I have long thought that all content (local and remote) should be properly labeled with metadata. Just like the cans of soup in the supermarket, you don't have to open it to find out if it has peanuts, lactose, or MSG in it; you should be able to filter data before accessing it.
You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.
Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.
The project is being abandoned because the maintainer is tired of working for free. They said that they hoped someone would fork it, change the name, and pick up where it was left off.
Why would anyone do that? If the person who was most passionate about it for over a dozen years has given up because it was never worth the trouble; what fool would think things will be different going forward?
> what fool would think things will be different going forward?
> This is the curse of OSS.
There are examples of failing forks. And there are examples of forks that became better than the original. It is not possible to generalize this into one or the other solely via a curse-of-OSS conclusion. Funding will always be an issue; but funding is not necessarily the main or only criterium as to whether a project fails or succeeds.
An alternative reading is that after 13 years dedicated to a single project, the original author is simply burnt out on it, but a new maintainer can start with fresh passion that will last a number of years.
Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.
Did you read the notice on the git hub site? I think he clearly states that he wanted to continue to work on the project, but could not justify it after sources of funding failed to materialize.
Sure, but a new maintainer might have different needs. The original maintainer doesn’t have the time now to do the work for free, since they have to also have a job to pay the bills. A new maintainer might have more free time, at least for a while…
They said they imagined it would (I read as "might") be forked, and if it were, please don't use their name for it.
I don't think they are "hoping" someone else will take it, exactly. They're just done with it. That's how I read it, they liked working on it, but it wasn't financially sustainable, the project is now over, and my reading is they are sad about it.
While I tend to agree with the line of thinking in this thread that the ethos of open source (and the web writ large) have been taken advantage of by capitalism, I can't quite see this: things belong to a time and place in one's life. The creator feels like his time with this project is at an end, but why would that be an impediment to someone who needs a package like this stepping up and maintaining it? Better to do that than build a replacement from scratch (most likely). And more likely to attract new sponsorship by being a reliable steward of a known name (albeit with a suffix or something).
“And many programmers, they say to me, “The people who hire programmers demand this, this and this. If I don't do those things, I'll starve.” It's literally the word they use. Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. So, really, they're in no danger.”
- Richard Stallman in 2001 admitting his ideology can’t explain how a programmer can eat
In my opinion, though this is HN heresy, the free software ideology and ethos was naïve, utopian, and clueless about how power works, from day 1. His dream is literally structurally impossible, capitalism or no capitalism, so long as humans need money to eat.
"Dear Mr. Stallman, it is I, gjsman-1000, a time-traveler sent back to tell you to rethink your upcoming GNU project because you are currently clueless about how power works. Yes, you may be able to code up an impressive prototype compiler and revise it until your fingers bleed. Yes, a decade later some zealous followers may follow your lead and maintain it on the bleeding edge. Yes, two decades later others will perhaps start an open source compiler project to wrest control from your successful compiler that is largely maintained without your direct input. And yes, three decades later your compiler team may even merge in new features and improvements that came from the other compiler. But heed my ominous warning: four decades later I will not be able to remember my original point, for time travel is dangerous business and has adverse effects on short and long term memory."
What is RMS quote supposed to prove here? We can always find new work? Is that it? If so -- not so fast. When you have a family, your freedom is severely hampered. Most companies understand this and abuse it.
And yes the free software ideology is as naive as a puppy. Every serious individual understands this. Most HN-ers are in a fairly specific bubble (income brackets, geo-location, political leanings, upbringing, the whole package); of course to them this is "heresy". This is well-understood. Happily for me and many others around here, karma farming is not the goal so we don't mind getting some gray arrow treatment every now and then.
Communism occurs in part whenever a need is met or an economic decision is made without using value tokens. Direct access to resources without money happens every day (e.g. anyone using Linux rather than a proprietary OS, or exercising in a public park rather than a for-profit gym). The only thing keeping other products & services hoarded behind paywalls is devotion to capitalist ideology. It literally is a problem of capitalism. The structure of the world outside of people's brains has nothing to do with it.
It is my experience that most people work hard to 'get ahead' and not to merely survive. Yes, we will work for subsistence wages if no other option exists, but the goal is to thrive.
Some who are opposed to capitalism seem to think that anyone who wants to trade their talents and hard work for more than the minimum, are exploiting anyone who wants or needs their product.
I mean, repeated claims about starving programmers I see HN are indeed ridiculously dramatic. They show up in relation to open source, but mostly as arguments why all those highly paid people just must do unethical things, else they will starve.
I am not even fan of Stallman. I think it is ok to produce close software. But starving argument is just not it.
When I started working at Novell in October 1988, I was on the OS/2 team. The version I installed first was 1.0 so I remember that there was no GUI. A few months later we got the update (1.1) with the GUI.
What I remember the most is that they ordered us memory expansion cards that gave us an extra 4MB of RAM for a total of 5MB. I didn't see the actual invoice, but I remember them telling me that the expansion card cost about $2,000. I try to remember that when I complain about memory DIMMs measuring in the dozens of GB going up a bit in price.
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss tells his team they were going to start paying the developers to fix bugs. Wally tells everyone that he is going to code himself a minivan.
I once interviewed at Microsoft. The hiring manager asked me how I would go about programming a break point if I were writing a debugger. I started to explain how I would have to swap out an instruction to put an INT 3 in the code and then replace it when the breakpoint would hit.
He stopped me an said he was just looking to see if I knew what an INT 3 was. He said few engineers he interviewed had any idea.
One thing the age of the internet brought us, was the ability to easily connect with people over a broad area, who have an interest in something very niche.
You might be the only person in your neighborhood, school, or even town to have a deep interest in something. Others might think you are weird because 'nobody' else thinks that thing is cool.
But post something here on HN or other forum, and suddenly you find out that hundreds or thousands of people around the world also have some interest in it.
This is both the best and the worst thing about the internet. On the one hand, it's amazing how many completely niche things a person might really care about that they can find a community for online. The MAME project doesn't just capture the arcade games everyone thinks about, but it captures things like the old Tiger LCD handhelds, and mechanical games like coin pushers and pinball machines, and even those old bartop trivia games. All because the internet allows a small group of people who really care about those things and preserving those things to coordinate and work with others who care just as much as they do. Heck most of the retro gaming world works on this.
But at the same time, the internet massively amplifies the effects of a niche being taken over by its most extreme members. The middle between "dabbling interest" in a topic and "this topic is my life and I all I do is eat, drink and sleep this topic" erodes very quickly. If you only care a little or only care about a part of a topic, the internet can be almost as isolating or dismissive as the real world around you too. Some of that is a lot of internet communities are actually a small handful of people who are growing together, so they've already covered the same topics over and over that newer entrants might want to cover. But some of it is also just a level of care or obsession that many people won't ever reach. Popping into a "Show HN" thread, especially about something that was built that has either A) been built before or B) isn't clearly built with a business case can be a very depressing experience as "super carers" tear the thing being shown off to pieces for choosing the wrong language, or the wrong library or the wrong security model. And I get that some of this is just people trying to covey hard won knowledge, but it does sometimes feel like the equivalent of having an astronomy club where half the people are amateurs with back yard telescopes and half are people working at and with mountain top radio telescopes all having discussions about the best equipment to buy.
I agree that some topics can be dominated by outspoken 'experts' who don't have very good social skills. They can be hostile to newcomers as they try to keep their little club exclusive. They can also ridicule anyone who tries to introduce a new idea or direction.
But hopefully, the club itself will have enough reasonable members to keep those people in check.
Realize that the tech industry lives on hype. Every new piece of technology is 'going to upend everything'; according to those building it.
Us old programmers have live through about 100 of these hype cycles; so experience tells us to not panic.
AI is definitely a real thing like the internet, but it won't replace every programmer. Study it. Use it for things it is good at. Adapt to be useful in areas it is not good at.
Of course it won't, but work is getting too demanding.
* management assumes work X shouldn't take 20 days anymore - they're partly right, if you do full vibe-coding you get result in 1 day
* depending on which part of the spectrum you went with (full vibe coding, complete manual, somewhere in between) - you understand that problems are getting accumulated, it is on you to prevent them or do rework in the future - I have been in many companies where rework is difficult to justify, its easier to prevent mess going in to the codebase, but not anymore, now leadership wants things to be delivered faster, and they ask to postpone quality work (because they are not responsible when things go down)
It is very difficult, especially if you need it to be an instant success (i.e. replace your salary before you are homeless).
I have a project (a new kind of general-purpose data management system) that I have worked on for over 10 years. In the beginning, I hoped it would 'take off' and replace my salary. I was never able to quit my day job because it was so lucrative.
Now I am retired. I still work on it in bursts (spend many hours for a week to get something working, then don't touch it for a month); but I treat it like a hobby.
Maybe it will catch on (it does some amazing things with large data sets), but maybe it won't. I try to spread the word on forums or in my blog, but I am not a big marketing guy and there is so much noise out there that everything gets lost.
You could define a set of 5 or six categories (nudity, sex, drugs, violence, etc.) and have a scale from 1 to 10 for each. Each content producer would rate each category according to defined criteria.
Then each user, or their parent, can set what their own acceptable level is. If you set your violence level at 4 then nothing level 5 or higher will load.
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