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Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

mitchellh.com

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Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#71

Post by bryanlarsen »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #32
thomascountz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.

Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.

Unhappiness and happiness are surprisingly orthogonal. Removing unhappiness does not make you happy, it makes you not unhappy[1]. Being not unhappy is a requirement for happiness, but it's not sufficient.

1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#72

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #51
sph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.

EDIT: comment was under incorrect parent. my error. moved it to correct location. EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing. Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison. There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.

I don't feel the parent post is about bad envy. There is also good envy, when you feel happy for someone's blessings. But you also would like to have it for yourself.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#73

Post by adrian_b »

colesantiago wrote: post #11

Doesn't this prove that Mitchell Hashimoto is probably the only "good billionaire"? I thought all billionaires were bad?

It is very likely that most billionaires are very bad.

That does not mean that there are no good billionaires. There are even billionaires who have become billionaires by being bad, but who nonetheless have attempted after that to do only good things, perhaps to atone for their past sins.

Mitchell Hashimoto appears to really be one of the good ones.

I have recently discovered the ghostty open-source terminal emulator, written by him in recent years, which appears to have some advantages that I value, over its competitors, and I have switched to it, after using a very large number of other terminal emulators in the past, and switching between them whenever I encountered a better one.

Therefore I am grateful to him for his good programming work, shared with the world.

Most of ghostty is written in Zig, so there is little doubt that he likes the language, thus there is no surprise that he is choosing it for a donation.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#74

Post by Npovview »

mi_lk wrote: post #10

Nothing more beautiful when game recognizes game.

I wish Rich people did this more often. Not just rich people but rich companies. Not just rich companies but rich governments. But we are a broken society. People should be paying more to OSS for building digital infrastructure.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#75

Post by wickrom »

Lerc wrote: post #34

It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has repr…

I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#76

Post by bryanlarsen »

bluGill wrote: post #50
Herbstluft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What that always leaves out, however, is that no/little money can very much cause a lot of unhappiness.

The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.

That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#77

Post by Xirdus »

sph wrote: post #47
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.

> Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either. Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer? At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more…

More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were.

More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).

So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#79

Post by b-kf »

hresvelgr wrote: post #8

Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1]. [1] https://jangafx.com/

Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.

I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).

Re: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

#80

Post by acedTrex »

I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level.

Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim.

I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.

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