<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=NYMPEhUBDyM&feature=share">https://youtube.com/watch?v=NYMPEhUBDyM&feature=share</a><div><br></div><div><br>Video posted of tonight’s talk. <br><div dir="ltr"><div><br></div></div><div dir="ltr"><br><blockquote type="cite">On Jun 14, 2023, at 08:57, NYC*BUG Announcements <announce@lists.nycbug.org> wrote:<br><br></blockquote></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><span>2 Lightning Talks, R. Cuza and J. Natis</span><br><span></span><br><span>2023-06-14 @ 18:45 - Five Mile Stone at 1640 2nd Ave (northeast Corner</span><br><span>of 2nd Ave and 85th St, 2nd floor). Please note the stairs to the second</span><br><span>floor are on the north wall as you enter from 2nd Ave.</span><br><span>Notice: Location Change</span><br><span></span><br><span>Raúl Talk:</span><br><span></span><br><span>Probably like you, Raúl didn't get to go to BSDCan '23, but he will make</span><br><span>time to watch some of the sessions, do a little extra research and</span><br><span>re-present them more poorly than the original speaker to you. You could</span><br><span>watch them on your own, but then you won't be in a bar drinking. Or if</span><br><span>you do watch while drinking in a bar, you will be that person perhaps</span><br><span>sitting alone looking at their laptop in the bar.</span><br><span></span><br><span>If you did go to BSDCan '23, maybe Raúl will present on a talk you</span><br><span>didn't attend. Or if you did attend, you will be able to knowledgeably</span><br><span>heckle as a way to get over your poutine withdrawal.</span><br><span>Josh Talk: Down With the Corporate Ethos, Up With the Sunrise: Inspiring</span><br><span>a New Generation of Hackers</span><br><span></span><br><span>I. Students</span><br><span></span><br><span>As a student, it's easy to feel useless in the current state of the</span><br><span>world's software ecosystem. At times, it seems like everything has been</span><br><span>invented already. For the most part, we're only able to program "toy"</span><br><span>projects, and if we do decide to be amicable and share them with the</span><br><span>world, our code falls upon deaf ears – there is no positive</span><br><span>reinforcement for our feedback loop, our programs do not seem to help</span><br><span>anybody. Software forges like GitHub are brimming with programs, why</span><br><span>should anybody be concerned with ours? Projects we care about are so</span><br><span>complex that we can hardly grok their code, let alone offer any</span><br><span>meaningful help. Looking far into the past, the picture seems less</span><br><span>bleak. Programmers were a scarce resource. There was no Internet, and</span><br><span>thus no gigantic repository of programs to render yours obsolete. If you</span><br><span>wrote a program, you were contributing to your community's</span><br><span>infrastructure, building it up with more and more utilities over time.</span><br><span>Every program you wrote bettered the system, extending the capabilities</span><br><span>of whomever you were sharing your system with. Systems themselves were</span><br><span>simpler, built from primitives one could reasonably wrap their head</span><br><span>around, so adding an impactful change was possible. This endows</span><br><span>programming with a sliver of humanity – you are doing a favor to your</span><br><span>community by doing this work. In modern day, this is often replaced by</span><br><span>an appeal to capitalism – you are improving your resume by programming</span><br><span>this, it will help you get a job. This leaves us hollow.</span><br><span></span><br><span>II. Computing Industry, Western Society</span><br><span></span><br><span>The world of computer science students is representative of a general</span><br><span>trend within the computing industry, which itself is a microcosm of</span><br><span>society as a whole. The pure information overload of the Global Village,</span><br><span>the wealth and power amassed and deployed by technofeudal corporations,</span><br><span>the fading away of our warm, caring human nature and trust in one</span><br><span>another, the slow cancellation of the future as we train our children to</span><br><span>be automatons. Where have all the hackers gone? I think this is deeply</span><br><span>connected to the gaping hole left by the departure of myth, spirit, and</span><br><span>religion from our society, replaced by a cold calculated rationalism and</span><br><span>commodification of everything, even human nature and identity. The</span><br><span>Soviet Union tried to fill this hole through "God-building". What should</span><br><span>we do?</span><br><span></span><br><span>We will look to the past to once again discover the warm stream of</span><br><span>computing, the free-flowing camaraderie of the hacker ethic. We'll</span><br><span>consider the freedom of constraints, the altruistic nature of humans,</span><br><span>the tradeoffs between the departing software Wild West and the global</span><br><span>coordination enabled by standards / governing bodies, best practices,</span><br><span>and a convergence on a shared corpus of open source software. With the</span><br><span>flame in your heart kindled, we will debate how to improve the state of</span><br><span>affairs -- should we go bottom up? Become teachers, mentors, poets,</span><br><span>artists, creators of evocative media, inspiring the new generation of</span><br><span>hackers? Or should we go top down, using whatever means necessary to</span><br><span>change the way we live in our society on a macro level -- economic and</span><br><span>political systems, states.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Things can be different -- Down With the Corporate Ethos, Up With the</span><br><span>Sunrise.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Caveats:</span><br><span></span><br><span> I come bearing questions not answers</span><br><span> I was wearing a diaper when 9/11 happened so I can't speak</span><br><span>authoritatively about the past</span><br><span> I have a relatively strict time limit so even if I was a crackpot I</span><br><span>couldn't take up too much of your time :-).</span><br><span></span><br><span>Offsite Participation: We plan to stream via NYC*BUG Website unless the</span><br><span>speaker requests otherwise. Q&A will be via IRC on Libera.chat channel</span><br><span>#nycbug - Please preface your questions with '[Q]'.</span><br><span>Media</span><br><span></span><br><span>Speaker Biography</span><br><span></span><br><span>Raúl Cuza thinks computers are at their best as they load an operating</span><br><span>system. Before that moment they lack any spark. After that moment they</span><br><span>are nothing but headaches.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Josh Natis is a Unix herder searching for unknown unknowns, hopelessly</span><br><span>stuck in a dialectic between Luddism and technological utopia. Loves</span><br><span>having a cappuccino at night. Longs for mornings but is never awake for</span><br><span>them. Happy to be here.</span><br><span>_______________________________________________</span><br><span>announce mailing list</span><br><span>announce@lists.nycbug.org</span><br><span>https://lists.nycbug.org:8443/mailman/listinfo/announce</span><br></div></blockquote></div></body></html>