rabidrat

One thing I've been thinking about recently, is the difference between "asking for help" and "being offered help". It's difficult to ask for help in a socially acceptable way: deferential, but not ingratiating; vulnerable, but not needy; bounded, but not transactional. Whereas these tensions are largely circumvented when someone sees you struggling and offers to help in some way. This leads better results also, as often when I need help, I don't even know what kind of help to ask for. But someone who has gone through something similar, can help simply by knowing what it is I might need, even if they can't provide it. It's very difficult to get that kind of help by asking for it.

> patio tables

Where the APIs are compatible anyway, but only the names or order of arguments are different, it sure would be nice to have a standard so you didn't have to look up whether it was count or len or length or size.

Well, perhaps there could be a small modification that would allow "use in perpetuity" and rights of survivorship, or whatever. The important part is just that profiteers have to negotiate with the creator(s) so that they get some slice of the pie they've helped create.

Of course! It's VisiData (visidata.org). Thanks for asking, let me know if you find it useful too :)

I wish there were a vetted Open Source license that:

- allowed the code to be visible and available as a general rule

- allowed an individual user to use it and modify it for non-commercial use

- disallowed redistributing modified versions (distributing patches would be fine)

- disallowed commercial use

Basically, a license that would allow free experimentation and grassroots adoption and all kinds of open-source goodness for individuals, while not giving FAANG profiteers a handout for RMS' ideological reasons.

I took a sabbatical from work in 2017 and devoted that time to creating an open source project which I felt was important to exist in the world. I am not wealthy, nor was anyone else supporting me; I had saved up enough to take a year off, and instead of travelling or learning the saxophone, I spent my time developing software that I released under GPL.

I guess because I was not living hand-to-mouth, I didn't "need" the money? But I wound up nearly going into debt, because it took another year to get a job after that--turns out that maintaining an open-source project is not an asset for employers but a liability. I had an offer from a HugeCo for decent money, but I turned it down because it would basically have precluded me from working further on this project which is only now starting to walk on its own.

It's not my entire working life, by any stretch, but those 2 years were 5% of it, and I figure that cost me $200k+ in "lost" wages. And that does not count all the "free" time I've spent since, fixing bugs and helping people use it, because I love the thing and I want other people to love it too. I'm glad I created it, it's very useful to me and other people who do data exploration in the terminal, but now I have to accept that I probably won't ever recover any significant amount of that value, because...people don't pay for open-source software.

It's been proposed and tried before, and I think generally deemed not worth it. a) Almost no one donates, b) the donations would be broken up to infinitesimal levels, helping no one, and c) there are people who devote their working lives to OSS without compensation, other people who write a few cute small libraries/tools but don't need the money, and then there are corporations who contribute to open-source for their own benefit. The proportion of money that would go to your favorite OSS heroes would be embarrassingly small; compounded by the low donation level and general dilution.

These are order-of-magnitude increases. If it costs $5m to train GPT-3, which is 100x more compute than GPT-2, then it may cost $500m to train GPT-4, and $50b to train GPT-5. This is what is meant by economically (not to mention environmentally) unsustainable.

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for this very reason. You might think it's ridiculous but the fight for the right to modify the software running on devices you own has been raging for 35 years and is bigger than ever.

You're not immortal, you still need to eat and stay warm and get medical care. In fact if anything now the stakes are even higher to achieve a certain sustainable dollar amount so that you can 'retire' (i.e. live sustainably off passive income for a million years).

So it's like stenos create their own Huffman code for all their typing needs, from one of a few starting dictionaries (systems like Plover).

That hardly works if there is no power :)

> As soon you need to talk about these things over and over you want to write these down.

This is the relevant part, to me. Can we do this documentation process JIT when someone asks about it? Maybe even convert the dialogue (in chat) or transcript of the conversation into the documentation.

Concentration of bad stuff matters though.

These articles about engineering process always put the responsibility solely in the implementing engineer's lap. Always more and more work to achieve JPL-level capability maturity, no matter your budget or headcount. Of course we want unit tests for every case, and verbose explanation in every atomic commit message, and architecture documents that are seldom read before they become stale. But make sure you also get your story points done for this sprint and meet your OKRs for this quarter.

> get your manager to do their job better

"This arrogant engineer I manage just told me how to do my job better! I've already assigned them 14 story points in JIRA, what more do they want me to do?"

How does that help when some places have only one polling station for 100k people? And there is a global pandemic, so we don't want 100k people congregating in the same crowded space?

Yes, I think so. There are many git clients which offer superior UX already, but they only provide a subset of the functionality available with the data structure. I'd personally love to experiment with showing and editing the data structure more 'directly', instead of relying on a battery of CLI commands and options.

An ad-hoc sales tactic from 1993 that involves pretending to be a male stripper to get attention for your software product, might not be all that viable in 2020.

People keep repeating this, but it's not true. The interface has so many "this flag in this case" but "this other flag in that case" and "that command doesn't support this flag like that" etc. There's no composability or orthoganality or suggestiveness. It's nonsensical and capricious and unmemorable, even though I understand the "simple" underlying model and have for years.

> a business is not short-term sustainable, but IS long-term, and investor capital gets you over that hump.

Unfortunately, investor capital changes the dynamics such that what would be long-term sustainable without investment, may very well not be long-term sustainable with investment.

Max Levchin (the lesser-known co-founder of PayPal) invented CAPTCHAs. So you can pretty easily get a picture of his face to print onto a pillow to punch.

The Economist is definitely not liberal. It's intended to be nonpolitical but its conscious opinions lean conservative. Disagreeing with Trump or talking about Trump in a negative manner does not make one liberal, no matter what US political pundit will tell you.

Some miserable things you have to do and can't get around it in the future. e.g. taxes.

Extremely relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/

Not anymore.

Some programs may allow for plugins which can have their own options. But you may want to provide an option for where to load the plugins from.

That's only if you `export` the vars. You can do `FOO=1 BAR=2 cmd` and FOO and BAR will only have those values for the process and children. This is isomorphic to `cmd --foo=1 --bar=2`.

> more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space.

Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 hour).

Do you like split-window, code-folding, etc etc so much that you can't download it while traveling in a rural area, have to close it so you can run Photoshop, and have to carry a spare battery so you can use it for the entirety of a 3-hour plane ride?