at 32, i did. best decision of my life. and not because i had a horrible job. i had a great job working at a global investment company. i went from financial district to dorm-room in 3 weeks. i took nothing but math courses for 12 months. i'll likely do this again every ten years or so. i would highly, highly recommend it. and, i'm not going to give reasons why i recommend it because the value you get out of something like this is completely case by case. but, switching from "producer" to "learner" from time to time is an amazing experience.
That's really inspiring to hear! I would love to do the same one day - I wished I knew what I now know about being a good learner back when I was at school and feel like as though doing what you did will be a good way to experience that.
with quotes like "we were able to 'find' silicon valey" and findings like "the best indicators of entrepreneurial quality were characteristics like a company's name", it is surprising that the article does not discuss the role that 'correlation' and similar phenomenon might have played in this study.
I'm assuming I'm being down-voted by folks that have not spent any appreciable amount of time walking around Manhattan and have no clue to what I was referring to.
GNU is awesome in the way that 'Citizen Kane' is awesome. It is awesome because of what it accomplished given the context in which it was created. The context has changed but GNU, by and large, has not. "Free Software" gave us BSD and Linux, but it is also partially responsible for the privacy issues of Google and Facebook (neither of which would be as competitive if they had to pay licensing fees to Microsoft and Oracle, and they give their services away in exchange for monetizing user data), Heartbleed and similar bugs (these projects are not properly funded for security audits and/or maintenance), and the expectation that one should work for free (if you don't have a job the first thing you do is start working on open source projects to show what you can do). Richard Stallman is arguing for the freedom of software, not people. Unless we change society such that its citizens will be provided for regardless of how they spend their afternoons open source needs a new business model. As software becomes more pervasive finding alternative models will become more urgent. And, it's already very urgent.
Thought experiment: if there was no GPLv2, only GPLv3, would the same concerns apply?
Have you come across promising alternative models? These would need to exhibit some properties of GNU-style free software and some properties of cash-cow commercial software. Thus, technical run-time mechanisms for software composition will play a key role in the new legal framework, just as linking (e.g. GPL vs LGPL) did in the GNU ecosystem.
Today we have microservices, containers, etc - which allow composition of software with different licenses, T&C and biz models.
all this will change with the internet of things. once every "thing" is networked, then these optimization platforms won't need to wait for some human to input info about altered environments. the platform will "sense" it.
ai won't kill us, unless it does. then it will kill us quite spectacularly. anyway, the last person i'm going to listen to on this is anyone from microsoft.
i quit facebook 12/31/2014. before doing so i explained to many of my friends and family why i was doing so. every single one of them, no exaggeration, agreed with my reasons, but said they couldn't because of (reason x, y, z). now that ello is patenting their ip i think it is especially important to begin thinking about ways to create public protocols for these type of services. what do you think it would require for most people to give up fb?
from the article: "Most striking, the company said they are applying for patents to protect what they believe are innovative ideas for providing social network services."
-i would love to see ello help establish a community protocol using the open source governance model.
