Expert developer, Buddhist

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  • 161 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I remember one internship in college, I realized that after 4 months of work, the result was 15k lines less code than when I started. I figured out new ways to structure the system so it was much easier to write and maintain, while actually adding features. That felt great

    And yeah, there are many ways for it to happen. Ex. someone was shipping the tests with the code and decided to stop, debug symbols being removed, inlined dependencies being externalized, maybe a new version of a UI toolkit has extra icons built in

    Efficiency can gently creep in. What blows my mind is that this is averaged out across so many packages at once. And sure, sometimes it goes up too, but nothing like Windows/OSX. It’s really cool that you can make a Linux that will fit into ~any space you want, whereas the min requirements for Win11 include 64gb of hd




  • Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf

    The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email

    Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation


  • Honestly, I don’t recommend it. It’s a stressful lifestyle, you have to do a lot, and it’s rare that you make more than just switching jobs. Seeking jobs, doing negotiations / signing contracts, and dealing with the kind of bosses that don’t understand software well — are all really annoying. I’ve been a contractor for 5 years now, and I’m genuinely not sure what the good part of it is

    Ok, so how to do it / get started. Imo you need a well known public project and speciality. Being the lead dev of a popular open source project is a good way. People will reach out to you for help integrating it, or making something similar, or adding features they need & will pay for. A specialty is something like being really good at WebRTC, financial regulations law, graphics drivers, crypto smart contracts, etc — with a proven record. You need a brand for yourself, and it needs to be way stronger than just a resume. You need to spend part of your time networking & job hunting, always

    An important part is either getting paid very well, or taking ownership stake in the projects you build to roll the dice that way. Otherwise, you would be better off doing a job. Why? Because a contracting firm, which I had, isn’t worth anything in a sale, aside from the talent it has. Compare this with something like a SAAS startup where the value is a multiple of revenue and user count. Having a flat value for just the employees isn’t as valuable as a 10x multiplier on a steady business. It’s volatile. I’ve heard construction contractors complain the same way, “I just take a salary to build a house someone else flips for double, I wish I owned my own house”

    Honestly, software jobs are lucrative and easy. Contracting is stressful and complicated. The freedom isn’t much different



  • I have no idea what I’m talking about / am an idiot, but I think you have an opportunity to choose your jurisdiction here. This seems similar to how an offshore business works, where the money lives in a different country, and you don’t pay taxes on it until you “import” the money

    So adding new funds to it seems like a whole can of worms, but the money you already have there is actually still in the USA and plays by USA rules