toebert

Nothing, if that was your point then I misunderstood what you were suggesting - also perfectly valid.

I think 75% is apt here, tailwind is incredibly popular and most people wouldn’t know how many engineers they have. If it said “tailwind let 3 people go” I bet most (including me) would assume alright… tailwinds big they may have 30-50 people around… 3 is not too bad right?

I also disagree with this being entirely bullshit, I think he is right that the impact of AI has made the situation worse for him by impacting his most valuable sales funnel (their own documentation pages). But separately, it is a very populated space (UI libraries) with multiple options to compete with, some of which are rather well established and free - so it was an uphill battle to begin with.

“Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he added. He then goes on to explain that “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.”

People no longer need to look at their docs or their website because they ask AI how to do something with tailwind instead, so they no longer get to expose and advertise their product (tailwind plus).

Tailwind plus is a one time payment, not a subscription. If there are no new customers to buy it, their income is gone.

I worked for a reasonably successful startup in IT, and quit around the time when investors started calling for their returns. It went from the focus being providing good service to selling something, anything, whether we have it or not to boost the books before the end of next quarter. Every quarter. Our sales team who used to be part of the product design process and knew more about our product than some engineers were getting replaced with people who didn’t even know the name of features. They just made up things to potential customers and straight up lied, once the paper was signed they were done.

It was demoralising to see and go through this, I was a tech team lead for one of our core products and the requirements were mad. Every customer started becoming their own product because of all the overpromising, and it was all the absolute bare minimum. Anyhow, I was on good terms with the remaining few old sales people as we had worked together a lot prior to this mess.

I remember sitting in a meeting with some higher management and one of these older sales guys where he was saying he does not know what to do anymore and needs help or we need to change something as it’s impossible to do his job well anymore with these expectations that we just abandon customers as soon as they’re signed and chase new business. He broke down crying during the call while he was explaining how soul crushing it was to have to do this to people - build up a relationship, convince them to pay us and then ignore them immediately. There was an awkward quiet in the room when he finished and the “top dog” in the room just said “try to detach yourself, it’s just business” and then we moved on.

I saw myself becoming that man in a year, maybe 2 tops. I started interviewing the next day and found a new job in about 2 weeks (luckily this was when IT was booming and recruiters were lining up for anyone with engineer in their title). The company has since been sold multiple times and completely exhausted to a husk. The last sale I’m pretty sure was just a large enterprise acquiring staff and some tech.

“A large open world to explore!” - by slowly walking or teleporting.

I can’t say I know the answer but a few ideas:

• did you access it with a browser? Maybe it snitches on you or some extension does?
• did you try to resolve it with a public DNS server at any point (are you sure nothing forwarded the request to one)?

You could try it again, create the domain in the config and then do absolutely nothing. Don’t try to confirm it works in any way. If you don’t see the same behaviour you can do one of the above and then the other and see when it kicks in. If it gets picked up without you doing anything…then pass!

His point seems to be rather that he has been using a monetisation approach to his work where he released his work open source and then used the exposure of it to sell his services, which is now being taken away because LLMs hide him from the equation and all the person sees on the other side is “ai solved it for me”. That sounds to me more like a business model that leverages open source, which he is now considering changing and charging everyone instead because his previous one is being made impossible. It doesn’t sound like he is doing this as a hobby, but as a job. It’s not different than being a self employed photographer, writer etc - all the other professions which are revolting against AI for the exact same reason.

To your metaphor, it’s more akin to someone going around the street and recording the best songs of every musician there and then putting it on YouTube with a label of “don’t bother going to this place, here’s the music you wanted”. Not only do they not get money directly, nor are they getting any credit or royalty but it even removes the chance of them getting anything out of it, even if it’s just exposure to further their career.

I’m pretty sure few people will bask for 6-8 hours a day every day as a hobby without hoping to get something for it.

To your last point…Isn’t the definition of charity pretty much along the lines of offering services or resources to others without the expectation of profit? I get your point if it applies to the “I wrote some code which works for me, you can have it as is, good luck” situation alone but that’s incredibly rare in open source projects with any popularity (i.e. real users) - a lot of time and effort goes into supporting people and doing things you wouldn’t do for yourself.

I don’t think it is selfish to expect to be compensated for your work - open source or otherwise - especially when you do start doing it for others (e.g. dealing with issues, reviewing prs, fixing and implementing things you wouldn’t just for yourself).

If you don’t expect it that’s great, but as he pointed out - that’s charity. No reason to expect that everyone will be in a position to do that indefinitely, especially when it comes to massive projects that turn into full time jobs.

I never pre-order, there is no benefit.

Early access is misleading, there are games which are “released” and would barely count as early access and vice-versa, so I just treat them equally.

The criteria for me is that based on reviews or some gameplay footage it seems like I can get £1/hour worth of enjoyment out of it. I tend to look for how many hours do people have when they leave reviews and how many have they played since, rather than just what they say. If I’m unsure if I’ll like it and there is not enough videos or reviews to give me certainty, i may take a risk on £10 and below games depending on how bored I am at the time.

There is a “non-food crops” slice in the agricultural land part which seems to do exactly this though.

They’re doing their part in UK politics. Tories stole everything they could and drove it all into the ground until everyone got sick and elected labour. Now they’re raising taxes to put money back in and doing everything they can to make sure they’re hated enough that there is no chance they get re-elected. Then, Tories can just walk back in and take all the money coming in from the new taxes again. It’s a beautiful cycle of the general population getting fucked from both sides.

I think your example is great for how the messaging of “pick a job you love and you’ll never work a day”/“you can be whatever you want to be” can be quite harmful, I know several people in similar situations with various art/creative degrees.

The only thing I’d add is to consider what a degree will do for you if you can’t work in the field it’s for. E.g if you get a degree in marine biology it may be used to re-train as a teacher or similar, but not much else. Meanwhile a degree in some business subject will probably allow you to apply for most office jobs in general. You may not love it, but it’s a lot easier to have a decent salary and find a hobby than to starve trying to get paid for your hobby.

This is true but there is a matter of being able to split up work into multiple pieces easily and prioritise between services. E.g. the piece of legacy service that nobody likes to touch, has no tests and is used for 2% of traffic can take its’ time getting sorted out without blocking all the other services moving on.

You still have to do it and it should be ASAP, but there are more options on how to manage it.

I’m not vegan myself but I had asked a similar enough question to a vegan friend a while ago and liked his answer:

He said for him it’s 2 parts, 1 is that while the animal that died may not have been harmed by humans, the ecosystem that relies on scavenging carcasses will be hurt if humans effectively start removing their entire food source (same way we have driven species to extinction by hunting).

The 2nd part is that with humans everything with even the tiniest loop hole will get abused… Imagine that we say this is okay. Today it may be the odd naturally deceased animal, in a month it’ll start including animals “killed accidentally”, in a year it’ll be someone farming animals with some weird way of culling them so they can claim it’s still natural causes by some twisted logic… at the end of it we’d just not be able to trust any of it anyway so it’s easier to not even entertain the thought - the energy to figure it all out would be better spent on improving alternatives.