How'd it end up? I'm wondering why it ended up actually less serious

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996481

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

PC is even more digital-only than Playstation. No one buys physical games on PC. The only difference is that Valve has been a very good steward over Steam. Theoretically, PC can get as enshittified as PS.

I guess there are other DRM-based purchasing platforms, and there's also DRM free ones like GOG so PC gamers have choice, but those feel niche mostly.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895376

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586295

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Yes, vendors can, do, and should talk to users, but then a lot of users don't like receiving cold messages from vendors (and some users go so far as to say that cold messages should _never_ be sent).

So, the alternative is to collect some soft telemetry to get usage metrics. As long as a company is upfront about it and provides an opt-out mechanism, I don't see a problem with it. Software projects (and the businesses around them) die if they don't make the right decisions.

As an open source author and maintainer, I very rarely hear from my users unless I put in the legwork to reach out to them so I completely identify with this.

That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706240

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

I think AI writing makes humanities and writing courses more important, and I hope people maintain their sense of taste with writing, but tbh I’m not optimistic here.

“On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?”

A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly.

The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders.

I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important.

There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways.

And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.

I'm used to a different usage of that word: from malware analysis, a sandbox is a contained system that is difficult to impossible to break out of so that the malware can be observed safely.

Applying this to AI, I think there are many companies trying to build technical boundaries stronger than just "are you sure" prompts. Interesting space to watch.