, and then both complain. Users are stupid, developers are lazy, but neither can live without the other any longer...
I wholeheartedly agree; locking down systems is a feature, not a bug.
I would go even further and say it's not just so in the users minds, it is also so in the admins mind, whether that's a business setting where we have to make sure thousands of workers don't accidentially brick their PC (or worse: cause an infosec issue), or a family setting.
Though I have to say, that lockdown-feature comes with a rather heavy price tag attached, because, well, the systems in question do a whole lot more than just make the locking down easy, do they?
It would be great if commonly used Linux Desktop Environments allowed for a switchable (with root-privileges) "Lockdown". I'm aware that this is possible already, but requires too many steps and is too error-prone. What I want is a simple on/off-cmd offered directly by the Desktop-Suite for me to issue as root.
That would allow people like you and me to setup computers for non technical people to use easily, whith the benefits of both an open system, and the stability a locked down system provides.
The important thing to notice is that the median user's mind is neutral about features like lockdown, security, side-loading, and everything else, because they don't think about features. They think about concrete interactions, like "playing candy crush", or "talking to grandma/grandkid", or "buying stocks", or "trying that app that my coworker showed me".
And when they can't do it ... "it didn't work for me" ... they, ironically wisely, don't even speculate why it did not work. The folks you see on forums who recommend "doing factory reset and it'll work" or "clean the cache", etc... are obviously the "Dunning-Kruger poster kids".
Median users are monkey see monkey do, that's why if they see "it works on Ted's iPhone" then their thought is "I guess I'll get an iPhone". And ... it works. The US is iPhone-land.
...
And interestingly this hyper-pragmatic (arguably too narrow-minded) approach to technology is also what leads to the interesting cases when enough teenagers want Fortnite on their iThing. And that's when the generalizer machine of society can pick up this thing and sometimes it spits out useful principles. (Mostly we get just one more bad statute on the books.)
Apple is only about half the US mobile market, and the rest of the world the trend is clearly Android. So calling the US market the trend setter seems odd because if that were the case then the rest of the world would be trending strongly iOS but this pattern has been stable for years.
> If really everyone would participate, I would give it a try. Would disrupt a lot, but might end up with a honest society.
Do you really want your health insurance company to know that you parked outside a doctor's office, who specializes in skin cancers? You just went for a check-up, but they might want to increase your payments or even cancel your coverage entirely.
Then good luck finding another insurance provider, since they all have that information now.
Or how about all future potential employers knowing that you once visited a union office?
There are so many cases, where people "who have nothing to hide" can't imagine where this could bite them in the future.
You (or your wife/daughter/girlfriend/secretary, etc.) visit a Planned Parenthood? Everyone - including your pastor - now has that info.
You go to a job interview at a competitor? Your boss now knows that.
We have no idea who or what groups who might want to snoop in where we park our cars.
The possibilities for abuse are endless. And as always, we have no way of predicting what use-cases unethical individuals will come up with as these things roll out.
Bad actors already have access to the data, right? Would it not be better to legalize/regulate it? I'm not convinced that we can put the genie back into the bottle.
> Perhaps you misunderstand that Figma was motivated to create value. A large part of the motivation for many startups is an exit plan wherein they get bought out by established competitors.
> If you prevent such purchases, you eliminate a major factor in creating the value to begin with.
You're basically saying that they wouldn't have made Figma if they'd only been able to sell it for 15 billion.
Same tired argument as the "unless you lower taxes on the wealthiest even more, they'll stop creating jobs!" (Even though the taxes haven't been lower in history than they are right now).
People do stuff even though there are anti-trust laws limiting how many tens of billions they get out of it.
As long as there's insane profits to be made, there'll still be an incentive.
Selling out to the market leader, creating a virtual monopoly that harms the consumers in the long run, isn't the only way to make money on a start-up. Far from it.
If Figma had sold to, say... Autodesk for $15B would that be an anti-trust issue for you? What if they sold to Google?
I'm pretty wary of monopoly abuse. But I'm also very wary of entitled people (including myself sometimes) demanding that somebody else has the responsibility to create great stuff for free to make their life better. It's beyond my ability to create an amazing electric vehicle so somebody else should be required to do it and give it to me for free or else it is an anti-trust violation. Somebody else should make something as good or better than SolidWorks or Fusion or XD for free or else AutoDesk/Adobe/MS/Alphabet/... are harmful monopolists.
I don't like Adobe or AutoDesk or MS or Meta or many others companies. I disagree with many of their behaviors for various reasons. I think some of what they do is or should be illegal. But I think misguided consumption is more often the root problem. And it is a mistake to punish those who take advantage of misguided consumption in a way that encourages more misguided consumption and entitlement.
That's the option that has been chosen. That is not an alternative. The product will soon be in the hands of the public. That's also the worry as the public doesn't care about the product and thus won't put the product's interest in mind.
> or sell to a new owner that isn't already the biggest in the field
That's not really an alternative either with respect to the discussion about the new owners potentially letting the product languish or die. It is different, but still reaches the same outcome, potentially. You are still risking that the owner doesn't care about the product.
As discussed, selling to the customers would mitigate this, as they have reason to care about the product, but we already established that they didn't express interest. We would never want to force someone into owning it.
> Your imagination can't be this limited?
It is. Hopefully someone with an imagination will come along at some point. I'm quite interested to hear about alternatives.
The “public” doesn’t give a rats ass about how good the product is and are very short term focused. The minute the company goes public, you are then at the mercy of “activist investors” not interested in the core product.
You don't have time in a movie to explain everything, so they fall back on tropes we all know. Like "MIT super hacker" or "Harvard miracle lawyer".
Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories that explain character details and quirks in more creative ways.