psycotica0

My useless brain read the title as "Giant Worm", and then I saw the cover and thought "okay, that's clearly the octopus back there, so is she supposed to be a worm? That has got to be the laziest, most fan servicy bullshit worm costume I've ever seen"

Then I read the summary hoping she wasn't the worm, and then was confused about why it didn't mention a worm at all! I figured it out, eventually...

Huh, that's some fun psychology. Donations make me feel guilty and uncomfortable 😛

Good to know someone enjoys them!

To be fair, I have the same problem when my wife is telling a story about her and her friends doing something. It's all "the she told her that she wasn't going to do that anymore" and I have to stop her and be like "wait wait, who told who that who wasn't going to do what anymore!?" 😅

I agree that "they" being plural sometimes too adds another dimension of figuring out what the girls were doing as a group rather than a girl was doing, but it's honestly already a shitshow. And (while I love my wife) made worse by a person who... maybe doesn't have their audience's interests in mind while telling a story. Because a well told story is structured to maintain a consistent use of pronouns and reintroduces by name when required. So, like, if we're talking about Carmen's story, she gets to be "she", and then you tell me how "she said to Joan, that Tabby had blah blah blah". That's a little bit the orator's fault.

New plan, we have first and second person pronouns (I and you), I think we need 5 new pronouns that correspond to "third person", "fourth person", "fifth person", etc.

And those can be gender non-specific, because the same problem happens when a guy is telling a story involving multiple guys. Then it can come up in the grammar that "Johnny was talking to Peter, and A told B that Richard was mad at A because C didn't go to B's BBQ."

Problem solved 😛

To devil's advocate in a different direction, most projects aren't setup to actually do anything with donations. They could be, like if they had a stable income source they could hire people full time as a job rather then relying on volunteer time. And some of the larger projects are already at that point, and so maybe having more money would allow them to expand the team further. And some projects have a particular goal they're trying to fund, like an external security audit, or some kind of certification process.

But for most projects, sporadic donations are like "hey cool, I guess. I'll go out to dinner tonight" gifts of appreciation, because up until they become a solid full time wage, they're not a solid full time wage. And once they are a solid full time wage, any further donations are like "hey cool, I'll go out to dinner tonight" until they're big enough to be a second wage 😛

I'm not saying we shouldn't donate stuff, gifts of appreciation are still appreciated, I'm sure. But they don't produce output.

Hmm. I've been in math, computer science, and computer programming for 20 years in English (Canada) and I've never heard "denary". It's cute, but never once heard anyone say it. So they're not interchangeable to me 😛

Right, but here's the trick: I can't do the same thing twice. So if I write it ugly the first time, that's the best that's ever going to be. What a waste of its potential! 😅

I don't think it's the tickling thing. It's a fair hypothesis, but it doesn't feel right to me. To me I think it's the emotional connection of doing something with another person, and the physical connection of two (or more) people working together. Like, I'd say that throwing a ball up into the air and catching it again just isn't as fun as throwing a ball back and forth between people is, and there's no biological imperative there. There isn't a lust for tossing the ball with the boys. But it's a group activity, and group activities fill a different need than solo activities, which is a different biological imperative.

So I think joinking it fulfills only part of the craving, but leaves other parts unfulfilled, which is why as soon as that part recovers the body is like "okay, let's try again"

Even if they don't change laws, and even if they don't resort to anything outright immoral, a large player can pay an up-and-coming competitor $100k for their thing, and then bury it. A $100k windfall might be a big deal to a new entrant, a difficult offer to pass up, while simultaneously being nothing for the existing incumbent. Or less morally you could outbid them for a critical resource they require just to prevent them from having it, when you don't even need it.

There's a lot of power that comes from being able to sustain a loss larger than the other party's entire operating budget.

A classic I needed to send to a friend:

Water fans explain that it is wet.

It feels like "we have 12 months to cash in on the marketing of Open Source, but then 12 months to weasel out of providing the first shred of source"

For an honest answer, from an Open Source perspective, it's mostly auth, profiles, and discoverability.

Presuming I have a GitHub account, when I encounter a library or tool or something that's hosted on GitHub that means I can fork it, make issues, comment on issues, make pull requests from my fork to upstream tied to issues, and generally have seamless interaction with any and all software on GitHub.

Or, if I have my account added to a project, then I can also merge PRs and push to master and be a maintainer of that software without any friction.

When I see that software is hosted on KDE's thing it's like "Ugh". I have to login to that, and create a profile for that, and then figure out how tickets work there, and how do I contribute to that. It's enough to just not, most of the time. And maybe I do that for kdenlive. Then I have a bug for Gimp. Okay, what the heck do they use? Is that another login? How do I contribute over there? Is registration even open? Okay guix, oh boy a mailing list. Do I want to subscribe to a dev mailing list just to submit a 2 line patch? I think I'll just not... I'm sure someone else will fix it eventually......

So besides all that, some people like their GitHub profile, and like that people can see all the things they've contributed to from one spot. That's why it's often linked on resumes, but beyond that there's also a kind of cultural cachet to having a diverse and positive profile, should someone look. If someone is a maintainer of a repo with a lot of stars, that might tell you they're "important" even if you don't know why. Because maybe you're a JS programmer, but this person seems to be big in the Java community, because they seem to maintain a few high profile java libraries.

And then lastly, it's sometimes useful as a shortcut in searching. "Source code" is kind of a useless term for searching, so if I search "ruby Ledger file library" I'm more likely to get some docs or a rubygems page, but if I search "ruby Ledger file GitHub" I'm probably going to get what I actually want, which is a readme and a git uri I can clone and play around with. Or a web view of the source I can search through to debug something without cloning. At least assuming that is what I want, it depends on what my goals are, but it's useful often enough that I do it sometimes as a way of jumping to the source part.

I'm typically anti-centralization, and anti-microsoft, and if we all move away from GitHub I'm sure I'll live, but this is why I like it despite its problems. And sometimes I want a webview of file contents, with search, without cloning, so sue me 😛