I hate to use the word sociopath, because it has such a fine point on it, but if you believe there are smart "sociopaths" out there, might they be attracted to AI in general (companies like OpenAI or SpaceXAI specifically)?
That does seem like the way Capitalism is being presented these days. Move fast and break things struck me as also from the same "fuck it" ethos that pervades the Modern Valley.
It might be the Valley attracts this kind (of sociopath?). In "the day" I watched as some co-workers popped from company to company, never staying for more than 6 months, and getting a salary bump with each jump. I guess good for them?
I was handling my moms bills when, at an independent living home, she was sent twice by ambulance for minor falls.
As the article says, thousands of dollars for these 5 minute drives.
(Fuck "credit score") I sent a check for $20 for each of the two bills. And I then did the same the next month when the bills came again.
I repeated this $20-a-month routine for a few years before, in both cases, they ended up closing the accounts-billing after perhaps $500 or so was paid.
If I bought Adobe Photoshop I expect the OS to fix anything change they might have made that broke Photoshop. This is how it used to work. (Ho, ho, the Mac OS source base was well known to have workarounds to keep, for example, Microsoft products running.)
I can manage my own documents cloud.
Affinity got my money for years for not having a subscription strategy. (And for their apps being pretty badass.)
"I believe subscriptions for mobile apps are the best thing that has ever happened for both indie developers and iPhone users."
Not at all.
Users hate subscriptions, will therefore not subscribe to your product. I sure as shit won't (and I frankly don't know anyone else that will).
Users particularly hate subscriptions they don't use. How many of us have paid for an Adobe subscription, or an AllTrails subscription only to find months (years?) go by and you barely if ever used said app?
It creates a kind of anxiety: I am paying for apps with a subscription but not using them.
So much in there: so much hand-soldering of SMD, the way he made an SMD resistor bridge to bodge his MOSI/MISO mixup, using the Bambu 3D printer as a test harness (with pogo-pin attachment) to test his "blades"…
(I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)
Even before retiring I have been more or less giving things away for free or at a loss even (especially when you consider my time). Software, hardware…
Another commenter calls it altruism, I just call it my hobby. (No one expects to get their material bike investment back when they take up mountain biking, right?)
So perhaps 800 hours or so to write a game which nets me about $500 on Steam. You can do the math to figure out my wages on that one—but I was able at least to justify picking up a Steam Deck from the proceeds (which I likely would not have done out of pocket).
More recently: perhaps about $4K and another 800 to 1000 hours invested in an analog computer kit and I'll be lucky to ask for $20 profit and will be surprised if I sell 25 of them.
It's okay though. I know already going into it that 1) it is niche and 2) that, as I said, it's a hobby.
(And when I use AI or clipart for the artwork in the project it's because I'm not likely to find an artist willing to partner with me and lose money on the whole venture, ha ha.)
My selfish suggestion would be to add support to populate the part numbers for all the components from LCSC's database. JLCPCB wants these numbers in order to assemble a PCB.
(Currently I use a JLCPCB plug-in to do this in KiCAD.)
https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt
https://bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com