I appreciate the intent here, but these are the immediate issues that leap to mind:
* "Do work, but get paid only if we use it" feels potentially exploitative. You do mention a "base pay" rate but I wonder how it compares to the "merged PR" rate?
* Code quality and adherence to internal code standards is challenging for external contributions. Open source projects, of course, are already used to this, so it's not surprising to see that's where the bulk of your current customer base lives; it's more difficult to see how this would work with other types of organization -- I'd be concerned that I'm spending more time in code review and such than I'd gain in contributed lines of code.
* The whole setup seems to fit in an uncomfortable middle ground between just hiring an offshore developer directly or through a traditional outsourcing firm, on the one hand; and hourly piecework on the other. The only advantage I see to this sort of arrangement on the hiring end compared to regular old long-contract outsourcing is that I don't have to pay for work I don't end up using, but that circles me right back to the "exploitative" part.
> "Do work, but get paid only if we use it" feels potentially exploitative. You do mention a "base pay" rate but I wonder how it compares to the "merged PR" rate?
90% of compensation for devs is base and does not depend on the “merge PR” rate (which is in-fact 95%)
> * Code quality and adherence to internal code standards is challenging for external contributions
> The whole setup seems to fit in an uncomfortable middle ground
Majority of our customers are in-fact private and not OSS. We can unfortunately only share the latter. But it is targeted towards engineering teams that have already started to invest into DevEx and building tooling to make contribution easier
We do help to set that up if customers sign up on the Team or Enterprise plan as a first sprint to add all these guardrails in place.
I agree that junior devs today are heavily exploited by existing freelance and outsourcing platforms where it's a race to the cheapest contractor in the market. For teams who want to freelance, we are not a good fit (and most likely more expensive). Where we do shine is an in-house team that does not have the bandwidth to hand-hold each external contractor one by one to become productive. And with that focus, our devs get to enjoy a fixed base stipend, career ladder internally to grow and successfully joining our customers and / or larger corps like Meta, Google and so on
Went to the demo, instinctively used `cmd-w` to close one of the "desktop" windows, and was quickly reminded of one of the limitations of building an application like this inside a browser.
Note to developer: you may want to add an `onbeforeunload` handler
I heard you can fix that with Alt+F4. Seriously though, this is my biggest gripe with building for the web. You are limited in interactions to what the browser allows and at the end of the day it’s an app inside a sandbox-ish container with an app inside a shadow-dom. WASM full-screen, full-hardware, experiences have yet to take root. It’s getting there.
The few times I've tried using ChatGPT or another LLM as a coding assist, the "confidently wrong answer that looks correct" was the entirety of my experience. (Mostly the failure mode was mixing up incompatible instructions from various versions of the framework or toolchain: even if I specify a version number it'll still often want to use syntax or functions that don't exist in that version.) I did not find it to be a time saver.
Hmm fair. It's strange that our experiences are so different. Can I ask what types of problems you ask it to solve? FWIW I've had to take quite a lot of time figuring out how to talk to it in a way that gets good results.
The one where I struggled the longest was trying to put together the right webpack configuration to generate multiple static files based on input in markdown format. It kept switching which plugins it wanted me to use, or mixed up functions from conflicting plugins, and often mixed up syntax from different versions of webpack itself.
I finally gave up on that one when it got caught in a loop somehow where it apologized for giving me the wrong line of code for an import, gave an obviously wrong explanation for why it didn't work, then "corrected" it to the exact same line of code.
Another attempt I was asking it to compare different ways for measuring the amount of difference between data trees -- it did give me the names of a couple of different algorithms, and very wordy, plausible-looking descriptions of how each of them worked... neither of which was terribly helpful, because they both boiled down to "recursively examine the tree and tally up the differences."
Asked for an implementation example, it gave me code that expected input arrays of pre-calculated edit costs, and suggested I write my own function to convert the tree data into that array format.
So that one was extra weird, in that it wasn't wrong, just unhelpful, like here I'll do the easy part for you and leave the thing you asked about as an exercise for the reader.
I dunno, maybe with practice I could learn how to drag it towards helpfulness, but for now RTFM still seems easier.
Personally I go back and forth on whether the hostile, aggressive gatekeeping is part of why stack overflow is failing, or is part of what kept it functioning as long as it did. Probably both. Both is good.
But this one terribly accurate line included in the alternatives to SO is worth the whole price of admission:
> ...you can even go to ChatGPT, where it’ll give you a confidently wrong answer that looks so correct that you’ll spend another 7 hours debugging why your code doesn’t work.
This hasn’t been my experience at all and I’ve found that chatgpt saves a ton of time over filtering SO.
I loved SO when it first started, but it got frustrating over time as moderators seemed to be too strict around removing “duplicate” answers.
It’s hard to know for sure, but I always felt SO would be better with a more Wikipedia approach that didn’t rely as much on opinionated mods.
It’s a tough place to be and I don’t think it’s possible to make a ton of money, I think it went downhill when the original founders sold a few years ago.
The mods of Wikipedia operate very differently than the mods at SO. I think there are more rigorous rules with SO than Wikipedia and they also have their tiers of users who upvote messages. Wikipedia has nothing like this.
When I've tried using it I've generally found that it leads me in circles between incompatible versions of a framework or tool -- it'll give me syntax that's correct for one version, but wants to use it to call a function that only exists in a different version, that sort of thing. They're not even hallucinations, each step is technically correct, but can't be used successfully with the other steps.
Another thing I found is that it can have "obvious omissions". As in: the answer is correct, and it works, but it's a bad solution and there's a much more obvious and better way to solve it.
> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.
The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).
Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).
Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271
The parts that could most safely be described as "scam", to my point of view, are
* lying to users about protecting their privacy, while gathering and reselling more information than was possible with existing 3rd party trackers
* lying about "giving back to publishers", while actually coopting those publishers' revenue streams
Your "Websites are not entitled to showing ads" statement gave me a moment of thought, I have to admit: I don't see anything wrong with ad blockers, but I do think the ethics of ad replacers is pretty problematic. At best it makes Brave a parasitic entity feeding off revenue that would have otherwise gone to the content creators.
I'll reluctantly agree that that part on its own doesn't rise to the level of "scam" but I certainly don't think it's admirable.
I think letting an advertising company have any control over content distribution or display is inherently a problem, so Brave signalling that they want to do advertising is pretty clear to me that they cannot be trusted.
Like, do Brave think google is just evil and that if someone else becomes the advertising behemoth things will be just rosy?
For sure. And their overall shiftiness whenever anyone calls attention to their plans ("oh, that FAQ's out of date," "oh that's a future feature," "oh that's not what we planned, even though it's exactly what we said," etc) doesn't exactly help make them seem like a trustworthy partner.
"HTML First" versus "HTML Only" aside, I hadn't heard of this one before, and it looks promising.
I've been looking for simpler frameworks that do less, because I'm tired of coming back to projects I've set aside for six months or a year and having to basically relearn and rewrite them to match all the updates and incompatible changes the framework made in the meantime.
At first glance this looks like it handles the essentials and doesn't try too hard to handle anything else; I'm going to give it a try.
Oh, bosh. Don’t be absurd. Elon demonstrably isn’t “favoring free speech over censorship.” He’s just choosing different speech to favor and to censor.
Oddly enough, he tends to favor hate groups and dictators: “Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen [during Musk’s tenure] to over 80%, from around 50%.”
Because he keeps having these late-night binges of bizarre, brand-destroying decision making. Twitter is underperforming as a result of his previous rounds of bizarre, brand- and product-destroying decision making. Twitter wasn't dying until he came along to "fix" it.
Yeah, his personality is plenty objectionable too, but it's mostly the way he's seemingly intentionally running the company into the ground that I object to.
* "Do work, but get paid only if we use it" feels potentially exploitative. You do mention a "base pay" rate but I wonder how it compares to the "merged PR" rate?
* Code quality and adherence to internal code standards is challenging for external contributions. Open source projects, of course, are already used to this, so it's not surprising to see that's where the bulk of your current customer base lives; it's more difficult to see how this would work with other types of organization -- I'd be concerned that I'm spending more time in code review and such than I'd gain in contributed lines of code.
* The whole setup seems to fit in an uncomfortable middle ground between just hiring an offshore developer directly or through a traditional outsourcing firm, on the one hand; and hourly piecework on the other. The only advantage I see to this sort of arrangement on the hiring end compared to regular old long-contract outsourcing is that I don't have to pay for work I don't end up using, but that circles me right back to the "exploitative" part.