gfodor.id

@jartine @Scobleizer great comment - it does seem like not worth giving up on. lots of ideas, like paid open source, can seem impossible it's just early, and the door just needed to be unlocked by the right technology at the right time.

My project was adopted by 32% of enterprises. I have no idea who any of them are. I only know because Wiz (a business intelligence security company) published an aggregate report on it. We had spotty download statistics from Hugging Face but Mozilla didn't trust them, because we saw very few people engaging on GitHub and Discord. There's no way to monetize a community of dark matter developers you can't see. People pay for things if you have leverage, it's scarce, or it solves their pain. In the 2000s when open source was immature and the world was unfamiliar with how it worked, there was an abundance of folks willing to pay for help solving the problems that caused. But as Linux and friends became more polished and perfect, Red Hat's business model dried up. Software is infinitely copyable and requires zero effort to maintain, which makes it fundamentally at odds with having any kind of economy. There have been numerous efforts to make software not be the way that it is. For example, software is the only thing on Earth that can be both patented and copyrighted. Both of them failed. Folks would pirate. Patent trolls abused it. Open source rejected it. Additionally folks have tried to regulate software, with things like FIPS standards, that need corporations to pay for experts for certifications but this was rejected by the industry too. You have little hope of making any income off that unless you're a government contractor and that means having the right connections. There definitely exists an economy for certifying and owning the risks of open source, but I don't think much of the money goes to the people who did the software work. That's just how their world operates, and I think it's a good thing that open source has helped them succed. The most successful model for profiting off software to date, has been to never distribute it. You put it in the cloud and charge rent to anyone wanting to use it. It's the only way the software industry could survive, and everything which isn't that just became open source. At the end of the day, open source simply isn't compatible with any economic model we know, because it's the absense of an economic model. Capitalism won't work. Socialism won't work. The only funding model I've seen work is the most ancient one, which is patronage. Before devices like patents existed ancient innovators would seek the sponsorship of the most powerful folks in their day. This is how people like Archimedes, Michelangelo, etc. got paid. So I wish people wouldn't try to solve the open source monetization problem because there isn't one. Money is orthogonal and it should stay orthogonal. I think it should be a gentleman amateur activity rather than an institutionalized role people perform to feed their kids. Open source is the byproduct of curiosity and it's not the sort of thing you can industrialize. If you bring too much money into the equation, it creates liabilities, responsibilities, etc. that corrupt the motivations at endanger those of us who just want to be curious. However this isn't just my wish, it's a warning. I've seen many folks try to solve this unsolvable problem and it makes them all half mad, and if they're smart then they give up before they go completely mad. The solution for an open source developer looking for income, to me, has always seemed as clear as day. You either win the affection of a Medici, or you make your money doing something else. One modern Medici is the European social safety net. Many open source developers hail from Europe since their economic policies ensure people have food and shelter, giving them the freedom to focus on anything, while taking away many freedoms to be enterprising. In America, I was able to fund my open source work on Cosmopolitan Libc for many years with a very simple stock trading strategy, which was to invest 100% of my money in a tech company on Charleston Road. With financial markets giving me money for nothing, I felt it was fair that I should work on open source to kick back some of the benefits to the community. I've actually been discovering new ways to redistribute wealth from Wall Street to the open source community. It makes me happy to have the opportunity to apply my work towards building a thing for me. I mean, you can't spend your whole career making the tools to other people do things without ever doing a thing yourself? What's great is that financial markets are unbiased. It's surprisingly competitive giving things away for free. I've dealt with plenty of hate and harassment for sharing software with the world. But the NASDAQ won't hate me because of what I am or what it thinks I believe. All that matters is if I can write a cleverer algorithm. That's the thing open source is supposed to be about. The only tradeoff is I'll stop making money the moment I share my algorithm with everyone. So there's no glory or recognition in doing it. Just dollars. In life, you can optimize for earning respect. You can optimize for money. You can even optimize for impact. But you can't maximize all of the above. The world just does not let it happen. But it'll give you a lot more of one if you're willing to give up the others. So anyone who's made the intentional tradeoff to max out one stat at the expense of the others, shouldn't feel unhappy they weren't given all three.

Open Source's big problem. Last night I went to a Y Combinator party in San Francisco and met an entrepreneur who is making a top Open Source AI model. He told me it is very hard to make money in open source. Yeah, it is cool being popular, he told me, but figuring out how to make a business out of it is proving to be very difficult. The Chinese are pounding the price into the ground with their open source models. Which makes it tough. In the old world of Open Source you could make money with them by consulting, service, etc, like RedHat did. But in this new world, he told me, it's much harder to make a good business out of it. Is anyone making a good business out of open source? What would your advice be to the businesses that are trying to support Open Source?

@greyishpilgrim what did it crap on? I've never understood this take, it just seems like this movie had new characters coming into their own and old characters evolving in a way that comes with old age and cynicism.

@gfodor TFA was fun. That’s it. We all knew it was a rehash, and we saw it as a safe way to set up new characters. What most of us who grew up on the OT didn’t want was a sequel that crapped on the things we loved about the originals.

The Force Awakens was the same plot as A New Hope and I think a lot of the haters were triggered by the first actual new Star Wars movie in 30 years not a regurgitated Empire Strikes Back

@RVL1389 @ArtOfPilgrim Seems like it would break down at this level of depth disparity

@ArtOfPilgrim People are over complicating it Perlin noise POM + SDF mask (slide along the 0-1 gradient for growth)

Hey game devs, how do you think you would achieve this growth effect in game? (Let's just pretend there's a scenario in which you needed this exact effect 😅)

@ViT0ViT0ViT0 It’s a Star Wars take, is there any other kind?

@gfodor Engagement/rage farming BS

@PettyTyrant444 I don’t see how anyone could shit on Star Wars harder than George Lucas with Episode I

@gfodor TFA sucks because it was completely mediocre and tried to not be anything. Uninteresting, but not offensive. TLJ sucks because it tried to be something, and that something was shitting on all of Star Wars.

When I visited Starbase everything was 10-100x bigger than I had imagined based on seeing videos

@ArtOfPilgrim SDF surface fit to extents from a PIC/FLIP sim with inter particle forces

@SpatialBiggs Was able to get it to beat saber hard level, so not bad!

@gfodor Hell yeah 👏

If my math is right, I’m going to be able to bring a full 6dof controller + hand tracking system (for VRChat, HL Alyx, etc) to 100M people this week entirely via software.

@TRDenTechs iPhone depth camera is pretty impressive even the front one. I’m about to release something for 6dof controller tracking like this too (not custom models tho, well done!)

finally time to tease this… i've spent months building a brand new app for full body tracking in VRChat using Kinects or iPhones with custom ML models. steam page dropping soon😉

@SamCole Too soon

If you raise money now as a VR company, at least you know your investors are true believers

(Unlike the original experiment, what I wrote above applies to both colors here depending on the frame)

Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to make

@badusernameguy The OP said his was random infants, so as dumb as that is, applies here

@gfodor You never specified in this one if it was the “infants randomly hit a button” version or the “all rational adults” version. Nor did you specify the actual phrasing given to the participants. Both of those matter. It’s a great variant, but specificity is needed.

@OfWonk I hope that was cathartic for you, feel better

@gfodor It’s where you are politically and personally. Your views haven’t gone magically unexplained over the last few years… the challenge has been getting you to stop running your fucking mouth about it. There’s no ironic failure to understand on the part of blue people here.

I struggle to come up with a more ironic statement than "my opponents are so cartoonishly stupid they are literally unable to conceptualize basic things about their opponents" it's like the FedEx arrow - once you see it, you can't unsee it

@Scow21 Pretty sure this is entirely algorithmic bias, posts like the OP flood my feed

@gfodor I see that take mostly from Red button pushers.

@CalebDixonSmith @Frank66_ That makes zero sense, there is obviously a benefit to having a parent in that world. Arguably the value of having parents goes up depending on how much the world is in chaos.

@gfodor @Frank66_ No, there is no benefit to surviving for my children if it means their father is a murderer and half the human race is dead, the world engulfed in apocalyptic disorder.

The funniest thing about the “vote blue to save the children who randomly voted blue” position is that I have seen zero of its promoters consider the children who randomly voted red.

@bumbleckuf @Frank66_ Can’t imagine being so deranged as to reply like this to a total stranger based on a tweet, good luck with your mental health issues

@gfodor @Frank66_ You couldn’t be more wrong, it’s obvious you aren’t a parent, even if you somehow managed to procreate. Blue is the right answer, there’s a reason it won and anyone that pressed red has to write a dissertation defending their shallow thought process.