ggame's comments

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

I wish it was my lack of marketing and business skills, that way there would be more room for others to succeed.

While I'm not claiming to be a marketing guru, I am successful in business in a different domain. Hence my early retirement.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

None of the ideas you present are new to me. I've tried them all. I have many friends in the space who have tried them all as well. If anything worked we'd be the first to know.

"If it can be phased in a culturally acceptable way" - have you ever tried to intentionally change a culture? It's damn near impossible. Having it as a prerequisite to success practically guarantees failure.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

People will complain about the code of conduct and again about their banning upon breaking a code of conduct. Managing a community takes a lot of time for something you're not getting paid for.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

For general purpose programming I consider the meta languages (ML) to be great. E.g. Rust, Typescript, Swift, Scala, F#, Haskell, Ocaml etc. Something like Hindly-Milner typesystem in order to build good tooling. Scripting languages don't have this so I don't consider them great. Facebook build one for PHP after the fact and at great cost. So, I consider them successful despite the initial lack of a type system. It is great that the world is catching on to ML languages now. This stuff has been around since the 70s so it has been ridiculously slow.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

I personally use Vim and Tmux for my IDE. But I build tools for people who aren't me and they need tools specialized for their job.

Even general purpose devs can benefit from better compilers and code completion.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

I think the point I was alluding to is that the market should be much bigger than it is. And it would be great if open source contributors could make money from their work.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

As you point out, sufficiently good. But not great.

I agree that the world is a better place with open source. I simply wish there was a culture were developers opened their wallet and supported it. That way we would have even more of it.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

Python, PHP, and Ruby are not great languages. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are successful inspite of them.

I'm not saying open source is bad, I'm saying Dev culture in not paying for tools is bad. I agree that ideally it would be different.

I speak from decades of experience doing Dev tools inc open source. All of my friends are practitioners in the space. We're all obsessed on how to get people to use better tools. It is something I've put a lot of thought into. I've personally spent over $200K on salaries for people to build open source tooling. If I could make a business out of it I would spend more. But I can't. I had to build an entirely separate company to make money.

Edit (addendum): People who have paid $1500 for my software are grateful that I'll even talk to them; whereas open source freeloaders constantly demand I do more free work for them.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

Not getting paid for open source is how the world works.

If you do any of the above you invite yourself to so much criticism that it's not worth it. I have first hand experience of this.

I hope to retire next year to do open source full time with money made from closed source. My audience will not be developers though; I'm soured on them. I'll be targeting a niche group who are actually grateful for free tools and don't feel like it's their life duty to criticize every small thing.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: US Announces Withdrawal from TPP

Not a fan of Trump but this is a good thing. See this exert from John Oliver on the effect of such trade deals; https://youtu.be/6UsHHOCH4q8

And that's the existing trade deals, TPP would have made it much worse. There is a reason why democratically elected governments need to protect their sovereignty. The scope of the legal provisions along with the requirement to use easily corruptible mediation is superfluous to free trade.

In addition, I don't understand those that think boxing out Russia and China from the rest of Europe and Asia is a good thing.

ggame | 9 years ago | on: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping

It mixes a virtual world with the real world; thus augmenting the real world. I would argue that a fine grain occlusion (individual pixels) vs coarse grain (movable display) isn't that big of a difference with immersion. Consider that we are immersed with our phones quite a bit already.

In addition the lack of 3D isn't that big of a deal given the brain fills in the details with other cues. E.g. People that go blind in one eye can adjust quite well to the lack of 3D.

I personally would love a HUD for my sporting activities; e.g. Skully. But my phone is perfectly fine as a daily driver.

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