Support: "it doesn't work in that situation. Here's a link to our documentation with two dozen bullet points about where and when that feature doesn't work".
It's as if you selected a cell in Excel, and the copy-paste buttons were missing, and you raised a support case with Microsoft and they said "copy-paste does not work if your spreadsheet was opened from a NAS share. It's documented here that it doesn't work: ".
That is documentation as a defense, instead of the company putting in the effort to make the thing work, they put in documentation that it doesn't work so they can blame the user who "won't read the documentation".
> "There's a recurring pattern on HN where any time someone talks about knocking dozens of personal projects off their list"
Nobody was talking about that very believable use case. What they specifically said was "enterprise scale projects". Enterprise scale means lots of users, decades of backwards compatibility, regulation compliance, logging and auditing, reporting, role based access control and permissions, integration with other enterprise systems, etc. etc.
> "you AI doomers show up and demand receipts as though that's a total reasonable and"
Asking what large scale programs they have built is not "dooming". It's also not demanding. It's also not unreasonable.
> "definitely not obnoxious request".
Saying that it's "unreasonable and obnoxious" to ask people to justify their claims is where the likes of Theranos and Nikola electric truck company are hiding. If they don't want to talk about their stuff, they could have not commented. Since they commented it's reasonable to ask them about what they said.
> What they specifically said was "enterprise scale projects". Enterprise scale means lots of users, decades of backwards compatibility, regulation compliance, logging and auditing, reporting, role based access control and permissions, integration with other enterprise systems, etc. etc.
It's extremely obvious to everyone else here that they were not talking about literal enterprise software. Perhaps they could have chosen different terminology, but the fact that you've clearly latched on to this relatively minor word choice as some kind of smoking gun says infinitely more about your perspective and motivations than it does about whether some guy is building big-to-him projects or Enterprise Projects.
Tell me: when someone says that the shit hit the fan, do you furiously start looking around for actual shit?
1) someone makes unbelievable claim, someone else questions it.
2) You jump in: "how dare you not accept this obviously-true claim at face value, why are you AI doomers always insinuating that these claims are false and demanding evidence?!".
3) I comment taking the claim at face value.
4) You jump in: "idiot, how stupid are you to take the claim at face value, it's extremely obvious to everyone here that it's not meant literally".
Well if we all agree it's completely unbeleivable if taken literally, can we now have your permission to ask about the reality behind the statement? "if 'enterprise scale' is not intended to mean 'enterprise scale', what scale is the person actually talking about?
> "Absolutely nothing you're saying is in good faith. You're just arguing for the sake of arguing."
And your dragging the conversation off topic, turning it into personal attacks, redefining what words mean, refusing to address the point, flip-flopping your position 180 degrees, refusing to acknowledge that you did that, turning it personal again, has all been good faith positive contribution, has it?
This is a really weird take. OP worked on this during all of their free time for over 10 years. And it finally took off into making a solid revenue for them. This is a rare success story for an indie developer. We should be supporting them. It would suck for anyone to get their life's work stolen and given away for free, which is what is happening here.
-Another indie developer who hopes to have 1/100th the success that Photopea has had.
> "OP worked on this during all of their free time for over 10 years."
And they can have the payoff of not having to do that anymore, isntead of continuing to do that. That's literally the dream!
> "And it finally took off into making a solid revenue for them. This is a rare success story for an indie developer."
Yes, it's incredibly rare, so OP should be on their sailboat in the Bahamas (or wherever), not doing exactly the same things they would be doing if it had not taken off at all. Otherwise what is the point?
> "We should be supporting them."
I am not not-supporting them.
> "It would suck for anyone to get their life's work stolen and given away for free, which is what is happening here."
I never suggested otherwise. But one thing which helps is: having "fuck you" money and not needing to care. Life changing amounts of money, and the specific change is: not needing to do boring work stuff.
Fair enough. Those are all valid points. 10 years, you get attached to stuff. And plus, if you have a solid revenue stream, why shouldn't someone defend their IP?
I think what you're suggesting is a world view difference, perhaps anecdotal. If you were making a 1M a year, you would retire after a few like you said. For some people, they want to keep pushing the boundaries and go further, not necessarily for the money, but perhaps for other intrinsic motivators.
> "I think what you're suggesting is a world view difference"
For comparison, average UK salary is about £36k/year. 20 years of earnings is less than a million dollars, less than one fifth of the amount discussed. Before tax.
I'm looking at it as "several lifetimes of earnings". More than a lottery win of money. Approximately nobody - no normal person - ever gets that kind of money. Even boomer-generation with houses in London bought 50 years ago with full careers behind them and great pension schemes might only get to half that kind of money.
Perhaps you're looking at it like from a more ... Silicon Valley view of money?
“““One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room.
“Naked?” she asked hopefully.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in
exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged.
“Why don’t you ever whip me?” she pouted one night.
“Because I haven’t the time,” he snapped at her impatiently. “I
haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?”""" - Catch 22, Joseph Heller.
“““All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights. Officers’ clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.""" - also Catch 22, Joseph Heller.
I can't argue for the original person, but when 500 large projects are different instantiations of just a handful of fundamental primitives, it is not hard to keep track of large number of projects which might look like completely different non overlapping projects for an outside observer.
With enough competence, it boils down to an exercise in organizing discipline and first principles derivation. As I have mentioned in the past, skillsets at sufficient granularity are transferable across domains.
What you said would be true when looked at each different project as a separate domain, but real world is rarely a collection of isolated domains.
To put that in perspective, our app SlypBusiness has memberships, products, services, gift cards, privilege cards, etc. which all look like different domains to a user but is fundamentally the same primitive instantiated differently.
> Landscapers sometimes accommodate desire paths by paving them, thereby integrating them into the official path network rather than blocking them.[…] Sometimes, land planners have deliberately left land fully or partially unpathed, waiting to see what desire paths are created, and then paving those.
That's fascinating that it already had a term! The YC founder I used to work for was adamant that he came up with the term "idealized path" for this phenomenon.
Pathways is an urban open problem that companies like GoodMaps are trying to solve, although in a convoluted way (more sensors = more accuracy, but walled-garden is meh).
I was in the tens of thousands of points on Stack Overflow, over a hundred badges, into the millions of “people reached”, learning things just to be able to answer, things I have found now in search results and been surprised that it was my answer, and yet so far from being a top contributor it may as well be the Moon.
And haven’t been back there for years. Reinstate Monica. And shame on the licensing grab.
Thank you so much. Whatever the motivation, contributions like yours are what helped hobbyists like me decide that whatever ambition I had was in fact a possible outcome, when I otherwise was hitting infinite walls of my own. And I'm sure for those who turned that hobby into their career, you've helped advance countless improvements to everyone's standard of living.
Sure some advancements suck, but that's not on you. Answering the questions publicly for all to see enables everyone, and it's up to them to use it for better or worse.
Thank you; I hope it’s been mildly useful to some people. It sometimes feels like a volunteering effort that I can do, which is slightly unusual and most people can’t do.
Unlike HN and Reddit “discussions” which bring out the snark and ackchually in me far too often, and rarely seem a good way to “discuss” anything, focused questions and answers can potentially add a small value to the world.
> "we can just turn off the data center if we need to"
1. If it never happens or AGI is friendly then we won't need to. If a hostile AGI is created, one trained on all writing about war and strategy and deception, able to respond in microseconds, with has ample time to plot before it makes an obvious move, then thinking you will wait until you see it attack and then turn off a datacenter, is way too little, too late. Like saying "the nuclear bomb explosion is local to one place, if it hurts, we will just walk away from it".
2. That claim does not hold water once you start to dig into who, specifically, would turn off which specific billion-dollar datacenter, under which conditions. Google has been moving compute jobs around the planet to get nighttime electricity rates for bulk compute jobs for years, the idea that there is "one datacenter" is far too simple. The idea that employee 74,123 at Meta doing AI research is also able to get a Meta datacenter shutdown quickly on request, or would know enough about Meta's infrastructure to know which datacenter, seems unlikely. The idea that it even has one off switch, or that nobody will quickly power it back on, or that the compute jobs will not pick up automatically somewhere else, or that nobody else on the planet will be at a similar point in their research, also seem important.
3. This assumes there will be a simple critical point that makes it clear we need to "turn off datacenter now". The fact that you then go on to talk about climate change, imagine you had said "we can just turn the factories off if climate change becomes a problem" and maybe that will make it clearer. Who will turn which factories off, at what point in the climate catastrophe, and why haven't they? That's why it won't happen with datacenters either.
> "Like we're not going to have some runaway skynet thing, that's just completely off the table."
You're confident that tens of billions of dollars of investment and research, US v China national AI competition, some of the largest companies in the world researching AGI will be a flop and develop nothing? Despite the progress from GPT2 to present day, despite historic analogies like the Wright Brothers to the Moon Landing in one lifetime?
NVidia shipped an estimated 40 million GPUs in 2025. Say they average 1 TFLOPS each and a year has 31 million seconds, that's 1.2 million million quadrillion calculations in a year. That much compute power piling up around the planet year-on-year is not going to be important or relevant to the near-medium term future? Because it's just "off the table" that anyone could invent anything interesting with that much growing compute in the next ten or twenty years?
They get electricity through cables. You nick the cable, end of story for the datacenter. Dataceters in space, welll.... not a good idea. When AI systems gets hooked to humans via brain interfaces and human like robots, well we'd better start worrying.
That doesn’t address any of the points I raised about who would make the decision, or about compute jobs moving to another data centre, or about a dangerous AI deceiving that it was stupid until it had a plan to account for that, or an AGI responding much faster than humans, but it raises new points - how do you “nick” a 20 MegaWatt power feed without dying, and what do you do about the batteries and generator backup in a secured area?
Now are you imagining that the employee who can’t ask for a data centre to be shut down, can call the military and telling them a self-improving AGI is about to destroy the world and they need to attack an American company?
Because not having dictatorial control doesn't protect anyone from anything; politicians take 'donations' (bribes) and then argue or enact laws for what the donor wants, no dictating involved.
Or in software terms, BigCorp sponsors you to develop an open source tool fulltime. If you make the tool more useful for them while making it more complex or worse or ignoring things for others, they might fund you next year as well. If you don't develop things that help them, they might stop and send that money elsewhere and you will need to get a normal job instead and drop your tool work to part-time. Even though they aren't dictating anything, what are you incentivised to do?
There's definitely a cost in terms of features BigCo doesn't need that get deprioritized. But that work still gets done if other people need it, it's just slower, and I don't think you could ever pull off making things worse on purpose in a big community run project like Rust.
The only times this actually happened are C++ and CORBA as far as I remember. Both of them were bureaucratic design by committee efforts from the start, the people doing it weren't users but implementors looking to stop competition, and it all happened before the open source era.
Me: "hi support, feature is not available??"
Support: "it doesn't work in that situation. Here's a link to our documentation with two dozen bullet points about where and when that feature doesn't work".
It's as if you selected a cell in Excel, and the copy-paste buttons were missing, and you raised a support case with Microsoft and they said "copy-paste does not work if your spreadsheet was opened from a NAS share. It's documented here that it doesn't work: ".
That is documentation as a defense, instead of the company putting in the effort to make the thing work, they put in documentation that it doesn't work so they can blame the user who "won't read the documentation".
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