Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people aren't even fully aware that Babel is part of their toolchain.
And I thought that such awareness was a part of being good at one's job.
Most people are not good at their job.
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
231–240 of 729 posts
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that jump from $20/month to $500/month is too big. JetBrains asks for $500 per year--that's probably right about the discretionary spend of a decent engineer. $500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.
> JetBrains asks for $500 per year For IntelliJ; their other tools are $200 a year. And I suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending than a random JS fullstack devsecops person.
Sorry, I never even noticed their "teams" things. And it looks like the full pack is now $650.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#233There's a lot of greedy selfish people out there. This past year I was mostly unemployed, and wasted countless hours, days and weeks, months doing tech interviews. A complete waste of my time that I'll never get back. I live in London and it's stupidly expensive. Although all of my problems, I've kept sending my donations to people, projects to show my support, appreciation, and also charities and family in need. I g…
I don't want to disagree with your sentiment, but it's for the companies who benefit from Babel to donate, not individual techies.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#234BabelJS's idea is so simple, yet huge. BabelJS, or, as I like to call them in my talks, is the "Age of transpilers". The idea of having some sort of meta layer that you compile from to another source is old, but totally underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler With my team we optimized render processes using transpilers/meta language and this totally rocks. I hope that BabelJS will continue…
Transpilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary JS tooling. How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for webdevs to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all. Not only the debugging is breaking down because of them, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find. Framework authors force involuntary decision to use transpilers on people downstream, a…
Compilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary assembler tooling.
How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for embedded developers to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all.
Not only the debugging is breaking down because of UB, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find.
Library authors force involuntary decision to use compilers on people downstream, and everything suffers from that: "feature A breaks with compiler G* 5.0," but because end users simply don't use them, and thus don't file bugs, devs don't know that either.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should they make more than senior engineers with decades of experience in Berlin? Why should customers/users of the project have to pay/donate twice or thrice as much for the same result, just because the devs want to live in the US instead of e.g. Paris?
Why should users of babel feel enttitled not to pay anything at all in contrast with other professions?
Because it's free?
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#236The ecosystem for for node is literally this goddamn comic from xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ Really, my advice is to start holding the node ecosystem hostage until you get properly compensated. Leftpad 'em.
> literally this goddamn comic Isn't this about Daniel, the Curl project maintainer? Don't think curl is used heavily in Node. I think Daniel started Curl in 1997, but if there is one person who thanklessly held a large part of software industry like this, that is Daniel. Such a brilliant and humble person!
I'm sure there are a lot of Daniels out there. (The combination of "Nebraska" and "2003" tells me that there's at least one more, since Daniel Stenberg (a.k.a. Mr cURL) is living in Sweden.)
And I agree - we all owe him a lot. I'm sending him $5 every month via github sponsorship. That itself will not make him rich, but if all users of cURL did.. ;-)
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's mistaken in two ways. First, the tragedy of the commons - aka the public goods problem - is an argument why a commons can't work, full stop. It's precisely mathematically specified. If the conclusion doesn't hold, that's because the assumptions didn't hold. You can certainly argue that the assumptions don't hold in many places, e.g. among Maine lobster gangs or in the woods around Japanese villages, and indeed…
The economic system is literally part of the assumptions. The tragedy of the commons holds up under laissez-faire capitalism. It can be somewhat mitigated under other forms of capitalism but there are examples for commons that pre-date capitalism itself and also specifically enclosure (the formal privatization of common land), which itself pre-dates capitalism. I'm not sure why you think you need to defend the concep…
No, the logic of public goods does not require any assumption about the economic system. Any set of actors whose actions create a negative externality, and who cannot enforce agreements to cooperate (either through the courts or via repeated interactions) will overproduce the externality. So, you could say the assumptions include the legal system. There are numerous tragedies of the commons under socialist economic systems, including environmental degradation and the inefficiency of socialist firms. There are plenty under capitalism too. Berlin under Rhineland capitalism has plenty of litter, just as New York does under Anglo-American capitalism. Hunter-gatherering bands are also perfectly capable of overusing natural resources and failing to cooperate. When they succeed, it's because they get the incentives right - at least, there is a reasonable case for that.[1]
I defend homo economicus to dispel a false impression: that successfully sustained commons refute the idea that humans (a) are self-interested and (b) make optimal choices. You could say that laboratory public goods games do that, but even there you'd have to qualify your argument very carefully.
[1] Guala, Francesco, 2012. Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. Behavioral and brain sciences, 35(1), pp.1-15.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#238Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#239See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve. >The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a…
Looking at the the commit activity of some maintainers, that seems to be correct: 7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202... $110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions
600 open issues
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should users of babel feel enttitled not to pay anything at all in contrast with other professions?
Because it's free?
Until it is gone as developers look for a proper source of income.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...