They're not "flesh-and-blood compute" you absolute monster, they're human beings with their own hopes and dreams. Reading this comment has given me a strange new respect for crypto, because if slaving under you is what those kids' alternatives were, then they made the right choice to take the pull on the influencer slot machine.

The motto of anyone under the age of 30 should be "fuck you, pay me", and I say that as a middle aged man with a Big Tech salary. It is precisely people like me that have the financial and career stability that we can (and should!) start contributing to open source projects out of a sense of civic responsibility, but that is because we are already in a position to do so.

This continuous obsession with making the younger generation "prove themselves" by "putting in their time" otherwise they're "entitled", only to keep yanking up the "make it" age, has damned multiple generations at this point. We need to re-normalize 22 year olds buying their first home with their first baby on the way, NOT the 27-year-old working yet another unpaid internship while making his open source contribution to your open source project in a frantic attempt to get noticed.