[HN Gopher] The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-17 23:00 UTC)