If you have never played the backwards-lifetime game, you should.
Take your current age and work backwards that same number of days, months and years before your birth. Every year something else remarkable is added.
At my current backwards age, World War II is the best part of two decades away; the UK is still recovering from World War I. Rocket 88, the first rock and roll song, won't be written for nearly another three decades. Women still can't vote in the UK, the Wall Street Crash is several years away.
When my father (who knew one of the most important men in medical history in his younger days and who was working in medicine not long after the NHS was founded) died, his backwards age reached back before the germ theory of modern medicine.
Another interesting game is to use your "oocyte age" — about 32 weeks before your mother was born is roughly when the oocyte developed that led to your egg. In my case this too is before World War II started.
It’s impressive that surgical teams put aside ego enough to do this - and I suspect that barely 1 in 1000 businesses and teams could decide their own work as deeply.
1. Microservices imply distributed computing. So work with the grain on that - which is basically message passing with shared nothing resources. Most microservices try to do that so we are pretty good from a technical pov
2. Semantic loops - which is kind of what we are doing here with poly trees. This is really trying to model the business in software
Now here comes the hard part - this is not merely hard it’s sometimes bad politics to find out how a business really works. Is think far more software projects fail because the business they are in is unwilling to admit it is not the shape they are telling the software developers it is. Politics, fraud or anything in steer.
In the golden era of advertising (don’t really know but say before the iPhone)
there was no “opt-out”. If you wanted to watch Lucille Ball, rich or poor you had to sit through the ads. If you wanted to read the New York Times article, rich or poor, you had to turn the full page ad over.
Today that’s gone - you can for a fee never see an advert again. And that fee is easier to pay if you are rich, and harder if poor. And so more and more “traditional” advertising will become aggressive and aimed at both lower income audience and more scammy products (because you are selling to the poorest you cannot beat costs eventually). And advertising will stop being about “brand” (which are naturally less aggressive and focused on closing) and more about the last click to sale.
We are already seeing this world take shape, as “influencers” become the way to reach those who have paid to stop all other advertising, and why travel influencers are head of that pack.
Ultimately this is about design of our public spaces. We rightly celebrate architects, civil engineers and their sponsors who create enjoyable and beneficial built areas - we have still to get a hold of the digital public spaces. While Times Square has a quality of its own, living there permanently would have mental health issues for most of us.
And in the end, positive public spaces are associated with the words paternalism, socialism, public good and none with Toll, extraction, rentierism.
The arguments against ads are arguments for paternalism of government control for a better life for us all.
I just realised I have been thinking about OSS funding the wrong way around
It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”
The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
If you're making a product, I think Kickstarter is awesome.
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
I like where you're going. I'm intrigued! but what would it look like? For example, curl. I use curl it's awesome. I love it. It's not at a level where I'm going to go to community meet ups for it though, but I'm super happy it exists. I can buy stickers for my laptop and do free advertising?
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
I'm thinking more about a subscription to a monthly fee that you and I and other fans of OSS voluntarily pay.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
The tracking app would be pretty simple. A shim in the shell that tracks the first argument on the command line and increments a counter. Then usage stats are pushed to the service every 24 hours (or something like that).
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?
I wonder if some weird kind of aggregation could go on.
At the end of the month, I'm told to donate my entire $10 to some obscure tool I've never even heard of.
The system did all of the tracking, across all users, and then figured out how to assign users like me to projects, such that I'm only donating once or twice ($6 to this project, and $4 to that project.)
The system I propose does all of the counting, all of the aggregating, matching intended donations to the recipients, and then encourages me to do my actual gifting...
Seems possible, but weird. Or maybe we need to set up a non-profit to do all this money laundering^W^W donating.
or maybe that's a direction to go towards. Similar to Spotify wrapped, someone else made a thing to go through your bash history and say what your popular things were.
I've donated quite a bit through the Kofi and Tipjar payment systems for neat OSS apps I use. I agree that it's not enough, however we do have other systems in place via Github sponsorships, Patreon (consistent funding), etc.
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project
The problem is the arbitrary way the funding is allocated, find something interesting to companies du jour with a clear path to funding and you're golden.
If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
Humans in their "free time" will make and create things of great value to society.
We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.
People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.
Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.
How do you study software history? Most of the lessons seem forever locked away behind corporate walls - any honest assessments made public will either end careers or start lawsuits
Ticketmaster is of course only doing what the artists want. They want to look like they sell tickets at reasonable prices that young fans could afford but really want to sell tickets for as much as possible - hence ticketmaster sells a fraction at face value, then basically hands the rest to touts who sell them for 2 grand a pop and give ticketmaster a cut which goes right back to the artist
So banning selling above face value just kicks that whole industry to the grass - and people either put prices at market value or more likely stop touring
(Ok so there is a third option, that fake classes of tickets will be created - it’s happening now as you get “meet the artist tickets” or “tickets with an ice cream” going for twice the price.
But this will rebound on the artist - will Taylor Swift want to be seen as gouging 13 yo fans - or will she just tour less, or put on kids nights and so on.
Anyway it’s probably just going to die a death and not get to law.
So I did something similar (well less cool), but as old Software devs start finding our bodies don’t work as well after a while we will see more and more of this sort of “taking control”
I did wonder but I keep downloading to the app to “see how I am doing”
Throughout the day so I would not be easily able to sniff it - and I assumed that as a highly engineered professional “medical device” it would of course be encrypted with unbreakable … oh it’s probably base64
FWIW the latest version of the app does export the previous day's averages to Apple Health (only when you open the app, mind, which can make it look like there's missing data.) I use BPExtract to read the PDF and export every reading to Apple Health but I'll definitely be giving your stuff a go as well (because automation >> manual every time.)
So this when they became a new brand (?) called Hilo.
I am not following their business but presume something is up.
Of course the format change seems to have broken the extractor so the next free lunchtime(s) I get will fix it. I assumed no one else uses it so was not in a hurry - any feedback gratefully recvd :-)
I am not even that old, but already seeing need to take some things into my own hands. I find going to a GP is more or less just a semaphore for specialists, and those specialists have wait times measured in months to years. I would be insane to just do nothing for that timeframe.
Although I think you need to be quite critical to have such a mindset, and assume you are wrong rather than right.
Imagine you are an Alien playing Sims 17.0 - Earth Edition. You’ve got the Industrial Revolution part mostly done, solar is going to hit big in Africa and Apac, the climate warning light came on but the manual says you can push that out a bit.
The problem is the economic transmission thing. Money was a great invention, but you are close to enough energy production for every Sim to be fed and housed sustainably. Then you get some time for the upgrade pack but you can’t stop the oil thing right now and darn it they keep trying to do the work and dribble out wealth that way. What’s wrong with the plan? Industrial Revolution, silicon and robots level, everyone relaxes and we can do the moonbase
The problem is they keep thinking they need to create more instead of level off - sharing it more and entering maintenance mode
The modern world is a lot more crammed together than we think it is
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