Likely, at least for some. I've caught various chatbots/CLI harnesses more than once inspecting a github repo file by file (often multiple times, because context rot)
But the sheer volume makes it unlikely that's the only reason. It's not like everybody has constantly questions bout the same tiny website.
> I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
as someone that donates plasma twice weekly I wonder what health effects of removing and filtering the blood regularly has if accumulation of byproducts is a major issue
That's somewhat unfair to the site - they are very much still exploring how to visualize information understandably and aesthetically pleasing. Yes, they got started when infographics got really popular, but it's very much a site that's alive and continuing its work.
And really, infographics are rooted in information design. Which in itself is much older than the web. Heck, the canonical popular book - Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - is from 1982.
I know it's not the most popular thing if you can just ask Claude for a quick visualization, but the space is both very rich in information LLMs blissfully ignore, and continues to be fertile ground for explaration.
If you think the facts are "good" or "bad" then take it up w/ the people who can do something about it to make them "better". Typical discussions about stuff like this becomes nonsensical & incoherent b/c whether you think the facts are "good" or "bad" makes no difference to the material reality & again, those are as I have stated them.
If you believe "costly autocomplete" is all you get, you absolutely shouldn't bother.
You're opting for "sorry boss, it's going to take me 10 times as long, but it's going to be loving craftsmanship, not industrial production" instead. You want different tools, for a different job.
I've seen forms that explicitly say to put in all nines if you "don't have one", so that's what I do everywhere that insists on asking but doesn't have a legitimate purpose (ie tax reporting). To any human it should be obvious that all nines indicates an exception.
You can only fix that with leverage. The sudo maintainer doesn't have it. sudo is valuable, but if Todd stepped away, you could (and would) find other maintainers because it's so important.
If you want to fix it, you need organizational heft comparable to the companies using it, and the ability & willingness to make freeriding a more painful experience.
Say, I clone sudo. Clearly, a human applying freedom zero. I use it in my projects. Probably still freedom zero. I use it in my CI pipeline for the stuff that makes me money... corporation or human? If it's corporation, what if I sponsor a not-for-profit that provides that piece of CI infra?
The problem is that "corporation or not" has more shades than you can reasonably account for. And, worse, the cost of accounting for it is more than any volunteer wants to shoulder.
Even if this were a hard and legally enforceable rule, what individual maintainer wants to sue a company with a legal department?
What could work is a large collective that licenses free software with the explicit goal of extracting money from corporate users and distributing it to authors. Maybe.
The challenge is that this doesn't really work for community-developed software.
Let's say somebody uses this scheme for software they wrote. Would anybody else ever contribute significantly if the original author would benefit financially but they wouldn't?
Mediating the financial benefits through a non-profit might help, but (1) there's still a trust problem: who controls the non-profit? and (2) that's a lot of overhead to set up when starting out for a piece of software that may or may not become relevant.
And the shades in between account for the large number of new licensing schemes sprouting, with different restrictions on what is and isn't possible. (Not to mention the large number of "just used it anyways" instances). And it struggles for smaller utilities, or packages of many different things.
It's "worked out" in the sense that it still doesn't really work for a lot of maintainers.
But the sheer volume makes it unlikely that's the only reason. It's not like everybody has constantly questions bout the same tiny website.
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