I buy it. SaaS doesn’t have to go extinct for this to be true.
I’m building an app and many things I’d normally pay for like metrics and emailing I can just do myself.
A friend has a law firm employing 100+ people and they are building so many internal tools they would otherwise be delaying or paying salesforce consultants for.
You really should pay, especially for work by small foundries.
Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The financial upside is extremely hard to justify.
I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
I'm actually a designer, have paid for many fonts - including licenses for websites - have made a couple myself and have a good idea how hard they are to make.
That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum selling old rope again and again without adding anything of value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around such things for use on their personal blog with an audience of ten, should they so wish.
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ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole usable font from a small foundry in the first place, without buying it.
Fonts are (simplifying greatly) just code, right? I wonder when AI models will be able to cleanroom-clone the general look of a font without violating the copyright on the official version's underlying code.
I do a bit of graphic design for friends and family and am more than willing to spend like up to $100 on a nice typeface from smaller creators. It's just unfortunate many professional typefaces from the big foundries will charge you thousands of dollars for an entire family with strict usage limits. Like I'm just trying to make some holiday cards...
I get that they're trying to make their ROI back from enterprise customers who can justify paying thousands a month for their specific corporate font, but I would like to see more personal use, project based pricing that's affordable for hobbyist use
+1 — "just being lazy" is no excuse when you can just ask your LLM of choice for a free font recommendation similar to what you can't afford. If you absolutely can't live without using the paid font, of course you should pay for it!
You can't copyright basic geometric shapes either.
>there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.
You mean there are plenty of bezier curved shapes which are within the public domain and no one can stop me. I'm not obligated to surrender my rights so you can turn typography into a business model. If you piss me off, I might just release tools that even stooges can use that copy the shapes out of the otf file, rearrange those completely so that no file fingerprinting will match, and has the user rename the files. I will go to war.
Legally, typeface designs do not receive protection (which is based on idiotic declarations like “you can’t copyright the alphabet”) but digital font files are considered programs and thus are able to be protected as IP.¹ You can try to justify the theft to yourself but somewhere there’s an individual (or on some occasions many individuals) who spent a long time making decisions about how that typeface should look and choosing the best points to turn it into splines to describe the shape and you decided that your laziness trumps their work.
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1. I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
>there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free for you to use.
Legally based off the carefully considered positions of philosophers of law like Thomas Jefferson, and others just as renowned, who actually created modern copyright law in the United States, because they weren't trying to set you up to be rent-seeking degenerate scribblers for the next umpteen millennia.
>but digital font files are considered programs
As precedented in case law by degenerate judges who should be brought up on treason charges. They aren't programs in any meaningful sense, culinary recipes are likely closer to programs (they, arguably, run on a Turing-complete machine, the human brain, and have something akin to branching going on once in awhile).
>You can try to justify the theft
What theft? No theft occurred, because I denied no one the possession of their own property. Even the judges and lawyers have to admit that this is at most infringement, so please use that word or just confess here and now that you'rea manipulative liar.
>I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
What!?!?! Those aren't programs too? Please, consult the computer scientists, they must be informed! Are they also not stored as ones and zeroes?
If we are talking about jobs (quantity) maybe to some extent. But if want to be honest, it’s qualitative (human-judgment) question. And even if a job seems totally AI-ready on paper, it might have invisible side effects.
(Thought experiment: do I want an AI robot to perform a surgery on me, if it only has 2% chance of hallucinating? My answer is no, bring the surgeon)
I wonder if we will see some perverse incentives emerge to make the AI seem even better. For example, say a well rested, stress free surgeon can have a 1% error rate. Well, lets make the job harder then, fatigue the surgeon, lay many of them off (or just not rehire as they leave) and spread the remainder thin. Make them hit 3% error rate. Then fire the lot because it would be malpractice not to.
If that’s the dystopia we would live in, I’d imagine an alternate healthcare/legal system would emerge. Also, personally I’m far more forgiving of the human-error than that of the machine
I think Claude Code can write very good end to end tests given the right constructs.
I have been building a desktop app (electron-based) which interacts with Anthropic’s AgentSDK and the local file system.
It’s 100% spec driven and Claude Code has written every line. I do large features instead of small ones (spec in issue around 300 lines of markdown).
I have had it generate playwright tests from the start. It was doing okay but one thing made it do amazing. I created a spec driven pull request to use data-testid attributes for selectors.
Every new feature adds tests, and verifies it hasn’t broken existing features.
I don’t even bother with unit tests. It’s working amazing.
I tried claude code, and it did write some good quality e2e tests but my biggest worry was the full coverage. Its really difficult to quantify e2e test coverage the way developers do unit test coverage. its really impossible. specs is just one artifact just like code is just one of many artifacts that full system wide e2e coverage needs. addng production logs + producton incidents which I tried also give me some sense of full e2e coverage. if you are using claude code for dev and testing both, its like having cake and eat it too. If claude for whatever reason misrepresent or misinterpret a requirement, that will percolate in code and testing as well. having a 3rd party testing tool is appropiate with allthe data flowing in it like specs, legacy tests, prod incidents, code and then perhaps we can expect full unbiased test coevrage. I am not talking about wanna be enterprise apps or hobby apps, i am talking about >v0 enterprise apps that have real customers and real downside if they go down with rich data set of past incidents and not so perfect code but now they are increasingly using agentic ai to produce more non-human code. they need a 3rd party tool that ingest their data, create a KG understanding of their data and prevent crtical bugs leak into production by geenrating small number of high quality high coverage tests.
Slightly related. Something I love to do is to tell Claude to generate a detailed explanation of a topic I want to learn more about (recently, it was Donor Advised Funds).
If I’m going to pick my kids up then I tell it to make it 10 minutes when read aloud. Then I listen to that on my drive.
Kubero seems nice for more kubernetes oriented tasks.
But I feel like if someone is having a single piece of hardware as the OP did. Kubernetes might not be of as much help and Coolify/Dokploy are so much simpler in that regards.
I suppose kubernetes with the right operators installed and the right node labels applied could almost work as a self service control plane. But then VMs have to run in kubevirt. There is crossplane but that needs another IaaS to do its thing.
My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library.
It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience.
For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just markdown and csv files for Claude Code (for research and document writing).
I know some systems leverage the modern file meta data (extended attributes), but it's clearly not successful enough that folks can use them for an application like this.
Ostensibly, things like MacOS Spotlight can bring real utility and value to the file system, and extended attributes through the sidecar indexing, etc. But Spotlight is infamous for its unreliability.
The other issue with file systems is simply that the user (potentially) has "direct access" to them, in that they can readily move files in and up and around whimsically. The "structure" is laid bare for them to potentially interfere with, or, such as the case with the extended attributes, drag a file to a USB fob, and then copy it back -- inadvertently removing those attributes.
And thats how we end up with everything being stuffed into a SQLite DB.
Yeah, IMO extended metadata attributes are fine for caching data that can be recovered via other means but generally violate the principal of least surprise. For them to be successful a standardized transparent container format or something would be necessary, but at that point the FS abstraction is leaking.
I have your repo starred from a post/comment you made a few weeks ago but haven't had time to actually use/integrate it with my own stuff.
What are your thoughts on XMP sidecar files? I'm torn right now between digital negative + external metadata versus all-in-one image with mutable properties. Portability vs. Durability etc.
I've avoided using XMP sidecars. Mostly because I don't want to have to worry about two files for every photo. And I don't think they're ubiquitously supported like EXIF.
Thanks for starring the repo and let me know if you need any help.
I’m building an app and many things I’d normally pay for like metrics and emailing I can just do myself.
A friend has a law firm employing 100+ people and they are building so many internal tools they would otherwise be delaying or paying salesforce consultants for.
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