[TheDong]

For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works.

Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work.

Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages for me, but that deprives me of the joy of creating and running a botnet to index webpages, storing 100s of terrabytes of scraped data, and writing my own search code.

Targeting hackers is indeed a sucker's game.

[popcorncowboy]

> but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling

I'm 90% sure you're serious, but that didn't stop me having the best belly laugh for a solid few minutes at this. Thank you.

[lqstuart]

I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.

[sgarland]

If that; I’ve met plenty who only care that they work, not how they work.

As someone who works in infra and dabbles in coding, this is a continual bugbear, because often I’ll find an optimization while troubleshooting “my” problem, and the dev team is disinterested in implementing it. Their endpoints are meeting their SLO, so who cares?

[Bjorkbat]

I've honestly thought of hacker spirit as embodying a kind of homesteader ethos in a way. There's this homesteading book I bought a long time ago when I was in college, rich with illustrations on how to do everything from raise animals and grow food to building a house, processing lumber, drilling a well, everything. The same fascination I have with homesteading and DIY culture extends into my interest in technology, and I suspect this is the same with a lot of developers as well.