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The End of Eleventy

brennan.day

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Re: The End of Eleventy

#141

Post by joenot443 »

peteforde wrote: post #58

Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you feel as annoyed by the tone of this post as I do. I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who a…

> but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage

What are some ways that one might do this?

Re: The End of Eleventy

#142

Post by peteforde »

pjmlp wrote: post #82
peteforde wrote: post #58

Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you feel as annoyed by the tone of this post as I do. I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who a…

The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well. I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis. Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, lo…

I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem.

That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get.

I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#143

Post by trinix912 »

pjmlp wrote: post #133
red_admiral wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet. You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.

There are plenty of programs where you can still do that, that gladly accept one time license payment. However think on your own salary and how many copies you need to sell, at what price, per month, to receive the same monetary amount after taxes. Add to it, the amount of new user acquisitions per month, to keep a sustainable salary level.

You’re right about that. But now put the users in the equation. If you’re making and marketing a B2B tool, it’s fine. But for a B2C tool, that tool will have to be so good that people will be willing to keep paying an ongoing subscription. That means that you’re now also competing against other cheaper alternatives (OSS) and people’s other life expenses (including other subscriptions).

It depends on the niche you’re targeting but I’d go as far as to say it might sometimes be better to sell 100 copies at once every now and then, than get 5-10 people who are willing to subscribe and might all cancel their subscriptions a few months later when some other subscription-based tool shows up. For most people it’s easier to justify a one-time $10 purchase than locking in a $10 monthly subscription.

But I agree that there’s no universal solution and it depends on what tool you’re making and in what niche.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#144

Post by PaulHoule »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #115
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well. I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis. Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, lo…

Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying. Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free . This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model traini…

So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me.

Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google.

As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#145

Post by Tomte »

bjackman wrote: post #132
charles_f wrote: post #18

I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y. I refuse to learn anything about ruby, or spend any time upgrading Jekyll or any of the 2 plug-ins I use, and I take a weird pride in that. It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else. I have no idea how it works anymore. For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned. That version o…

Ha, I had a similar story with Jekyll but my build wasn't containerised. At some point it stopped being compatible with the latest [something. Ruby? Gems? I don't care, just build my fucking HTML templates please] so I just migrated to Hugo. I stuck around on Hugo for quite some time and I've never had any such issues yet, but now I've also wrapped the build in Nix. So yeah I'll do the same - if it ever stops working…

Just last week updating Hugo broke my templates. That‘s happening every few months. They deprecate and then remove or rename template variables like crazy.

Great tool, though.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#146

Post by pjmlp »

peteforde wrote: post #142
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well. I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis. Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, lo…

I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciou…

If you open an old Byte or Dr Dobbs magazine, it will be full of ads from companies whose business was utility libraries.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#147

Post by pjmlp »

latexr wrote: post #139
pjmlp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial? On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because. Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy. Adobe tools are subscriptions and they get pirated all the time.

They do, as did Autocad with key locks, the point is to make it harder, as long as it runs locally, there is always a way.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#148

Post by pjmlp »

estimator7292 wrote: post #136
pjmlp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial? On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because. Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take. It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.

The sarcastic tone ignores that was much worse during Napster golden days.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#149

Post by freedomben »

charles_f wrote: post #18

I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y. I refuse to learn anything about ruby, or spend any time upgrading Jekyll or any of the 2 plug-ins I use, and I take a weird pride in that. It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else. I have no idea how it works anymore. For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned. That version o…

I was in the same boat! I love Ruby so the language isn't an issue, but I generally do not like Jekyll. I especially find the template system very limiting. That is especially disappointing since ERB is pretty great. I wish that had been a first class feature.

I use it to generate my resume, and I went almost 10 years without updating Jekyll. Since Claude has come on the scene, I used it to upgrade everything to the latest and it was quite painless. There's something beautiful about a system that is so stable. Sinatra especially is a joy, because it has been so stable for so many years.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#150

Post by MidnightRider39 »

cachius wrote: post #101
MidnightRider39 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but that still requires a non-zero amount of time to setup and most importantly maintain and keep up to date. Pure HTML generated from a text file just works and probably will forever. I mean it’s just my personal website which is mostly just for me to look up things quickly / personal wiki

But the text file has some markup syntax beyond human language? Point being LLMs are subpar for acting on formal grammars, like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. That's why its important tools like 11ty and pandoc remain.

That’s somewhat true (in my case it’s it’s laughably simple though).

I also never said that tools like pandoc are obsolete now. Just in my case they are already overpowered and I might migrate to something simpler soon. Otoh i might just run the current version of 11ty indefinitely and never upgrade.

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