stanmancan

I don’t think so?

$300,000/year for 14 years is $4.2m

If you’re making $1m in profit after 14 years it doesn’t take long to catch up even if your first few years were slow. You also are sitting on a business you could likely sell for $5-10m on top of that.

Your math only makes sense if you’re assuming they got all their customers year one and have had no growth since. Who’s to say the donations last year weren’t $100,000 putting the estimated profits at $1.2m (assuming all months are roughly equal)?

I saw it was released but never looked into it as there's no reason to now that I've moved to LiveView.

I have other issues with Livewire as well, including how Caleb operates his communities. He has and continues to make a ton of money off Livewire and still provides zero support to the community. Want any actual support? Well that starts at $6,000/year for one support request a month.

He doesn't even appear to be a member of his own discord server anymore. Not that it makes a difference; last time I checked had only ever sent 34 messages in there and the last one was in 20202. He has one guy who would randomly show up around once a day and answer some of the questions.

I don't expect free support but if your package is so confusing that the community is unable to support each other, you should probably be around trying to help sort that out. Instead, he just keeps doing re-writes which puts the the load on everyone else.

Anyways; if you're interested in this type of project I HIGHLY recommend you check out Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView. I haven't enjoyed writing software this much for a long time; not only is the language and framework more enjoyable to work with, but the community is so much better in general.

Yeah the page isn't ideal. Project is still early but you can follow it here: https://github.com/liveview-native

#liveview-native on the Elixir slack is a great resource as well to learn more.

Laravel Livewire is… frustrating. I used it for 1-2 years and ended up learning Elixir so I could use LiveView instead.

Livewires performance is terrible for anything other than very basic components. The fact that it has to rebuild state on every interaction makes it a pretty poor tool for most use cases.

LiveView Native is exactly that and being worked on by DockYard. https://native.live

My favourite licensing models for self-hosted software are perpetual fallback licenses. Jetbrains does this well and their description of it is:

   A perpetual fallback license is a license that allows you to use a specific version of software without an active subscription for it. The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included.

I don't think PHP needs "saving". PHP jobs pay less because of supply and demand. There's likely more PHP developers out there than any other language. Higher supply leads to lower salaries.

This isn't really a problem; this is one of the selling points of using PHP. PHP is a a great choice for small websites; but if you're planning on building a product or SaaS with it then it's likely not the best tool for the job. However; in those cases it's main advantage is likely that developers are cheap and abundant.

> The CPU industry is rife with engineers leaving and starting their own successful company.

You just proved GPS point. They said it happens 1-2 times a decade and you only provided 3 examples that spanned over 4-5 decades.

Classic armchair critic

In high school we found we could use netsend to send messages to other computers; or every computer on the network at once. The rest of the school year was a back and forward where the sysadmins would try to block us and we would find ways around it. I think the final method that worked was writing vbscript macros inside Excel.

I’ve been using Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView exclusively for about 7-8 months now and it’s been so much fun. Can’t recommend it enough.

The best part about Livewire is that it was appealing enough to try out but bad enough that I left PHP/Laravel and moved to Elixir/Phoenix for the real deal.

I never said they were stupid, and I also never implied they stuff their faces with cake. People will order a salad thinking it’s a healthy choice and not knowing it has as many calories as a burger.

My theory, based on nothing, is that up until recently food was scarce so when it was available we had to eat for survival. The more calorie dense something was the more likely we were to survive.

After millions of years of evolution we've only recently had an abundance of food in many places and our instincts to eat it all haven't evolved quite yet.

(To confirm again, this is just my personal theory and I know nothing about the space)

Anyways; personally I've found education to be very helpful. It does take some will power but that's the same for anything. Lots of people find drinking fun; why don't you wake up and drink in the morning? Relaxing, hanging with friends, and doing hobbies is more fun than work so why don't we all quit our jobs to pursue those things?

We know drinking can be destructive and is bad for us so, addicts aside, we know to drink with moderation.

We know we have bills to pay to survive so we know we can't quit our job.

With proper education people might realize their food choices are killing them and make healthier choices. Most people just simply don't know.

It won't work for everyone, but some people are alcoholics and some are unemployed, but having the proper education and tools would absolutely empower a lot of people to make better choices and live healthier lives.

People's diets are literally killing them and they don't know any better.

Most people would probably lose a significant amount of weight just cutting out beverages with calories in them.

A step further is to cut out fast food, boxed food, or anything pre-made. You should be doing 90% of your shopping in the produce/meat/dairy sections of the grocery store. The vast majority of anything you buy in aisles is either bad for you or incredibly calorie dense.

Unfortunately nutrition doesn't seem to be taught in high school, and cooking at home is an optional course. Learning how to take care of your body and having the tools to be healthy if you choose is beneficial to everyone; much more useful in day to day life than almost anything you learn after grade 8.

I think the real problem is that the vast majority of people know nothing about nutrition and thus are unable to make healthy decisions.

Nutrition, diet, and cooking should be required courses in high school.

Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.

Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward.

Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.

Have you taken a look at Elixir/Phoenix? I've recently made the switch and I find it incredibly productive as a solo developer.

I like Jetbrains licensing. Essentially you pay for updates and once you stop paying you’re locked in at that specific version, but you can use it indefinitely.

Is this subtly just chasing dopamine hits by doing things that we are good at?

I hadn’t played video games for years when COVID hit. Call of Duty Warzone launched and since my finances were in order, family was stuck at home, I promptly got pretty addicted to the game. I could play for hours on end chasing the wins. When I died I could reflect on what went wrong, make plans on how to avoid it happening again, and try again right away. Games are so quick that you can iterate and see the results within hours. Other things in life usually take weeks or months to see progress. It’s addicting. I still have to keep the PlayStation disconnected because playing one game can easily turn into playing all week.

Real life requires a lot more work to get the same reward.

That’s around the time I started playing too. I still go through phases where I’ll get really into a new game. I don’t have the reaction time of the younger generation but the skills built up over decades of gaming allows me to stay competitive.

This was a fantastic answer, thank you!

Hm, does that change anything? Atoms per molecule doesn’t seem important when we’re talking about the total weight. If anything jet fuel isn’t pure carbon so the math works out to create less CO2 than I calculated?

I have no clue what I'm talking about but this piqued my interest. If I ask WolframAlpha:

   Q:how many carbon molecules in 2.4 tons
   A: 1.092×10^29 molecules

X molecules of pure carbon carbon would theoretically require 2X molecules of oxygen to turn into CO2

   Q: how much does (10^29)*2 molecules of oxygen weight in us tons
   A: 5.827 tons

So 2.4 tons of Carbon + 5.827 tons of Oxygen = 8.227 tons of CO2? Maybe? What am I missing to have 2.4 tons of fuel turn into 16.8 tons of CO2 emissions? I'm not doubting it, and I'm sure it's WAY more complicated than above, but just genuinely curious!*

Lots of complaints here but I personally love my OG HomePod. It sounds fantastic which is what I'm looking for out of a speaker. I personally have zero issues with Siri. It's basic but that's all I really need; all I use Siri for is turning on music, measurement conversions when cooking, and adding things to my various reminder lists ("Hey Siri add cucumber to my shopping list").

I am a little surprised that it's more or less the same device re-launched but the more I think about it I'm not really sure what I expected. It's a speaker, its' main requirement is to sound good and the OG HomePod sounds great. I can't think of many other features you can add to the speaker itself.

Which is why it’s important that you don’t share it until you have some momentum. Then once you do just realize that many people naturally look for reasons not to put in the work, instead of the opposite. Fear of failure? Fear of wasting their time? Fear of finding out they don’t have what it takes? That it’s not all dumb luck? Who knows. Either way; just keep trucking along.

Clearly at some point you’ll have to share it but the point is to get building and at least get an MVP out first. If you have the mental fortitude to press on after having your idea praised or put down then that’s fantastic but realize you’re an anomaly.

I think more people have these ideas than they realize, but it’s the failure to act that holds them back.

Just because there are competitors doesn’t mean there’s no room for you.

Don’t look for reasons not to give it a shot.

Don’t tell anyone about it. There’s a lot of psychology trickery going on when you share your idea with people. Either they shit on the idea and you lose incentive to work on it, or the praise you and your brain takes that dopamine rush and considers the job over. Don’t tell anyone, just get to work.

I’ve felt the same way. After years of patience and practice my kid has become a fantastic artist. I’m a bit concerned that at some point they might think “why bother?” and give it up after they see someone type some prompt in with “pencil, sketch” as a suffix.