> These applications tend to have incredible pricing power. The more of someone's cognition that gets offloaded to the app, the more switching means scooping out a portion of their brain and waiting a few months or years for it to grow back.
Huh, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. I’d tend to be allergic to that type of product I think; I love vim, but I wouldn’t have become reliant on it if it was proprietary, I think. If someone could revoke a license key and cripple my brain, that would be too stressful and uncertain an existence.
That said, open source devotees aren’t typical so I guess my case doesn’t tell me anything about the theory in general.
I'd be in real trouble if I lost emacs. Probably talking a 90% slowdown in the short term, only really getting back up to speed after I'd reimplemented it. But emacs is free and not-ridiculous to build from source so the dependency causes me no stress.
I can see obsidian ending up with similar effect. That's probably in the same category where it disappearing tomorrow would mean I drop whatever I'm working on to reimplement it, hopefully building on top of some existing alternative. However that one is not open source. There is low level anxiety there. An interesting question is how high the licence cost would get before it was no longer a net benefit.
This feels like a solid discussion of very much the opposite. The computer as bicycle for the mind is a beautiful & well traveled metaphor. And Engelbart is back there in history, always encouraging us to take the training wheels off: to get deep into systems that would let us deeply Augment Intellect.
Huh, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. I’d tend to be allergic to that type of product I think; I love vim, but I wouldn’t have become reliant on it if it was proprietary, I think. If someone could revoke a license key and cripple my brain, that would be too stressful and uncertain an existence.
That said, open source devotees aren’t typical so I guess my case doesn’t tell me anything about the theory in general.