> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected.
> people run kaneo on setups i never imagined:
> behind corporate proxies
> ...
> in kubernetes with custom networking
It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in large enterprises.
It's FOSS, so they can use it for free if they want, but if they need custom support or features, they're a great user to tell, "Sure, I'm happy to help you with that if you purchase a $500/yr support contract." You'd be surprised how many customers like that don't care because they have a corporate card and that amount is too little to require approvals or much process.
This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.
But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.
Also, look at Gitea. People got paranoid and forked the project after the original author did exactly that.
Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.
This isn’t true. The tax office will bother you, the client also will demand you have an actual company with liability insurance and more.
There is a tremendous amount of legal and paperwork once you start accepting money and working with corps. It’s a nightmare.
You don't seem to understand the power balance here. The client is in no position to demand anything, since the article author can just tell them to scram, and they can solve their own problems.
Working with corps is not a problem. Unless you have a slave mentality that is, and let them bully you and stomp all over you. If they have their wits with them, they will fully understand what negotiating position they are in, and not make unnecessary demands on the software creator.
The IRS will definitely bother you if they figure out you have unreported income. Will they find out? Maybe not if it’s a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. More than $10K? Then it gets more likely. If a client sends you a 1099 then they’ll certainly know.
They’ll know because in the US and abroad the banks send the balances and transactions to the IRS. I get letters every year/6 months that I’m subject to additional withholding because they haven’t gotten any $$ but they show I have.
AFAIK only transactions over $10k are reported, maybe different between personal and business accounts?
Considering he is doing it for free, it won't be more than a few thousand dollars. And he can report it and pay tax on it if he pleases.
> But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.
I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them.
> I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them.
One thing is to charge the customer, the other thing is getting along with the insanely convoluted invoicing and taxation laws (at least in Germany).
Believe me: when you have to get along with these laws, from the deepest of your heart you wish the politicians who created these laws to be murdered as soon as possible, and you would would do basically anything in your power to help a madman who wants to do a mass murdering of these politicians.
[deleted]
OpenCollective Europe
You receive the money as contractor wages
Well not every country is Germany. Dunno what to tell you there.
The second half of that also sounds unhinged.
> The second half of that also sounds unhinged.
Since Hacker News also centers on entrepreneurship: I know quite some entrepreneurs in Germany who think this way about the bureacratic chicanery that companies have to handle, and already thought about whether hiring a hitman for these politicians would be a good idea. The hate for the political caste in Germany among many people is insane.
Especially a site that frequently champions, shall we say... more creative forms of running a company in its early stages (like how Spotify started out charging money for pirated music). If it's okay for OpenAI to launder copyright, it's okay for you to send a net-30 PDF to a Fortune 500 company.
Alternatively, people could just stop complaining about it.
Well the laws are like spider webs that only catch small bugs. It's "okay" for a Spotify or OpenAI because they can hire lawyers and expect to blitzscale. Harder to take those risks for a random solo developer who just wants to make things.
I wish. In my company that is an instant no. The amount of legal contracting bull we have to go through for that would quite literally take 9 months.
If a company is unwilling to jump through its self-imposed barriers to paying for things it wants, then it obviously doesn't value those features/items. This is definitely a case of 'voting with [one's] dollars'.
> if you purchase a $500/yr support contract
500/hr more like.
I mean you might have to negotiate a bit but yeah, a simple professional statement like “My rate for custom enhancements is $X/hr” is not going to ruffle any feathers. They might not bat an eye.
The thing is if you agree, now you have to deliver. Be sure it’s something you want to do. If the project is open source because you don’t want to be a business, then be careful about letting a little quick cash change your mind.
I wouldnt worry about the license, unless you licenses yourself into a corner. MIT is great for this.
Secondly, yes. The biggest challenge I have seen is getting on "VENDOR LISTS". Vendor approval is a huge PITA. master agreements, proof of insurance, etc.
Yeah running a miniture incarnation of data centre Jira (i.e. the old one where people self install and uograde) as a single dev. That will be a lot of work!
This is actually nice and balanced, but the title is misleading. I feel like ALL I hear about maintaining an open source project is how hard it is and how people burn our. I almost never read a blogpost or comment declaring how rewarding it is. So, this was a nice (slightly) more balanced view.
[deleted]
There are a lot of happy open source projects rocking along ... happily.
You may not hear about them here or on your socials but it is possible you are not hearing everything. For example, do you have a presence on Mastodon or Lemmy (for example)?
There are a lot more channels too (you mentioned blogs).
Just like the roads you drive on seem to repair themselves sometimes (sort of), FOSS keeps on rocking along with minimal fuss, driven by a vast army of people who do what they can when they fancy it.
Look at the evidence: There is a vast, publicly accessible, free and open source, pool of software for you to download and play with. It gets larger daily but individual stories are immaterial - they might be described or not.
Look at the community: Along with all that software, often there will be a community. Arch, Gentoo and many others are legendary in providing resources to engage with.
>the honest truth
>maintaining an open source, self-hosted project is:
> more work than building it
> different fun than building it
> more rewarding than you'd expect
> harder than you'd expect
> worth it
I'd say the title is not misleading: what they don't tell you is that is more rewarding than you'd expect and worth it. (Because yes, we mostly hear the "it's too much work and not worth it" story.)
For anyone interested in this (and certainly for OP) I highly highly recommend the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal. When I was raising my profile on my open source farming robot, this book really helped me understand the types of projects one might want to foster, how to think about users, and generally gave me very helpful guidance on becoming an open source maintainer!
I liked the humble, “lessons learned” tone of the post.
> every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever.
This.
Keeping a framework/app/SDK “pure” is very important, in my experience.
This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal splice, failure to seal a gasket properly resulting in water intrusion that stresses fibres when the water turns into ice, ...), but those become quite rare if you're done your job properly.
On the other hand, software is never done. Even simple features, like headphones, regress these days. (I missed a meeting today because my phone decided to send audio notifications into the black void of the heat death of the universe because I didn't unlock my phone after plugging the headphones into the USB-C port of my iPhone -- the audio didn't come out of the speaker, nor out of the bluetooth of the car I was driving. No sound worked until after the phone was unlocked.)
At least with open source software I can fix the bugs I care about, but the fun goes away once you have to deal with other people to get things merged.
Is there a community of software Luddites I can go live with where we build simple technology that works and works well?
You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.
It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber?
I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.
> how long it would take to retrain as a plumber
Yeah people have thoughts like this but then you hear a story about lying on your back in a muddy 3’ crawl space cutting into a blocked sewer line to install a cleanout and hoping you can roll away when the liquid starts pouring out.
Then your desk job writing code starts to sound a little better.
Most of my career has been in software development. Running an ISP / carrier is more fun as there's more of a variety from day to day (as is the case for anything entrepreneurial) while still involving technical skills. There is a need for with some programming from time to time, but it is usually tied to solving a particular business need.
I'm sure there are other people out there frustrated with the software grind. My point is that change is always an option. There are interesting problems to solve in the world that exist outside of large software projects that most folks here have the required skill sets to tackle.
As we all know, the only real job is writing React web apps.
I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.
Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1]
If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are.
In the words of Lizzo: "Let 'em say what they gonna say. They gonna feel how they gonna feel." Back in the day, we called this "feeding the trolls", and the advice hasn't changed: ignore them. You don't owe every single person online any part of your short, precious life. Issues have delete buttons (and there are other hosted SCMs besides GitHub). I encourage liberal use thereof.
I would pull my hair out.
Ew gross
LOL all that user does is open issues for free support?
People who give away things like this tend to be good people. As such when someone comes asking for help or new things they are inclined to help.
Your response is where it should go when things get rude, but you don't want to start there.
Ya OP is shadow boxing. There is absolutely no need for any of these things.
Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.
Seriously. If I throw something up somewhere, you get a tarball, a README, and no way to get in touch with me. If the code helps you, fantastic! If it doesn't, then I hope you at least got something out of the experience. But "as-is" means what it says on the tin. I'm not sure why people are so hellbent on treating every message from every stranger as important.
> someone opens an issue: "how do i install this?"
Honestly, this is a GitHub thing. You wouldn't get that issue on sourcehut, bitbucket or self hosted.
GitHub is the lowest common denominator for users.
>but here's the thing: people come from different backgrounds. what's obvious to me after building the thing isn't obvious to someone installing it for the first time.
Sure, but you're also not obligated to do... well, anything. And people are also allowed to read documentation and code and put in the effort to build and install things themselves. What happened to the oldschool hacker spirit that rewarded learning and helping yourself? If you show up to a group of people and say "how do I make this work?" while showing zero evidence that you've actually done anything, you'll be politely told to fuck off. I promise it's okay to say no to people, especially people who haven't demonstrated that they've put in their own time to understand something.
But this is immaterial anyway. I don't know how to better explain that you don't owe your time to strangers on the internet, some portion of whom are probably not even human. Alternatively, you could get them to pay you, especially the organizations "behind corporate proxies". If they can afford a corporate proxy, they can certainly afford your time, as long as you value it appropriately.
So yeah. Stop working for free, and stop treating every last internet stranger as relevant.
Ah, the classic hacker spirit of commercializing every interaction?
No, the real one, not the one people talk about here.
I like the article a lot. Very thoughtful.
Kinda frustratingly written by ai
Just curious, how do you know / why do you think it's written by AI? The bullet points?
Particularly frustratingly because it's so unnecessary in this case. It's not even that much text, just write it yourself. It would probably take less time.
I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually.
I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it.
We're at the point we need to coin a law for it. With tongue firmly in cheek, we could call it Turing's Law perhaps?
"Any person who publishes any text on the internet will be mistaken for a robot"
There's a bunch of typical ChatGPT catch phrases in the post "Here's the thing", "but honestly". You can't know for sure but it really does look like OP wrote it then stuck it in ChatGPT but told it to not fix the capitalisation for some reason.
I say those things all the time, and I'm most certainly not ChatGPT. You can't infer someone is using an LLM from that.
Hmm, I didn't pick up anything reading it but going back it does have that vibe with the repeated bullet points and cadence.
I wouldn't be certain of it but I can definitely believe it.
No evidence of this
Don't help people who won't help themselves.
I mean, Docker Compose could use to be more robust. I recommend Caddy for things like this.
[dead]
[flagged]
I agree, but you might want to practice what you preach.
it's been a thing for a long time; just pretend you're reading achewood and everyone is roast beef
> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected.
> people run kaneo on setups i never imagined:
> behind corporate proxies
> ...
> in kubernetes with custom networking
It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in large enterprises.
It's FOSS, so they can use it for free if they want, but if they need custom support or features, they're a great user to tell, "Sure, I'm happy to help you with that if you purchase a $500/yr support contract." You'd be surprised how many customers like that don't care because they have a corporate card and that amount is too little to require approvals or much process.
This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.
[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.
Also, look at Gitea. People got paranoid and forked the project after the original author did exactly that.
Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.
This isn’t true. The tax office will bother you, the client also will demand you have an actual company with liability insurance and more.
There is a tremendous amount of legal and paperwork once you start accepting money and working with corps. It’s a nightmare.
You don't seem to understand the power balance here. The client is in no position to demand anything, since the article author can just tell them to scram, and they can solve their own problems.
Working with corps is not a problem. Unless you have a slave mentality that is, and let them bully you and stomp all over you. If they have their wits with them, they will fully understand what negotiating position they are in, and not make unnecessary demands on the software creator.
The IRS will definitely bother you if they figure out you have unreported income. Will they find out? Maybe not if it’s a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. More than $10K? Then it gets more likely. If a client sends you a 1099 then they’ll certainly know.
They’ll know because in the US and abroad the banks send the balances and transactions to the IRS. I get letters every year/6 months that I’m subject to additional withholding because they haven’t gotten any $$ but they show I have.
AFAIK only transactions over $10k are reported, maybe different between personal and business accounts?
Considering he is doing it for free, it won't be more than a few thousand dollars. And he can report it and pay tax on it if he pleases.
> But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.
I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them.
> I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them.
One thing is to charge the customer, the other thing is getting along with the insanely convoluted invoicing and taxation laws (at least in Germany).
Believe me: when you have to get along with these laws, from the deepest of your heart you wish the politicians who created these laws to be murdered as soon as possible, and you would would do basically anything in your power to help a madman who wants to do a mass murdering of these politicians.
OpenCollective Europe
You receive the money as contractor wages
Well not every country is Germany. Dunno what to tell you there.
The second half of that also sounds unhinged.
> The second half of that also sounds unhinged.
Since Hacker News also centers on entrepreneurship: I know quite some entrepreneurs in Germany who think this way about the bureacratic chicanery that companies have to handle, and already thought about whether hiring a hitman for these politicians would be a good idea. The hate for the political caste in Germany among many people is insane.
Especially a site that frequently champions, shall we say... more creative forms of running a company in its early stages (like how Spotify started out charging money for pirated music). If it's okay for OpenAI to launder copyright, it's okay for you to send a net-30 PDF to a Fortune 500 company.
Alternatively, people could just stop complaining about it.
Well the laws are like spider webs that only catch small bugs. It's "okay" for a Spotify or OpenAI because they can hire lawyers and expect to blitzscale. Harder to take those risks for a random solo developer who just wants to make things.
I wish. In my company that is an instant no. The amount of legal contracting bull we have to go through for that would quite literally take 9 months.
If a company is unwilling to jump through its self-imposed barriers to paying for things it wants, then it obviously doesn't value those features/items. This is definitely a case of 'voting with [one's] dollars'.
> if you purchase a $500/yr support contract
500/hr more like.
I mean you might have to negotiate a bit but yeah, a simple professional statement like “My rate for custom enhancements is $X/hr” is not going to ruffle any feathers. They might not bat an eye.
The thing is if you agree, now you have to deliver. Be sure it’s something you want to do. If the project is open source because you don’t want to be a business, then be careful about letting a little quick cash change your mind.
I wouldnt worry about the license, unless you licenses yourself into a corner. MIT is great for this.
Secondly, yes. The biggest challenge I have seen is getting on "VENDOR LISTS". Vendor approval is a huge PITA. master agreements, proof of insurance, etc.
Yeah running a miniture incarnation of data centre Jira (i.e. the old one where people self install and uograde) as a single dev. That will be a lot of work!
This is actually nice and balanced, but the title is misleading. I feel like ALL I hear about maintaining an open source project is how hard it is and how people burn our. I almost never read a blogpost or comment declaring how rewarding it is. So, this was a nice (slightly) more balanced view.
There are a lot of happy open source projects rocking along ... happily.
You may not hear about them here or on your socials but it is possible you are not hearing everything. For example, do you have a presence on Mastodon or Lemmy (for example)?
There are a lot more channels too (you mentioned blogs).
Just like the roads you drive on seem to repair themselves sometimes (sort of), FOSS keeps on rocking along with minimal fuss, driven by a vast army of people who do what they can when they fancy it.
Look at the evidence: There is a vast, publicly accessible, free and open source, pool of software for you to download and play with. It gets larger daily but individual stories are immaterial - they might be described or not.
Look at the community: Along with all that software, often there will be a community. Arch, Gentoo and many others are legendary in providing resources to engage with.
>the honest truth
>maintaining an open source, self-hosted project is:
> more work than building it > different fun than building it > more rewarding than you'd expect > harder than you'd expect > worth it
I'd say the title is not misleading: what they don't tell you is that is more rewarding than you'd expect and worth it. (Because yes, we mostly hear the "it's too much work and not worth it" story.)
For anyone interested in this (and certainly for OP) I highly highly recommend the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal. When I was raising my profile on my open source farming robot, this book really helped me understand the types of projects one might want to foster, how to think about users, and generally gave me very helpful guidance on becoming an open source maintainer!
Take a look: https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public
"Uncurled" by Daniel Stenberg, maintainer of curl, is a great resource for FOSS maintainers as well:
https://un.curl.dev/
I liked the humble, “lessons learned” tone of the post.
> every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever.
This.
Keeping a framework/app/SDK “pure” is very important, in my experience.
This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal splice, failure to seal a gasket properly resulting in water intrusion that stresses fibres when the water turns into ice, ...), but those become quite rare if you're done your job properly.
On the other hand, software is never done. Even simple features, like headphones, regress these days. (I missed a meeting today because my phone decided to send audio notifications into the black void of the heat death of the universe because I didn't unlock my phone after plugging the headphones into the USB-C port of my iPhone -- the audio didn't come out of the speaker, nor out of the bluetooth of the car I was driving. No sound worked until after the phone was unlocked.)
At least with open source software I can fix the bugs I care about, but the fun goes away once you have to deal with other people to get things merged.
Is there a community of software Luddites I can go live with where we build simple technology that works and works well?
You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.
It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber?
I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.
> how long it would take to retrain as a plumber
Yeah people have thoughts like this but then you hear a story about lying on your back in a muddy 3’ crawl space cutting into a blocked sewer line to install a cleanout and hoping you can roll away when the liquid starts pouring out.
Then your desk job writing code starts to sound a little better.
Most of my career has been in software development. Running an ISP / carrier is more fun as there's more of a variety from day to day (as is the case for anything entrepreneurial) while still involving technical skills. There is a need for with some programming from time to time, but it is usually tied to solving a particular business need.
I'm sure there are other people out there frustrated with the software grind. My point is that change is always an option. There are interesting problems to solve in the world that exist outside of large software projects that most folks here have the required skill sets to tackle.
As we all know, the only real job is writing React web apps.
I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.
Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1]
If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are.
[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/661#issu...
In the words of Lizzo: "Let 'em say what they gonna say. They gonna feel how they gonna feel." Back in the day, we called this "feeding the trolls", and the advice hasn't changed: ignore them. You don't owe every single person online any part of your short, precious life. Issues have delete buttons (and there are other hosted SCMs besides GitHub). I encourage liberal use thereof.
I would pull my hair out.
Ew gross
LOL all that user does is open issues for free support?
People who give away things like this tend to be good people. As such when someone comes asking for help or new things they are inclined to help.
Your response is where it should go when things get rude, but you don't want to start there.
Ya OP is shadow boxing. There is absolutely no need for any of these things.
Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.
Seriously. If I throw something up somewhere, you get a tarball, a README, and no way to get in touch with me. If the code helps you, fantastic! If it doesn't, then I hope you at least got something out of the experience. But "as-is" means what it says on the tin. I'm not sure why people are so hellbent on treating every message from every stranger as important.
> someone opens an issue: "how do i install this?"
Honestly, this is a GitHub thing. You wouldn't get that issue on sourcehut, bitbucket or self hosted.
GitHub is the lowest common denominator for users.
>but here's the thing: people come from different backgrounds. what's obvious to me after building the thing isn't obvious to someone installing it for the first time.
Sure, but you're also not obligated to do... well, anything. And people are also allowed to read documentation and code and put in the effort to build and install things themselves. What happened to the oldschool hacker spirit that rewarded learning and helping yourself? If you show up to a group of people and say "how do I make this work?" while showing zero evidence that you've actually done anything, you'll be politely told to fuck off. I promise it's okay to say no to people, especially people who haven't demonstrated that they've put in their own time to understand something.
But this is immaterial anyway. I don't know how to better explain that you don't owe your time to strangers on the internet, some portion of whom are probably not even human. Alternatively, you could get them to pay you, especially the organizations "behind corporate proxies". If they can afford a corporate proxy, they can certainly afford your time, as long as you value it appropriately.
So yeah. Stop working for free, and stop treating every last internet stranger as relevant.
Ah, the classic hacker spirit of commercializing every interaction?
No, the real one, not the one people talk about here.
I like the article a lot. Very thoughtful.
Kinda frustratingly written by ai
Just curious, how do you know / why do you think it's written by AI? The bullet points?
Particularly frustratingly because it's so unnecessary in this case. It's not even that much text, just write it yourself. It would probably take less time.
I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually.
I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it.
We're at the point we need to coin a law for it. With tongue firmly in cheek, we could call it Turing's Law perhaps?
"Any person who publishes any text on the internet will be mistaken for a robot"
There's a bunch of typical ChatGPT catch phrases in the post "Here's the thing", "but honestly". You can't know for sure but it really does look like OP wrote it then stuck it in ChatGPT but told it to not fix the capitalisation for some reason.
I say those things all the time, and I'm most certainly not ChatGPT. You can't infer someone is using an LLM from that.
Hmm, I didn't pick up anything reading it but going back it does have that vibe with the repeated bullet points and cadence.
I wouldn't be certain of it but I can definitely believe it.
No evidence of this
Don't help people who won't help themselves.
I mean, Docker Compose could use to be more robust. I recommend Caddy for things like this.
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I agree, but you might want to practice what you preach.
it's been a thing for a long time; just pretend you're reading achewood and everyone is roast beef
> is it a gen z thing?
no