I know I learned it in high school at one point but definitely isn’t something I would have been able to recall on my own.

Why would you assume consciousness is a fundamental force rather than an emergent property of complex systems built on the forces?

Not a treasure

I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

Same. I write FOSS software in my free time and also paid.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

And often if you box yourself into an API before you start implementing, it comes out worse.

I always learn a lot about the problem space once I start coding, and use that knowledge to refine the API of my system as I work.

This reminded me of an old joke:

Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other “I’ll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit”. To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.

A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he’ll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.

Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they’ve accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.

The two economists look rather taken aback. “Well sure,” they say, “but we’ve grown the economy by two million dollars!”

I actually don’t think that’s the case for languages. Most languages start out from a desire to do some specific thing better than other languages rather than do everything.

I joined the Star Trek instance solely because I like startrek.website being in my handle.

That’s not an issue with FOSS vs proprietary, but with large corporations needing to be broken up.

FOSS isn’t immune to that, its a known thing that large corporations can use their dominance of a market segment to infiltrate even totally open standards and make demands with the threat of leaving the standard (and therefore resigning it to becoming irrelevant).

This is especially true of web standards. Chromium is FOSS, yet Google can use its absolute dominance in the market place to force through changes to things like HTTP standards (also FOSS). My understanding is Microsoft and Google both have strong-armed stuff into C++ in the past as well

That’s why there is an option to disable ads… Everyone wins unless they think this person’s work should be distributed for free.

That’s very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.

Also, I’ve worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it’s not just newness for Lemmy.

IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.

But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I’ve noticed.