Solving the Maker-Taker Problem | Hacker News Reader

Solving the Maker-Taker Problem

dri.es

81 pointsgeerlingguy81 comments

This is a problem unique to Open Source because the root problem itself is baked into OSS and Free Software.

The very foundation of Free Software is the idea that a user can do whatever they like, are given the source code, and pass those freedoms on to their users. There are no protections offered to the developer, and that is not a bug it's the explicit point of the model.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. But the model is what it is.

Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.

Drupal has created a parallel organisation which monitors and rewards participation. This doesn't "solve" the problem, it just adds a commercial and administrative layer.

Proprietary software solved the problem by not being Open Source. Others have adopted a "source available" license, which may come with restrictions.

In other words, lots of people have solved the problem simply by not being "open source" (not necessarily by closing the source, but rather by restricting usage.)

Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it.

If Word Press don't like the rules of the game then they can change the rules. That is 100% under their control. But don't use the "common rule book" then complain when the other team plays to the rules.

Although I agree with what you say, that seems to be mischaricterising the blog post - he is talking about the community rather than the software.

It is a bit like free speech and ideologies like communism. Do I support the right of people to spread communist messages? Yes. Do I support them in doing so? No. Indeed, I would pick a fight with them on the subject - it just happens that suppressing them by censorship is a bad strategy. Similarly, the Drupal Association seems to be supporting the general freedom of all software users but the people it actually supports is a much smaller group.

The specifics might not work, but building a community isn't related to the license of a piece of software.

So you would physically fight someone over political speech? That doesn’t seem to respect their right to it. Curious why you’d choose to harp on communist ideology when there are real live Nazis again.

bruce511's comment included "Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it". In this comment the word "fight" means to write a blog post calling them parasites and maybe have some legal arguments.

They can't change the rules of the game because WordPress itself is a fork. [0]

This is GPL working exactly as it's designed to do, ensuring whoever forks the software must allow others to do the same.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.

Did the little GPL component force itself into the codebase without anyone noticing? Was it so useless that nobody could have removed it from the project to get rid of this obvious parasite?

I think it will hold in court specifically because, since it is so aggressive in what it is set to do, a company choosing to use it in their otherwise non-GPL codebase is declaring that it is not easily replaceable and thus proving it contributes to the overall value.

More people should try splitting the difference with source available licenses that turn into GPL after a year. The point of open source was to change the balance of power from developer to user, it was not an economic system. Theres plenty of room in the middle to balance interests without resorting to predatory proprietary licenses.

The only workable way to fund software development is for users to pay. The idea is that if the user, after some time, can take the source to a new development team then both parties are invested in continuing the relationship in a stable way unlike proprietary licenses where the incentive is to squeeze to the users limit. It also solves the abandonware issue.

> Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.

Maybe, but they seem to be basing their legal argument on trademarks, that WPE is using the same WordPress and WooCommerce labels as the labels on the primary maintainer's services based on the upstream code base, when, according to them, the downstream forks of pieces of this are not the same service and WPE doesn't have rights to that trade dress.

In addition to the methods you talk about, trademarks are another method of "solving the problem".

This is the most amazing part for me:

> Drupal users like Pfizer and the State of Georgia only allow Makers to apply in their vendor selection process.

I wonder how they managed to convince companies to add such a requirement, but it's amazing!

I could imagine a checkbox with something like "participates in the development of the Software" as a criterion for selecting vendors. I'm amazed they got it to be an absolute for a government body, I think it likely would not be legal in Europe.

It's pretty dirty. Yikes.

I don't really understand the premise of these types of write-ups — the software has a license, and people and companies use it accordingly. I understand most core software was started long ago as a one-person project and given a FOSS license. Due to the license, it grew from the work of hundreds or thousands who contributed, but the license no longer serves the authors' worldview. It seems to me all the contributors implicitly approve of this situation, as they contribute labor while knowing what the license is.

I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.

> once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies

Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die.

A classic tragedy of the billionaires.

> A classic tragedy of the commons.

Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte.

"But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832!

Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?

> maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?

This is something that took some getting use to working with clojure. You'll hear it a lot, a lot of libraries are simply "done". They do their thing and they do it well. The language itself prioritizes not making breaking changes so there is rarely a need to "maintain" many libraries that were last updated years ago.

Habit still makes me pause when seeing it, but looking through the code will usually be reassurance enough or tell you that it was abandoned and needs work. There is also CLJ Commons[0] that takes useful/popular libraries that are done/mostly done and no longer maintained by the original maintainers. Usually the only changes are some performance updates with new JVM/Clojure features. Many of them are incredibly useful and haven't been updated in months or years.

[0] https://clj-commons.org

The “tragedy” as commonly interpreted is so wrong-headed and ill-framed. The problem at the heart of it was always the intermingling of private interests and common goods. The biggest problem with OSS is exactly that: private corporations can take those commons and get rich based on them.

So what is the tragedy? Really? It’s the tragedy of private interests. But it’s of course not named that because Economists championed The Problem. In turn we have to pretend that The Commons have a problem. Because Private Interests are axiomatic and are not to be questioned.

It's definitely not a tragedy of the commons problem. Open source doesn't get used up by more people using it.

Takers actually have an inherent interest in supporting the open source software they use, in direct proportion to the long-term value they derive from it.

You actually need some countervailing force to have significant takers. E.g, with Wordpress I think there's an acrimonious and competitive relationship between the for-profit company controlling the open source project and one of the big for-profit users of the project.

The tragedy for OSS here is that an OSS project is being used as a lever in a struggle between business competitors over who gets the dollars. (I suspect WordPress was always designed and intended to support a commercial enterprise, though, so this kind thing was probably always going to be part of it.)

this is not a new problem; peter deutsch was very annoyed in the 90s about linux distributions distributing outdated, and often modified, copies of ghostscript, whose users would then complain to him about their bugs. compounding the problem in his case: virtually nobody else was capable of contributing third-party code that was up to his quality standards; for context, he'd written i think the second or third implementation of lisp, in assembly language, when he was 15, some 30 years earlier, and hadn't stopped honing his craft since then, for example inventing jit compilers

ultimately i think the answer is to limit your interactions with the takers; some of them may become makers later, often of different free software than yours†, but most of them won't. they may provide useful feedback (bug reports, feature requests, etc.) but most of them will not. what's important is preventing them from overrunning spaces where the makers are collaborating (and especially harassing makers into quitting), and maybe to give them a path toward growing into makers, if they are so inclined. dries's system seems like a gentle, probably sufficient way to do that

______

† the contributors to vim mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to gcc, and the gcc maintainers mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to vim, but they each benefit from the others' work. similarly, many linux distributors eventually became important indirect contributors to ghostscript development, even though at first peter wasn't using linux, and i think even today very little of the code is contributed by outsiders

Two immediate thoughts on this:

* There's nothing wrong per se with being a Taker - (assuming a broad definition of "profit") the vast majority of individual users certainly fall into this category. The problem is only when the Taker's actions harm the Maker ecosystem.

* Regarding a credit system, one problem that jumps out at me is - how do you quantify work on a plugin? Do you attempt to scale by what fraction of users uses that plugin? What about a plugin that's widely used, but many of its users are customers of your hosting company?

> how do you quantify work on a plugin

There's also the fact that the majority of big wordpress plugins are "freemium", with most features locked behind a paywall, that includes Automattic's own plugins like jetpack.

There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more.

I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.

Only rich people can think in terms of public good. Rest of us pheasants needs to put food on the table.

There is difference between childless google employee maintaining open source library as side hustle and someone running company building Drupal sites for a living in India.

And worse, we pheasants are in constant danger of being eaten by starving peasants.

It’s important, as pheasants, that we maintain presence of mind around peasants, lest we become holiday meal presents.

To my ear, this all sounds very pheasant.

> childless Google employee

yikes

They might prefer *childfree.

as a poor person, i greatly appreciate public goods such as the public park down the street, the sidewalks that take me there, the public order that kept me from getting stabbed the last time i was successfully robbed, wikipedia, linux, firefox, and library genesis

i contribute to them by, among other things, not littering in the park, editing wikipedia, and publishing my software as free software

Where does the land of "la unica solución" seem to be heading? Are you more likely to wind up with somewhat more protection from robbery, getting robbed at chainsaw-point (beats getting dropped out of a helicopter), or somewhere in between?

Lagniappe: https://d22fxaf9t8d39k.cloudfront.net/bfaefbf26f795ff226ff08...

[we had someone in recently who seemed very well educated for taking a job as a cuidador de caballos, but it turned out to be dual purpose: during the 6-month visa we could arrange, he managed (in surprisingly few physical trips) to do all the italian bureaucracy wrangling he'd needed to get their passport]

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=907381

Is the sage skeptical of education eg

(Carleton again, the hidden fortress?)

Carleton?

Being a hacker and not an economist, I have a simplistic view of public expenditures:

With a computer, we pay a certain amount for the base package of hardware + software, and a certain amount for whatever peripherals or applications/services we wish to acquire on top of that base.

Everyone complains that these base packages are bloated, yet it turns out that they're cheap enough that only a dedicated few (retro builders? arch users?) are revealed as willing to assume the inconvenience of unbundling.

In a society, we pay a certain amount (taxes*) for the base provision of (public) goods and services, and a certain amount (private expenditure) for whatever goods and services we wish to acquire on top of that base.

Everyone complains that these base packages are bloated, yet it turns out...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCGu5Z_vaps

* these days; in older, poorer, times there was corvée for both public and private purposes.

CC Veblens alma mater, here CU.

Table 3, (basic,infra)hardware+software in quadrant “club goods”, solved except in minds of some recalcitrant VCs, contentious is the diametrically opposite one.

Is the diametrically opposite quadrant the tragic one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-mile_limit was one way to "regulate" fisheries

Do the Houthis have anything to add to the conversation that started (or at least we join it) in 1455 ("Mare clausum"), continued through 1609 (Mare Liberum) and 1635 (Mare Clausum), followed by the very pragmatic 1702 (De dominio maris) which technology superseded enough to arrive at 1982 (UNCLOS)?

Designori would approve of the pragmatism of waiting to come up theories, first seeing what could work in practice, including having listened to the ultima ratio regum; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abvgtlL50Rk

EDIT: to what degree is the "front page" the equivalent of being within 12 nm off the "coast" of HN?

EDIT2: Figure 1 explains why public expenditure is so contentious — no Schelling points

EDIT3: "club goods" also explains why I am not as anti-tax as modal vocal HN: when I'm a member of a club, I pay my dues

EDIT4: plenty of "contested" here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone#/media...

Id expect the interesting surface is the one between club and the other general cases (esp. the set of externalities, antigoods so to speak)

Furthermore i suspect, part of the shame lies in realizing that thermodynamics may “work” neither in practice, nor in theory, so designori, nominatively, might be tempted to pursue both at the same time.

So Houthis could charitably be helping us price (empirically) the very public externality called “currentday drone tech” — which for abbreviated sakes cant even autonomously harness energy transienting the earths habitable zone

REDIT0: not sure but if HNFp=YC intertidal zone, theyd be worried about superior phishing tech exhausting the (intertidal) phishstocks without their knowledge.. you might have to ask dang where the littoral/intertidal boundaries are

USN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_zone#/media/File:Litt...

Yeah, I really liked the characterisation in that article of externalities as antigoods. "There is really only one good in the universe, and it proceeds forwards and backwards through time until it has woven its way through an entire economy"?

energy harvesting referring to https://aroundtheworld.solarimpulse.com ?

Both smugglers and the Royal Navy had considerable interest in being able to predict tides; while I don't think the former ever had much influence on the development of computational technology, the latter did.

We know that the eternal electron is not Wheelers teddy (he didnt seem exhibitionistic, like CK), so perhaps we shall look elsewhere..

Solarimpulse. Yes! For design reasons, it wouldnt suffice just to replace the pilots with autopilots..

Somehow. Suspect that RN leant on the smugglers..

So §2190 of TMAS[0] is where VFDP makes it clear that he expects leonine (force) and vulpine (guile) strategies to almost always be pure in individuals, and only mixed in groups[1]. I can certainly argue with him that Gini coefficients are not at all fixed, contrary to his claim that the Pareto distribution occurs semper ubique et ab omnibus, but his description of how fox-depleted middles usually take advantage of a few "demagogue" turncoats from the lion-depleted high agrees not only with my understandings of history, but also with Emmanuel Goldstein's generalities as well as with Fletcher Christian's particular mutiny.

[0] in which Pareto is channeling his inner Ibn Khaldun? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah

[1] consider the roles of a mafia consigliere, Cardinal Richelieu, or 齊太公. at the moment I can't think of any lions who became infamous working for fox groups, but might that just be because foxes always take care to brush their tails over associations they definitely don't have with "stochastic" violence?

>With its Etruscan leonine heads, the façade is the symbol of the fights between Guelphs and Ghibellines. It is said, in fact, that the scion of the Guelph Buondelmonte family, who owned towers on Borgo Santi Apostoli, was about to marry a member of the Ghibelline family Amedei when he fell in love with a girl from the Donati family.

https://archive.ph/5Ki96

(Good to know that the tuscans lionized the etruscans, not romans?)

Sigfox: JvN/Takesaki

1)Implosion scheme of Manhattan P: Neddermeyer was the fox, Oppenheimer the lion

2)type III_lambda: tomita was the fox, connes was the lion

Q: dynamic ginis should correspond to Pareto’s pagliaccetto (Note: Edwardian design)

Update: with hindsight, we know that the bell ineqs were Einstein’s CamiKnickers, and now i’m trying on Feynman’s :)

https://archive.ph/toGkK

Credit for these links to chatgpt?

Update2: Aaronson is a known exhibitionist (>diaperhedron) but check out post-flamewar (2014+) comments at p=1537

max(p=1537)=186 << 2014?

> the narrowing of the corridor prevented ambushes: an armed man could not go through it

Bap unte kuwang, depelesh imim ge to. ("doors and corners, that's where they get you")

If you're too land-poor to have large pastures, and either too capital- or too labour-poor to have individual boxes, it's wise to design horse group pens so there are no places a weaker animal could be trapped by a stronger one; I hear the same design principles apply (only more so, because monkeys brigade) to primate areas in zoos, which makes it no surprise that we'd also find it among feudal humans.

> etruscans, not romans

Assuming the Sabines ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women#/medi... ) were not a singular event, the neighbours of the romans might've had many reasons not to lionise them. Although the trope* does recur, both in the New World ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_raiding#/media/File:Joh... ) and even among those seeking a new life in the Off-World colonies ( https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/images/stencil/1280x12... ).

A felt isn't woven along straight lines like a fabric, it's just a mass (no loom needed!) held together by crooked fibers. Does the felt of society therefore imply "me and my brother against our cousin; we and our cousins against the other faction; all the city-zens against those romans"?

If you ever come up with a revolution in mathematical physics to replace string theory, obviously don't let me name it or it'd wind up something like "tanga theory"

on that note, any ideas why AVR's dancers would be traditional-video-clad among the greeks ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV-eFZCSnZw ) but prude-culture-friendly among the romans ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzJTleWMjQ ) ?

[and what's with the vampire teeth? we've seen those before...]

* subverted by Нина in Кавказская пленница (1967), in a manner that would eventually provide the soundtrack to Yeltsin Tank Day.

Your perspective is probably also affected by living in a country whose government does largely spend its taxes on public goods and club goods rather than on, for example, pork-barrel politics, invading other countries, and harming the public and itself. Living in a country where the government spent some of its tax money on keeping me from getting vaccinated against covid, and where I used to live in a house full of refugees from Venezuela, gives me a different perspective—even where we know the same facts, different ones may seem especially salient to me.

True, upon reflection I have the dual advantages of (a) a country which agrees with Cicero* that it's much cheaper (and pleasanter!) when people don't have to routinely watch out for sharp dealing, and (b) a country of my choice, not an accident of birth.

* De Officiis (44 BC) 54-72 https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/47001/pg47001-images.html ; he would prefer to say "more honourable" but I think my formulation may be more convincing for people who attempt to attack moral issues with economic tools?

Now, (and i’m still partial to keeping the lion-fox defos close to where they have always been*) would these people who attack moral issues with economic tools be lions or foxes? Its not that lions do not fear death, but that they fear lack of impact (ie positive externalities) more than death

I posit to thee that lion-fox is a spectrum (and not even very bimodal). where would you place the (napo)leon, sama, dang, and PG? I’d say closer to the lion, because while they keep tactical details close to their chest, their hearts are worn elsewhere.

*The historical [& natural] lions (with an epsilon of fox?) appears to employ camouflage, and if i may say so, enjoy subterfuge, by necessity? What the fiducial lion values, or respect (loyalty,unpredictability), are in their subordinates [as well as themselves]. Same for standard foxes ([intellectual]prowess,legibility).. i’d add that sibboleth consists of dropping something on their paws Y, where Y is something like an accusation of hypocrisy (& not dishonourabilitiness) watching their L0 (cache) ejaculation

Since my gallic quotemining skills are inadequate, bonaparte appeared to have said

X does not understand men like I do

Q: who was X? Cicero, Livy or Plutarch?

>just because… he says he can read [dead] people https://archive.is/www.economist.com/business/2024/10/03/wha...

while I delve into Gallica (and run a few errands, and ponder the ancient dictum that people are like stones on a counting board — how much they're worth depends upon where* you put them):

Napoleon Ier — lion (2M in the imperial army, with organic support, and a navy) see also 13 Vendémiaire, Year 4.

DanG - fox (at most, he could field a squad w/ small arms)

PG & SamA - foxes (a few hundred green troops w/ small arms and no indirect fire capability is about an order of magnitude [pace innovations from Ukraine?] too small to hold or gain ground. SamA, given heavier weapons and mortars and double or treble the headcount, could maybe hold — for a day or two, at which point we'd need to add in a logistics train to somewhere friendly...)

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJBNJ2wq0Y

* compare the reapportionment of horses in the Anabasis.

E1R (leonine heart and stomach) would be a fox too, before and/or after Tilbury?, same as E2R ? Or does being an assassin’s target count

(Somehow i feel you will not downgrade the discourse towards metaphorical threats to life, as in

https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html)

~200 ships and ~16'000 men sounds pretty leonine to me? (and even the 4'500 militia at Tilbury dwarf an OpenAI or a YCombinator)

TIL from where the brits learned (the hard way) about "let's you and him fight": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada#:~:text=The%20K... (in later text note the use of elizabethan-era drones, fireships, leading up to the Tilbury speech*, as well as the providential arrival of a "divine wind" after it)

[so from whom did Philip, by the grace of God King of England, Spain, France, both the Sicilies, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Milan and Brabant, Count of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol, learn that foxes' game? (found also in the Panchatantra as "the crows and the snake")]

Wouldn't being an assassin's target say much more about the strategy of the initial source of the assassination attempt than it would about that of the target? (a fox might assassinate anyone: fox, lion, or designori; while an insufficiently leonine designori** would assassinate a lion or more leonine designori; between designori we get into a comparative advantage game for who takes the fox and who the lion role?)

It'll take me a moment to switch out of lion mode; for the moment all I'm coming up with is that Xenophon et. al. correctly surmised they were default dead unless they could cross the chasm, err, make it to a friendly coastline.

(Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! being the cry of investors upon finding a second potential buyer?)

* note that E1R starts with pairs in the run-ups but concludes on full tricolons; no mere "shock and awe" for her.

** EDIT: eg, well before co-founding Likud, MVB was busy bombing brits

EDIT2: NB channels NdBdM:

> “Je sais, quand il le faut, quitter la peau du lion pour prendre celle du renard.” (when necessary, I can remove the lion's skin and wear the fox's)

My bad, I had an old number for OpenAI; at 3'600 it's actually getting close, in principle, to E1R's militia at Tilbury.

Closest equivalent in the US system would be a Brigade Combat Team, which (if SamA had the equivalent mix of occupational specialties as well as non-civilian equipment) incorporates support and sustainment elements and would be fairly leonine.

Compare early 2017 PMC Wagner.

EDIT: according to the doctrine of FM 3-96, BCT commanders (who have organic intelligence units) are not only responsible for outcomes in the field, but are also have responsibility for influencing audiences and narratives, which sounds pretty vulpine.

[NB that the notion of arming a 600 person AI company and asking them to hold a piece of ground is already at the edge of plausibility; asking a 3'600 person AI company to act as a BCT would require a clearly implausible acquisition of process knowledge]

...and while we're reading PG, Cicero (second use source) quoting Cato (ostensible source) on venture capital: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

[note that capitalism via *kaput (head) and feudalism via *fehu (cattle) stand in a metonymic relation. compare https://adebiportal.kz/kz/translation/view/595#:~:text=We%20... ]

Forsooth, That was a gem!! That is, i still dont know whether youd be happy to steer clear from invoking violence when discoursing economic approaches to moral issues…

Mongoose vs (king) cobra, thats a pairing from asia i could be curious about..

[I note another horseshoe-like effect where foxes mporp lions, realtime, get themselves confused..]

Anabasis is _the_ counterexample i’d like to have remembered.. fully vulpine Commanding Officer

(I mentioned assassinationtargetstateofmind because… inferred internal states tend to be insanely effective when identifying .. familiars?)

I've been invoking violence because that is ("keeping the lion-fox defos close to where they have always been") the historical leonine[0] trait.

Fox-lion confusion by a third party also occurs in one of the Panchatantra stories, where a mother leaps to the conclusion that the mongoose with blood on its mouth has betrayed her... (compare "Rikki-tikki-tavi")

From the violence-dealing viewpoint, wasn't the CO in the Anabasis designori? A 10'000 strong combined arms unit, even if default dead, is still well capable of holding its perimeter against wolves. (both here and in Persia)

That said, if you'd prefer to rotate the microscope lenses and narrow down to even-more-metaphorical lions and foxes, I'm happy to do so (if I may footnote the occasional ultima ratio[1] from time to time?) going forward.

[0] in the Tanakh lion is used metaphorically for scholars, but only as part of a total order, and there's plenty of violence in the (t <= R. Meir) fox and lion stories. (open Q: was the hebrew word, which gets translated fox, a fox or a jackal?)

[1] making people offers they can't refuse?

EDIT: this is probably the reason for our different distributional preferences: as metaphors for strategies, I'll grant a non-bimodal distribution, but as long as the lion stands (rampant?) for violence, doing gangsta shit effectively (which includes irreversible decision-making under the influence of adrenaline) implies a significant time sunk cost in having earlier practised doing gangsta shit; similarly all the skulking about meeting with (potential) informants is a significant time sink for the case officer: we can't all just have Hugin and Munin show up each morning with the news.

EDIT2: to what extent does Hercules' use of the Nemean Lion's claws to skin itself anticipate Cantor's use of diagonalisation?

In order to get a better idea of the distinction you have in mind, fox or lion: EES, DJT, NB1, DG, PG, SHA?

Ill need you to disambiguate EES,DG (DanG?) ..

NB1 designori, writing off Laplace as a chancellor was fox skin (see below)

DJT designori, but much less certainty, fox wearing lion skin badly, or with help of stims?

PG: from video, designori, from writings, fox, so maybe fox wearing a lion skin? (havent considered his encounters with wolves and traps)

DanG no idea, slight maybe of fox wearing lion skin (from interviews)

Another measure: warmth/intellect affectations, so if inferred from writings=propganda (uh modulo that french isnt my Ln) old boney is one hell of a fox, or lion wearing fox skin..

Theres also the Mahatma: designori imho certainly, if he said=he meant

live like youll die tomorrow,]l[earn like youll live forever

Sorry about the Xenophon, brainfatulence, as it was. So id encourge you to point out any egregious goalpost shifting above & below

Our Lord of the Masses, yes (designori, probably, as a guess from the 2nd hand ads and not from any scholarship whatsoever)

El Cid, no idea, too far back, but from what you just said , designori but no idea of what wearing what skin

(If youd like i would have to even put some bars on my responses)

Veblen: most likely fox, unless we surface something in Ellen’s papers?

Bw limited, so answering the shallower q’s because the discourse seems like it jumped in depth

EES: Eric Schmidt (not Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith)

no wuckers; I'm happy for any discourse with a timescale beyond the HN "look a squirrel!" mode.

EES might have seemed a fox but now he’s been mostly just living the life, so i’d wager he’d been always a lion albeit with a fox skin as the situations required..

A lot of (human) capital destruction happened “under his watch” possibly too; yesterday i found in my acorn stash an old html document from Hal Varian, “markets for information goods” which should provide a good framing story for that (im guessing that the nomenclature ICE is just fortunate)

“Lone” (子連れ) whiskered canid here.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5LmAo4tmT4

Erm, i (mostly) missed the flagged post, maybe rehash some of that stuff here?

EE’D’S always wondered if the moniker was inspired by “Lehnsmann” (aka UvH)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23980317

[NP Spiesser gonna spiess*; guess 31-60 are noisy channels too?]

the lone canid being the post-'69 Nu Pogodi sketch?

bright eyed and bushy tailed on the drones!

widespread solar could be like the old RN: unlike the non-nuclear bits of the USN, they only needed to put into port for fresh water, victuals, and the occasional repair. where are we on beamed power? (I'd think like charging, you'd want as large an area as possible on the receiving end, so maybe not so useful for keeping drones aloft?)

Igloo White reminded me of Project Loon (but maybe it's just pareidolia that I see dual-use everywhere?) which would be another (but probably insufficiently stealthy) approach to drone range-extension (witness DARPA fascination with perching).

Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

[in between I figured out the vampire teeth. È colpa di Celentano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRVNEIIhYpY#t=870 that's probably also the original source for Анонс?

Lagniappe2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLIWoUbcyo ]

* compare The Scorpion and the Frog

I'll have to add RTT to the list that includes Mary Poppins, Pooh, der Ententanz, leg warmers, etc. (RTT has antagonists, but animals [or at least snakes] fall in the pirate class?)

Ogami, having had to carry weapons in the pram, would've appreciated UvH's bei ... Fischfang müssen wir eisengepanzert sein. (oops: why did I quote the german? UvH wrote in latin)

EDIT: I can't believe the en.wikipedia for LWaC doesn't mention Hard Boiled (1992) in its trope list; the baby scene was even referenced shot for shot in a recent Fast and Furious.

EDIT: I'd guess HRV knew what he was doing (1998>>1981) but he does seem to be from the wrong generation

EDIT: https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/08/16/242148/hal-varia... Growing up, he turned to science fiction for excitement. ICE was a shout out.

not so Lone Partisan (note the japanese maple!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWnj3qwlSc

from MfIG: A fourth technique for deal with exclusion is to embrace it, and bundle the information good with information that sellers want to be widely disseminated such as advertising.

One more violent lion: El Cid (or designori?)

Someday I'll have to actually read his story, because he took the Kolmogorov Option: his friendly suzerain died and an enemy inherited, so he wound up in exile, yet was able (while maintaining feudal proprieties) to capture Valencia, at which point (for story purposes) said hostile suzerain married the suzerain's sons to El Cid's daughters, leaving him sandwiched by inimical interests, and yet he still maintained his Kolmogorov bubble until death (and even some time after).

Crane vs Crab (ft Mongoose) is a good one...

X is unlikely to be Plutarque, for https://www.napoleon.org/wp-content/thumbnails/uploads/2009/... (depicting him at 15) was supposedly made with some input from the principal himself, and the book is supposed to be the Lives (also frequently mentioned by others in a cursory search).

Between Cicéron and Tite-Live my priors are (0,5:0,5) because it seems like he read whatever he could get his paws on: https://blog.napoleon-cologne.fr/napoleon-bonaparte-et-les-l... (with a rather Molochian /dev/null for books not worth the time to read? War and Peace also mentions french book burning habits, but those were driven by more prosaic motivations)

EDIT: > "it is an advantage if from time to time there are individuals who do not understand men" —???

(which reminds me, I still haven't tracked down one of your earlier paraphrases...)

I'll guess X=Livy — as he was a "professional" historian (one of Veblen's non-governing elites?) and therefore more likely to produce Gell-Mann (non)Amnesia moments.

[It's interesting to see the difference between quotes attributed to N1 on {de,en,fr} websites: in fr they sound pretty accurate (some fraction are lifted from Cicero or other classical authors); in de they're enriched in those that either concern germany itself or the hassle of dealing with idiots all day; in en just about anything gets his name slapped on it. ("87% of all statistics are just made up — Napoleon Bonaparte")]

That said, even though Cicero was in government, Livy seems to have been a tad more cynical (small-c, modern sense) than Cicero, so I could be wrong. Alongside the lifted-from-Cicero quotes, one also finds more machiavellian expressions:

> “Le peuple est le même partout. Quand on dore ses fers, il ne hait pas la servitude.” (People are everywhere alike. Give them golden handcuffs, and they don't hate their subjection) https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65037972/f113.image.r...

Im guessing Livy too, as i heard it from a professional (English) historian at least a decade ago..

All i remembered was that, whoever the poor writer was, had never waged (or even experienced?) war, but popularly quoted in those contexts

now that you mentioned it, i notice that English historians (of any day) can be a bit… sloppy in their scholarship compared to continentals

Thanks for delving!

sounds like (what I've read about) Livy; no wuckers!

> Motivating Workers to Exert Effort (in the NBER wp)

Squad Leader (Avalon Hill) is the only game, board or otherwise, I've run across where "motivating [grunts] to exert effort" is an explicit part of the gameplay. Are there any others?

EDIT: also, I think whoever tested the teenaged Winston Smith and put him in the Outer Party did well: his adult allocation of confidants to revolutionary cells does not reflect well, neither on his CFIT, nor on his AG.

Possibly less protection against random bandits, less protection against official corruption, and decaying infrastructure as well. We'll see; I'm surprised things haven't gotten any worse than they have (I was expecting general strikes to unseat our ideologue months ago) but it remains to be seen how things work out. The official plan is a transition to capitalism, but that depends on private investment. And what fool would invest their own money in Argentina, knowing they'll lose their investment after the next election?

Maybe Milei could issue a BoludoCoin?

EDIT: no, that's already a thing https://boludocoin.com :|

> What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good".

The term is in the article:

Our approach stems from a key insight, also explained in my Makers and Takers blog post: customers are a "common good" for an open source project, not a "public good".

This problem has an established name and is widely studied in economics and mechanism design: the free-rider problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

I don't see this issue at all. I put a BSD license on it so you can do whatever you want. Get rich with it; steer missiles at civilian targets with it; whatever.

Building a business with the help of someone else's open source isn't some zero effort, turn-key event. Those people still hustle and take risks.

Does this really solve the problem? The article doesn’t really provide statistics, but why would WP Engine suddenly increase contributions to get listed on the WordPress homepage? Is that an important marketing tool for them?

Some Drupal users only contracting with contributors likely does solve a lot of the problem. How they made that happen, I don't know.

The marketing surely also helps, not sure how relevant it is for WP Engine though and how willing WordPress would be to do that given the very direct competition with Automattic.

It's the software developer equivalent of - I will make a post on my Instagram (50,000 followers) if you give me a free holiday - "influencer" request.

Yeah, it really requires a whole specific culture of the community, which Wordpress did not build over the decades, and Drupal did. It's not a system, but a long culture-bending process to implement this to full effect

Drupal best this drum every conference and summit for decades

The title made me think this was about market makers and takers.

This all stems from people of certain backgrounds expecting everyone to be a good citizen, more or less.

If your intentions are not clearly spelled out somewhere, then somebody is absolutely going to use your thing in a way that you did not intend.

What complicates matters even further is that the original license reflected some youthful idealism and optimism. In the meantime the maintainer(s) worldview evolved but they forgot to encode that in a new license. Pretty classic mistake, it seems.

Less idealism and more formalities solve that problem. Mostly. Though good luck suing the big companies if they violate the license.

"Certain backgrounds"? Any particular examples?

Well I am not a sociologist or a professional psychologist, I am sharing what I've seen many times is all. But let's just say: somewhat privileged white Western men. They seem to think everyone operates on goodwill.

I am a white guy, though from Eastern Europe. Happily most of us suffer no illusions about the benevolence of the world at large.

I don't think this expectation is a consequence of race or ethnicity, but a consequence of seeing it work in one's own local society. (Privilege, in a generic sense of socio-economic status, probably does play into that. It's easier to have high trust when nobody is desperate.)

Indeed it's not a question of race and ethnicity per se, but it's also true that historically such communities that demonstrate a bit of a privileged mindset are mostly white (with some rich Asians here and there).

Privilege stems from community as you alluded to. Many people's worst problem was to ask a new neighbor to turn down the music 1-2 times until they learned to be a good citizen of the neighborhood and that was that. Some of us however had to deal with much worse situations -- on a regular basis -- and for people like myself I really find it difficult to sympathize with OP because coldly and mathematically speaking, they simply did not cover their bases, and they had signs and signals that they should have done it.

This seems far wordier than necessary for the point it's making, and reads to me as AI-generated or at least assisted.

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