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… which means it’s a problem.

Patreon, Substack, etc are no different. We’ve seen people be silenced on X. We’ve also seen payment processors disallow payments to organizations and whatnot.

This is all a problem.

You can dissent in an echo chamber but it doesn’t do any good.

So yes, another will rise up. But even better would be a distributed network that actually _works_, immune to the threat of centralization.

We certainly need a more P2P, version of this type of platform and a way to fund and scale it such that it can’t be messed with by billionaire hacks.

The odds of this being wildly successful are pretty slim, I’d say…

This is an implementation of the OpenGL API interface. It is not OpenGL. It does not support GPU acceleration. It does math with floating point on the CPU. It then draws points and lines on a 2D surface provided by raylib.

Could this be adapted to use SIMD, or a GPU? Sure. That is not what this is today.

Plenty of companies also don’t allow their employees to contribute to GPL tools with company resources.

1. You incorporate GPL software and hope that no one notices and/or no one challenges. This is the most popular approach, and it’s quite successful, actually. 2. You cease to be a proprietary software company. Less popular, but an option.

Both of these are literally possible.

Using GPL software: yes. Totally fine. The rise of Linux and all that jazz.

Incorporating any part of GPL software _into_ other products? Pretty much doesn’t happen. Every company I’ve ever worked for has said “do not bring LGPL or GPL software into the codebase.” When it comes to commercial software, be it cloud based, or downloadable, you’re not going to find much that tries to incorporate GPL stuff. You just won’t.

When I look at Orca (https://100r.co/site/orca.html) I’m reminded of it, but it was definitely unique. Anyone happen to remember / have a link to a successor?

Or in my case, you realize 20 years later that if you had chased profits and done some ETF investing the next 20 years could have been all passion, potentially without needing to make money for my family.

Lots of different angles to choose from.

You have a choice to not write the article, and thereby not spread it.

In a Slack someone posted the statement from Astronomer, and I had no idea what the statement was referring to. Now I can’t get away from hearing about the story.

The hack allows the compiler to be maintained in Zig, compiled to WASM (a supported backend), and then bootstrapped with only a wasm interpreter… and one is provided in a single C file (I believe… but haven’t looked in a while).

This is a much nicer situation than most other bootstrap scenarios. All the SMLs, for instance, require you to have a whole other SML! MoscowML bootstraps with an included Caml interpreter… but it’s not sufficient to compile MLton.

What’s not to understand? There’s a whole class of people that start a startup hoping for it to be the next big thing and they get their golden ticket to billionairedom. There’s also a whole class of non-founders that will join early stage companies at their riskiest stage hoping for the lottery payout. I’m not sure what there is to misunderstand about this?

> I'm just saying: there's no romance or great reward to working in a failing startup. If you have a clear signal that your startup is failing, you've been given a gift from the heavens: the ability to see into the future, see yourself wasting years, and then navigate around those years.

I don’t think I’ve said anything that negates this statement? If after 6 months you have absolutely no customers and you’ve tried everything, then clearly you don’t stick around for 5 years trying. I’ve never said that. This is way different than “we’ve found some success and after 5 years, hired people, just never figured out how to take it to the next level and so we’re shutting down.”

But you can’t make a general statement that there’s no “romance or reward” because people have a whole lot of reasons for doing what they’re doing. That’s been my big disagreement here. As always the answer is “it depends.” You’ve not cited some study that says differently… so… shrug.

> (I have no idea how old you are, but "how did your startup fail in 2001" is an odd question).

I _guess_ I asked that question, but not really. I asked what your startup was, and made an assumption that the amount of “free money” available may have doomed it from the start. Maybe VCs bet on something that obviously (in retrospect) couldn’t succeed … like Pets.com, or the wide variety of “we’ll just burn all this cash paying people to drive a pack of gum from the upper east side to wall st… in the middle of rush hour… and hope we figure out a way to scale it later!!!!!” startups that existed.

> Were you a founder …

I’m not sure why this actually matters? There are plenty of founders who start a company… almost accidentally… because a project they built became bigger than side-project, who aren’t necessarily motivated by a potential unicorn status. The people who benefit most from “try something for 3mo and hope it fails fast!!!” are (I’m going to make a guess because I doubt there’s a citable study out there!) the people most likely looking to win the startup lottery. In that case, the more chances to “scratch off the ticket” the better.

But, I still maintain that it’d be better for those people to have the experience of being a longer term founder for 5 years to gain more experience, see and adapt to more problems… etc, than to start and kill, start and kill, over and over again. In a fast cycles, you can test one or two hypotheses against a very targetted customer base. But you could totally be looking for a great white shark in a lake, which makes absolutely no sense.

> Finally: if you try to factor money out of entrepreneurship discussions, you get to very funny places.

Funny, when I brought money into it before:

> Yeah, you're missing my point. Given most startups fail, the question isn't "at the end of the day do you still get a paycheck for your failed startup", it's "how much of your life did you burn on that failed startup".

This will be my last reply. We don’t agree, and that’s fine. :)

If you’re not already financially stable at 60 and hoping to win the startup lottery to retire… well…

So yeah, obviously age plays some role here.

I didn’t go work at startups because I thought I was gonna get rich. I worked at startups because I expected to learn waaaaay more than at Big Co, and have wayyyy more fun while doing it. This panned out.

Money has never been my motivation in computing—interesting problems are.

It wasn’t until I turned 42 that I realized I did it all backwards, though. I should have started by working at Big Co and saved/invested every penny to seek early retirement, and then do whatever I wanted with no financial pressure, later.

I could have stayed at a Big Co for 4+ more years and racked up more RSUs, and bonuses, but my job became boring, and I started to resent it. What can I say?

Curious about the 2001 failure… but am guessing the amount of free money in the dotcom boom led to you trying to build something not well thought out or with ang real hope for viability. (not throwing shade, but lots of mud was thrown and very little stuck)

It happens! It’s OK!

I’ve worked at a few “unsuccessful,” but long term startups. Bought, but kind of for parts. The 2 yo startup I closed down was the most enjoyable and most rewarding from a learning perspective. The longer term, but unsuccessful, ones were also enjoyable and great learning experiences.

The two larger company experiences had me much more pigeonholed, even as a principal engineer / architect, and exposed me to far less of the important aspects of running a company or product, generally, but I made money. Often it was not enjoyable, and certainly leadership did not always enjoy my questioning of their actions and decisions.