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boltzmann-brainon FOSS "just fork it" delusion

see, that's the problem, you immediately jump to a combative stance + assume the current maintainer is always right, which is exactly how the situations i presented happen in the first place

boltzmann-brainon FOSS "just fork it" delusion

a tiny cohort's opinion does not change the truthfulness of a statement

boltzmann-brainon FOSS "just fork it" delusion

that would turn it into a witch hunt drama post. it's good that this sort of thing wasn't included.

boltzmann-brainon FOSS "just fork it" delusion

in 30+ years of software development i've never heard "just fork it" or "you're welcome to fork it" used as an encouragement and i've heard it as a dismissal countless times. the article is spot on, and your interpretation of the described real-life situation is a rosy-tinted hypothetical at best.

boltzmann-brainon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

Main tech skills:

- Backend Programming: Rust, Zig, Haskell, Python, JS, TypeScript, Node, Vue, React, Elm, Scala, C, C++, SQL, Perl, PHP, Clojure, OCaml, Erlang, Elixir, Theorem provers (TLA+, Isabelle HOL, Agda), ...

- Devops & co: NixOS, Terraform, AWS, Docker, Ansible, Linux admin, Distributed Systems, ... Quote from code review: "This is the most beautiful Bash code I've ever seen written"

- Fintech: Dev experience with banks and financial institutions. Launched Tezos and other major blockchains. Dozens of smart contract audits.

- Bizdev: Gamification, consumer modelling, data-driven retention and engagement

- AI: LLMs, predictive text, machine vision (trajectory tracking), DSP, Big Data, ...

- Infosec: Cryptography, Red team testing, RE, audits, threat modeling, ...

- Other tech: Godot game engine, audio engineering (mastering), Verilog, VHDL

Management and business: Minor in Psychology, led and managed teams between 2 and 30 people, product design and gamification, hiring, executive and political outreach, media appearances, and a lot of other experience that won't fit in this post.

boltzmann-brainon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

  Location: EU
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: C++, Rust, Python, Go, Zig, Haskell, TypeScript, Nix
  Résumé/CV: ask damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com
  Email: damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com

20+ yoe as dev/IC. 10+ yoe in managerial and executive roles. Multiple great exits and acquisitions. I have recently built a software NGO with over half a million supporters and over a thousand active volunteers and major political and media networking. I have built tech for Tezos, Oracle, Shell, Digitas, Saatchi & Saatchi, Time Warner, Sparkasse, Bank of America.

If there's a problem related to tech, I can solve it, and build a team or company around it. Available for work as dev/IC, EM, Director, or CTO, with experience in each. Full-solution MVP development from scratch. Performance optimization and modernization of older systems. DSL and programming language design, compilers. Let me know if you're looking for experience that isn't below! HN posts are short. CV upon request.

If you think I might be able to help you, shoot me an email: damian.jobsites+hn@gmail.com

~~

Example engagement types:

- Long term dev / IC or managerial roles

- Security audits for cryptography and secure code

- Review your code and dev processes, 10-page report

- Short-term dev and research work

- One-shot meetings

(see reply for skill list)

boltzmann-brainon Demystifying DVDs

if it's just "some" bad sectors, maybe you can just bruteforce guessing what was in those sectors.

boltzmann-brainon Self-hosting is being enshittified

not necessarily, you can also have a plex server at home and as a student have a laptop in your dorm or at school and watch stuff there. or on the move when you're using a mobile phone, etc.

boltzmann-brainon How to complain (2024)

Funnily enough, the author does not take their own advice. They say you should motivate with background first, but in that article, they put the motivating background at the very end, after their suggestion is provided without any motivation.

However, given that the whole article pretty much fits on a single screen, that can be mostly excused.

boltzmann-brainon Self-hosting is being enshittified

> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?

that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.

People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and burdensome monetization.

As the examples illustrate, the pattern of capturing users with a good offering and then subsequently squeezing them for money can very easily be done by open source software with free licenses. The reason for that is that source code being available is not, alone, enough to ensure not getting captured by adversarial interests.

What you ALSO need is people wanting to put in the work to create a parallel fork to continuously keep the enshittification at bay. Someone who rolls a distribution with a massive amount of ever-decaying patches, increasingly large amounts of workarounds, etc. Or, alternatively, a "final release" style fork that enters maintenance mode and only ever backports security vulnerability fixes. Either of those is a huge amount of work and it's not even sure that people will find that fork on their own rather than just assume "things are like that now".

Given that the code's originating corporation can and will eagerly throw whole teams of people at disabling such efforts, the counter-efforts would require the same amount of free labor to be successful - or even larger, given that it's easy to wreck things for the code's originator but it's difficult to fix them for the restoration crew.

This pattern, repeated in many projects over the decades since GPL2 and MIT were produced, displays that merely being free and open source does not create a complete anti enshittification measure for the end user. What is actually necessary is a societal measure, a safety web made up of developers dedicated to conservation of important software, who would be capable of correcting any stupid decisions made by pointy-haired managers. There are some small projects like this (eg Apache, and many more) but they are not all-encompassing and many projects that are important to people are without such a safety net.

So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this particular software. Their efforts would be well spent on rapidly building such a safety network to quickly force the corporation's hand into increasingly more desperate measures, accelerating their endgame and self-induced implosion. Then, after the corpo's greed inevitably makes them eat themselves in full, the software can enter the normal space of FOSS development rather than forever remain this corporate slave-product that is pact-bound to a Delaware LLC by a chain of corporate greed.

Only once any free fork's competition backed by VCs burning their money on a ceremonial heap has been removed can the free version of the software become the central source for all users and therefore become successful, rather than continuously play catch up with a throng of H-2B holders.

boltzmann-brainon Self-hosting is being enshittified

> I suspect you don’t

...today.

If you're self-hosting, do you need 640K of ram?

boltzmann-brainon Researchers discover molecular difference in autistic brains

I think the point was that the colloquial use of "on the spectrum" is incorrect, as is a majority of layperson derived psychiatrical diagnosing.

boltzmann-brainon What an unprocessed photo looks like

Funnily enough that's not the only mistake he made in that article. His final image is noticeably different from the camera's output image because he rescaled the values in the first step. That's why the dark areas look so crushed, eg around the firewood carrier on the lower left or around the cat, and similarly with highlights, e.g. the specular highlights on the ornaments.

After that, the next most important problem is the fact he operates in the wrong color space, where he's boosting raw RGB channels rather than luminance. That means that some objects appear much too saturated.

So his photo isn't "unprocessed", it's just incorrectly processed.

boltzmann-brainon Demystifying DVDs

The whole article is about the heroic efforts to dump a DVD that has bad sectors by using a combination of different methods that ultimately yielded a fully read disc.

boltzmann-brainon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)