Hacker News: wolftune

New comment by wolftune in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

wolftune — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:09:46 +0000

Spirit was killed by illegal predatory pricing!! There's no reason the corporate criminals who do this stuff would go easy on competition run by different people. The answer is anti-trust enforcement (and related enforcing of the law) and much stronger regulation of businesses in general (if not outright public/government airlines)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/who-killed-spirit-airline...

New comment by wolftune in "Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores"

wolftune — Sun, 03 May 2026 05:58:40 +0000

Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.

Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.

New comment by wolftune in "Why is selling software so weird?"

wolftune — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 15:28:31 +0000

This is just software folks trying to speculate about economics and not finding the right sources to make sense of things.

The KEY distinction between software and house is abundance vs scarcity.

Once software and house both exist, software can be used all at once by every single potential user. But the house can only be lived in by a few people at a time. Everything else about the economic distinctions flows from these facts. The "marginal cost" idea is correct but is a symptom of the fact that houses are *rivalrous* and software is not.

I gave a talk about this recently with further context at LibrePlanet (so it's aimed at software-freedom advocates, keep that angle in mind): https://framatube.org/w/ssYsun1bEXuL1nm5cT9ckw

New comment by wolftune in "Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change"

wolftune — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 23:53:10 +0000

*It is easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.* - Dan Ariely

New comment by wolftune in "Funds for Open Source"

wolftune — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 05:24:07 +0000

Not sure what you mean by "open place", we (too messily right now) are tracking stuff at https://gitlab.com/groups/snowdrift/-/issues and there's a needs-updating semi-outdated page https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/planning

We could certainly use help from anyone who would like to do some project management. In general, we have https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/community/how-to-help

We have weekly audio meetings and have Matrix and IRC discussions, and people are welcome to pop in.

Not sure if these are the things you were asking about

New comment by wolftune in "Funds for Open Source"

wolftune — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:47:51 +0000

You are thinking of tip4commit. Gittip later became Gratipay and then closed (but the fork at Liberapay still exists). Gittip never collected contributions for people who didn't first sign up. Gittip/Gratipay did other reckless things, but that's a separate matter.

New comment by wolftune in "Funds for Open Source"

wolftune — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:45:52 +0000

No easy answers. We're trying to address that at Snowdrift.coop but are ourselves struggling volunteers not getting fully launched still (but not giving up, still at it).

Most efforts do seem focused on corporate open-source. The under-funding of that stuff is indeed an issue. But it doesn't result in real public goods that treat the public well if it's all upstream stuff that only serves to make proprietary downstream end-user products.

New comment by wolftune in "Snowdrift.coop as a 2021 High Priority Free Software Project"

wolftune — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 01:00:32 +0000

> We've been around since 2014 (before Patreon!)

Patreon was announced in 2013 I think. But Snowdrift.coop still was started first, as the first rough prototype proposal was up online in early 2013 actually.

(This is a bit internal feedback, I'm the co-founder of Snowdrift.coop who was more involved at that early time)

New comment by wolftune in "Is There a Google-Free Future for Firefox?"

wolftune — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 19:40:03 +0000

If we didn't have our own issues with zero-funding and all-volunteer efforts, we'd have gotten Snowdrift.coop launched by now (we're still working on it, hope to show some real public updates soon). Our focus on 'crowdmatching' is aiming specifically to address this type of dilemma, and we'd be thrilled to see it work for Firefox. We just need to get the whole thing functioning (and proven with more likely first adopter projects, tweaking and solidifying the platform) before Firefox dies.

The basic point: we all (the users and general public) do need to be donating. But I do not donate myself to Firefox. After all, I'm underemployed, low-income, and volunteering thousands of hours for related software-freedom and anti-ad etc. efforts. For me to donate won't change the overall situation. We need a critical mass of donors, hundreds of thousands, millions of donors. We cannot get there by just asking each person to unilaterally sacrifice. I want to pledge to the world that I'm willing to be part of that critical mass. I'll donate more of what I can for each of you others who join me in such a pledge.

This is about the best we can do short of funding these sorts of public goods with taxes. As long as it's open to the public and not paywalled (and that's fundamentally important), we're stuck with the freerider dilemmas and need to resolve the challenges of collective-action and coordination.