Funnily enough, I was sitting about 30 meters up in an old church bell tower late at night and wanted something that made the "Have Idea > Write Idea > Publish Idea" workflow super simple but also better than a pastebin and I've always hated how underscores in markdown result in italicized text, not underscored text. Yes every social media platform solves the workflow problems, but I don't want everything I write tied to a central identity; I want to be able to share single thoughts as links with people.

Nonograph doesn't have any tracking. Everything coming into the host is through two hops of reverse proxies or Tor before the request reaches me. That's also why its 300ms to load a plain html page until I find a better solution to hide the server location. The most tracking I'm doing is looking at `top` to make sure the resource usage is low. Avg. 3% CPU, 210mb MEM.

In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.

More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.

It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.

Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.

I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.

If they are so inclined, they can fork it and patch it. It's out there after all. As long as they obey the terms of the license I put forth, it's all fair.

My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.

I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.

I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?

Using GPL or MIT or whatever open or free license you prefer does not mean it's OK to get bullied.

It's perfectly fine to not accept entitlement and still let others use or even build on your work, if you want to.

You have the freedom to shape the interactions you want even if nobody else does it this way.

https://github.com/agoodway/goodday

It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.

Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.

In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.

But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.

This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192025

The OSS part ensured that even if I went full Sam Altman, the user will still have an absolute baseline they can fallback on. And given how lazy I am, the OSS is often basically 70% of the project. This also has the benefit that the significant part of the code can be audited for security/etc, sometimes even for free.

"Be entitled to whatever one is willing to give upstream" is my motto.

This is where I'm at. I'm one of the few Gen-Z with enough to live on comfortably + safety net, so I give back.

Edit: took a look, neat stuff you're doing!

If you demand remuneration for all your work, then it's only fair for you to also pay for every single piece of software you ever use. If OTOH you're willing to trade some of your time and effort for the time and effort someone else spent on the software you enjoy for free, then you might appreciate that a financial transaction is not required for value to be created in the world. What is required is fair collaboration.

A RasPi would be an upgrade!

Also, Nonograph doesn't store or serve any media, just html and markdown.

Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.

I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?

Also, you can append .md to the end of any page (except /) to get the markdown from disk as raw text.

let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?

what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...

The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.

It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.

Now everything is for sale.

At first all engagement is exciting and validating. You work nights and weekends to please people you’ve never met, sure that one good turn deserves another.

Then you get your first jerk, then your second, then your third, while your father is in the hospital. You feel pressure to ship a feature you never wanted. Your issue tracker is demoralizing. You get a PR! Maybe someone is coming to your rescue. It sucks. Now you need to figure out how to respond. You’re alone. Your passion project has become your albatross.

Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.

This feeling is probably shared by many lefties people. They love to work, they just don't like to be restricted/manipulated into working under a highly specified and standardized environment, especially when every bit of their performance is measured for competition.

But I have grown to understand the environment of the "big tech" companies. It is hard to manage a project as it expands, and the result of human work is hard to predict, so often there's two ways to choose: 1) only hire people who's "on the same channel", highly talented "rock star" programmer, or 2) regulate everything to the detail, and "filter out" (a.k.a. firing) those who's incapable of fitting. Both are brutal, but effective and cheap to implement at scale.

If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own. But then of course you'll have to find some kind of financial support, maybe it's from "value extracting", but maybe it's something else.

BTW, I don't think "value extracting" == "user hostile". A lot of people go overboard with their religious beliefs, thinking rich is bad. But your time on this Earth is limited, and this is the only adventure you'll ever have. Thus your labor must be fairly compensated, so you can continue your journey a bit more freely. Otherwise it's a zero-sum game, more you "give out", less chance for yourself. How can you be so sure that other people would utilize their time better than you?

Selling your produce for financial isn't "user hostile". It will be if you're predatory, but it won't be if you're being fair.

I'm arguing that the current climate of "vibe code a startup a day" is unsustainable, terrible, and should NOT be the thing people strive for. Instead of appeasing VC firms, that energy can be better spent on passion projects or contributing to other open-source projects like KDE / Linux / GrapheneOS / etc..

It's mirrored to other servers running the software, plus there's entire separate instances beyond my control, and Tor-only instances. If one goes down, it will pop up somewhere else.

- I'm not particularly into castles, but I've visited a fair few while travelling. I lived in Norwich for 10 years, home to one of the finest Norman castles in the country. Did I visit? Did I heck.

- When your favourite film was on TV you'd watch it every time. Then when you got it on DVD you'd never watch it again.

- Give a dog some miscellaneous leftovers and notice how they prioritise ingestion.

Not sure it's really the same entitlement phenomenon the GP was talking about, though.

The name for this is the Veblen Effect [0], and it applies to all irrational market behaviour where people are actually happier with luxury goods the more they pay for them.

Funnily enough, I've seen some of the exact same clients brag about how cheaply they got something else. The lesson I've drawn is that they're mostly looking for approval, so they're equally interested in buying status as they are in getting real stuff done. It's a win/win if you deliver a great product that they can brag about, because they'll do the hard work of selling it to themselves for you.

A corollary of that psychology is that some, maybe even most people are never happy with stuff they paid market price for. They either think they could've gotten it cheaper, or they think they could have gotten more for their money. Paying market price makes them feel like a chump. But paying way more than market has to be justified to themselves first. It's simply too embarrassing to admit that they might have overpaid an arm and a leg. So as a contractor, pricing your work as either very cheap or very expensive, on the margins of the parabola, alleviates this vague sense of dissatisfaction from your clients' internal debate, and gives them the peace of mind that they're actually trying to buy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

They were almost always full to the brim.

Anecdotes are fun, but not much more than that.

The pragmatic accept that work ≠ value, some do so permanently. But someone newly aware of this may deem it unfair, and react with totally disproportionate demands, some do so permanently.

Then you come across those who already benefit greatly from the imbalance, yet still make disproportionate demands. These tend to be good at it, subtle, strategic. Which may explain why they end up on the benefiting side.

Broadly, you find three types: the greedy, the balanced, and the generous pragmatic.

The greedy exploits relativity. The balanced respects it. The generous navigates it without resentment. Whether consciously or not.

Generally speaking it just works.

But driving that line is a cost: to you, your volunteers, or your tokens(?).

See: Redis, Elastic, etc.

Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make hundreds of millions without cutting you in.

We need new licenses that are more "shareware" like. That permit individuals, but slap big trillion dollar companies.

"Fair source", "Fair code", the defold license, etc. are all pretty good.

If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.

The Black Lotus - Eon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc

It's mostly rose tinted glasses.

There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took.

In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which were amazing but also took weeks).

Or you relied on magazines which had a publication cycle. Writing actual physical letters about a program that was written out in the magazine was a thing.

When I got internet access in the mid-90s I remember emailing someone to ask about mirrors of their documentation project because I didn't want to use up their bandwidth.

I'd never ever want to go back. Bring on the future!

I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.

Now, no, of course not.

Originally though, yes this is how many human economies worked. Surplus was shared in a gift economy.

That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.

Your team cares though. Probably including yourself later. Maintaining proper commit history is always worth it.

I've been writing software for ~35 years, have taken exactly one course in CS (graduate machine learning while getting my PhD in physics), and did it professionally for about 5 years… that said, "writing software" has been a big part of other jobs I've had, even if not the headline description.

There's a huge landscape of things in between these two options.

Well if you want to use the scanner for something useful, you can run the web version here: https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/

No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.

> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?

Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.

I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.

It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.

Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.

That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.

I'm not sure the starving artist is an ideal to strive for, either. Surely there's a middle ground?

Obsidian's model seems fair: https://obsidian.md/pricing

JetBrains' lifetime "subscription" which gets locked at the version you paid for seems fair to me

I don't see why you can't work on something you're passionate about and make money from it. For those of us not retired, the money is essential to make it sustainable.

https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/

It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.

If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!

I am a 90s kid and I watch things like Stranger Things and feel nostalgia for a simpler time even though I wasn't even alive in the 80s.

The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.

I think plenty of artists would give away their work for free without second thoughts if they didn't have to make it pay their bills.

  > When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. 

I didn't mean in terms of 'seriousness' I meant in terms of liability.

Having terms saying "do what you want, not my problem" isn't a good strategy.

Basically, you get what you pay for. That's not always true, but it holds pretty reliably.

As for tokens, there have been exactly zero cases where someone has submitted LLM code to one of my repos that has been up to my standards and I have accepted it. Yes, I can say that with certainty. If I wanted LLM code I’d ask for it myself, having an intermediary in that process is worse than useless.

Similarly most salespeople would gladly work commission-free if it meant more sales.

Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.

Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years

The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun.

Today it’s all about side hustles.

I'd say it comes off as more of a challenge than a suggestion. "I don't care, do it yourself if you care so much". Most people just go away when they get told that. Some people actually rise up to the challenge.

> even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it

That's fine if clarified beforehand. The CONTRIBUTING.md from the above comment is an excellent example. It clearly communicates the maintainer's stance.

If it's coming from someone who previously "welcomed PRs", that sort of reply is extremely rude. Learning and modifying someone else's project is a major undertaking, and it's very disrespectful when maintainers don't match that effort, especially when they invited it upon themselves.

Having to spend time reviewing a PR or issue is “no cost”?

I’m not convinced yet.

> As for tokens

I did not mean LLM contributions…I meant using AI tools to automate the reviews of contributions and users you seem to think cost no time or attention, but I do..

What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me"

"But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "not telling me you're breaking my license". If I don't know about it I can't impose any penalties on you. Every good business already knows how and when they can break the law with impunity, and that's one of them.

Companies shouldn't get your labor for free. Especially the big ones.

Trillion dollar companies don't deserve hand outs.

We should have figured this out twenty years ago.

You can choose to

Or you can choose to ignore them

So, if you can, be the change you want to see in the world. Although videogames and screens are a big culprit too, in my opinion.

Why are you on a platform open to accepting them in the first place?

Are we talking about the same thing?

Git hosting provides discoverability and the ability to fork repositories. Everything else is an optional feature.

because you don’t have to “drive a hard line”, to do that,

you just draw it once (publish a no PR policy, don’t host on GH, etc),

and you shouldn’t be hearing from users.

So, reviewing them.

Which takes time/focus.