Yeah abstain from having a life and a family just so you can afford to spend your days hacking on other people's websites for free as a hobby or something.
Come now. Plenty of people on HN insist in AI threads that artists and creatives should only work for passion and love and not corrupt the purity of their craft with the vulgar drive to make money. Suffering and hunger only drive one to greater innovation after all. So why not apply that philosophy to tech as well?
When so much of the web is currently being destroyed by capitalist incentives, shouldn't we go back to the days when quirky nerds just built and maintained websites as a hobby? Why should any of us be paid for any of this when money ruins everything?
The point is you do it for you. Just because you like it. And you also get to do it however you want, whenever you want, with no obligation to anyone else.
Money gets involved when people want you to work on their stuff. Nobody really cares about other people's stuff. So either they do it themselves or they pay other people to get them to work on it. Sometimes even money doesn't get people to do it. I was offered money to develop some features on an open source project and I certainly wanted to take up that offer, the problem is literally days later I got engaged and that overrode all other concerns. I should probably see if the offer's still on the table when life winds down a bit.
> shouldn't we go back to the days when quirky nerds just built and maintained websites as a hobby?
That's what I do. And that's why my website doesn't have a new article every single week. Because I only work on it when I feel like it.
You raspberry pi guys act like anything is possible and energy is infinite.
Not everyone is bill gates