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Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by DoreenMichele on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:17PM (#26812478)
I have spent a lot of years getting healthier via diet and lifestyle with an incurable and deadly condition. You would think people would welcome alternatives, given that it's incurable and deadly. You would think diet and lifestyle approaches would be the most conservative thing you could do because you have to eat and live anyway, so better to be more informed about how to do that well in the face of this.

It was an amazing amount of ugly drama to try to talk to others with my condition about what I do and what I think about why it probably works. And then people would take very conservative bits of advice that were the most well established and screw them up to an amazing degree.

One example: Coconut oil is a very well established beneficial supplement for my condition that is medically recommended and this is common knowledge for the CF community. It also tends to cause diarrhea.

So "on my advice", someone began giving their toddler like a freaking tablespoon of coconut oil per day -- which is insane amounts to give -- and the result was very extreme amounts of diarrhea that couldn't be contained by a diaper and resulted in the floor needing to be mopped (like every single day until she finally said something to me and I was like "That's waaaay too much coconut oil to give").

So, ultimately, I left all the lists and I still write about what I do for my health, but I've worked hard at figuring out how to talk about things to a lay audience knowing that some of them can manage to do amazingly stupid and harmful things with the most conservative suggestions. And I mostly don't have an audience for that kind of writing and I'm okay with that. Go have your dumpster fire elsewhere and don't try to pin the blame on me, thanks.

Code no doubt has some people like that. And there's a crazy amount of built in assumptions that the original author will know but may not know he "needs" to document and spell out explicitly so some random internet stranger doesn't create some dumpster fire and claim it's someone else's fault because "no one told me...!"

And no amount of "use at your own risk" type language is enough to protect you from crazies who want something for free, aren't competent enough to effectively deploy it and now think that freebie owes them like they paid good money and it came with a warranty.

Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by remram on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:34PM (#26812685)
People might do that anyway, see how you use React components on your blog and replicate it on their own, doing it wrong and making their webpages take minutes to load. See your animated sparkles, and replicate the effect over their whole pages. They can do that without your code.

If you want to make absolutely sure the "crazies" don't get any bad ideas from you, the only way is to not publish anything at all.

Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by DoreenMichele on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:38PM (#26812740)
And not publishing something is a valid choice that the author is currently making with regards to his code for his blog and I support his right to be closed source on that detail so he can focus on other things.
Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by remram on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @05:57PM (#26813613)
We are discussing his article called "Why My Blog Is Closed Source". I am not randomly criticizing his life choices, just engaging in the discussion he started.
Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by DoreenMichele on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @06:03PM (#26813667)
Well, arguably, other people started this discussion. He blogged about it because people said stuff to him about it and he chose to respond more generally, probably in part to try to reduce the amount of time spent explaining it one on one.

Yes, any time you publish anything at all, you risk having someone misuse it. But someone who replicates a thing and messes it up where you didn't provide the source code is less likely to act like "you did this to me, you evil monster, you." More importantly, the rest of the world is less likely to hold you responsible.

Publishing A and publishing B don't come with equal risks. He is choosing to mitigate risks for reasons that make sense to him in areas that matter to him and explaining it on his blog.

You can feel however you feel about that, but he has a right to make those distinctions and choices whether you like it or not.

Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by remram on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:31PM (#26814420)
I am not saying he has no right to his opinions, I am disagreeing. It seems like you are trying to argue that we don't get to argue or something, which is not productive. Please stop it.
Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by DoreenMichele on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:52PM (#26814600)
It seems like you are trying to argue that we don't get to argue... Please stop it.

Irony, incarnate.

Re:Why My Blog Is Closed-Source by remram on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @10:36PM (#26815609)
That is not what irony means. And you are still pushing the discussion further from the actual thread. Why? Can't you argue the point at hand instead of serving those "his opinion is valid", "we don't know if he wanted a discussion", and other "he has a right to make a bad choice" non-arguments?