[JM]: I'd like to kick off today's episode by sharing yet another creation from Neal.fun.
[JM]: And I'm getting the impression that this might be a semi-regular segment on this show, because this is probably the third time, or perhaps even more, I haven't counted,
[JM]: that we've mentioned, N-E-A-L, Neal.fun.
[JM]: And in this particular occasion, the new exhibition is called "Size of Life".
[JM]: And if you've seen some of his other creations, you start to see a theme, right?
[JM]: Like, there's certainly a question of comparing size or distance.
[JM]: You know, there was the one about going into the depths of the ocean.
[JM]: Then there was the one going from sea level to different levels of the atmosphere and into outer space.
[JM]: And in this particular exhibition, it is an exploration of various sizes of organisms, starting with a strand of DNA and going to larger things, step by step.
[JM]: And a couple of comments as I experienced this...
[JM]: I love the background ambient music that Neal chose for this.
[JM]: It really sets the mood.
[JM]: And also the images.
[JM]: I don't know where they came from.
[JM]: I'm sure if I hunted around, there's probably some attribution as to where these images came from.
[JM]: But they're just beautiful and they feel...
[JM]: They fit one another — they're not just like here's random illustrations of these various organisms. They all seem to fit together, like it's coherent and consistent and they're all just stunningly beautiful. And a couple of the things that I really enjoyed as I was browsing through the
[JM]: progression from smaller to larger...
[JM]: I liked the entry for the velociraptor, which said, "Smaller than usually depicted, the velociraptor was actually only about the size of a turkey", and the image is, like, feathered.
[JM]: It kind of looks like a streamlined aerodynamic turkey.
[JM]: It's really not at all...
[JM]: the image that I think we have in our heads, thanks to Jurassic Park, of this gigantic, deadly, I-will-rip-your-head-off type of animal.
[JM]: I really can't imagine having any kind of fearful reaction to an aerodynamic-looking turkey.
[JM]: It doesn't really inspire terror.
[DJ]: You just have to imagine yourself being about the size of a ferret.
[DJ]: Then you could probably imagine.
[DJ]: I remember hearing, and this is a tangent, but I remember hearing that I think the thing that's called a velociraptor, the dinosaur that's called a velociraptor in Jurassic Park is actually a different species with a less terrifying name.
[DJ]: It's like Utah raptor or something like that,
[DJ]: something similar, but it's something that is actually an eight-foot reptile.
[DJ]: I've also heard things like, I think it might also have had feathers.
[DJ]: Like I believe, I think the modern conception of dinosaurs is that some or many of them actually probably were feathered, but it's been hard to establish that from the fossil records, since obviously you'd need to find things like fossilized skin to suggest to you that there were feathers.
[DJ]: You're not going to be able to tell that from a skeleton, I assume.
[JM]: Indeed.
[JM]: One of the other entries that I liked is the capybara, which I'm aware as being the largest rodent.
[JM]: But to see it side-by-side with a German shepherd was not something I expected to see.
[JM]: Like, that really puts it in perspective.
[JM]: And that's why I love this project, is to imagine a rodent the size of a German shepherd.
[JM]: And then the corpse flower, which is this gigantic world's-largest flower that gives off the oh-so-pleasant aroma of a rotting corpse, is larger than both of those things, both the capybara and the German shepherd.
[JM]: And you can keep going, obviously, and the Japanese spider crab is even larger with a full leg span of 12 feet,
[JM]: or three and a half meters.
[JM]: And as I'm going through these things, one of the other things that occurred to me is looking at one of them and it says one of the largest land invertebrates is nine feet long.
[JM]: And I'm thinking there's this like gigantic, what looks like an insect or a centipede.
[JM]: And I'm like, there's like a nine-foot long centipede.
[JM]: And then I noticed, oh, wait, hold on.
[JM]: It says it went extinct 300 million years ago.
[DJ]: Don't worry, Justin, you're safe.
[DJ]: It's not sneaking up on you right now.
[JM]: Yeah, that definitely was a relief to be reminded that a lot of the organisms in this list went extinct a long time ago.
[DJ]: So by the time you got to Tyrannosaurus Rex, you weren't worried anymore.
[JM]: No, at that point, I think I understood what was going on, thankfully.
[JM]: And the last thing I'll comment on is Hyperion, discovered in California in 2006.
[JM]: And this is a redwood, which is the tallest living tree.
[JM]: Its exact location is kept secret to protect it, which I think is brilliant because I don't know if you've noticed sometime recently, there have been incidents where beloved trees that
[JM]: up until very recently, were still around and had been around for hundreds of years, people would wake up in the morning to find that some person or persons cut them down for who-knows-what reason.
[JM]: So I'm glad that they're keeping this one a secret.
[DJ]: Yeah, indeed.
[DJ]: I heard about one of those recently in the UK, and the coda to it being tragically cut down was pretty nice, which was that they actually took, I guess they managed to extract seeds from what was left of the tree,
[DJ]: Like a preservation society essentially cultivated a couple of dozen new trees from it.
[DJ]: And those new trees have been like donated and planted in places like conflict zones and other things around the world to sort of spread this thing around, which I think is a really nice legacy for a tree.
[JM]: That is indeed very cool.
[DJ]: So yeah, I think we can confidently say that Neal.fun is an unofficial sponsor of Abstractions because it's the web site that just keeps giving.
[DJ]: I love this site.
[DJ]: New, beautiful things that are enjoyable to play with just keep popping up.
[DJ]: So we will happily keep presenting them.
[JM]: It is indeed the web gift that keeps on giving.
[JM]: All right, next up, I'd like to talk about RAM prices.
[JM]: The gift that keeps on *taking*.
[JM]: That's certainly not what I would consider to be a gift.
[JM]: Yeah.
[JM]: What's the antithesis of a gift?
[DJ]: I don't know, but I think neither of us are going to receive RAM as gifts because it has become as expensive as diamonds.
[DJ]: Lo, look upon the treasury of the kings of old and that's the only place you're going to find RAM chips anymore.
[JM]: One of the more interesting parts of this story is how I first heard about it.
[JM]: Because I remember you were looking at potentially buying a new computer at some point over the last few weeks.
[JM]: And I remember you commenting that there was some crazy price, like hundreds of dollars for 32 gigabytes of RAM.
[JM]: And I remember thinking, well, that's weird because a very short time ago, I had bought 32 gigabytes of RAM for a computer that I have.
[JM]: And I think it cost me, I don't know, $40.
[JM]: So something didn't add up.
[JM]: I'm like, well, how is it that mine costs $40 and you're telling me that there's RAM that's now hundreds of dollars?
[JM]: Like, this math doesn't work.
[JM]: There's no way that RAM prices went from $40 to $300 or $400 in the span of months or even weeks.
[DJ]: Or is there?
[JM]: It turns out there is.
[DJ]: I was afraid there would be.
[JM]: I think we are all familiar with what has happened with graphics cards over the last few years.
[JM]: And it feels like almost archaic to call them graphics cards now, right?
[JM]: Because increasingly the global demand for them is not to process graphics.
[DJ]: No, it's for crypto, right?
[JM]: Well, that's actually really funny because you're right.
[JM]: That is what happened.
[JM]: That was like the first real demand explosion for graphics cards
[JM]: besides games, right?
[JM]: The origin, like the reason why we have graphics cards, the reason they are called graphics cards, the reason they are called GPUs, right?
[JM]: Where the G is for graphics is because these cards and chips have traditionally been used for games.
[JM]: And then at some point, I don't know, in the last decade or so, cryptocurrency came on the scene and people started buying every card they could get their hands on in order to mine Bitcoin,
[JM]: making it often unaffordable and also often impossible to even buy a card in order to play games because there was so much demand for these cards from cryptocurrency miners.
[JM]: And I think to some degree, that situation at some point kind of leveled out.
[JM]: either because GPU production rose to meet demand or because cryptocurrency miners started getting diminishing returns on their mining activities and stopped stuffing data centers full of GPUs in order to mine cryptocurrency.
[JM]: And then in the last, I think three years, give or take, there's been this other huge demand explosion for graphics processing units...
[JM]: in order to train large language models and to run inference tasks on large language models, essentially to use them.
[JM]: And I think in this particular case, it's been even worse in many ways than the cryptocurrency demand boom, in part because in the first wave for the cryptocurrency stuff, I don't really feel like the producers of the GPUs shifted
[JM]: what they're doing. Like, they didn't really change their focus. They thought, okay well we're just going to continue to produce the same cards and whoever buys them buys them and we'll actually even try to make it so that people who play games can still get them because we don't want all of those cards to be sucked into this vortex of cryptocurrency mining activity.
[JM]: This time feels different because the producers of GPUs are very much like, oh yeah, you people who play games, that's so cute.
[JM]: That's so three years ago.
[JM]: We're not doing that anymore.
[JM]: We're now selling every single one we can to the highest bidder.
[JM]: And we all know you, gamer, are not the highest bidder.
[JM]: You're not even close.
[JM]: So this market's shifted and our attention is now focused entirely elsewhere.
[DJ]: Yeah, no, the companies that make GPUs come over to the gamers and put their arms around our shoulders and they're like, guys, guys, have you seen how much money those venture capitalists gave OpenAI?
[DJ]: Sorry, like I know we'd plan to hang out and like play Fortnite or whatever.
[DJ]: I've got to go.
[DJ]: I've got to go over there.
[DJ]: Because there's so much money.
[DJ]: And we're sitting here going like, can I still pay like maybe a couple hundred bucks for a video card?
[DJ]: And they're just like, huh, what?
[DJ]: And now I guess the thing that happened to GPUs is happening to RAM as well, which is even worse because RAM is even more of a core component of every computer that you might want to put together or that you might want to pay another company to put together for you, and you're going to pay more for it because they have the same increased costs that you would.
[DJ]: And that's wild, right?
[JM]: Because unless you are trying to play games, mine cryptocurrency, do large language model and other generative software stuff... ([DJ]: All three, thank you very much.)
[JM]: ...and some other specialized functions, unless you are in one of those groups, you don't really need lots of graphics processing unit power.
[JM]: A very small amount will suffice for accelerating...
[JM]: the user interface elements on your computer or your phone.
[JM]: But RAM is something altogether different.
[JM]: Every single computing device that we use needs RAM and increasing amounts of it.
[JM]: And what we are seeing is a very similar dynamic that we just described with GPUs, but on a time horizon that I can barely wrap my head around.
[JM]: I'm looking at a graph right now of RAM prices from July 2024 to more or less the present day.
[JM]: And for the vast majority of this graph, it is flat, it just stays at the same level all the way through until about October.
[JM]: So two months ago, and then this flat horizontal line goes nearly vertical.
[JM]: showing RAM prices for 64 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM going from $150 to over $500.
[JM]: And the impacts of this are going to be far-reaching because if you have a small company
[JM]: making products with, say, relatively tight margins, there's no way that you can continue to produce these products at the prices that you were selling them for in the past.
[JM]: For example, a single four-gigabyte module of DDR4 memory now costs $35, which is more expensive than any other component on your average single board computer — like a Raspberry Pi — combined.
[DJ]: Those are computers that are famous for costing about $35 to the end user entirely.
[JM]: Correct.
[DJ]: Now just one component of them costs that much.
[DJ]: So, I mean, it's a pretty brutal deal for a company.
[DJ]: I'm not saying these numbers are actually true, but you can imagine it like a pretty brutal deal for a company like Raspberry Pi and their customers if they have to suddenly say, hey, yeah, we're really sorry, but you know that low-priced product that you really appreciate of ours?
[DJ]: It's twice as much now.
[JM]: Please still buy it.
[JM]: And these insane prices are going to affect so many different things.
[JM]: Computers, phones, tablets, cameras, gaming consoles, anything that has memory in it is going to get hit sooner or later.
[JM]: And we already live in a world of pretty significant inflation.
[JM]: This is definitely not going to help that situation.
[JM]: I saw one person comment that Apple's traditionally insanely expensive memory upgrade pricing is now in line with the rest of the industry.
[DJ]: Just in case the phrasing of that sentence makes anyone think it's a good thing, that's not a good thing.
[JM]: And anyone who thinks that Apple's RAM price upgrades are going to stay at the current level is probably mistaken.
[DJ]: The safest bet would be that they are also going to increase prices to maintain their profit margins.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: But as soon as we learned about this strange fluctuation, I think, Justin, it's safe to say that the first question we had was, who do we blame for this?
[JM]: Unsurprisingly, the answer to that question is a bunch of generative software companies.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: And like, not very many either.
[JM]: No.
[JM]: And just like the GPU market's fixation, understandably to some degree, on producing products for generative software companies, there's a similar focus now where these companies are producing RAM specifically for that market and are just like gaming graphics cards, ignoring the non-generative software market because it's not as profitable for them.
[JM]: For example, it seems like Nvidia used to provide memory along with their chips to graphics card manufacturers, and now they're not giving them the memory along with their chips anymore, essentially telling them, good luck, you'll just have to find your own RAM or wherever you can get it, because all the RAM we can get our hands on, that's for our use.
[DJ]: Yeah, and by our use, we mean OpenAI's use.
[JM]: Yeah, at this point, everyone is stockpiling RAM.
[JM]: It's like a toilet paper craze, where if you can buy it, it sounds like these companies are buying it, stockpiling it, and it becomes like this vicious cycle, right?
[JM]: Where when you realize, well, they're stockpiling RAM, and if I don't do the same thing, I'm not going to be able to get it.
[JM]: Well, then everyone just buys as much as they can, and that's how you end up with no toilet paper on your shelves.
[JM]: This is the same dynamic.
[DJ]: Yeah, it's what happens at the grocery store every time it threatens to snow at all in my city.
[JM]: Right.
[JM]: And it seems like the most significant factor that has really caused the RAM market to... ([DJ] Go insane?)
[JM]: go insane indeed, is that on the 1st of October, OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and a company called SK Hynix and secured 40% of the world's memory supply.
[JM]: The craziest part of this story is that OpenAI negotiated the deals with these two companies secretly, making sure
[JM]: that neither one had any idea that OpenAI was also negotiating with the other.
[JM]: And this secrecy was really important because if one of these companies had any idea that OpenAI was going to simultaneously sign these deals, tying up 40% of the global DRAM market, you can imagine that they might have been reticent to supply such a huge amount of the global market of RAM to this one company.
[DJ]: Or at least they would have asked for a lot more money to do so.
[JM]: And perhaps so much more money that OpenAI wouldn't or couldn't have made such a deal, thereby freeing up that RAM for all of the other companies in the world that need it.
[DJ]: Yeah, and for me, I also need it.
[JM]: This is just one of these crazy stories that is hard to imagine.
[JM]: That a single company effectively cornered the market for memory in a day.
[JM]: It just totally came out of left field and it's so brazen.
[JM]: It is...
[JM]: such a crazy, bold step that on some level, I guess I admire the audacity of it, but only like in a sinister, Lex Luthor kind of way.
[DJ]: It doesn't surprise me.
[DJ]: That's the problem.
[DJ]: Because the world of technology does feel like it has collapsed into maybe a dozen companies that have almost all of the money that has ever existed in the entire history of all of humanity,
[DJ]: and are giving large chunks of it to each other at everyone else's expense, that feels like the only story in technology anymore.
[DJ]: We were just talking recently, we may have covered it on the show or not, but there was a lot of stuff recently about OpenAI and Nvidia essentially buying parts of each other in a way that feels totally unsustainable, both of them being like, we're going to invest a trillion dollars, we're going to invest all the money that's ever existed in...
[DJ]: In what?
[DJ]: For starters, at the flagship of it, you have OpenAI, a company which isn't profitable at all, as far as I'm aware, and doesn't seem to have any apparent route to profitability except this vague goal of building some kind of machine god that will usher us all into the next era of humanity.
[DJ]: So unfortunately, no, like nothing about this surprises me.
[DJ]: It just feels like, oh, yeah, well, of course, like as soon as it's like, why is RAM so expensive?
[DJ]: I guess this didn't necessarily occur to me, but it could have in retrospect.
[DJ]: I could have just assumed that OpenAI bought all of it.
[DJ]: So I can't have any.
[JM]: I suppose when viewed from that lens, it isn't necessarily surprising, but it certainly caught the world off-guard.
[JM]: There was no safety stock that would have prevented this action from making such huge waves and creating such an incredible shock to the global system.
[JM]: And it's not easy to ramp up production of things like memory chips because the companies that produce them are hesitant to invest billions of dollars in additional capacity unless they think that the demand has increased in a way that is permanent,
[JM]: it's not just some blip, but the global demand has increased and therefore they need to increase production.
[JM]: Unless they feel confident that that's what's happening, they're not going to invest that massive sum of money into building additional DRAM factories.
[JM]: And so there's really no telling whether this is going to be a short-term or long-term problem because the only way if the demand continues and doesn't just seem like a temporary blip, there's no way to produce a whole lot more RAM in a short amount of time.
[JM]: So we might be stuck with these high prices for DRAM for a long time.
[JM]: And it'll be interesting to see what people are going to do on the consumer side, right?
[JM]: Because just like you have all of these companies that are scrambling to buy up as much memory as they can and stockpile it, I think you're going to see a similar dynamic from consumers where people might scramble to buy things that have
[JM]: decent amount of RAM in them in order to make sure that they can get them now and get them at prices that aren't nose-bleedingly high.
[JM]: I don't think that we've seen evidence yet of products that contain RAM getting hit with price increases.
[JM]: I imagine because these motherboards or other
[JM]: products were built at a time when the RAM was at a reasonable sane level.
[JM]: But I do think it's just a matter of time before even companies that bought the RAM when it was at that normal price say, well, wait a minute, when we go to produce more of these,
[JM]: we're gonna have to pay a lot more.
[JM]: So we might as well just start increasing the price now, even though we got this memory at this lower price, we're gonna have to increase our prices eventually.
[JM]: We might as well just get ahead of that and increase it now and make that much more margin on the products we're selling right now with the idea that we might have lower margins...
[JM]: going forward, if we can't command higher prices for the product that we're trying to sell with this heavily inflated component cost.
[JM]: So it's going to be interesting times... or at least expensive times.
[JM]: All right.
[JM]: In other news, David Heinemeier Hansson is back in the news.
[DJ]: Sigh.
[DJ]: Sorry, that was me sighing because he makes me tired.
[JM]: He seems to be on quite a roll these days.
[JM]: And he is back in the news because his team has released a new product, which I gather is a "kanban"-style task management tool.
[JM]: And it's been getting a lot of attention because, unlike many of the products his team has released in the past, this one is open source.
[DJ]: Or is it?
[JM]: ... and people are indeed taking issue with his usage of the term "open source".
[JM]: Because if you read the fine print, the license agreement contains the following small print:
[JM]: "No licensee or downstream recipient may use the software to directly compete with the original licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed or software as a service product where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the software itself."
[JM]: Put in layman's terms, this means we make money on this software by selling it to you as a hosted service for X number of dollars per month.
[JM]: If this software were truly open source, then you would be able to take the same software, host it yourself, and then sell that hosted version of the software to other people.
[JM]: That is precisely what this clause excludes.
[JM]: And I completely understand the motivation behind adding a clause like this.
[JM]: Because its purpose is to prevent people from competing with your hosted product, which is the one area that seems to be the most viable when it comes to making open source software financially sustainable.
[JM]: I myself have considered when I think about new projects that I might want to undertake, whether I want to make something open source
[JM]: or closed source — meaning, totally proprietary — or whether I want to find some middle ground, where the source code is available but that this one particular behavior is disallowed because it is the one area in which someone who produces open source software — or quasi-open-source software, as it as it were —
[JM]: can make it financially viable to put the requisite time and effort into it.
[JM]: The problem and the reason that we're talking about this is whether or not you can call it "open source".
[JM]: And I believe we have talked about this in a previous episode, but I think it's worth talking about it now because of how this person responded to people pointing out like, hey, you really shouldn't call it open source because that's not what this is.
[JM]: Because when this was pointed out to him,
[JM]: he brushed it off on the social network formerly known as Twitter and said, "You know, this is just some sh*t people made up, right?"
[JM]: "Open source is when the source is open."
[JM]: "Simple as that."
[JM]: I just think that this kind of dismissive response is gross for many reasons.
[JM]: The first one that pops into mind is the idea that
[JM]: the words and phrases and definitions that we use to communicate with each other don't matter and can just be distorted at will for your own benefit and profit. Because you can't have it both ways.
[JM]: You can't add a clause like this in order to protect your revenue stream and then still call it open source.
[JM]: You can't add clauses or otherwise change licenses in a way that violates
[JM]: the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source, and then still seek the marketing goodwill that comes from using the "open source" moniker.
[JM]: You have to choose one of those things.
[JM]: And I know it's hard because there's no great term for this.
[JM]: Some people say, well, you should just call it "source available".
[JM]: And that's not a great moniker for what they're doing here either.
[JM]: Because "source available" could mean, well, here's the source code, but you can't use it to do anything.
[JM]: Technically that's "source available", right?
[JM]: That you can see it, you can download it, but legally you're restricted from doing anything useful with it.
[JM]: That could be called "source available".
[JM]: So people who say, well, this project should just be called "source available".
[JM]: I can see why there's hesitation
[JM]: there too, because that term doesn't really fit this situation, where it is almost entirely open source except for this one little thing — but that little thing is important.
[JM]: And I wish that there were a better phrase, a better way of describing what this is, but there isn't.
[JM]: No one seems to have come up with one, right?
[JM]: There's been all these attempts to create the... there's the business source license.
[JM]: There's all of these other attempts to create
[JM]: names for these alternative licenses. I don't think any of them have really stuck in terms of conveying a certain value in the same way that the term "open source" has.
[JM]: And that's why people want to keep using it, right?
[JM]: They want that goodwill, the way that people will share, oh, that's an *open source* project.
[JM]: It's something that people are attracted to.
[JM]: They will share it because it doesn't seem like you're pitching something at them.
[JM]: You're not trying to sell them something.
[JM]: You're saying, oh, here's this thing I built.
[JM]: It is free as in software and it is free as in beer.
[JM]: So I wish that there were another moniker for this kind of license that conveyed some of the goodwill of open source and didn't tempt people to just default to saying, oh no, we're going to take all the goodwill and distort the meaning of this phrase.
[DJ]: I agree with the defenses of the term, but as you pointed out, there is a lot of value in the model that's being applied here, which is we put a bunch of work into building this thing.
[DJ]: We want to make it available to a lot of people, and we want them to be able to do more things with it than the average piece of software, and we want it to be more accessible in terms of cost than the average piece of software, but like, we still gots to feed ourselves somehow, so we need to make money off of this, so it needs some kind of business model, and as you said, a pretty good one so far is like a hosted SaaS product.
[DJ]: Where if you have more time and technical skills than the average person, yeah, you can take the source and figure out how to do this all yourself, and then you own all of your own data and you don't have to pay for it.
[DJ]: Great.
[DJ]: Some of us want to do that, are willing and able to.
[DJ]: However, lots of people probably just want the outcome that using the software gives them, and they're willing to pay someone else to make that happen for them.
[DJ]: That's actually a pretty great model.
[DJ]: So I agree with you that it's too bad that it doesn't have a label.
[DJ]: In a way, that's the problem of labels, is not that they're meaningless, as this guy is apparently claiming, but rather that a label can be a useful shorthand, but it also eliminates nuance.
[DJ]: Because you can only communicate so much through the two words paired together: "open source".
[DJ]: So I must admit, I wish people were a little more tolerant of the nuance that can come with that.
[DJ]: And I'm not saying that, oh, we should just let them advertise whatever this product is as being "open source".
[DJ]: I would like people to at least be open, let's say, to hearing something like, we're making this available under certain terms that restrict what you can do with it, and then being willing to give that at least some goodwill.
[DJ]: I guess what I mean is,
[DJ]: on the other side of this debate are people, not all people who are interested in open source, but some of them that treat any attempt to license software in a somewhat restrictive way as being just as restrictive as totally closed-source software.
[DJ]: In other words, people who see purely open source as the only valid form of software licensing that is worthy of any kind of praise.
[DJ]: I wish that attitude would soften a little bit as well.
[JM]: I haven't seen a lot of people with that particular stance.
[JM]: Most of the things that... well, forget "most"... *All* of the things that I have seen are really critiques of calling this "open source".
[JM]: So far, all the responses I have seen have been supportive of the idea that we should try to find alternative ways of making software development sustainable, particularly when there are these
[JM]: open components to it.
[JM]: But to me, this insistence on calling it "open source", even when you know it's not, feels a little bit like when I see how Italians react to what Americans do to their food.
[JM]: I've heard Italians who watch Americans put chicken and vodka into their pasta and say, "Look, you're more than welcome to do that."
[JM]: "You just can't call it Italian food."
[JM]: "You can call it Yankee Noodles or whatever you want to call it, but it's not Italian food anymore because we would never do that."
[JM]: "So just find another name for it."
[JM]: And I think that's all that's happening here.
[JM]: You want to create licenses that make it financially sustainable for you to do the thing you want to do?
[JM]: Go for it.
[JM]: Just don't call it "open source".
[JM]: Call it something else.
[DJ]: Yeah.
[DJ]: And there is a degree of, like, the person who wishes that the people at the dinner party they were attending liked them and thought they were cool.
[DJ]: And the way that they express that is by pretending that they don't care what the people think of them.
[DJ]: As you said, there's a degree to like, if your response to people saying, hold on, what you're describing is not really open source is, well, "Open source doesn't matter."
[DJ]: "It's meaningless."
[DJ]: It's like, okay, cool.
[DJ]: Then you won't mind calling it something else, since you don't care at all.
[DJ]: It's the disingenuousness of it, I think, that is so durably and reliably obnoxious about this person in particular.
[DJ]: This notion of whenever they are challenged at all, they retreat to like, "Well, what you're talking about is nonsense and doesn't matter."
[DJ]: And it's like, well, if it's nonsense and doesn't matter, why are you yelling about it so much on Twitter?
[DJ]: Sorry, I mean X.
[DJ]: Sorry, I don't mean X. I mean Twitter.
[DJ]: I think the thing I was reacting to was my general impression that the labor that goes into the creation of software is not highly valued in a lot of spaces.
[DJ]: That can include open source spaces sometimes.
[DJ]: I agree there is a large and vibrant community of people who both really understand and value how much labor goes into the creation of software...
[DJ]: and also want to live by and perpetuate the values that are inherent in the term open source software, the reason that open source does have like an official definition. And at the same time, there's a little part of me that always remains frustrated by the people who you know want some piece of software to help them do some meaningful task, and the only way they can think to ask is like, "Is there some way I can do this for free?"
[DJ]: And while I sympathize, you know, as a person who makes software, I kind of want to be like, "No, do you assume that you can have other people perform other forms of labor for you for free?"
[DJ]: "So why do you assume that you can get this one?"
[DJ]: I wish someone would come over to my house and cook all my meals, but I don't assume that I can get that for free.
[DJ]: I'm not saying that that attitude was present in this specific debate, but I think when it comes to like people arguing about what's okay and what's not okay, it's...
[DJ]: Or even just like what they would like to see and what they don't like to see in software licensing.
[DJ]: I'm a little sensitive to the demonization of any kind of profit motive inherent in software, because there is labor that needs to be compensated.
[JM]: I 100% agree with what you're saying here, because even though I haven't seen that behavior as it relates to this particular topic, one thing that I have seen recently is the application that I use to access the Fediverse at the moment is called Mona.
[JM]: And the author of Mona just announced Mona 7, whereas the version I'm currently using is Mona 6.
[JM]: And in a few days, Mona 7 will officially launch.
[JM]: And this is going to be a paid upgrade.
[JM]: And you should see the replies on the Fediverse to this poor person's posts.
[JM]: The incredible entitlement of these people that say,
[JM]: "How dare you charge for this upgrade?"
[JM]: "I already paid for this product because it's not a subscription, and that's why I chose it."
[JM]: Wait a minute.
[JM]: Right.
[JM]: It's *not* a subscription, and that's great.
[JM]: And that's also why I bought it.
[JM]: But I didn't have an expectation that this person would *never* charge for an upgrade.
[JM]: That's insane.
[JM]: And yet it's, it's crazy.
[JM]: Like, the number of people that feel this way, it's... it baffles my mind.
[DJ]: That drives me crazy.
[DJ]: And the other thing too, in absolute terms, how much did you pay for it?
[JM]: I got, I think, the Pro Max, which means I got it for all the Macs that I own, my iPhone, my iPad.
[JM]: I can effectively use it on all of these devices.
[JM]: I think it might have cost me somewhere in the range of $20 to $25.
[DJ]: $20 to $25.
[DJ]: Cool, cool, cool.
[DJ]: Have you gone out for dinner recently?
[DJ]: How much did that cost you?
[JM]: Multiples of that.
[DJ]: Yeah, like this is the thing that we all know that the psychology of pricing has no relationship to reality.
[DJ]: And we all just have to live with that as both producers and consumers.
[DJ]: But I will say that one of my least favorite things in this domain is when you compare the relative cost of software to its relative value... people's attitudes towards it.
[DJ]: I want to say I have no sympathy for them, but it's more that they make me incendiary with rage.
[DJ]: We watched this happen with the iPhone and the App Store driving down the cost of apps, where people would constantly just be like, "This app's like $1.99."
[DJ]: I'm like, when was the last time in your life, in any other context, that you spent more than, I don't know, half a second thinking about whether you should spend $1.99 on something?
[DJ]: Give me a break.
[DJ]: Someone gave a crap for hundreds of hours to create this thing.
[DJ]: I really, really hate that attitude of just like, "How dare you charge me?"
[DJ]: It's like, cool, man, just vibe-code your own Fediverse client then.
[JM]: Or continue using the perfectly functional tool that you enjoy using and that's why you bought it and continue to use it.
[JM]: You can just continue doing that.
[JM]: No one is bending you over a barrel and saying you have to buy this thing.
[JM]: So anyway, yeah, it just, I'm with you.
[JM]: It's infuriating.
[DJ]: It is very frustrating, but we also shouldn't let that distract us from the fact that DHH is equally obnoxious.
[JM]: Indeed.
[JM]: And one of his other hobbies, it seems, is failing to understand what a Linux distribution is and trying to create what he thinks it is.
[DJ]: Well, Justin, the word distro is just BS.
[DJ]: It doesn't mean anything.
[JM]: That's right.
[DJ]: A distro can be whatever you want it to be.
[JM]: Just a word someone made up.
[DJ]: Microsoft Windows is a Linux distro.
[JM]: It seems that he has created something called Omarchy.
[JM]: I don't know how to pronounce this.
[JM]: Again, yes, naming is hard, but come on.
[JM]: Just pick something people can pronounce.
[DJ]: But it's a clever mashup of a variety of things.
[DJ]: I'm not actually sure what it's a mashup of, but I'm pretty sure it's a mashup of things.
[JM]: The only thing I can get out of it visually is the word Arch, as in Arch Linux, which is another distro that presumably Omarchy is based on.
[DJ]: Yeah, I think the "Oma" part is a reference to a Japanese word that you would probably know better than I would.
[JM]: I probably would, but I can infer no Japanese word from this name, so...
[DJ]: All right, fair.
[DJ]: More research needed.
[JM]:
[DJ]: All right, so tell us about this bold new Linux distribution.
[JM]: From what I gather, it looks like this person got frustrated with whatever Linux distribution he had been using, whether that was Arch or something else, and decided to do stuff.
[JM]: And the following is the way that someone who knows much more about Linux distributions than I do has characterized this attempt at creating a so-called Linux distribution.
[JM]: "Omarchy feels like a project created by a Linux newcomer, utterly captivated by all the cool things that Linux can do, but lacking the architectural knowledge to get the basics right and the experience to give each tool a thoughtful review.
[JM]: Instead of carefully selecting software and ensuring that everything works as promised, the approach seems to be more about throwing everything that somehow looks cool into a pile.
[JM]: There's no attention to sensible defaults, no real quality control,
[JM]: and certainly no verification that the setup won't end up causing harm or at the very least frustration for the user.
[JM]: The primary focus seems to be on creating a visually appealing but otherwise hollow product.
[JM]: Moreover, the entire Omarchy ecosystem is held together by often poorly-written Bash scripts that lack any structure, let alone properly defined interfaces.
[JM]: Software packages are being installed via curling shell scripts
[JM]: or similar mechanisms, rather than provided as properly packaged solutions via a package manager.
[JM]: Hansen is quick to label Omarchy a Linux distribution, yet he seems reluctant to engage with the foundational work that defines a true distribution,
[JM]: the development and proper packaging, otherwise known as *distribution* of software."
[JM]: And I will put links to some of these takedowns in the show notes as usual, because they are really well written,
[JM]: blisteringly critical in all the ways that it seems they should be.
[JM]: Because it's easy to critique, right?
[JM]: It's easy to just tear down something that someone else created.
[JM]: And I have no desire to criticize for its own sake.
[JM]: It's not fun.
[JM]: I think it's great when people create things and it's much easier to criticize something than it is to build something.
[JM]: And at the same time, whether it's the Humane AI pin that we lavished criticism on, or what appears to be a rather hacked-together bubblegum-and-twine, not really properly thought-out Linux distribution, sometimes things are worthy of that criticism.
[DJ]: The Humane AI pin, by the way... also a Linux distribution.
[DJ]: Who's gonna argue with me?
[JM]: All right, I'd like to end this show on one last quick thing, and that is that there is a new monitor in my home, and that is the Asus ProArt 6K monitor.
[JM]: If you have paid any attention to the state of external displays, then you are probably aware of the paucity of good options that are above 4K resolution.
[JM]: And you might think, well, why would I care about that?
[JM]: All of today's movies are in 4K.
[JM]: 4K seems perfectly reasonable.
[JM]: I remember back when I had a 720p monitor.
[JM]: 4K is so much higher resolution than that.
[JM]: Why are we having this conversation?
[DJ]: I mean, I remember when I had like a 1024 by 768 pixel monitor, so nevermind.
[JM]: Indeed.
[DJ]: And the reason is pixel density.
[JM]: 4K displays, unless they are really, really small, and they are never sold small enough to achieve what I'm talking about here, your pixel density is going to be low.
[JM]: Apple introduced this term called "Retina"...
[JM]: years ago to describe a pixel density of somewhere in the realm of, north of say 200 pixels per inch or PPI. I don't think unless you buy a 4K monitor that's like 20 inches diagonally that you could possibly achieve that kind of pixel density, and thus all the 4K screens I've ever used, you can see the individual pixels when you're looking at the screen.
[JM]: 10 years ago, I bought a 27-inch iMac that had a 5K built-in display.
[JM]: And I just could not believe how incredible this display looked.
[JM]: At some point that machine stopped working and it was time to replace it.
[JM]: And I decided to replace it with a Mac mini or some other computer that didn't have its own built-in display,
[JM]: and I could not find a decent 5K monitor that came close to rivaling the 27-inch iMac that I had replaced.
[JM]: And so only until Apple introduced the 27-inch 5K Studio Display that I'm currently looking at, did we really have an option that came close to this 5K ideal.
[JM]: But in the last year or two, finally, it seems like companies are producing displays that provide some competition.
[JM]: And this Asus ProArt 6K display is an example of that.
[JM]: Its resolution is 6016 by 3384.
[JM]: That's the native resolution.
[JM]: So pixel-doubled, which is the way that any sane person would use this display,
[JM]: gives you real estate of approximately 3000 by 1700 pixels, which is a *lot* of screen.
[JM]: And this screen I think is 31 and a half inches diagonal.
[JM]: So it's effective pixel density is, I don't remember exactly, 225, 240, I don't remember, somewhere in that range.
[JM]: The bottom line is it's essentially a Retina-caliber screen, meaning you don't see the individual pixels.
[JM]: And so the display is great, really bright.
[JM]: The stand, however,
[JM]: is just as junky as I expected it to be.
[JM]: No, I take that back.
[JM]: It was actually junkier than I expected it to be.
[JM]: There's just things that are misaligned.
[JM]: Like if I were going to use this in any long-term environment, I would just rip off the stand, go get a VESA compatible mount and just attach it to my desk or some other stand because the built-in one is garbage, but it's fine.
[JM]: It's adjustable enough that you don't really even notice
[JM]: just how janky it is.
[JM]: But the display is great.
[JM]: Highly recommended.
[JM]: It was $1,300 US.
[DJ]: Yeah, I'm naturally looking, adding it to my shopping cart right now.
[DJ]: Well, not quite, but looking it up on the place where I usually buy hardware and it is $1,899.99 Canadian, which is still less than Apple's Studio Display, I guess, and would probably have better compatibility.
[DJ]: And I do already have a great pair of monitor arms on my desk, so I would definitely rip the janky stand right off of there.
[JM]: Yeah, $1,300 is a decent amount to spend on a monitor for sure.
[JM]: But I'm just glad that we even have this as an option because like the only other 6K monitor that we've had for the last few years is the 32-inch Apple Pro XDR, whatever it's called, that's like $7,000.
[JM]: So just to have this as an option is great.
[DJ]: Right.
[DJ]: Well, and I was really happy when Apple launched the Studio Display, which I just mentioned, because it is merely like a couple thousand dollars and isn't as big or as dense, I don't think.
[DJ]: But no one needs that Pro Display, no average consumer anyway.
[DJ]: So I've thought about getting the Studio Display, but have held off because there is just a non-zero chance that I might have to connect something other than a MacBook to it or a Mac to it,
[DJ]: and it doesn't seem like it would handle that very well. Like my current monitor is, uh I want to say an HP Z27, and it's a 4K, it's 27 inches, so it's not ultra dense but it it's pretty good as far as like brightness and pixel density, but one of the things I like the most about it is
[DJ]: you should see how many ports it has on it.
[DJ]: Like it has an entire hub built into it so I can connect Ethernet and all kinds of stuff that again, like the Studio Display, maybe like that stuff might work, but it might not.
[DJ]: So I am also happy that there is an alternative monitor with a really high density.
[DJ]: If I, if I were truly feel like I need an even better monitor than the one I have now, which is still very good.
[JM]: And you're totally right about the ports.
[JM]: This 6K monitor has a bevy of ports, including Thunderbolt 4.
[JM]: So you can use it as a hub and plug in other Thunderbolt devices into it.
[JM]: If you had a MacBook Pro, you could charge your MacBook Pro by plugging it into the monitor and then plugging the monitor into power.
[JM]: Yeah, so if you're in the market for a new monitor, you should definitely check it out.
[JM]: All right, that's all for this episode.
[JM]: Thanks everyone for listening.
[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan on the web at danj.ca.
[JM]: Share your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.