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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • Python is Spanish; a ton of people learned a bit in school and never picked it back up again. Places that speak it natively all have their own conventions because, even though the native languages were replaced by colonizers, a lot of the native languages patterns remained in place. Most places that speak it are super welcoming and stoked that you’re trying to learn.



  • I’m invested because higher adoption of my preferred platform causes prices of said platform to drop, making the platform economically attractive to develop for.

    Fewer users causes less effort to go into the platform by larger corporations due to lower revenue streams, diminishing updates and feature count over time.

    Eventually, users leave due to pain points not being addressed. Shrinking user bases causes independent developer talent to focus on other platforms since the economics no longer work in the marginal case.

    The shrinking independent developer contributions to the ecosystem make the required effort to develop for it that much higher, since the tools and apps that would have been built weren’t.

    Higher development costs slow down feature pacing, due to the increased effort needed to substitute the efforts of missing ecosystem developers.

    Lack of feature cadence drives users to other platforms, shrinking the user base, bringing us back to step 1.












  • The difference is that, for Windows, a million other people have seen your problem most of the time, so there’s usually some kind of support article that can point you in the right direction on how to fix your problem without having to dive into the docs.

    Linux just doesn’t have that luxury. If I were getting paid to solve the problem, sure, I’d probably have figured it out in a day or so as a Linux noob. But I’m not. My free time is limited. I don’t need to know much about Windows because it works pretty much all the time (ymmv).




  • My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn’t, SMS was fine because that’s how I was going to talk to them anyway.

    The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn’t work with 99% of the other people in their lives.

    They own and run a pretty large business. There’s no way that they’re staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they “should” do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.

    Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.