alazoral

It’s not clear to me how this idea, a decentralised place where you can access a lot of different stores, isn’t just the web. There’s a lot of mature alternatives for running web based ecommerce storefronts.

The value of Amazon and other marketplace systems, what I think many would say is their distinguishing factor, is capital L Logistics. It’s the warehouses, the return systems, quality control, customer support, international shipping and importing, inter-warehouse trucking and a network of last mile delivery, all tuned to minimise costs. An open source platform that handles all of that somehow would actually be revolutionary, but even the design of the system would require actual years of user research and mastery of systems that are truly arcane.

What I find is everything that I find interesting is cyclic, and so Rust has poor ergonomics for writing things I’m interested in. This is sad for me because it has the best compiler errors in the business. If I could get Swift with Rust’s compiler errors (Rust’s compiler in general is far better behaved) I’d be a happy chap.

I think it’s too easy to get anthropocentric and 1D about intelligence. That dog understands things about the world, important things, that mere humans like Bernoulli could never even dream of.

If I was watching a gritty crime film and one of the criminals said “alright lads, looks like it time to do some pig butchering”, my assumption would be they would be ambushing some cops. If the next scene was them setting up a Facebook profile it would seem comically mismatched.

Some of it makes coding much faster, easier and safer in larger teams. Typescript massively increases velocity and code quality. React and other front end frameworks let teams do component-driven development and patterns like atomic design really neatly, which makes apps more consistent.

What that complexity is really buying is desktop-class web applications like Figma, Notion, and the like, and massively reducing the engineering costs of building products like those to the point where it’s way cheaper and easier to build a rich, complex web app that can run for anyone anywhere than it is to build desktop or mobile software with the platform-holders’ own APIs.

If you’re not doing one of those and are just doing a light crud app, then you probably want to use one of those desktop-class web apps like AirTable.

And if you want to make a static website, then we have some much better tooling you can opt into to make managing it and building it out faster, but it’s far from essential.

A lot of open source software gains automatic trust by virtue of the fact you could check it out, read the source, and compile it yourself. This possibility stands in for the fact that you probably can't - you probably can't actually read the code, and if you could you can't possibly understand all the edge cases and implications, and you definitely don't have time, especially if you are to recurse into its dependency tree.

So for scripting, where you give a random piece of code access to your entire digital life, a language that is hard to write for even experienced developers but is easy to read and fully understand what is going to happen when they run it, for anyone who could read its licence agreement, is an inspired choice.

It should be very hard to make software that could hurt people. It should be obvious, to as many people as possible, when software could hurt people. If we all prioritised user safety over developer comfort we would have a very different industry.

Linux, and all free software, is at its heart a gift economy. It's all about making amazing things, solving problems, and working together as a community to make everything better together so everyone can have better choices.

So my feeling is that if you're claiming to represent and evangelise that community, using obstinate tribalism to justify commoditising your familial love isn't the way to win hearts and minds. Seems, to me, like a way to perpetrate some pretty terrible stereotypes.

Computers aren't inherently useful, or good. They are just boxes with a number inside. If we use them to make people we love happy, only then are they useful and good.

My guy, this is Epic Games. They make Fortnite, one of the most popular pieces of media ever, with billions of dollars of revenue a year from selling avatar hats to hundreds of millions of users. You don't have to worry about their investors.

I would disagree with your assertion there that bureaucracies are terminal. Historically, military dictatorships tend to overthrow bureaucracies, while democracies overthrow military dictatorships and bureaucracies subsume democracies. Each of these transitions can be understood thermodynamically; each transition results in a lower energy state for the problems facing them at the time:

Bureaucracies lack military response time. Dictatorships lack economic stability. Democracies lack efficiency. Each of these are actually each model's strength, but over time becomes fatal.

Wrong question.

Community is your market, and crucially, you.

You should have found the community first. Then, if you're truly part of it, you'll know what your product should be.

If you're asking the question you're asking, it means you built a product without a market which is going to be... challenging.