In theory, some of the rhetoric you mentioned reminds me a little bit of the FUTO funding. Some billionaire (Eron Wolf) I guess is giving funding to libre/free open source projects.

Eron Wolf, apparently made his billion(s) by "playing the game" in Silly Con Valley?

I've never met the guy. He apparently had an Amiga. I still have my Amiga 1200. Amigas were pretty groovy for their era.

I thought, years ago, maybe I would apply for a grant? I helped co-found Noisebridge (a 501c3 hacker space). I have been a contributing editor to undeadly.org (the OpenBSD Journal) from its inception (and I used to submit a lot of stories to deadly.org its predecessor). I have been contributing to various libre/free open source software projects for decades (the first BBS I was asked to Co-SysOp ran a Citadel variant, which thanks to Cynbe Ru Taren, had its source code in the public domain before the FSF even existed). Heck, my parents' church in Menlo Park, even today, still shares a parking lot with SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and I was blessed to befriend Doug Engelbart and Bill English and other luminaries before they passed away.

As a teen, I was repeatedly invited to toil on systems as nps.navy.mil (now nps.edu). Admittedly, not for pay (the "privilege" was getting to use hardware that cost more than the mortgage on my parents house); I wasn't credited either. One of my friends from that era, eventually got an M.S. from nps (he was in their VR lab); and I guess at some point was part of the team that helped give legs to the avatars at Meta? (Last time we hung out, he was working at Unity; and I guess helped with Unity support for Apple's Vision Pro. But he also worked at some other start up run by the guy who created Second Life.). I was a Co-SysOp of one of his BBSes too; but no money was exchanged, we were just friends. He wasn't charging folks for access, he wasn't making $ from that fun, why would he be paying anyone to help what was already a labor of love?

So I dunno, I never "played the game" like Eron Wolf. Neither did that friend from my teens, nor my other savvy friends from my teens and earlier. None of us are billionaires.

But I did email Louis Rossman and inquired about maybe getting a grant somehow?

He asked for more clarification on what it is that I did, and I emailed back and never got a response.

So I dunno. I've applied to other grants and jobs and whatnot, but I can't shake the feeling that those with the $ aren't really sharing it too freely?

At least, not with me.

Louis seemed enthused that I knew Mitch Altman. But oblivious that I know Mitch, because he would do Circuit Hacking Mondays classes at Noisebridge. That I've known Mitch, probably longer than Louis has, by some margin.

I probably know a lot of other folks like Mitch, but Mitch also isn't a billionaire. I don't know how to phrase things in a meaningful way I guess.

When I worked on Syzygryd, that was funded in part by a grant from the Burning Man organization. That's probably the only project to which I have ever co-contributed which had some grant funding, but I didn't write the grant application for that one. Moreover, of all the funding it received? I still sank who knows how many unpaid hours and thousands of dollars of my own money into it, and I was just one of maybe 60 some odd contributors who were all probably doing the same. I don't think the grant covered more than a mere fraction of what it took to co-create that giant interactive fire art sculpture/grid sequencer.

But I guess Ladybird got a $250,000 grant from the FUTO organization?

IIRC, the BM org grant for Syzygryd was $60,000 and we delivered, in under a year.

Ladybird I don't know when they will have public builds available. I tried to build the code from source, and was unsuccessful. I encountered use of Homebrew and vcpkg, both of which are spyware by default (they call their spyware "telemetry" but it has to be explicitly configured to be turned off) and when I raised concerns about that on a YouTube video about Ladybird? That comment was deleted in fewer than 24 hours.

Call me crazy, but a "privacy" focused browser, IMHO, shouldn't be using toolchains which have spyware. Alternatives exist, which don't, but I am not a developer in that project and based on my preliminary interactions with its codebase, it is a non trivial amount of effort to rejigger it into something that doesn't use such dependencies.

But it was eye opening as far as what was actually getting funding from one of those billionaires who "played the game".

Near as I can discern, they have a false perception of reality; over gamification. For many of us, this isn't a game and it isn't playful and it's really upsetting to see how they redistribute their wealth, while actively ignoring others who thought maybe there was a hope they weren't being disingenuous.

I guess I am accustomed to being let down and false promises? It still leaves an impression when encountering double speak though. As my divorce attorney once told me: "you are too honest for your own good."

Meanwhile, my perspective: truth and honesty are real goods, deviation from such precepts is a quick path to other hell realms.

That is an interesting idea I guess?

Maybe Google back in the "don't be evil" days, while they were apparently trying to hire a bunch of PhDs was making some sort of effort at it?

I knew one person there who worked on Google Wave and claimed that Google didn't actually innovate anything they just found ways to take existing research and make it available to end users for no monetary cost.

But, they, from my perspective, lost the path the moment they started AdWords and whatnot. Sure they became massively rich, and their CxOs and founders retired?

I can't imagine retiring, ever. There is no end game to wealth redistribution, until every human is housed (I do not consider paying mortage or rent housing, if anything, it's worse than being homeless, because you're paying some bank or landlord for the "privilege" of a roof?).

I watched what was it, "Dead Man's Wire" recently, and they had a bunch of Gil-Scott Heron "the revolution will not be televised" stuff; but where is the pop culture reprisal or "Whitey on the Moon"? NASA, and SpaceX and BlueOrigin, are all horrid still; and yet I heard gray beards as apologists for Musk and all, since SpaceX is "accomplishing" more than NASA as a private entity? I don't get it, there are a panoply of space programs and all of them, from my vantage: are a waste of resources until we get food scarcity, housing and health care solved for humans on Earth first.

But I used to work as a "Network Security Specialist" at a mining and construction company that had the "largest granite extraction facility West of the Mississippi" (aka the Aromas quarry) where many of the cars in the parking lots read: "EARTH FIRST, WE'LL MINE OTHER PLANETS LATER" and I just can't laugh at that BS anymore. It's so depressing. More people making hell on Earth than trying to undo the damage.

I agree that wealth redistribution is a more important problem to solve than anything else capitalism is presently faced with, but precisely none of those with money and power seem interested in it.

For profit publicly traded companies are legally liable to their shareholders to turn a profit, and risk being litigated against if they fail to deliver.

So, what are the alternatives? The warez scene with "share the wealth" paradigms were, for many decades, where the counter culture sorts toiled their skills (friends of mine were cracking copy protection in elementary school, by middle school we were training console games and more with tools and hardware most still barely know about). But eventually a lot of folks become adults and face more severe penalties or are "turned", becoming operatives for TLAs and the like. ;(

I don't see a lot of winning, I just see layers and layers of losing.

What is the line from that Dead Can Dance song: "How fortunate the man with none"?

Or the Daoists who admire the "uncarved block"?

FSF/GNU seem as if they're resplendent examples of failure to me, attempting to worth "with" copyright as a poison pill? Sophomoric at best. Now RHEL is owned by IBM and certainly not moving the needle forward. It's become the very thing many strove against. Sun? Subsumed by Oracle. Micro$oft, owns GitHub and LinkedIn. The scoundrels keep getting richer, but what is actually improving?

I couldn't give a shit how many FPS some video game renders on some NVIDIA GPU I can't afford that requires active cooling and generates noise pollution in the process, the engineering discipline seemingly died. Decades ago, at that mining and construction company, I had to find fanless multi-head GPUs because fans and airflow: lead to hardware failures in mining sites which are filled with Prop 65 warning dust everywhere.

I know some at NVIDIA, I knew some at SGI; but in general they were always the sorts who seemed to think that they could throw money at a problem and that was good "enough" for their limited needs.

The needs of the many are so much bigger than any problem SGI or NVIDIA ever seemed capable of dreaming about. I have zero faith that any meaningful solutions will come from them.

And when it comes to faith? z0mg, church attendance is so low that I'm amazed when a congregation survives at all. So many are closing due to low attendance.

This was all foreseen in Vedic scripture though. Things are prophesied to get a lot lot worse for a long long time (the current Kali Yuga cycle doesn't end until 428,899 CE) before there's real hope of any improvements. ;(

"ngscopeclient certainly has been a net loss to me, we've got some donations but nowhere near enough to even cover what i've personally spent on the project much less the value of my time and that of all of the other contributors"

I and presumably many others, probably can echo similar sentiments?

For me at least, the "net loss" part of open source isn't really a thing though.

It's like: real wealth is health. I am grateful I am not currently afflicted with any major maladies! I can't understate how important that is given how much else in my human incarnation is awful.

The "powers that be" those "vested interests" with money to burn on A"I" or whatever? I dunno, it's seemingly impossible to ignore them. Like pop music, I can never buy the vinyl from such "artists", but I'll probably still hear the crappy tunes all over the place?

I can, and do my best to filter out a lot of the BS; but for me, what's really vital?

Fresh air!

Clean water!

Healthy (vegan) food in my belly.

The rest of it? I would really like less noise pollution. Less light pollution. A solitary shelter without shared walls I can call my own; but even when I had a vehicle and was sleeping in that?

Assholes, would break into my car and steal what limited material possessions I would leave in it, time and time again.

So; I don't know. Better seems as if it may be possible, just not for me in this incarnation. Too many thieves and liars and others who do not respect personal space, boundaries, possessions. I am not a fighter, and unfortunately for me, even when I thought i was dead, I have been recorporealized. Seemingly doomed to continue to exist in a continually marginalized hell.

I'm not going to actively make things worse for myself or others though. Vengeance is not meaningfully useful either.

Heck, I don't even know if libre/free open source software is particularly useful. I just think it's not as bad as the alternatives.

Their loss.

More good tea for those in the know I guess?

"whether people would be willing to pay what it cost to pay the staff a fair industry rate for their services is another question, of course"

I gave up on that, decades ago.

I don't think capitalism is fair, period.

I'm still going to keep contributing code (e.g. today I submitted this PR which was merged: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30995). Still share stuff in other ways too (undeadly.org had its 20th anniversary last year); was a (co)SysOp of Citadel and other BBSes in decades before for free.

Even my best paid job was $130,000.00 USD/year, but with 24x7 on call (130,000.00/8760 [365*24] = $14.84/hour. For reference, that was in San Francisco. Current minimum wage in San Francisco? $19.18 per hour.

Many of my jobs as a sysadmin, paid substantially less than that.

One of the other MacPorts for which I am a maintainer is LibreSSL. MacPorts' LibreSSL currently at: 4.2.1, released October 30th, 2025. I downstreamed that pretty quickly.

Apple, with its multi-trillion dollar valuation as a company? Is still shipping LibreSSL 3.3.6, from August, 2021.

So, I guess I could be like Tim Crook, and rich beyond imagination? Remove headphone jacks, for higher profit margins for shareholders, while sound unequivocally engineering suffers and more overpriced Thneeds will end up in landfills with dead batteries without easily user servicable parts?

Or I could keep doing what I am doing, as I have been doing, and share code freely, as intended and hope others stop putting so much credence into capitalism?

But please, don't hook me up to some bait and switch A"I" slop crap. I was already tasked with writing anti-A"I" code in the 1980s on others systems. I don't know what happened to that nor where it is now, but I am so sick of watching others repeat the mistakes from history I already learned from long ago.

I'm happy to continue to volunteer my skills to meaningfully help others; ideally to help them empower themselves so they can help others too.

Getting folks to pay? I never cracked that nut, and it only stresses me out. There is no heaven on Earth I can imagine which has currency constructs of any sort; and I am already down too many layers deep in too many rings of hell as it is.

Vaguely heartened that the Night at the Octagon I am missin?

Is bein streamed live on Twitch:

https://www.twitch.tv/djqbert

But, I don't like bein streamed or in front of cameras tbh.

Also seems sparsely attended (for now at least).

So at least there's that? Saved probably $20 in transit fare back and forth and I have work tomorrow too. Ah well!

There will be more.

I also wholeheartedly concur.

When my mom died, my sister basically got her half of our shared assets outright.

Unfortunately for me, my half were put into a trust; which despite it not being stipulated anywhere is an "administrative" trust and apparently according to California law, must be handled by a bank (I do all of my personal financial stuff via a credit union and have used credit unions pretty much exclusively for 30 years). The initial bank: was Wells Fargo.

z0mg, the idiocy.

Eventually I at least managed to get some aspects moved to another bank, but they're still awful in many of the same ways. At least so far, I haven't been given excuses that an ACH transfer was delayed because of ice storms in Texas (Wells Fargo was founded in California, I live in California, and if their HA/Disaster Recovery is so bad that they can't handle ACH transfers when there is some inclement weather states away, I have no idea how they have stayed in operation at all).

My mom, in her infinite ineptitude, seems to find ways to haunt me from beyond the grave. ;-/ She owned some stocks. At one point I asked the bankers if I could have them sell those off (she was invested in companies I consider morally reprehensible) and instead take the funds and put them into a vegan mutual fund and was denied. Heck, they even denied a request for reimbursement on an oil change (I don't know what planet they live on where cars do not require oil changes as part of routine maintenance, but apparently they have a very different view of reality).

My best guess is: since the banks which handle administrative trusts, take a percentage of the funds from the trust, their entire incentive structure is to pay out from the trust to the trustees: as little as possible, since that maximizes the banks' profits.

The entire thing stinks.

I am not completely starving and destitute, but I remain homeless, thousands in debt and the bankers drag their heels with any simple request, despite being provided with more than sufficient documentation each and every time.

Perhaps, in theory, a trust attorney might be able to ameliorate some of the damage? I doubt it, every experience with lawyers is that they prey upon clients and no doubt what trickle of funds I receive would go to them and I would be end up in an even worse position.

It's dumbfounding how few payment processors actually exist.

Meanwhile, Expedia continues to ask me if I want to apply for a OneKey Cash card via Wells Fargo, but if I do so:

Their phone app claims that my phone # is not valid (whatever database that they are using, is clearly the same one that Discord, Twitch, LiveNation/Ticketmaster and a lot of other things are set up with and it's just incorrect since I've been using that VoIP # for a decade and a half at this point, at least).

If I go through the Expedia website, it doesn't throw those errors, but Wells Fargo still doesn't offer me a OneKey Cash card after doing whatever credit check it does asking for my address, income, rent, SSN, birthday and whatnot.

Despite that: I have zero doubts that Expedia will continue to nag me to apply for the OneKey Cash card ad infinitum, because they have zero smarts to remember what they've asked me and declined me on already.

"The future" much dystopia, very grim.

Thanks for that. Chesteron's Fence and Peter's Law were unfamiliar to me.

Admittedly, as I look back on my career, I remember being asked why I didn't apply for a CTO position and maybe some internal awareness of Peter's Law was partially what caused me to abstain from pursuing such responsibilities?

Maybe that was an error on my part and I should have pursued a more upward trajectory? I have had so many awful experiences with managers and bosses that I have never wanted to become such a person myself.

CC: @nprofile1q...

Awesome, thank you!

I created a Pull Request to update MacPorts' Got to -portable-0.121 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30995

GitHub's Continuous Integration checks passed OK, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

I also submitted a story to undeadly.org but I'll leave it up to one of the other editors to look it over in case I caused any errors rather than publish it myself.

#Got #GameOfTrees #MacPorts #VersionControl #OpenSource #OpenBSD #Git #macOS

Probably?

ECC uses more chips due to how the error correction is implemented, so it's always more expensive (and higher latency) as a result. Still: pretty darn worth it IMHO.

CC: @nprofile1q...

Right now debating plans for tonight (I had paid to attend another Night at the Octagon with DJ Q*Bert earlier this month, but it got rescheduled to tonight due to NAMM stuff) and tomorrow (there's a screening of Kill La Kill in SF tomorrow) relative to how constrained my finances are and how the bankers are making up new excuses and how my efforts to "get creative" with my finances earlier have not been particularly forthcoming.

I'm thinking, the extra expense of some additional BART trips may push me beyond my already strained limits. ;-/

I had thought: maybe there was a snowball's chance in hell I could have a new vehicle sooner than later and then not waste $ on less than stellar hotel accommodations, but that prospect also vanished.

I plan for the worst, but my resources are never sufficient. Things seem to invariably get worse, as if this ungoldy universe continues to plot against me, perpetually; doubling down when I am already being as proactive and defensive as I can be.

No doubt, I'll survive, worse for wear, as usual; because the mercy of being left to be one with oblivion eludes me. That would be too kind apparently.