I'm a veteran calcium oxalate stone former; I've ended up in hospital three times because of them, and my last scan showed I currently am carrying 16 of them, (plus 3 bonus bladder stones). I'd thought I'd pass on what I've learned in the last 30 years; if helps one person, then I've been useful.
1. Drink lots of water (actually a very dilute lime juice/cranberry juice mix). I aim for 4 litres/1 gallon a day, more in hot weather.
2. Don't drink spirits (specifically - note to self - half a bottle of bourbon, no matter how delicious). They cause some weird kind of dehydration, which makes the stones painful.
3. If you start getting discomfort from a stone, drink more water. It seems to 'float' them somehow, and can usually make the discomfort go away.
4. The stones act like little breeding grounds for bacteria. So, if you have stones you will be prone to chronic infections. If you are a chap, then this can lead to chronic bacterial prostatitus, which can cause all manner of problems, leading to a having a catheter fitted. But, if you have bladder stones, the stones will break the little plastic widget that stops the catheter from falling out, which means it has to be refitted. So, you may need to take a low-level antibiotic like nitrofuratoin (there is some evidence that cranberry juice can also help, because it reduces the stickiness of bacteria).
5. If you are passing a stone, and they offer you morphine, decline it and hold out for something more powerful. Morphine seems to contract the tubes, only offers partial relief, and makes the problem worse in my experience. I once had an IM injection of (something beginning with pent~ - I wasn't in the mood to take notes at the time) which worked very well.
6. Avoid foods containing high oxalate levels, like spinach.
7. Don't take medical advice from strangers on the internet (like me).
Calcium stones run all along the male side of my family too.. and I've had a few. The notion to me that lemonade would be helpful is counterintuitive. Generally we've come to understand that high doses of Vitamin C are part of the problem, because that's been something the men in my family do to ward off sickness - but my father, who took 5000 milligrams of C a day for years, always got the worst stones of all.
>> 2. Don't drink spirits.
This is probably true, but it contravenes the one piece of hard-won family folk wisdom that has helped me. Our method of removing kidney stones is as follows:
1. Go to a bar, take a piss if you can, then sit and order a Guinness.
2. Order 5 more Guinnesses and make a concerted effort to drink them all without taking a piss. Wait until you're absolutely desperate.
3. Go to the men's room and eject the stone. [the intoxication helps numb it, too].
I've watched my father pass them in the hospital; I remember remarkably twiddling one of his kidney stones in my hand as we drove him home, it was iridescent white and about the size of a shriveled pea. So far, though, this method hasn't failed me and I've yet to be hospitalized.
Vitamin C supplements are synthesized from fermentation products of corn and wheat. [0]
A single lemon contains about 32 milligrams of Vitamin C, along with many other things. This study showed that it's lemon extract, not vitamin C alone, that improves kidney stones.
Yeah, I'd assume it's something in lemons that has the absolute opposite effect of Vitamin C, if it breaks up stones. I believe on strong circumstantial evidence that vitamin C contributes to them, so whatever lemons have, my dad should've squeezed more of it.
Well, the whole point is not to sit around at home, thinking of the pain.
Call it a weird theory, but I've spent a good part of my life in bars and I've never actually seen anyone die in one. This is reassuring; it means as long as I'm inside a bar, I probably won't die. The moment I hit the sidewalk outside, anything could happen.
When I've gone to bars to pass kidney stones, I make sure to alert and tip the hell out of the bartender before I embark on this kind of thing. I consider it a sort of vulgar hospital. At that point, tipping $50 is basically medical insurance. The last time it happened, I was in Paris; I saw the stone on the doctor's ultrasound. I staggered up the street and a girl I had sort of a crush on was bartending; I just told her the whole story without embarrassment, and she lined up the beers for me and made sure I got a taxi home. I'm pretty sure she would've sent someone to pick me up off the bathroom floor, which is more than you can say about health care in America.
Let me be the first to state that nothing I have said here is intended as medical advice. [edit: I also specifically called it "family folk wisdom" which is about as clear as anyone can get that it's not scientific medical advice] Like everything else around here, it's just one person's opinion, and no one has leverage to brigade for or against it, which we all appreciate about this board. Just ignore it if it bugs you, or argue the damn thing on its merits, tell me what a fucking idiot I am if that helps; no one's reading this except you and me and like 30 other people, and their minds aren't going to be changed whatever the outcome of our conversation is.
I'd say if you're here to make a point about how to make a point, you're sort of missing the point.
Skip attacking the style and get down to arguing the content. You're thankfully not limited here to 140/280 characters.
Indeed, but it is a forum for sharing possibly useful experiences, and if this works for the author it may work for others and be a net benefit to all. So I'm for it given the trouble stones apparently can cause.
HN was ahead of the curve on NAC, Ivermectin, and Vitamin D during COVID while the experts screeched in dismay. I’ll take medical advice from the Internet any day, over the experts.
I have a 15+ mm one. It's not going to pass and urologists already tried ESWL. They're waiting until it becomes a problem to remove it surgically because it will likely return.
Cola, excess vitamin C, and anything high in oxalate equal stone growth.
There are several stone types with different pathologies.
High citrate intake is generally good to counteract growth but there is no shrinking existing stones through diet. Anyone claiming this is a liar.
ESWL or surgery for anything larger than a few mm because passing would be brutal.
The Picol code has always been a fascinating read, until you get to the comment /* XXX: escape handling missing! */ and realise it won't escape/eval stuff inside strings, so you think ha! and roll up your sleeves and get tapping ... then you think ha! I could just improve that bit of code, and ... before you know it the sun's coming up and you didn't feed the dog last night. Speaking for a friend, obviously.
But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the nerd snipe source code into his own repo, or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the source into his own repo, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the source in your repo. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the source in my repo!
This is the same thing that happens in Scheme/Lisp when you note that the tiny thing you're working on doesn't handle dotted pairs so you dig in and ...
The next thing you know your tiny code has tripled in size and now spews so much gark that you have to go optimize your garbage collector and ...
It also doesn't do well with strings that have a null character in it. Which would stop basic stuff like being able to copy/read arbitrary files. So, neat, but not practical outside a narrow subset of problems.
And my understanding was that localStorage didn't actually have any specific permanence guarantees; how do I know I won't spend a bunch of time putting in some information, only to have it disappear behind my back if I don't touch it in a few months?
Sorry, in a few days I will add an export and import function. And will build electron app later, as it will be more convenient than export/import. Yes, Structpad isn't well polished now. But I posted it anyway, as the purpose of the post was to find out people's interest. Much work expected :)
Given my (rough) understanding of Justine’s political leanings (active in Occupy [1]), I think (and hope) that you are mistaken. The following searches turn up empty [2,3] as well.
It is perfectly possible that you are still right. But I would be darn careful to make statements like you made without backing them up with facts. The Internet is a chilling enough place without even more vague rumours going around.
Edit: Well, apparently your memory is on to something after all [4,5].
I've never heard of that before, though I did hear about the whole Atomwaffen (or really a separate US group going by the same name) O9A infiltration disaster. Is there any public documentation of this going in in general, or is it confined to private Discord rooms and that sort of thing?
Oh please f** off with the speech policing. There is no hate festering in the article or anywhere on her page. Someone had to go very far out of their way to dig up something she said. Until then, it was just a technical post. That's very far from Moldbug who wrote volumes of rhetoric explicitly designed to push a particular ideology. In fact if exposure to radical views is the problem, the person who dug up the comments and posted them here did more harm here than anyone else. Until then we were all blissfully unaware and just having a technical discussion.
> Someone had to go very far out of their way to dig up something she said.
And every time it happens, more and more people find out. Streisand effect.
When I asked @dang a few years ago why Yarvin was banned, that was his response: in even technical posts related to Yarvin, his politics endlessly get brought up—and HN doesn't exist for that kind of discussion.
You can still see that happen in virtually any Urbit post, despite him not even being involved in it anymore.
If I were @dang, I would have allowed Yarvin links on HN (and Justine, obviously—amazingly talented engineer) and instead have a different HN policy: ask random HN posters to stop bringing up unrelated politics in the comments of technical posts.
Maybe @dang will do just that and we'll both be happy. It happens a lot and would make the site much, much nicer.
“If Stalin had a good writeup on programming, would linking that be dangerous, because some people might read it, start liking HIM, thus start liking communism and the ineviteble mass murder that follows it? Is this how little we trust other individuals when it comes to access to information? I personally trust my readers to have the ability to create their own opinions instead of blindly following whatever says the person they like.”
I have many people I dislike on a personal level, but still praise for their technical abilities.
Yes, please! Politics, technical inventions and the things people do in their free time are different things! Please stop mixing all of those together. This is a ad hominem attack and I can't stand it.
What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?
I don't like ads, on the internet or TV, and therefore refuse to inflict them on anyone who plays the little game apps that I release, otherwise I'd be a hypocrite.
Well done to Josh for having the humanity for just making a thing that people enjoy, and stopping there.
When I first started following HN, I remarked to my spouse: "On the east coast, you're nobody if you're not rich. On the west coast, you're nobody if you're not trying to get rich."
I grew up not rich and not safe. You could say I've fetishized money because I've got a fair amount of it and greatly enjoy my work. But I see it as the most efficient way to protect me and mine. Living in a nearly crime-free neighborhood and having a shade tree doesn't seem like a fetish to me. This would put me in the group of people who are interested in, but not obsessed by, a choice not to monetize.
As I understood your parent, he/she was not talking about your kind of rich (what I'd consider a healthy rich) but rather a money at all costs and money for its own sake -kind of rich.
Because we know a creator's sacrifice by not monetizing, money can buy them comfort, security and freedom (less time working, quitting job even). I don't think most people will fault anyone for choosing to monetise their work.
Flappy Bird was reportedly making $50k per day during its short initial peak after going viral. If I was the Wordle dev, I wouldn't go crazy and try to turn Wordle into a full fledged company. However unless the dev is independently wealthy I honestly think it is a little stupid not to do any monetization. There is probably enough potential their to ride a month or two of popularity to lifelong financial security. Why not take that?
Josh built a fun game for his partner, and now a lot more people are enjoying it.
As long as it isn't horrendous in hosting costs, I'd say that is already a huge return on the project. Giving some great entertainment to folks is a win already in itself.
Using your skills to the benefit of your community (global in this case) is one of the best things you can do. You don't need to profit off it as well to make it an intelligent project.
Because Josh could potentially monetize this project and allow both him and his partner to spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but making these fun projects for each other, working to benefit the global community, or whatever else they would want to do having achieved financial independence.
I also don't agree with the idea that any form of monetization is inherently hostile towards players. The game takes up roughly 500px by 800px on a page that is receiving millions of hits a day. You can throw an ad on that page and barely impact the user experience while pulling in 4 or 5 figures per day. There is money to be made there without resorting to adding microtransactions or something actively hostile to users.
I have dramatically underestimated the amount of revenue one can get from serving ads on a modestly popular game that everyone will have forgotten in a month's time.
It is more than “modestly” popular. I don’t know the exact users counts but I’m he could make well over a million dollars even if the game’s popularity only lasts a month… though I’m willing to bet it stays popular for much longer than that, seeing how it is becoming a daily habit/ritual for so many people.
> I’m willing to bet it stays popular for much longer than that, seeing how it is becoming a daily habit/ritual for so many people.
And therein lies the contradiction - it has become a daily ritual because it doesn't demand continual "engagement" or trick people into becoming addicted: 2 things that will increase monetizability.
My thoughts are it's commendable for someone to share their delightful creation with the world for free. Something pure, with no dark patterns or gray areas. It is a breath of fresh air, and legitimately makes the world a better place for countless people. Thanks Josh!
Something good for users would be access to previous worlde puzzles, it provides added content and fun to users, and sustains creation. Pricing doesn't have to be exploitative either.
Can you explain why replacing whitespace with a static banner ad is user hostile? I simply don't understand how someone can view that as on the same level as something like microtransactions.
The moment you add advertising, you need to welcome a bunch of tracking and spying on users, an unavoidable cookie consent popover, a huge network of unchecked 'partners' any of whom can serve the latest browser exploits to your users, and the ads will be tasteless - scams, malware, and grinning mouths full of rotten teeth.
None of this is a requirement of advertising. Adsense isn’t the only form of internet advertising. There is a reason I said a static banner ad. It can be as simple as a native HTML anchor element with an image inside.
Here, I'll try to explain to you why (this message was brough to you by pierce and pierce aquisitions) replacing whitespace with a static banner ad is user hostile. It distracts (feeling too distracted? Try the new chrome extension distractionBlockr that will block all the distractions so you can focus on your work!) from the content.
You aren't replacing whitespace there. You are inserting an ad in the middle of your content. You also aren't making the ad visually distinctive from the comment. If there was an ad at the end of your comment and it was all in italics, would that be distracting or would it be easily ignored?
Considering most ads are more visually striking than the content they're being put in, I think putting the ads in the middle of the content itself is a good way to simulate that on a text-only website like hacker news. Also, ads are often on the top or at the side, not at the bottom. But let's try it and find out. Edit: I think this is still distracting, but that may be because italics is often used for emphasis on HN. I wouldn't call it very distracting though. It's a slight annoyance. But it does make things a bit worse.
This message was brought to you by hnaddr, the best way to get paid for your comments on HN
One way to look at it: advertisements are trying to influence your thoughts and behavior. At least micro-transactions are (or can be) a simple and honest exchange of money for a service.
> I honestly think it is a little stupid not to do any monetization.
This may be a popular sentiment on hacker news but thankfully it is an unpopular view among the best programmers. If everyone thought like this, there would be no Linux, no GNU. We’d all be reading this in Internet Explorer on Windows
Open source doesn’t mean there is no monetization strategy. For example you could be using Firefox on Ubuntu. Both of those are monetized. Plus most open source software couldn’t monetize as easily or harmlessly as a webpage.
While I appreciate the original sarcasm, I don't appreciate this: sarcasm is almost by definition hard to tell apart from real opinion because you are taking the position of someone who'd have such an opinion.
Since I consider the opinion of open source developers being idiots unlikely and silly, I am reading your message in a "consider best possible interpretation" way, which is that it's an ironic joke.
I would imagine that's what most people who've upvoted you thought as well.
Basically, if you resort to sarcasm, your "amusing" dilemmas should have obvious answers or you are misapplying it or using it in the wrong context (unless you are really aiming for just being an odd man out in a particular group, also known as a "troll" :).
Sarcasm is, by definition, use of irony to be a bit meaner than just make fun of something. It's still irony, and I am not even sure it qualifies for the sarcastic qualities on top.
I find that sarcasm or irony are pretty frequent on HN, or maybe it's just me who thinks it is so. ;-)
"I honestly think it is a little stupid not to do any monetization."
Maybe he does not care monetization?
Or there is no obvious path to monetization?
If you start an app phenomena from scratch with no inbuilt monetization mechanism designed from the start I would imagine implementing one would be non-trivial? Or is there an "obvious and simple" method to monetize said work?
The creator has a good resume of tech work including two years at reddit where he created two viral campaigns and probably received stock for their upcoming IPO. Seems he's pretty comfortable and just wanted to do this for fun.
Eh, because one’s time is valuable/expensive and most people would love to have more time doing what they love.
It’s cool that he doesn’t want to monetize it, but I would absolutely understand if he did. You don’t have a hit like that often and it could free him up for years (life?) to build more stuff he’s interested in without answering to anyone.
A lot of (most?) already super rich people monetize everything they can to the max. So I don't believe it's out of a desire to simply quit working. I think it's more about making money for the sake of making money, also known as greed.
A lot of them do, but don’t underestimate the number of people who are role-playing as being more wealthy than they are.
I’m not talking about people with successful business exits or those who have been in high-paying careers for a few decades who have a side business. It’s the people pleading with you to pay $10/month for their side Substack or trying to charge for mediocre podcasts and such. One of the oldest tricks in the content marketing book is to pretend to be very wealthy and then charge others for access to your knowledge.
For a lot of people it's not even just simple greed but more an easy way to measure them against other people. They are often very ambitious types who take great pride in being "type A personalities" and things like that.
Not only that but their parents and grandparents were and still are encouraged to live spendthrift lifestyles so younger generation will inherit less. I get a laugh out of certain ads; stuff your spoilt brat kids, you worked hard, you deserve to reverse mortgage your house and travel the world, buy that motorbike, do that thing.
Yes, there is a pamphlet for that as well. “No longer living life to the fullest, tired of being a burden on those around you, end of life services has a solution. For 5 easy payments of $39.99 a better place awaits you.”
In my opinion corporatism has worked with government to drive a wedge between family generations and I worry that the fallout will be quite brutal.
I have nightmares of desperate youth deliberately infecting their parents with black market Covid in an effort to speed up and preserve their inheritance.
I worry that parents will find illicit ways to off themselves to prevent their family's fortune going to the for-profit 'healthcare' system whose main function is to extract money.
My father is determined not to waste away like his father so is keeping an eye out for end of life options for when the time comes. I’ve been given instructions to pull the plug at the earliest opportunity. I suggested he take up rock climbing and progressively take bigger risks.
Not saying you're wrong, but considering the societal disruption of people (anyone, including people that the society would like to keep around for one reason or another) caused by people checking out because of their definition of decreased quality of life. It's not just about whether the doctors think that your meat sack is gonna fail critically in the next 6 months (one criteria for assisted suicide) but whether you like what you see when you wake up and look around each day. If it's not fun any more, it will become harder to sell the idea of sticking around.
I agree with you. When I made IMGZ.org, many people here wouldn't believe that I made it for me and don't want it to grow (even though it's "pay for what you use"). I always found it that mindset a bit odd, to be unable to fathom why someone might want to make a cool thing just to make it, and to believe that they must (and should) want to make money off it.
The more inequality there is in a society, the worse the consequences of not having money are. Money isn't about not having a second jet-ski or a five-star instead of a three-star hotel anymore - it's about not working 70 hour weeks while your kids are getting beat up in a dangerous school.
That's exactly what I have been working for. For instance, I love cars, I used to love it even more, but nowadays I don't imagine myself putting USD 1 million on car, that just obnoxious. I would rather use that money to change my next generation.
In the same vein, why does (nearly) every organization ‘have’ to be for-profit?
What does that say about our societies that we have embedded the profit motive in (most) organisations?
Worth noting that obviously there are many not for profit organizations, just that they are largely clustered in the fields of health, education, social welfare, etc.
And also note the difference between (unlimited or at least not capped) profit and earning or being paid a living or even high wage. People often confuse the ability to earn a ‘good’ wage and a very high wage.
Why do shopping malls build selfie traps into the walkways now?
Why is everyone's backdrop on Zoom so aesthetic?
Why are brilliant computer scientists spending their best years reinventing banking?
Why are talented artists leaving their easels behind to draw pixel zombies?
> What does that say about our societies that we have embedded the profit motive in (most) organisations?
It says that capital management is non-trivial and full of risk that needs to be proportionally rewarded with profit to justify the outlay.
Even non-profits have to grow revenue, because organizations require resources. But non-profits are hampered by the fact that they can't reward people for taking risks on them. A for profit organization can seek outside capital and reward risk. A non-profit can only seek donations or charge for services.
Ultimately, society benefits a great deal from it.
Sure, some good points but ultimately, it’s all about proportionately.
One can still receive many financial rewards in not-for-profit organizations: a high wage, payments, etc. without those rewards being ‘unlimited’ in scope.
As an experiment, imagine if the FAANGS and the BATs of this world were not for profit organizations; appreciating the role that venture capital played for all of them so maybe the experiment is that they wouldn’t exist!
What I struggle to understand is the relationship between the financial interests of humans (extending between the two extremes of billionaires on one hand and absolute poverty on the other) and organizational design in the west.
In other words, revenue is not profit and wages are still income, so why does the current system benefit capital (owners, investors) to such an extent.
Could we live in an alternate economic reality - maybe one that is ‘fairer’ if more of our for-profit organizations were not for profits. Or is that a fallacy?
What about money in = money out? If an organization pays its expenses - including the wages of its staff - well, why does there ‘need’ to be some cream leftover at the top?
What I am trying to better understand is why there is a preference (morally, legally, societally) for for-profit organizations.
Is it because (most) people are inherently profit-focused, or, that it is just the way things are? Amongst many other possible options.
non profit institutions are bound by the same constraints
sustainable ones do not move all of it to expenses or purpose
the answer of why is that the buffer allows them to continue existing. if there is any disruption in money coming in, then they cease to exist.
I understand you are wanting a different discussion that I didn't offer, based on wanting a reason that has nothing to do with moral legal or societal. There are more for profit organizations because it is easier to set one up, it is "permissionless" whereas a non-profit requires approval.
for profit and non profit are bound to the same fundamental constraints and I think that is misunderstood by many. both types of organizations have the capability of having none left over. both types of organizations have the risk of having a disruption in their ability to exist. both types can keep more for themselves. this is not a moral issue.
Govt works exactly the same way. You think they spend more than they take in by ignoring the excess is lent to them by investors - even the govt is taking in more than it spends.
If you're considering the Fed, it too is a lender, and has a zero net asset sheet.
>why does (nearly) every organization ‘have’ to be for-profit?
The opposite, not for profit, usually means, for loss, which is not sustainable.
An organization designed to be zero net will also die during hiccups and downtimes.
So if you want something to be sustainable, provide stable jobs, provide continues benefits to whatever it serves, "for profit" means it runs on less than it makes, allowing it to survive.
Basically, all the "not for profit" things die, and you don't see them around very long.
> The opposite, not for profit, usually means, for loss, which is not sustainable.
Not-for-profit means that 100% of the revenue is reinvested in the business (“mission”), rather than have a portion returned to owners/shareholders as profit.
Successful not-for-profit companies can have a problem of having more money than they can effectively deploy. This can lead to all sorts of problems: Overpaid staff; Inefficient operations; etc.
They still turn a profit. You're conflating the tax status not-for-profit with the wider phrase not for profit, meaning not trying to do things where outflow exceeds inflow.
You are confusing the terms loss (revenue < expenses) with not-for-profit.
In the context of organizations, not-for-profit doesn’t mean they are designed to be not profitable; rather, it means their primary goal is focused on other goals than making the most amount of profit possible.
It’s also a misnomer that not-for-profits can’t make profits, it’s just that those profits are not distributed to the capital (owners, investors) of the organization.
Wikipedia, famously a non-profit funded solely by advertising, has consistently expanded for ~20 years, even while embarking on repeated, mostly useless projects unrelated to its current work (why does it need an internal search engine? it can already show a listing of related pages on its dominant service) instead of saving.
> What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?
The point is if he doesn't monetize it, someone else who works around the legalize and is less ethical about it will. It is going to very likely get monetized one way or the other, the only question is if the creator (for whom is is obviously a labor of love) is gonna monetize or someone else looking to make a buck.
Just because many people drive above the speed limit, doesn't mean you need to. Just because people dribble shit on twitter, doesn't mean you need to. Just because rich morons stick jade eggs into their vaginas, doesn't mean you need to. Just because there are greedy scumbags in the world, doesn't mean you need to be one too.
"But, but, someone's going to do it!" isn't even remotely a valid argument against having morals and ethics.
How does profiting from something valuable you created somehow makes you a greedy scumbag ?
Besides, you're not addressing the main point : Someone is going to "steal" most of his hard labor, and will profit from it.
Consider Dwarf Fortress. It’s currently not monetized (directly) and yet no one can come in and steal the business for themselves because nothing can replace Dwarf Fortress without an incredible investment. Wordle is basic as hell and was never built to be competitive in a market place. I bet the author would have lost to competition so quickly that the profits wouldn’t be as great as a lot of people think.
It's not an original idea either so it would be a hard battle to fight for any sort of rights. Kids (and adults) have been playing this and very similar concepts for decades with pen and paper.
I don't play Wordle but I guess that there are some infrastructure costs at least? Like a server on which it runs. So why should the game bring fun and joy to people, and bills and cost to the creator?
It's a fully client-side app with one HTML doc and one JavaScript file, both of which come back with 304s once you've been there once. I'm willing to bet the monthly "infrastructure costs" are less than the cost of a pizza.
I didn't know that. Thanks for the pointer. So it is 7 requests, 122kb in total. It had 2 million users last weekend according to https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/11/wordle-creator.... So this is about 250GB of traffic. Yes, you are right this is not a lot of traffic once you get served the first time.
counterpoint: nothing has happened to us as a society.
we have always had pressures to monitize things and do things for money, but of course money isnt everything and there have always been happy generous people who are happy to make things for free.
In fact, the proliferation of freely released, happy things in to the world has probably gone up over time.
The rot really set in with Thatcher and Reagan. My grandparents would be horrified at the way we live now. We pay people to make our coffee in the morning, we pay people to cook our evening meal, we pay people to look after our kids, we pay people to look after our ageing relatives, we pay people to change the oil in our car, we pay people to assemble flatpack furniture, we pay to exercise. We have succeeded in commercialising nearly everything.
It doesn't do us any good, do you know what correlates strongly with the likelihood of divorce? It's how much you spend on the honeymoon.
This is not new to us a society. I’d argue that what is new is that our standard of living is so high that people who aren’t wealthy and have an easy path to monetization wouldn’t do so.
I’m not a historian, so I could be wrong, but it seems like in the past — if you weren’t wealthy and could sell something and make a lot of money then you’d do so.
I’m personally glad he isn’t monetizing. But that’s for purely selfish reasons.
”You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Because we expect people who do good things to be rewarded. It will incitate people to do more good things.
And in our society, it generally means money. With money, you eat better, sleep better, you are able to do more of the things you enjoy and less of the things you don't. Money also allows you to become charitable, for example, if you think homelessness is a problem, with money, you can build a shelter. There a reason charities want money above all else.
Now, what are "good things"? In the context of game apps, that's an game that a lot of people enjoy playing.
Put everything together and you get monetization, it is a way to turn goodness into rewards.
I can name a plethora of good things that are not rewarded.
- teaching
- writing good documentation
- picking up trash
- putting back your shopping cart
- writing useful books (generally only the best of the best of the best get any real rewards)
- helping a stranger
- maintaining or improving the environment (don't drill baby drill)
So though I think the economic philosophy of providing incentive/rewards for good things, it is almost anything but that in practical economics
If that is the case, then the best way to monetize things would be to ask for donations; it allows the user to decide whether the person has done good work, rather than forcing them to have a less pleasant experience. Everyone should understand that the person who best understands how they feel is that person.
Yeah, probably, I'd milk you all until I could buy that nice country-side house with enough space never to have to hear my neighbors. It's my dream, I'm not giving it up so others don't have pay for their entertainment. I'm sorry.
I could use an employee who does work that is their passion. Based on your comment, will you do the work for free? It’s your passion like Wordle guy after all
> What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?
The assumption that this person is not privileged, and therefore, needs money? I mean if I had made something that could have generate a sustainable income, but chosen not to do so, and go to work to be a slave instead, there gotta be a good reason.
Who is us? Which society? Most countries today are composed of a thousand thousand different cultures worshiping a hundred different gods. The only truly common ground bringing people together to/in these countries today is money.
I agree. I would like to be rewarded in the knowledge that I've made something good or useful for my fellow humans. Hopefully they can take it further and give something back. Expecting me to monetize it, to exploit my fellow humans for my own gain, is an insult.
Vim. Emacs. VS Code. Log4J. Java. Python. iOS. Android OS. Firefox. Chromium. Safari. There’s quite the precedent for free in the software development sphere.
VS Code, iOS, Android OS, Chromium, Safari all had huge backing and there are huge profit based reasons to make all of them. These should not be brought up at all.
Vim, Emacs, Java, Python: these are huge things. As a creator or high level contributor, your resume is set. Many of the creators of these and others have specific titles at Google getting paid well. Creating such big projects also allows you to get paid tens of thousands for speaking gigs or similar things. I believe it is the jquery creator who was making $500K+ a year doing speaking gigs.
None of these are like Wordle. It isn’t a huge coding achievement that will garner the same financial benefits every thing listed gives.
I didn’t follow the log4j thing but I’d expect the creator to have been able to get lucrative consulting and contracting work beyond what would normally be possible.
A lot of people have 'real jobs' that provide them with the means to eat, have shelter, etc. Those same people may have hobbies that they do on their own time for any number of reasons other than making money to live, and may, in fact, be sufficiently compensated at said 'real job' that they can cover the cost of their hobby, even if it turns out to be a virally-popular word game, without significantly impacting their pocketbook.
How many of these people could survive a catastrophic life event for a long period of time? San example: something happens where some one can’t work for 3 years.
I understand the hostility to making everything be monetized, however, workers do need to be paid. This might not be particularly relevant for a smartphone app, as software developers can easily get a job that pays 2x or 3x the average salary. Most "creators", however, are not as lucky as devs. The average creative person has a boring regular job and most can only focus on the work they care about if they charge money for it and/or receive sufficient donations.
This is often framed as a criticism of capitalism, or consumerism, or some other modern phenomenon. But for most of history, artisans and craftsmen were paid for their work. The expectation that they would be paid for their work is what established the profession in the first place, allowing for things like workshops and decades-long apprenticeships to exist. This is why things like the Italian Renaissance happened. In fact, I'd say that the majority of the historical artistic and cultural artifacts that we have today were created in this manner and not because the creator just wanted to make stuff that people enjoy.
It's only in the last century or two that (influenced by the Romantic movement) that the notion of art = self-expression has taken over the entire concept of culture.
> What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?
People need to put food on the table and provide for their families. How do you expect society to do so if members are just giving away their goods and services?
Then you would have a bartering system like we had 100's of years ago. Here's my 6x beaver pelts for your knife. Do I need to explain to you how inefficient that is?
No, that's potluck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potluck), and, given its diversity across cultures and continued presence, it can't be very inefficient.
Potluck...are you serious? There's nothing efficient or inefficient about the concept of potluck. It's a cultural celebration, not a "I need this to provide sustenance to my being".
It is nice that he's willing to give the game away for free, but bandwidth isn't free and it it becoming quite popular. I hope it doesn't get too pricey for him to pay for out of pocket or he has to do something annoying like include ads.
A $1 smartphone app seems like a reasonable way of preventing these sorts of issues.
The 100 GB free bandwidth from Github/Netlify would cover north of a million monthly page loads of Wordle (and many times that when you account for browser caching). AWS CloudFront's free tier would cover 10 million page loads/month.
Cloudflare pages currently doesn't even have a bandwidth cap on their free offering yet...
He might have had to change hosting providers, and/or stick a new CDN in front, but for tiny (80 KB all told) client-side webapps like this with no database backend it's entirely feasible to host it for free pretty much indefinitely.
But then he’d have to spend the time creating and maintaining an iPhone and Android app. That takes time. As it is now the game is done. It’s an HTML page accessible by anyone with a browser. It requires nothing of him.
I was once told, by a car rental chap, that the rental companies don't make money renting out cars; instead, they make money by putting some miles on the cars in their fleet, and then reselling them at a profit.
He told me that the deals the rental companies have with the manufacturers are along the lines of "you will buy 5000 cars at a large discount, but you can't sell them until they have 5000 miles on the clock". So they buy lots of cars at a HUGE discount and then later sell them for MORE than they bought them for.
If this is true, then it makes sense for the rental companies to invest in EVs, because (a) there is customer demand for them, but more (b) because the market for second hand EVs is good.
If they can sell them for more than they purchased, why even drive them for a bit?
I think rental cars have a lower value/prestige compared to single-owner used cars (the idea being people are rougher and more careless with a rental they only use for a few days).
So much of the “never buy a rental” stigma is ICE-specific. EVs don’t rely on hundreds of hard-to-reach soft parts that can disable the vehicle if you drive them too hard.
But I’ll definitely be checking the battery and motors before buying a used EV.
I read and write all my Python code (and all my code in every language) in a proportional font.
You may be thinking of Python's "significant whitespace". But all that does is indicate nested blocks.
This works exactly the same in a proportional or monospaced font. The only thing Python cares about is how many spaces or tabs you have at the beginning of a line, and that you don't mix the two.
There are coding styles that don't look as good in a proportional font, such as this kind of "column alignment" or "hanging indent":
The latter is a better style anyway. It takes more lines, but it doesn't require realignment when renaming. Not to mention that getting the variable indent alignment can require fighting the editor. One common feature is to delete spaces back to the previous tab stop. When not aligning things, that feature is handy and exactly what I want the editor to do. But for realignment, it's a big pain. Removing a single leading space might require hitting delete and then pressing space 3 times. You might even need to do that when adding spaces because it's easy too overshoot by a single character and have to move backwards to correct it.
Technically, you can use any language, including Python. Python cares about the number of whitespace characters, not the sizing of them. Any other languages will have the same issue of your columns / pretty formatting not lining up exactly, but won't cause any issues.
If I had to pick one to use with a proportional font, I guess it would be Perl. The aesthetics would at least fit it well.
I'd love for all IDEs to support notebook style computing where comment blocks just turn into proportional font prose, perhaps with optional markdown rich text. Tables, lists, etc. look way better as proper HTML instead of ASCII art intermingled with code.
I’ve used Input Sans[1] with Python in the past and it works pretty well except if you use white space for formatting or ascii art as opposed to just indenting.
It works because the spaces are nice and wide unlike in a typical proportional font.
I don’t use it anymore mostly because I wanted something with a little more character but it’s worth a try.
1. Drink lots of water (actually a very dilute lime juice/cranberry juice mix). I aim for 4 litres/1 gallon a day, more in hot weather.
2. Don't drink spirits (specifically - note to self - half a bottle of bourbon, no matter how delicious). They cause some weird kind of dehydration, which makes the stones painful.
3. If you start getting discomfort from a stone, drink more water. It seems to 'float' them somehow, and can usually make the discomfort go away.
4. The stones act like little breeding grounds for bacteria. So, if you have stones you will be prone to chronic infections. If you are a chap, then this can lead to chronic bacterial prostatitus, which can cause all manner of problems, leading to a having a catheter fitted. But, if you have bladder stones, the stones will break the little plastic widget that stops the catheter from falling out, which means it has to be refitted. So, you may need to take a low-level antibiotic like nitrofuratoin (there is some evidence that cranberry juice can also help, because it reduces the stickiness of bacteria).
5. If you are passing a stone, and they offer you morphine, decline it and hold out for something more powerful. Morphine seems to contract the tubes, only offers partial relief, and makes the problem worse in my experience. I once had an IM injection of (something beginning with pent~ - I wasn't in the mood to take notes at the time) which worked very well.
6. Avoid foods containing high oxalate levels, like spinach.
7. Don't take medical advice from strangers on the internet (like me).