• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle








  • I think the difference here is between your conception that reality follows a mathematical model while their conception is that mathematical models follow and try to be reflective of reality.

    I think their concern is that, if one believes reality follows math, when the model fails to accurately predict something, the person with the model may wonder what’s wrong with reality. If that person believed the model follows reality they would wonder what’s wrong with the model. The latter perspective will yield better results.

    It’s the difference between saying “this is how it works” vs “to the best of my knowledge this is how it works.”








  • If the author no longer has passion for his OSS project, and isn’t being paid for it, why is he still working on it? Why should he feel responsible for companies building their processes on a free piece of software without guaranteed support? Why the heck is he sacrificing sleep for something he claims not to care about anymore? It sounds to me like he’s not living his values.

    If compensation for volunteer work is mandated, it becomes less volunteer work and more of a part(or in some cases full)-time job. My understanding is that a core pillar of open source software is that anyone can contribute to it, which should make it easier for contributors to come and go. Based on the graph shown it would take more than a full-time job worth of money to meet his demand, which seems unlikely in any case, and it’s time for him to go. Either someone else will volunteer to pick up the slack, the companies using it will pay someone to pick up the slack like the author mentioned, or the software will languish, degrade, and stop being used.

    I don’t see how any of those outcomes suggest that people need to be paid for the time they voluntarily give. I could get behind finding better ways to monetarily support those who do want to get paid, but “how could it be easier to pay OSS contributors after their passion is gone?” is a lot less provocative of a headline.


  • Imagine you have a big board on your front lawn where people can come to write stuff and respond to others on the board. This board is an instance.

    Your neighbor has their own board, which they have “federated” with yours. Messages from your board can show up on their board, and people there can write on those messages same as ones native to that board.

    You can federate with them so their stuff shows on your board, or defederate if you don’t like the people there.

    Anyone with the ability to make a board can have one federated with other boards to make a really big web of boards, but to a person looking at your lawn’s board it feels like one big one.