How can sole maintainers work with multi-billion corporations without being taken advantage of?

They can’t, thats why GPL is noncommercial. Capitalism is an exploitative system that relies on power imbalance. As soon as MS reached out, he should have made it clear they can’t even look at his code for ideas without a contract and payment. He shouldn’t have told them anything else without a contract. Papers with legal claims on them are the only language business speaks.

It’s a fair bit of work to set up, but I replaced Keep with Obsidian.

I suppose you could just pay for obsidian sync and then basically have parity. I do not. I use syncthing to sync my notebooks (vaults in obsidian terms) between my devices.

To get my existing notes, I used Google Takeout to get a copy of all my data, but you can just ask for the Keep data. They’ll send you a bunch of json files, which I was able to extract the text of my notes from pretty easily and copy into Obsidian notes.

Preservation, while perhaps idealistic, is about keeping every version that we can. Doom is a great example. Because Carmac released the source code, source ports have proliferated. That means anyone can play the original Doom on just about any machine. Varying degrees of accuracy to the original DOS release exist thanks to ports like Chocolate Doom, GZDoom, Eternity Engine, et al. As do varying degrees of accuracy to Doom 95, the Windows 95 rerelease. Or to the version running on Xbox packed in with Doom 3.

Ports cover the engine, but we also have an archive of all the doom.wad files, the contents. We have demo and prototype versions. The dos release. Officially patched versions. The win95 release. The Xbox release.

But a preservationist also wants the original Bethesda Unity release, wad and engine. The Kex release with the new engine and new episodes. Neither of those Bethesda engines needs to exist but why not keep them too? They’re a part of the Doom legacy, an ongoing chapter in the endless story of Doom.

Its good that in this community we’ve gotten to preserve so much. It keeps the history of one of the most important video games alive and relevant. It keeps the game itself relevant. Without the original source release, there’s no GZDoom and there’s probably no Bethesda rereleases. The impact that source release had on the gaming community, gaming as an industry, modding and indie gaming, is incalculable.

That Crysis–also a landmark game in its own time–deserves any less is laughable. The original release of the game should always be present and available: as an artifact of its time, as a fine game in its own right, and as a piece of living history that can be stood up against its remakes, sequels, and the games it inspired.

There is no place for Fascists within the Open Source and Free Software communities or the society at large. You will never fester your poisonous roots here. Go back to the cave you crawled out from where no sunlight can reach.

NAZI! DEVS! FUCK! OFF! 💯

Reminds me of a South Park episode as well. Randy is on Wheel of Fortune with the clue “People who annoy you” and “N_GGERS” on the board. The answer, of course, being naggers, which is not what Randy yells out.

Ah man, I’d been holding off on setting up another TES game on my PC since going to Linux. Now I’m going to have to go pre-emptive mod shopping for the essentials, and do it for so many games!

It’s a real shame that between crypto currencies, federated servers, and bittorrent we still haven’t come up with a fair and robust system for hosting large content archives.

The need for corporate-funded servers is killing video sites, mod sites, emulators, streaming, libraries, and so much more. Even the “self-hosted” crowd is like 90% dependent on cloud-hosting companies.

This is entirely apocryphal, but my friends who are very into blind items and celebrity gossip tell me about “yacht girls.” Famous (but not too famous) women are often invited to rich guy’s yachts as soft escorts. Sometimes there’s sex, often they’re just there to be pretty and flattering. Apparently Zach Effron is frequently a yacht “girl.”

So yes, I think a fairly significant portion of minor celebrity income is from private appearances (of one kind or another). Speaking engagements for businesses or clubs are another big (legitimate) arm of this trade.

More realistic versions:

Waterfall: the car is “finished” at the end, but replace the engine with a huge roaring fire. The Dev team continues to put the engine fire out and build the engine for 3x the original project duration.

Agile: replace the cute scooter and bicycle with the partial car graphics from Waterfall, but mount a uniccyle seat and then a park bench on top of the partially built car.

AI: the whole thing should always be on fire, and have several spies from different countries taking pictures of it constantly.

I feel like this is more an autistic or audhd trait. I’m way more likely to forget food exists for 24 hours than to ever eat the same thing twice in a row. My novelty seeking ensures my diet is pure choas.

Those mangos are really freaking good though right?!

The enshittification cycle Doctorow discusses is specific to online companies and services, but does have a certain general form that is applicable more broadly. But it isnt just “service degrades over time due to the tendency of profit to diminish.”

It’s about platforms, aka markets, aka middlemen. An online service doesn’t just exist to serve customers. Initially, the platform holder caters heavily to customers and to suppliers. Netflix offers a seemingly unlimited buffet of video for a low monthly fee, but also they seek out content creators to license their works and hire them to make new exclusive works. Epic Games store, same deal: free games for customers, huge exclusivity deals for publishers.

Enshittification happens when you get big enough to play the sides off each other. Publishers are captive to your platform for access to the audience, the audience is captive for access to your exclusive content. Older companies sold directly to stores or consumers, making it easier to just put the squeeze workers or customers.

By controlling the platform/market, you can extract wealth from every aspect of it: degrade customer experience, lock in and underpay producers and employees, and if you get big enough you can even start bossing around the government. Look at how much Amazon makes by forcing shippers and postal providers to cater to them.

That dynamic is somewhat novel. Markets are traditionally regulated, controlled, (and profited by) the government. David Graeber talks about the origins of markets under monarchs in order to centralize sales of goods to supply armies more readily. The modern capitalist understands that if you own the market, then you’ve won.

6/4/2025
I solved today's Stardewdle!

🟩🟥🟩🟩🟨
🟥🟥🟩🟩🟥
🟥🟥🟥🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟥
🟩🟥🟩🟩🟥
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Play at: https://stardewdle.com/

Got lucky on the first guess but then only had the price to narrow on so it got tricky there. Maybe if I could remember every crop’s season too.

I feel like its a mixed bag. Certainly there’s an infinitely higher chance of someone randomly noticing a backdoor in OSS than in closed source simply because any OSS project in use has someone looking at it. Many closed systems have dusty corners that haven’t had programmer eyes on them in years.

But also, modern dev requires either more vigilance than most of us have to give or more trust than most of us would ideally be comfortable offering. Forget leftpad, I’ve had npm dependencies run a full python script to compile and build sub dependencies. Every time I run npm update, it could be mining a couple of bitcoins for all I know in addition to installing gigs and gigs of other people’s code.

The whole industry had deep talks after leftpadgate about what needed to be done and ultimately, not much changed. NPM changed policy so that people couldn’t just dissapear their packages. But we didn’t come up with some better way.

Pretty much every language has its own NPM now, the problem is more widespread than ever. With Rust, it can run arbitrary macros and rust code in the build files, it can embed C dependencies. I’m not saying it would be super easy to hide something in cargo, i haven’t tried so I don’t know, but i do think the build system is incredibly vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A dependency chain could easily pull in some backdoor native code, embed it deep into your app, and you might never realize it’s even there.

MOV AX! RB da X!

https://youtu.be/tw429JGL5zo

I get people’s intentions behind this, ignorant though it is. I think medicated ADHD folks get a little defensive about it too though. I took adderall and then vyvanse for about 15 years total. Now I don’t take anything for it; I meditate and do THC recreationally (which was how I discovered the ADHD in the first place.)

I don’t think medication is bad, I think it helps people live they way they feel like they want or must. I realized that I was caught up in the hustle trap, taking meds to optimize my brain for the purpose of being a better capitalist worker.

I actually really like my default state. I’m extremely flexible and creative, I get a mix of tasks done, and my emotions are well regulated. On Vyvanse I got a lot of work done, but i was also a rage zombie, and I was prone to falling into “productivity mode” where I could hammer out line after line of code that was all boilerplate or data entry, other easy work to focus on. The kind of thing my ADHD brain would force me to find an easier (better designed) way to do the task if I wasn’t medicated into docile compliance.

So I’m not an advocate for either way: treat your mind the unique way you need to. But i really think the majority of ADHD folks are medicating themselves into acceptance of a broken and diseased system, when our brains have already been adapting to the actual needs of our information-overdense society.

Also, I’m quitting tomorrow and you’re in charge of MysteryTool maintenance. I’d start by upgrading the .NET version, that baby’s still running on Framework 4.5!

As discussed previously, browsers are quite complex and so adding a new feature (subtitles) is actually adding several features, on top of existing features (video player) that aren’t really (arguably) core to the web experience.

(I think olds like me want to believe the web is still “for” text and static images, but the majority of users today are (allegedly) all-in on video.)

Anyway, what sub-features make up “simple” subtitles? Oh the usual: where are they sourced? What format? What language? What encoding? (Utf8 one can only pray) Left to right support? Asian character support? What font are you using? System fonts? Are they widely supported? Does any of it work on mobile? Who holds the relevant patents? Etc.

I got fired from a programming job because I wrote code for maybe 30 minutes a day, but spent all my other time going from desk to desk helping other devs find problems and get unstuck. It was maybe the most productive I’ve ever been on a job.

That day, I learned a valuable lesson: do an hour of work a day (or week), then sit at your desk pretending to work while parceling out the stuff you did. Never help anyone. My career has been much more successful since.

Ooh, I’d been looking at wasmer but wasmtime looks easier and more appropriate. Thanks for the suggestion!

Also wow, a D programmer in the wild! I used to really like that language before I got into Rust (my beloved).

Literally have a dozen other tabs open about how to embed a WASM engine into my Rust game. At least I’m not (currently, at this time, right now) writing my own language or trying to embed a prolog engine.

“The addition of Polygon not only strengthens our editorial muscle but also amplifies our ability to deliver unmatched value to both audiences and advertisers,” said Valnet CEO Hassan Youssef in a statement.

That seems like it really won’t be true when you’ve laid off all the writers and editors who were doing that.