soundworlds

Hey all,

I just released minimal_worlds_ii (https://johnoestmannmusic.com/albums/) - an album of Game Boy music made entirely with Furnace Tracker (https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace). All project files are available through the individual track pages, and all music files are Public Domain / CC0!

If you do like what you hear, worth knowing all other albums on that page are Public Domain, and all of the recent ones also have their source projects available (basically since I got really into FOSS and started structuring my projects in a way that could be easily shared)

Cheers :)

Hey everyone, I just wanted to run a concept past the community, and am keen to hear thoughts from all sides. I’m currently designing a fictional positive future world for a project, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought into how future healthy societies may exist, and their structure - and Open-Source is a key part of this.

Looking at a lot of utopias in Sci Fi (e.g. Star Trek), future technology, while important, is kind of a veneer over the actual fiction which is usually a coherent society aligned with certain cultural values. E.g. Picard explains that in 24th Century, for humanity “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity” (https://youtu.be/PV4Oze9JEU0 - 3:00). This rests on the assumption that the collective humanity in Star Trek society are driven by those values. Yes they have matter replicators, but as Manu Saadia argues in Trekonomics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekonomics), even those require society and supply chains to be healthy to actually work for humanity’s prospering.

Of all the promising cultural movements in our own real world, Open-Source is consistently the one I come back to as having real humanity-wide empowerment value, and not just centralizing power with a few. However, most people I talk to have never heard of Open-Source, as most of them don’t touch code.

I had the idea of my fictional world having a cultural concept called “The Codestream” - which essentially refers to the entirety of Open-Source, but is treated with a sacred (but not divine) respect. For example, a member of this society might say something like “We draw from The Codestream and we give back to it. It gives us, and all peoples, life.” This basically means: we take programs, code, forked versions from the Open-Source space, and as a sign of respect, we contribute back to Open-Source. These programs run a huge number of functions that allows our societies to function.

I understand that this might evoke a response in some people (as it did when I first put down the name / idea), especially as it may sound “religious”. However, I think it is important to note that many people have argued that post-modern Western society has lost the treatment of almost anything as sacred, to its detriment. Democracy is probably the closest thing to a "sacred" value I can think of in the West. So just trying to stress that I am using the term “sacred” as in “treated with utmost respect”, not as in “divine”.

SO, I’m basically making this post to ask for people’s thoughts / reactions:

    What is your initial response?

    Could you see this spreading as a cultural value in our own real world?

    Is this just a rebranding of Open-Source and entirely unnecessary? Or does giving it the sacred-respect element give it more cultural mobility?

    Has this already come up in FOSS’ 70-yr history?

    Any other thoughts?

Thanks all for your time :)

Not sure if this has been shared already, but AllenAI / Ai2 is a US-based nonprofit who are trying to build AIs as open-source and transparently as possible.

Their OLMO models have fully transparent training data. Their Tulu ones are as transparent as you can be building on top of Llama. Earlier this week, they released their new 405B Parameter Tulu model for free online chat and download.

Chat: https://playground.allenai.org/

HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/allenai/Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-405B

This is not meant to be a political discussion, but more just practical information to have on hand. The country which hosts many digital services is currently undergoing rapid political change. Just in case any of those services are affected, it is worth knowing about alternatives:

https://switching.software/

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to