Lung

That’s so cool, maybe the first time in the history of humanity that we see open source tax software, that’s guaranteed to be accurate to the law. For one year at least

It runs Scala / Java, and has docker configs, decent documentation. And an ominous message explaining that some parts were too secret to open source so they had to rewrite chunks of it. Overall, it seems like it was a big project just to get this published, and I am impressed they managed it, given the software team was comprised of 3 different agencies and several contractor firms

Whoa! You can get energy from gravity and spin?? Who would have guessed

Totally unproven dream of the fediverse*

Imo it’ll go like this. 50%+ of the users captured on a single instance. Basically lemmy.world already. It continues to scale until there’s millions of active users. Costs get too high and the offer of investment money is too good. The instance sells out. Non-federated killer features creep in ala embrace / extend / extinguish. Nobody else in the community can afford to run it at that scale, too much admin and servers. Data export is turned off. Users don’t know how to get their accounts working on a clone or that it exists. Most of them stay on the big instance due to network effect. We end up with a new BlueSky, Threads, or Reddit. The investors win again. A new revolution begins over again …

Imo we just enjoy it while it’s here & stay small

That’s just any store

Idk he makes some pretty wild claims along the way

• AI is only going to become more expensive for corps with time. This has ~never been true in computing, where specialized hardware and optimizations trend costs down
• That marketing managers are dumbass easy marks who are wasting their company money. Every half way decent marketing department measures outcomes and knows exactly how much money is generated by their activities

No cap that might actually keep without boiling your bottles, you have on your hands a tomato shrub XD

Ah my thermometer only reads fahrenheit, so you know I’m naturally confused about temperatures

That’s true, I love taking a hot water bath, and it’s been completely safe so far

Today I learned that people do canning at home without a proper pressure cooker

VPNs don’t help here, the website asks you for your driver’s license. Tbf giving your credit card to them is typically enough for them (big tech + govt) to construct a full profile of who you are anyway, and that was the original “age gate” – though there are some services that make CCs modestly privacy preserving – not the case for IDs

Are salmon technically dogs or cats? You decide!

But to answer the question, I recommend your wife start an IRA to be able to make tax deferred investments

The most interesting part of this take is that JD Vance is very much in the big tech friends circle with Thiel and Musk. But I’m sure they can run some antitrust against their enemies at Google or whatever

Damn dawgs, Trump campaigned saying that he would fix this as a mere president-elect. This is my “wow holy shit” face, actually seeing it happen maybe :O

Ok so he said same about Russia, let’s see it

Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf

The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email

Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation

Honestly, I don’t recommend it. It’s a stressful lifestyle, you have to do a lot, and it’s rare that you make more than just switching jobs. Seeking jobs, doing negotiations / signing contracts, and dealing with the kind of bosses that don’t understand software well — are all really annoying. I’ve been a contractor for 5 years now, and I’m genuinely not sure what the good part of it is

Ok, so how to do it / get started. Imo you need a well known public project and speciality. Being the lead dev of a popular open source project is a good way. People will reach out to you for help integrating it, or making something similar, or adding features they need & will pay for. A specialty is something like being really good at WebRTC, financial regulations law, graphics drivers, crypto smart contracts, etc — with a proven record. You need a brand for yourself, and it needs to be way stronger than just a resume. You need to spend part of your time networking & job hunting, always

An important part is either getting paid very well, or taking ownership stake in the projects you build to roll the dice that way. Otherwise, you would be better off doing a job. Why? Because a contracting firm, which I had, isn’t worth anything in a sale, aside from the talent it has. Compare this with something like a SAAS startup where the value is a multiple of revenue and user count. Having a flat value for just the employees isn’t as valuable as a 10x multiplier on a steady business. It’s volatile. I’ve heard construction contractors complain the same way, “I just take a salary to build a house someone else flips for double, I wish I owned my own house”

Honestly, software jobs are lucrative and easy. Contracting is stressful and complicated. The freedom isn’t much different

There’s like 1.2 million people in USA prisons. Why this group in particular?? Just do what every dem president does and release all the potheads without actually fixing the war on drugs problem

Wow that’s pretty fkin shallow my guy, try going to Mexico one day. There are ancient ruins the size of modern cities everywhere, unique construction styles that make Hollywood look like a tin shack town, and a very rich show/restaurant scene. I mean it’s a huge fucking country, and I don’t think you’re gonna find Mexicans that see drugs as a good Christian lifestyle

Yeah I just had em mail me the thing

Yeeeep that’s a butt plug

Then I read that chat apps and YouTube would not be banned, and scoffed

Literally chat apps are social media. You can post stories and pump memes and news. You can even have bots that scrape and post content. YouTube is just a matter of checking a box whether it’s “for kids” and they already do that. Basically the whole thing is stupid