What is the "top"? "Top" is where you live off capital gains, meaning - in the broadest sense, someone else is working for you all the time. That's not something I'd aspire to. That's just plain lazy.
In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.
I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.
Corrupt police men in Indian sprawls know this for a long time. You cannot extract lots from a few rich drivers (in addition, you may face personal consequences as well).
The best spots are where you have a many middle class to lower class drivers, who need to be somewhere quickly, and will pay up. Smaller amounts, but continuously.
VW ships 3M cars per year, let's say a car is used 1h per day. Given all cars are used in this subscription model, we look at $765M MRR, or almost $10B per year, which is already about 10% of their current revenue.
Given that autonomous vehicles do not suck time out of the user's budget, they might even be used more. At 3h/day, we already at $30B yearly revenue - almost half of what they made in 2020.
And software has marginal costs, so once you got over the investment (they recruit developers extremely heavily in Germany right now), you are looking at a more than comfortable income stream.
Not sure about you, but I literally see the level of dopamine floating on the VW management floors right now.
That said, I hope I never need a personal car in my life.
This must be just the Volkswagen brand, the whole companz delivered a lot more: "The Volkswagen Group delivered 9.3 million vehicles to customers worldwide in fiscal year 2020 (2019: 11.0 million)."
I wonder why developers won't organise and demand royalty payments for their code?
It's crazy that company pays once for the software and makes money off of it forever but don't share those profits with developers.
I like the idea, and the industry continues to screw over developers, but there would be practical problems to a royalty plan.
Companies don't pay once for software, they hire a software team to maintain the code.
How would the royalties work? Do they all go to the person who first wrote the code? Based on the git blame of every line, so devs are always looking to rewrite as much as possible?
Sometimes I wonder what was wrong with a mostly static pages in the first place. Even http://mail.google.com/mail/h/ works fine, even in a slower browser - and I would say 80% of the sites today are less complex than Gmail.
I forgot how great Gmail was before they started doing major redesigns to it, although I do hate to say it... but it could benefit from a little JS to dynamically update with new e-mails...
I'm also a big fan of early repl.it. I used to be able to hit a bookmarked url and get a repl right away. But its been getting slower and slower and more complicated lately, and this whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth, and it's probably the push I need to move to an alternative.
In case anybody is thinking of building -- I'd happily pay for a similar app that let's you write/share private repls, with third-party package support (yarn, pip, nuget, maven, etc.)
To add some more info: I don’t want/need a file system, and I don’t care about building a web app -- rendering HTML, hosting the code in the cloud, etc., etc. -- I just want a simple console repl (what repl.it started as.)
Well, often you get way more than you pay for, and it would be stupid not to acknowledge that. For example almost all Linux users never pay for nor support Kernel development in any way or form. And I think the people who do the development and create the value for the rest of us mostly are ok with that.
That doesn't negate the fact that when you rely on open source software for your business and need more than just read access to the repo it would be polite to wise up on the maintainership status of the project and ask if you can contribute back in any form.
I maintain OS projects and my stance is simple: I'll fix thing, that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee.
The same limits I impose on the community I fully expect to follow when working with any OS project. Period.
Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for each and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new world" will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors, and if you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout.
Also remember, that for millions of people the notion of giving away something valuable for free is totally absent. They literally fail to comprehend. They are happy to sell the same thing many times over.
In my book, OS software developers are living in the future, today and a lot of the friction comes from a world, that just works by a totally different set of rules.
I don’t know why paying for someone’s time and effort is a bad thing. If anything, undervalued/unpaid labor seems a little dystopian, especially when some large companies are getting value out of someone’s volunteer work without giving anything back.
I get the value of free software, but lately it feels like OS went from geeks sharing code because we value knowledge, to people who use the software making demands on someone else’s personal time.
>I'll fix things that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee.
To some this may sound like it ruins the spirit of open-sourc but I totally support this. I should make this quote my default readme.
Even PRs often take a long time to review and get to a reasonable point, especially but not only from new contributors. Some are so bad I just have to close them even if I want the feature, and some I waste hours on that I could have spent just writing it myself. Rarely I get PRs that I can merge without non-nitpick reviews.
> Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for each and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new world" will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors, and if you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout.
Yeah, I think there are a couple of problems with Open Source as it is done today.
One is that people are making things that are useful to profit-maximizing value-extractors. I don't know how much is because their "itch" is aligned with them, or because that's the way to get a top project on GitHub and make a name for yourself. But seriously: stop making things that are useful to profit-maximizing value extractors. Make software that is useless[1].
The second is that we really have no kind of license to discourage the use of useful software by profit-maximizing value-extractors. In large part, this is, IMO, because FLOSS licenses have prioritized the rights of the user (who may be a profit-maximizing value-extractor) over those of the author or the community. It is also in part because licenses seem to be the wrong kind of tool for controlling how our software is used. CopyFarleft and Ethical Source licenses are trying to tackle this, but not very successfully, I think.
My personality seem not to allow me to just do one thing. Even today, I have a couple of jobs and I enjoy the variety of challenges. It's also risk management - basically any of my jobs could fail and it would not really affect me, which allows me to have a certain distance to each of the activities as well.
> It's also risk management - basically any of my jobs could fail and it would not really affect me, which allows me to have a certain distance to each of the activities as well.
Yep, this is huge for me.
My "real job" is as a software developer, like most of us here. My side hustles are many and varied: portrait photography, vinyl decals, custom garments, metalworking, leather working, drone stuff (photography, photogrammetry, volumetric, even FPV and racing), etc.
I've had a few instances where I've found myself suddenly without employment for one reason or another. It's stressful, but it's not the emergency that it would be if not for all of my hobbies/hustles. I can spend a couple of days refreshing contacts and easily expect to be making enough money doing drone stuff alone to pay my bills and put food on my family's table.
Was this real traffic though? Google Analytics had a massive spam referral problem in 2014, maybe earlier as well [0]
"The problem of fake references in Google Analytics has changed significantly over the past few years. In 2014, we had some bots from semalt and buttons-for-website that visited your website and left fake referrals in your analytics. In December 2014, the attacks began taking advantage of a weakness in Google’s new Measurement Protocol that allowed direct attacks on the Google Analytics tracking servers without having to actually visit your website. This is a lot easier than crawling the web looking for new websites. "
However these stories involving some mega corp as an evil actor always raise the question: what's to be gained, and what's the risk.
As soon as some manager instructs someone beneath them to do bad stuff, some kind of trail exists. The downside to mega corp is enormous if that comes to light.
Imagine if Google is caught in the act of pulling some shady shit like that. The law suits, loss of trust and prestige. The personal exposure to the individuals involved.
All it takes is for some underling to pop up with a smoking gun email, a recorded conversation on their IPhone, a receipt from a shady transaction. Then it's immense risk and a big cover up needed to try and save things.
I don't doubt that shady shit happens, passed down the chain Mafia boss style so there's no paper trail, even at Google.
But does that lead to actual dodgy acts like prioritizing AdSense customers in search results?
How many engineers would need to be brought along for the ride for that to happen? How many of them are potential whistle blowers?
For all of these reasons (and perhaps naively) I like to think that corporate corruption is not this overt.
Tldr; I hope you were mistaken and it was purely a coincidence.
> Imagine if Google is caught in the act of pulling some shady shit like that. The law suits, loss of trust and prestige.
Easily brushed away, quickly forgotten.
> The personal exposure to the individuals involved.
Virtually nonexistent.
To pick an example, Google colluded with other tech companies to limit the salaries of its engineers, yet here you are claiming it couldn’t possibly happen.
Do a search for “corporate malfeasance” and see the truly monstrous acts committed by companies that continue to do business quite successfully.
I have not implied that Google tried to be evil. It was just a very interesting observation (which I unfortunately did not experiment around longer, by removing ads again, etc.).
Risk is too high for such things to be decided, but maybe someone buried a change in the second decimal place in an to "ad-fraud" prevention subsystem, which required a minimum amount of traffic or some other non-voluntary things like that.
Even more: impenetrable deep learning models trained to maximize ad revenue - imagine pagerank and availability of ads on the site are two of the N features, what would the optimizer suggest you do?
In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.
I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.