[HN Gopher] The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child
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The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child
Author : doener
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-01-17 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (morganya.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (morganya.org)
| ferdowsi wrote:
| It's interesting to think about OLPC as a precursor to many of
| the hype-driven internet phenomena that promise utopian gains.
| It's easy to see similarities in blockchain-mania, the evangelism
| machines around certain technologies and programming languages,
| etc...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I never thought of it that way, but I did have a few friends
| who were very enthusiastic about OLPC, and most of them were
| very interested in Bitcoin.
|
| There's a certain similarity in some of the ideas of libre
| software, self-improvement, etc.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Solar roadways and "infinite solar power water bottles" comes
| to mind. Just absolute rubbish which manages to extract funds
| from government programs for them to research how to strap a
| dehumidifier to a bottle and find out it doesn't make any
| sense.
| blip54321 wrote:
| I'm a bit skeptical of the thesis of this book.
|
| Moonshot projects usually fail, by definition. OLPC was likely to
| fail from the beginning. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth
| trying.
|
| We can -- and should -- diagnose and learn from everything which
| went wrong. The name -- Charisma Machine -- is fair. It describes
| what's wrong with a lot of modern MIT: big names, big charisma,
| and marketing over substance.
|
| On the other hand, for the burn rate (~$12M/year), it seems like
| it was a worthwhile risk. If it worked as promised, the gains
| would be in the trillions. If it kinda-worked, the gains would
| still be high. I gave it maybe 5% odds, and I think that's fair
| for this type of project.
| smm11 wrote:
| I was enamored with this project. How couldn't everyone see this
| was the key to a marvelous future?
|
| Then I adopted a dog instead, and sort of forgot about it.
| xibalba wrote:
| MIT Media Lab: "Turning BS into donor $$$ since day one!"
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| Maybe you don't owe glamorous academic media labs better, but
| you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cpr wrote:
| arbirk wrote:
| As a child of aid workers (hippie parents) I lived as a kid and
| teen in southern Africa. I was critical of the OLPC project
| mainly because it was a closed eco system, but told to shut up.
|
| Poor communities are used to repairing everything that can be
| repaired and it seemed to me, that giving access to standard pc
| platforms would be a much better starting point.
| inetknght wrote:
| A much better starting point would be to make laptops able to
| be as easily repaired as a normal PC.
| azinman2 wrote:
| PCs at the time were much more expensive, ran closed source
| Windows (versus open sourced Linux of OLPC), weren't good
| ebook readers given their screen technologies, didn't have
| mesh networking technologies, and a whole host of other
| things that made the OLPC far more interesting and
| hypothetically relevant to the problem they were trying to
| solve.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| iPhone internals are difficult to repair, but they make up
| for it with reliability. If OLPC had hit that target they
| could have been successful but it was basically not
| achievable for a mid-2000s laptop.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The iphone isn't actually that hard to repair. If you have
| the parts and the tools, almost all the parts can be
| replaced pretty quickly. The problem is a lot of the parts
| that tend to fail like a screen replacement or water damage
| to the main board cost as much in parts as the phone is
| worth. Which in a way makes sense because the screen and
| main board make up pretty much all the value of the phone.
|
| The nice thing is they have come a very long way in terms
| of battery replacements. You can get it done by apple for
| quite cheap and soon you will be able to buy the battery
| officially.
|
| But improving phone repairability wouldn't really do much
| for poor communities because it is more economical for them
| to just buy one of the dirt cheap working phones on the
| second hand market.
| trhway wrote:
| absolutely. The OLPC looked like a well intentioned design-by-
| committee attempt of the first world people to solve the issue
| of the 3rd world.
|
| >giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better
| starting point
|
| i've been in similar situation - end of 198x / start of 199x in
| Russia where we like the 3rd world were scrambling into
| computerization, and the standard PC platform with easy
| swappable/upgradeable components was the key here to the extent
| that even slightly non-standard brand-name PCs like Compaq/etc.
| were shunned away because the even so slightly customizations
| they had to their case, PSU, high-end adapters with custom
| drivers, custom usually non-upgradeable motherboards, etc. were
| making them practically feasible only to very rich
| companies/people.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I haven't read this new book. But I was at the Media Lab when all
| of this was going on (without directly working on it). Reading
| the reviews of this book, all I can say is if "scholars" ran this
| world, nothing would be done. Inaction is far easier than action,
| and no one has all the answers before big leaps are taken (and
| this was an insanely ambitious project). I also say that as a fan
| of some of the reviewers.
|
| No doubt mistakes were made, and likely some where called out
| back then (including critiques I did hear at the time). But it's
| also a very different world in 2022, where things like cell
| phones and Facebook have taken over the planet... I hope the book
| contextualizes this.
| zestyping wrote:
| > if "scholars" ran this world, nothing would be done. Inaction
| is far easier than action, and no one has all the answers
| before big leaps are taken
|
| Do you mean to defend the OLPC folks as action-takers, or
| criticize them as scholars?
| emmelaich wrote:
| Surely defend.
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