Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

The maquis end up, in my opinion, as supremely unlikeable. Of course our exposure to them is through the federation lens, but in the abstract it is hard to understand how they can be the good guys.

From what we understand, the federation is a post scarcity society due to replicators. The maquis origins, as I understand it, is that to broker peace between the federation and cardassians some planets swapped ownership. The maquis are the displaced people from planets that shifted to cardassian control.

Ok, losing your planet sucks. Now whether or not these figures are sympathetic hinges on the federations accommodations to them. The federation offered to relocate them to other planets. They are federation citizens so they can go to any developed world in the federation or start a new colony, replicating whatever they need.

How did they respond? By going “no this patch of land is super duper important for some reason that no one will ever be able to explain” and refuse to leave. Then they begin terrorizing the cardassians for trying to settle the planets that were agreed to. Threatening the peace and stability of a space utopia society because they want to hold their breathe and stamp their feet and not sit in a shuttle craft for a day and go to some other of the vast countless planets in the universe they have access to.

Billions upon billions of federation and cardassian lives at risk so some jackass can keep farming a plot of land indistinguishable from the replacement plot of land he’s being offered for free. Oh and also he doesn’t fucking need to farm anything at all this is like a hobby or some shit because they have replicators.

Sisko was right to launch the tricobalt devices at their colonies and the federation should enlisted him to go Sherman on those traitors.

I get the frustration and there’s a lot of free software that is so vital to our modern way of life that it’s crazy that it’s always one dude in Nebraska maintaining it for the last 60 years for free as a hobby.

That said, I think you should consider the great landscape of dependencies and who the competition is.

For example, I’ve open sourced a bunch of things in my life and I have a library used to make testing more ergonomic. I worked very hard on it and I like it. There are other libraries that solve this problem to, I’m biased, but I like mine the best. I like when I can help people write higher quality software with nicer tests.

My “competition” isn’t commercial offerings it’s other free offerings. Now in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever uses the thing I wrote, but since I wrote it and put it out into the world I get to decide how I want to interact with the wider community of people that use it or might think about using it.

If I take a hardline stance, everyone has to be committed, but the right quality bars, do things the right way, etc. I’m free to do that. The most likely outcomes are two fold. One, I’ll have a very high quality thing to my standard. Two, probably not a lot of people are going to be using it because I’ve made it too hard to participate and they will go off and use an inferior solution. Again, if it solves my problem no big deal. But I might be missing out on someone that, if they had been allowed to participate more easily, could have made my thing better, faster, more secure.

So that’s the bargain. Do you have strict controls and limit your exposure to the good and bad out there in the open source community. Do you have lax controls and expose yourself to all the good and bad. Most maintainers end up shooting for the middle, open enough that good contributors can come and flourish but strict enough to keep bad contributors out. It’s a spectacularly difficult problem though, so I’m always happy to hear how other people think about it.

This seems like a reasonable approach when all actors are being paid to contribute.

I think where discord actually ends up helping is for community projects where everyone is basically a volunteer. It works because it lowers the barrier to helping.

The official documentation of your favorite programming language or highly popular library or framework is probably pretty locked down with a semi high quality bar for contributions. This is a good thing, those docs are consumed by lots of people and the documentation has no context for what the person is trying to do so making sure they are clear, concise, and easy to understand creates a high quality bar.

A lot of projects end up with enthusiastic helpers who probably aren’t going to dedicate the time and energy it takes to become a core maintainer. You can either leave these people and their possible helpfulness on the table or you can harness it with a discord server.

People that might not be the right fit for writing an in-depth general purpose getting started guide are still pretty great at answering peoples questions when given context and the ability to discuss it back and forth. That’s what projects are actually taking advantage of, a large group of people that are willing to help others learn how to use the programming language / library / framework.

The people they help end up having a good time with the friendly helpful community and hang out and help others. If you do it right you get this virtuous cycle where people using the thing you made help each other be successful making the thing you made even more popular.

RTFM, is ok in a corporate environment when part of your paycheck is for RTFMing. But for the last 70 years people that know how stuff works have been shouting RTFM at people wanting to learn how stuff works. But some people just aren’t good at RTFM or plain don’t want to. Discord, and other chat platforms, end up facilitating their learning models.

I think this is the main disconnect for people.

What a lot of technical people want is a forum. They want to have every problem discussed one time and then if someone brings it up again they can link to it and not have to discuss it again. This exists, it’s called stackoverflow and if technical people want someone to close their question as “already answered” or “off topic” they can go there.

Most discord communities though aren’t attempting to build a permanent corpus of knowledge carefully curated and searchable. Instead it’s basically the polar opposite, someone can show up and ask the question that every beginner stubs their toe on and people answer it and chat with them and help them learn.

It is more work for the people giving out the help, but it is seems like it’s what new users want. A place they can ask a question and get an answer or get someone to ask them questions to improve their question.

A lot of technical people get blinded by their own knowledge. Indexable searchable information is great if you know what to search for, but new people seldom do and they don’t even know the right way to formulate the questions. Asking other human beings that know what they are doing is a good way to learn stuff. Discord facilitates that, people like that, and no amount of highly technical people kicking their feet and holding their breathe and shouting at the communities “you are doing it wrong, you need a highly curated forum where questions are never asked twice” is going to stop human nature.

Eventually they do need to pay back the loan, the low interest rates just make it so that they can choose to sell their stocks in the most favorable way.

This is why it makes sense for the financial institute to give out the loan in the first place.

So here’s the scenario. Let’s say you wake up tomorrow and somehow find yourself with $200M worth of stock. You are now “worth” $200M so you’d like to start living like it! You want to go buy a mansion and a nice new car and a private chef. Problem is, none of those people take stock, they all want money.

Goldman Sachs goes, “hey, I’ll loan you the money really cheap, you have to pay me back with interest, but since you have $200M in stock you can sell some of that later and pay me back”

This is great for you because you get to enjoy the mansion and new car and private chef right now. If you sold the stock right now you’d get taxed as if it were income at 38% but if you hold the stock for a few years when you sell it it will be considered capital gains and only taxed at 10% (or 15%, whichever the rate is). In addition, you don’t have to go to the stock market and sell for whatever they want right now, you can wait until the value of your stock is really high and selling is very advantageous for you.

So you do have to pay back the money, but this is still a really sweet deal because you can enjoy all the nice things right now and you get to avoid that extra ~30% you would pay in taxes if you sold it right now.

As long as the amount you saved in taxes outweighs the amount you pay in interest, this is a great deal for you. And for the financial institute it’s low risk (they extended you $10M backed by $200M in assets) and when you repay they make back enough in interest to make it worthwhile.

You get more money in your pocket, the bank gets more money in its pocket, from their point of view this was a win win. The losers are the market suffering a higher price for the stock because the supply was artificially constrained by you having access to this credit (otherwise you’d have sold shares to buy a mansion and nice car and private chef) and the taxpayer who was to shoulder a heavy tax burden because you converted your income into capital gains.

The one thing that definitely isn’t happening is Bezos or Musk or any of these other “they are only rich on paper” people clipping coupons to make ends meet. They live like rich people because the have access to plenty of money secured by their less liquid assets

For anyone that’s fallen for the “{wealthy person} doesn’t actually have ${huge number} because it’s stock” thing, here’s how it works.

1. Wealthy people with lots of stock get access to very, very cheap credit. Not credit cards like the plebs get with a 23% APR, multi million dollar lines of credit from places like Goldman Sachs with hyper low interest rates.
2. Wealthy people use that credit to live indistinguishably from a person that actually has the vast wealth that they have access to. Spez might “only” make $400k but if he has access to $50M in cheap credit it spends all the same.
3. Wealthy people enjoying their access to cheap credit which spends the same as income then get to dodge income taxes and instead use the more favorable capital gains tax rates.
4. As a fun bonus, they also get to go “you morons I don’t have $200M that’s all just on paper, I only pay myself $10 a year because I’m a man of the people. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get on this private jet”

You might be wondering, why do they get this cheap credit? Because it’s a very safe bet for the financial institute, they are acting as a sort of time arbitrage mechanism for the person they are extending credit to. Since they perform this function they can be relatively assured that this will allow their client to sell their stocks, not because they have to cover expenses, but because capital gains protections and the market is favorable. It also aids in fostering a positive relationship with someone with a lot of wealth which is something financial institutes have an interest in doing.

All the actors are doing what’s in their rational self-interest. The end result is that Spez can access a large part of that $200M as liquid cash right now through credit with one hand and with the other wave you off and say “those are stocks I actually only got paid $400k”