I once set up a 1 month hotspot with Verizon when I moved into a new place that didn’t have internet yet.
After the month, I returned the hotspot to the store and they told me I was all good (in writing too!).
Then I started getting monthly bills that I couldn’t cancel online or over the phone. I repeatedly went into the store and they told me it was a billing mistake and they’d fix it.
Eventually they sent me to collections, my credit score dropped, and a debt collector started coming after me.
It took 2 years to finally get them to stop and to remove it from my credit history.
Verizon is a bad company that doesn’t care about its customers.
This was modus operandi for Comcast as well, along with continuing to bill you for service at an address after you'd canceled and moved off the property. IIRC one older woman went to their local offices and started whaling on things with a hammer in response to this.
I had a very similar story with T-Mobile! I couldn't get the account cancelled without going to the store and presenting ID in order to prove I was the customer because I had forgotten a made-up PIN. This was years ago and even this month they sent me a bill (for zero dollars, but still- why?!)
At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years.
It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y
We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com
This kind of absolutism is crazy. People who are doing 90% of what we want them to do should be greatly celebrated and rewarded. Else we penalize idealistic people who are not perfect instead of penalizing the people who are actually doing the opposite of what we care about (ex. Autodesk).
Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!
The problem with VC-founded projects is that there's some kind of rug-pull, ads, privacy violation (e.g. using repos to train AI) or "feature enhancing" subscription likely coming.
As a user who would need to invest time and effort in using Tangled, I think it's fair to ask to have the plan explained. I'd rather see explicit price for services than see enshittification happen.
Just like engineering, monetizing is an iterative process. As long as they don't make it hard to move off their platform, IMO it's completely fine for them to try different monetization models.
We should celebrate people building open source stuff and in the public. The alternative is for the software tooling ecosystem to look like EE or mechanical engineering tools - all closed source, proprietary, and with super expensive licensing.
It's easy to take open source for granted - 'information wants to be free', but we are at risk of the open source movement dying with proprietary AI completely changing everything about software.
If we penalize people who are working toward the right goal, we contribute to that decline.
This is how you get bad stuff. This mindset will turn the software ecosystem into mechanical / electrical engineering. Closed source, bad, and expensive tools.
This is a website created by a professional lobbyist who still has an active role taking lobbying contracts through a firm they founded called Steinhauser Strategies.
Running a nonprofit is really, really hard and I commend them for doing it. I hope they get through this crisis.
Hack Club almost went insolvent in 2017. We would have, if it wasn’t for 2 friends who stepped in near the end and saved us. Today there are tens of thousands of teens involved and doing amazing things.
I’m disappointed by all the negativity in the comments. I’m not familiar with Session, but raising donor funds is a very different skillset than software engineering and anyone who is trying to do both has my respect.
You are barking up the wrong tree. Ryan can't do anything to make government grants for this kind of work exist.
It would be a huge public service if you could get more public support for open source. Maybe you could do it instead of criticizing Ryan!
Some public support for this kind of work already exists, especially for the Python science ecosystem, but nothing that comes close to "competing" with VC for a project like Deno.
You should be the change you hope to see in the world and make this happen!
This is really not true. It’s important that when people say this, we hold them to it and reward them when they see it through.
The internet has a tendency to penalize people who try to do bold things. As a result, it’s too often strategic to stay quiet and boring and focus on the bottom line.
We shouldn’t be cynical. We should be excited when people say bold things and reward them when they live up to it.
This project was made by a teenager in https://blueprint.hackclub.com, a nonprofit program I'm helping run that helps teenagers learn PCB design and get up to $400 USD in funding to prototype and manufacture their designs!
After the month, I returned the hotspot to the store and they told me I was all good (in writing too!).
Then I started getting monthly bills that I couldn’t cancel online or over the phone. I repeatedly went into the store and they told me it was a billing mistake and they’d fix it.
Eventually they sent me to collections, my credit score dropped, and a debt collector started coming after me.
It took 2 years to finally get them to stop and to remove it from my credit history.
Verizon is a bad company that doesn’t care about its customers.
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