> If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the conclusion that it plays a big role in their success.
I think the point of the author in your quoted text is that you want to avoid the tools getting in your way. If you're a writer, you become successful by writing good stuff. That's harder to do if your OS crashes and you have to click through a bunch of menus while you're writing. That's the reason so many bloggers adopted markdown 10-15 years ago - writing in plain text meant the tools got out of their way. It's not about the tools making you more productive, it's about using tools that don't make you less productive.
No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.
> Don’t feel like you have continue the conversation if they respond. You can if you want, but don’t feel obligated.
You: Sorry you got laid off. I'll miss chatting about your family.
Them: I understand why they did it, but this is tough. I've got a kid in college and another graduating high school this year. Hopefully I'll be able to find something in a few months. Know of anyone that's hiring?
Author here. I was trying to walk the line between two concepts in tension:
* you want to treat your former co-worker as a human being. That's the whole point of the post.
* it can be scary or shameful to reach out to someone who was just let go. You wonder things like "why them and not me, what did they do wrong, what if they react negatively, I'm busy with other stuff, oh man, is my job at risk". (The caveat here is of course that those who remain still have income and so the burden is worse for the laid off.)
This is why I think some folks don't do this simple, humane, outreach. But they should. So I was trying to address the latter worry.
I doubt most conversations go negative (as I mentioned, I've never had them do so). I wanted to give permission to people to reach out because that is important but also permission to stop the conversation if it reached a point they didn't feel comfortable.
I am sure I could have phrased it better.
W/r/t your example, I think most folks who sent the first message you suggest would respond. I think I would.
Your phrasing in that post reads like boilerplate neutered corporate-speak, of the kind you'd get from some HR parasite instead of another fellow co-worker who might actually give half a shit about your misfortune. To start, describing their being fired as "parting ways" would be flat out insulting enough to toss the whole thing into the trash folder.
Also, "Don’t feel like you have continue the conversation if they respond. You can if you want, but don’t feel obligated."
Then what's the point of saying anything if it's just a meaningless single token of HR-speak sludge? better to not even write in the first place.
I think the point there was that, deciding in advance that you don't necessarily have to continue the conversation can unblock you from sending the mail in the first place. Thinking "if they reply back and say XYZ I wouldn't know how to respond" can be a reason people might not get in touch like TFA is suggesting.
$10/year for 10,000 messages/year is 10 cents per message. (Or some other volume at 10 cents/message.) Surely too high for spammers but cheap enough for an app with a low message volume.
Well, I was responding to your claim that "it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam" is the reason for killing their low-volume free tier. It's a different story if they dropped the free tier to focus on large-volume customers.
Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.
Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.
But we're talking about a substantial viewership drop, across a single platform (only desktop), all simultaneously on a single day. That's clearly not any sort of organic change.
Everything is driven by the algorithm. You can have big changes on one day and for specific platforms, even if it's something that's been building up gradually, because that might be the day the algorithm adjusted. It's hard to talk about "this caused that to happen" if you don't know what the algorithm is doing.
Anecdotal but my usage has been slowly dropping in the past year or two as the experience has gotten worse. First it was the terrible search results and then with shorts plaguing the whole thing.
This is a promising move in the right direction. Allowing users to pay for Relay Premium lets them take advantage of their reputation for privacy to make money. Let's hope they promote it and give it more than three months before dropping it.
> As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is.
If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades. You can use/write your software and people that believe in open source can use/write open source. What's the problem?
> If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades.
If I’ve learned anything from reading HN comments, it’s that “open source” means different things to different people, including those who believe themselves to have specific knowledge of the history of the topic.
There are half a dozen different claims about the original meaning of “open source” in this comment section alone. They’re coming from people citing history and notable figures from open source past.
Yeah, and all but one of those claims is incorrect.
"Open source" is not just a turn of phrase which became common over time. The phrase was coined by the founders of the Open Source Initiative, and it has always had a very specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative
People who seem to think that "open source" has a variety of meanings, are probably confusing it for "free software" which does indeed have a variety of meanings (which was the whole reason the phrase "open source" was created - because "free software" was too vague, and they wanted to create a term with a single, specific definition!)
Not at all. There are some people who want open source to mean something else than it does because they want the positive publicity that comes with the term without the commitments to user freedom. Those people should not be given any weight.
Free Software and Open Source have definitions that are both on their face and in practical application by the bodies responsible for each almost entirely identical. Neither is a subset of the other.
If you are concerned about mandating users provide modifications by a similar license to the one they received material under, what you want is copyleft.
“Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft.
All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.
1) hasn't/doesn't publish a free software definition that describes copyleft as a precondition to free software
2) hasn't/doesn't claim in any of their non-normative commentary that the definition has that precondition
3) readily and regularly refers to projects published under permissive licenses like the BSD, MIT/X11, and Apache licenses as "free software", despite not being copyleft licenses
4) themselves publish/maintain/govern software projects that are licensed under permissive licenses like the aforementioned non-copyleft licenses
The claim that "'free software' means 'copyleft'" is a pernicious, bizarrely recurring but wildly misinformed claim that only shows up on message boards by people who can't ever have actually read primary sources that explain the positions of the organization they purport to describe, and have instead just, like, decided they understand the topic (through, I dunno, osmosis or something, I guess).
Very explicit about open source being different from free software.
Also if what you say is true, there would be no reason for “open source” to exist. It was coined by Christine Peterson explicitly because the term free software conveyed a different ideal than the BSD/MIT license crowd was aiming for.
> nearly all open source programs are in fact free.
You are just wrong, and your first link proves it. The definitions are essentially identical. The philosophies behind them are different.
It's like the "Gulf of America" vs. the "Gulf of Mexico". You are talking about the same territory in either case, just expressing a different viewpoint about it.
This is completely false and ahistorical. The first license associated with the term "open-source" was the MPL, which is a copyleft license.
Open-source never attempted to distinguish itself from free software in terms of licensing or content, and "free software" has always included permissive licenses.
You can find lots of free software licenses which are not copyleft listed on the FSF website, with links to longer commentaries on them. The FSF clearly identifies them as free software licenses, and always has.
Take a few minutes reading the publications of the organizations and movements you're misrepresenting. Take a look at the OSI's Open-Source definition as well.
Indeed it is, but can people please not abuse the flag function for such cases? It's not against the rules to be mistaken, and "flag" is not supposed to be a super downvote.
You are correct ... the other responses to you are not. "Free software" as in the FSF is "free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", which is why copyleft was invented, to establish such a distinction.
No, this is completely wrong. Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software, such as demos or shareware. Any software that is freely available for users to legally modify and redistribute however they see fit, under the same license or some other, is free software.
Examples of non-free software are shareware like WinRar, software only available for non-commercial use like OMNeT++ [0], and (slightly more controversially) things like ElasticSearch or MongoDB.
It's not completely wrong ... how rude. Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer.
> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
And
> “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. We explain the difference in Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software.
That definition, and Richard Stallman himself, completely agree with me. A BSD license also guarantees "that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software".
> The two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL insist that modified versions of the program must be free software as well. Non-copyleft licenses do not insist on this. We recommend copyleft, because it protects freedom for all users, but non-copylefted software can still be free software, and useful to the free software community.
> There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license, X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses.
So, I stand by my assertion. You are completely wrong in saying that only copy left licenses are free/libre software, even according to Richard Stallman himself.
The BSD license does not offer the same software freedom guarantees as copyleft licenses though, since downstreams can elect to not release the source code. You are right otherwise though.
> Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer.
Yes. The comment you are replying to already said this: ‘Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software’.
Your earlier comment wasn’t wrong for saying that ‘free software’ refers to freedom; that part was correct. But it was wrong for agreeing with a comment which claimed that ‘free software’ means ‘copyleft’. Copyleft is free software, but free software isn’t always copyleft.
Saying that ‘free software means copyleft’ is like saying that ‘bird means goose’. Goose is a kind of bird, but not every bird is a goose; just like copyleft licences are free, but not every free licence is copyleft. The responses (which you called incorrect) were trying to explain this important difference.
Copyleft licenses don't even need to be free! All copyleft means is that derivative works must use the same license. For example, the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license [1] wouldn't fulfill freedom 0, since you can't use the material for commercial purposes.
(Granted, Creative Commons licenses are typically not used for software, but the point stands.)
Is that really the case? I’m not outright disputing this, but with the term ‘copyleft’ originating from the free software movement and all, I normally take it to identify free software which protects the freedoms it grants (typically by extending the terms of its licence to derivative works).
I see that a similar mechanism is used by some non-free licences, as you have just shown, but are those really considered ‘copyleft’? Isn’t the term more properly used when said mechanism is used specifically to grant and protect the four freedoms? Both the FSF¹ and Wikipedia² seem to view the freedom aspect as an important part of copyleft, at the very least.
Hm! The Wikipedia article intro explicitly lists the Creative Commons share-alike license condition in its list of "notable copyleft licenses", but later says that "any copyleft license is automatically a share-alike license but not the other way around". So at the very least I guess it's debatable :)
(I'm not sure I would rely heavily on Wikipedia for this — they only use secondary sources and in practice most of their sources will be GNU-related, so the article is probably biased in that direction.)
I think the point of the author in your quoted text is that you want to avoid the tools getting in your way. If you're a writer, you become successful by writing good stuff. That's harder to do if your OS crashes and you have to click through a bunch of menus while you're writing. That's the reason so many bloggers adopted markdown 10-15 years ago - writing in plain text meant the tools got out of their way. It's not about the tools making you more productive, it's about using tools that don't make you less productive.
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