Why can’t I just write this up as a PR to Firefox and stand a snowball’s chance of getting it merged, though? Everything’s somehow simultaneously extremely stodgy and completely beholden to whatever Google decides to ship this week.

Why don’t browsers know how to render a Markdown content-type yet, all by themselves? It’s ubiquitous now and it’s not like it’s hard to parse, but every site has to translate it into HTML itself for the browser.

Isn’t that because people are canceling it for some reason? I haven’t kept up with it enough to form an opinion, but I understand a lot of people want to ditch the project over something they don’t like about the dev(s).

But it’s the same platform! They all interoperate!

Can I ask you a question?

If I was trying to use ChatGPT I would say “hi” before explaining my whole deal for five minutes because I don’t want to hear “API Limit Exceeded, Buy More ChatGPT”.

Of course, I would never.

No?

I mean, how else are you meant to play the game actually?

I guess you could be like opening ports just to particular IPs. And you need a game that isn’t Swiss cheese that gets immediately hacked.

But like hackers don’t sort of seep in through port forwards; they need to physically identify and exploit a particular vulnerability.

It sounds like this is the free service charging to access data you already gave them with the expectation it would always be available later. And which might not exist elsewhere.

That’s not fremium, that’s ransomware.

I’ll chime in that posting to a community with about 12 subscribers is not very fun. But then that’s why we have vigorous cross-posting.

I think NeHe might still have tutorials on this, in C/C++. You probably want to be using OpenGL for acceleration and maybe the old fashioned immediate mode/fixed function stuff where you call functions like “We are drawing triangles now” and “here is a vertex” and “that vertex is blue”, and you can put off taking over the pipeline with your own shader code until later.

You still might be letting the library/gpu do most of “the maths” because I think you mostly hand it transformation matrices and points and it sends them to screen space. If you take over the vertex shader then your shader code does that.

You want to write a vector and matrix math library with 3-vectors and 4-vectors and 3x3 and 4x4 matrices, and add and multiply operations, and matrix inversion. The 4th dimension lets you make translation in 3D a linear multiply operation because you keep 1 in there and your matrix to represent a translation mixes that 1 into the other position coordinates to translate.

You also probably want to learn linear algebra enough for that to make sense.

And then on top of that you want to build a scene graph library where objects have parents they move with. And then your renderer loop will walk the scene graph node tree and push each object’s transformation matrix and draw it and do its children and then pop the transformation matrix off again.

I think that’s true, but it’s a different moral imperative than either open source (understood as just being able to get the code for the software you have) or Free Software (which was conceived when software came on tapes in the mail and completely fails to address project governance in the era of forges).

Well, yes, under normal circumstances things work properly and do not need to be debugged. But generally eventually any system encounters abnormal circumstances, and one does not want the correct answer to be “give up on that system forever and go home”.

Have you had to recover from a failed device yet? Managing the SIM with the app will work great as long as the app is in fact working, but it’s not obvious how you would go about connecting a new device when the old device is not available.

But if I am trying to debug some mobile connection related thing I can’t be waiting 30 minutes to swap it back and forth every time. Then I won’t be able to solve the problem in a timely fashion.

Sounds more like the pirate queen.

If you need X months to build this product out so you can sell it, and after that Y months to become profitable so you can support yourself, you need to work out what your expenses are going to be for those months in total, and collect that much money. If nobody is going to invest it in your project (and if they did, I wouldn’t recommend taking it, because professional investors are the natural foe of the entrepreneur), you need to come up with that money yourself, which means you need to save it. Basically, you need to plan to retire for a few months.

You need to look at the money you make and your expenses again, and you need the difference to be enough so that you can save up for the project in a reasonable amount of time.

If that math doesn’t work, you need to change those numbers: the expenses need to be lower, or the amount you get paid needs to be higher. If you’re a programmer with a lot of experience, you should be being paid noticeably more than twice what a human needs to survive, so saving up for N months of eating pasta in a studio apartment in the middle of nowhere doing your project should only take 2*N. months of eating pasta in a studio apartment in the middle of nowhere doing your job. If you’re not making that much, your current job is underpaying you, so try unionizing, demanding a raise, or finding a new job to work at a bit before starting your project full-time.

You can also look at options like grants (which are usually available for open-source work, but which might be able to help you end up with some sort of FOSS-based consulting outfit or open-core ecosystem), or going to grad school and turning your project into a research/thesis project done in collaboration with an advisor, or convincing your employer to let you work part-time so you can put in more hours on your project without needing to plan to have zero income.

But, as other commenters have noted, building out the MVP is not really determinative of whether your business plan will actually work. So whatever you do, you will want to make sure you don’t have no plan for if the sales don’t start rolling in at month X+Y as you’d hoped, and you want to make sure you give enough attention to the business development and sales work that is probably actually most of the problem.

I think most people have not dedicated enough brain space to the concept of software to contemplate re-configuring their notifications, but are vexed by them constantly.

I have never wanted to use Slackware more.

Pihole or other network-based ad blockers might be able to do a lot of the same things. Or an ad-blocking DNS set in the phone’s settings. But I don’t know of anything else that has the same on-device VPN implementation as the DDG tool.

I don’t think ActivityPub is set up for one server storing and forwarding a whole feed of everything, like Usenet. Right?