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Water Blower
6b9da920c4b6ecbf2c12018a7a2d143b4dfdf9878c3beac69e39bb597841cc6e
Creator of Blowater & I self identify as a Pro Sleeper

Just recovered from my illness. A small PR to get started https://github.com/BlowaterNostr/blowater/pull/344

https://blowater.app used to freeze a bit if you send messages immediately after the app loads. No more.

Now I am interesed in their music.

Yes, I totally see your points and I agree that needs to more softwares.

We should take game industry as an inspiration. Many games have mods and modular design. Minecraft is the best example. Without coding, players can create interesting new things from existing rules.

However, functionality software is not like this at large. To extend a functionality software, one has to code. Examples are:

Small nostr clients, VS code extensions

Worse, centralized platform software does not even allow you to extend with code.

Therefore, to address this problem, having more programmers is not the key. To have more no-code, extendable software is the key.

When users find composing with existing modules (minecraft building blocks) not enough, they will have a reason to learn the code.

Fun should be the consequence of good work. Fun should be built in to the process. It should not be a dopamine impulse introduced only by external factors. That’s the difference between deep joys and shallow fun.

In another works, if your work is truly amazing, it will produce fun eventually. But the process will have difficulties.

Replying to Avatar David King

Who Builds Software Matters

On the declining production costs and coming remixability of software

“As we become more sophisticated, our ideas about what our word processor, ourgraphics system should do for us diverge more and more from those of the initial designers. We now want to edit our tools as we have previously edited our documents.”

-Alan Kay, Apple Computer Corporation, Sept 1984

The High Cost of Software

Software is expensive to build today because there are very few software engineers. There are about 8 billion people in the world, but only about 28 million software developers. So the number of people who can build software rounds to roughly 0. Yet everyone in the world wants and needs software. Up till now, we’ve been prevented from getting what we actually want due to the high cost of production. Talented engineers only have a limited number of hours in a day to build so they need to get paid for their rare skill.

Software for the Masses

Building software has been expensive so we’ve become accustomed to accepting software designed for the masses. Today’s designers aim to serve the broadest set of users possible so the high cost of building gets amortized over a large number of people. That means no one gets exactly what they want, but everyone gets something that’s good enough to be useful.

AI changes WHO builds software

AI brings us tools that democratize software development. As production becomes cheaper, it changes who can build software. This changes how software gets designed, developed, and deployed, which creates an explosion in how much new software gets built. We can appreciate how AI code generation models help software engineers build. It’s easy to see how these tools can improve their efficiency. But we can organize these same tools in ways that change who builds software. And who builds software matters.

You can squint and see a future where we can all build our own custom software. We’ve seen this kind of auto-generation in the domains of language, images, and video. We'll soon see it in the domain of software creation.

Free-to-build encourages remixing

In the future you’ll notice a simple need and you’ll be able to conjure up a micro-app in minutes to address it. The economics of creating and owning software changes. Anything a user dreams up is low effort to create and copyable by someone else. That’s a good thing. It makes software more like media. Micro-apps become building blocks. Other users can remix them adding new functionality. We can now equip software with the same memetic super powers as we have with short-form video. This is the future of software. But no one has built the end-to-end tools to enable this yet.

These user-to-user creative interactions make the value of software compound. But we’ll need some network (or protocol?) to manage the specifications and data across these apps if they’re going to be collaborative.

Forget the drudgery of design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, upgrading, and data migration. This will happen behind the scenes. Who thinks about flipping electrical signals in silicon these days? We operate at a higher level of abstraction.

Implications of an AI codegen revolution

+ The amount of software created increases by at least 3 orders of magnitude. Likely much more like 5-10 orders of magnitude.

+ The concept of “charging for apps” feels dated. If everyone can conjure anything into existence for pennies, why “buy” when you can “create”? “Make me a free version of app ABC”.

+ The importance of modern app stores declines. Non-technical users create micro-apps and use them. For this to work it needs to be simple. This future might look like something of a super-app for user-generated micro-apps. Or they get deployed as PWAs.

+ How data gets stored and shared could get radically reimagined.

+ These micro-app/remix concepts may themselves become the basis for a new type of app store. If this were a company, I think it would likely become the most important company in AI.

+ A new layer of collaboration commoditizes adjacent AI layers. A hyperscaler could attempt to build this layer, but it seems as likely as someone new doing it.

At this point it's all up for grabs. If you’re building something like this DM me — I’d love to play with your project and give feedback!

Actually 28 million is way too many. That’s 1 programmer per 285 people.

It very ineffective per programmer to not even serve 285 people.

We don’t need more programmers. We need more good engineers. But, maybe the only way to have more good engineers is to have more base number.

It’s very hard to find dedicated people to work on new & challenging things. Most people are one of either lazy, greedy, lack of skills, easy to give up or insecure.

I used to make much more than 10K USD per month and I quitted my job to work on Nostr full-time many months before nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m donated to OpenSats.

If not for OpenSats, I won’t even make a living. Even with the grant, I am willing to only make a fraction of what I used to make. This is my commitment.

I can’t guarantee that I can continue it forever. But, I will carry on at least til the end of the grant and many months afterwards.

My point is, to find the right person to work on Nostr and Blowater in particular, they have to be so damn dedicated that they will do it for free because they believe in it so much. So that they will continue to work on it even it’s a bad day. They will continue to work on it even it doesn’t provide emotional joy & excitement anymore. They carry on, they hold their professionalism even more than they hold their bitcoins, if needed.

I am not here to just have fun. Having fun is part of my life. But it’s shallow. I am here to have deep thoughts and do deep work. Having fun is just the side effects, not my goal. Fun is fundamentally dopamine impulse and can’t last very long.

This is the difference between a developer and a user.

Only good developers can attract good users. Not the other way around.

Open source projects community can really benefit from Nostr. This is https://godotengine.org/community/

Meaning, scams will eventually become mainstream. Like "fake it to make it"?

Or do you mean that "scams density" is an indicator for nostr popularity?

Am I the only one feeling they became more stylistic when getting older?

What happened today to the market?

Replying to Avatar daniele

nostr:npub1dww6jgxykmkt7tqjqx985tg58dxlm7v83sa743578xa4j7zpe3hql6pdnf as per your request here is a first step of the restyling proposal for Blowater.

More info in the Github issue:

https://github.com/BlowaterNostr/blowater/issues/343

#nostrdesign

learned helplessness and victim mentality is absolutely toxic. Growth mindset is the only way out.

P.S. The new UI of Damus is nice.

Some people have this distinguishing between fiat world and Nostr world. The concept by itself is fine but misleading as if they are separate. Before any of these concepts, there is the real, physical world.

Do you want to escape from real world to Nostr as a refugee? Or do you want to make the real world actually more comfortable and better for you and other people to live in, by leveraging Nostr?

Big difference.

Nobody can escape the real world and people who hallucinates about escaping seriously need therapists and I just can’t stand with this pessimistic and pathetic mentality.