social.omar.website

I think a very similar critique still applies here: you may have the ability to edit the system core in theory, but how many people do it in practice?

(not many, because you don't have the tacit knowledge to change things, you're worried about breaking stuff because it's a shared space / because you don't have confidence in your stake there, you don't want to invest too much into something that isn't yours, you don't have the unbounded time to experiment and learn, …)

@omar it seems hard to avoid the forces that reify/productize software.
even if you have your own completely personal, malleable environment, the further you depart from the consensus version the more you lose compatibility, lose the ability to ask for support

@jes5199 yeah, I think there are all these interesting social-cultural-economic dynamics around what makes software malleable that aren't just about the inherent qualities of the software or the documentation: can you Google for stuff? do you have a local coworker expert? are there Stack Overflow answers?

@omar I used to run modded open l-source software on my laptop, stuff no one else would want to change, just to suit my own preferences. but upgrades break patches, and eventually it just wasn’t worth it

somewhat ironic that as the system has gotten technically easier to edit (they eliminated the engine, which moves things like GPU interface and fiducial recognition into 'user space' on the table & out of git repo / monolithic shared library / laptop space), the set of people editing it seems to have shrunk even further to 1-2

@omar let's make open source more accessible

@omar in practice I'd be guessing mainly Emacs and Smalltalk users

@PaniczGodek I don't really edit the source code of my Emacs or packages (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions over the last 13 years or so), but I do write 'mixins' into it like a lot of people do, which is pretty good compared to anything else

@omar yeah and the source of Emacs itself is more accessible than almost anything else, so you can go and read it to figure out how thjngs work, even if you don't modify it