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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • I see you point; but not even 200 years ago the people couldn’t imagine most people working in other “industries” than agriculture.

    Historically, most people worked in agriculture. (I’m not sure of the percentage, but it was >80% IIRC, but we can take a low estimate at 50%).

    Nowadays less than 5% of the world population works in agriculture, due to increases in automation (machinery that can plow and harvest), and better understanding of the process (more efficient use of land).

    While some of that turned out to be bad for the environment (who knew biodiversity is good, actually?), it did free up most of the population to do other things.

    I hope it’s not “AI” that will automate the future (because of the huge energy costs to the environment), but automation more generally could help us free more time for passionate pursuits.

    Jobs like software engineer didn’t even exist a century ago, and who knows what kind of new jobs will be created in the next 100?










  • Exactly, permissive licenses such as MIT allow for other people to do a rugpull and change the deal (pray I don’t alter it any further). With open source licenses the community can just fork.

    That’s why I always pick AGPL for my projects. Then I can be certain that the code can be freed from greedy hands, and the actual users get all the value of the effort I put in.

    VC funding really is making a deal with the devil, because you suddenly have a huge amount of cash, so the startup starts living large (hire more devs, run on expensive cloud infrastructure). But sooner or later they want their money back, plus interest; and few services are profitable, let alone that profitable. So the only thing that startups are usually capable of is to squeeze their users for all they’re worth.

    Take a look at all the big startups and see:

    • how long it took for them to be profitable
    • how much VC funding they got until then

    Companies need to pay that back and then some.

    And don’t forget that VC’s see this as a perpetual investment, so your revenue must grow year after year, even if you’ve saturated the market.







  • They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

    I do have several questions:

    Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

    Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

    Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?