> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.
Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.
Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.
Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.
I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.
If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.
But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.
Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.
Just pre ordered one. It reminds me of my first and favorite smartwatch - Withings Activité. Sadly, that one broke after 2 or 3 years, and since then I haven't found a smartwatch I'm willing to wear daily. My Apple Watch is now strictly used for workouts only.
They share a lot of similarities:
- Round dial
- Analog hands (though Round 2 simulates this with e-ink)
- Long battery life (Round 2 is ~2 weeks. I remember Withings lasting months on a coin battery)
- Thin and light
- No speaker, so no noise
These are the features I appreciate. I love gadgets, but for smartwatches, I want them to maintain a classic watch appearance. I don't want to worry about charging it every day, and I don't want too many features and notifications to distract me.
As for the "smart" part, I want the tech to focus on sensors, i.e. recording movement and sleep. The rest goes for aesthetics, like changing interesting watch faces now and then. That's really it. Most products on the market are no what I want because what the tech brings on them are interference and inconvenience.
From a basic feature perspective? Sure, they work. But the original Activité is incomparable by design, it’s the only one I really loved.
Once my original broke and I realized they weren't making that specific design anymore, I just lost interest in buying from the brand. The new models just don't have the same appeal.
The only thing shown of the UI is a screenshot of the launcher, I still don't understand how the system looks or feels to use. Besides, the entire launch video is too tedious and flashy. It's quite sarcastic of them to claim they hate long presentations full of nonsense at the very beginning.
The other comment already answers part of it, there is no real need for it for a NixOS system as you usually either can consult the store on the machine (and recursively build a graph of a all transitive dependencies of a generation), have a system that stores the config along with the generation (option `system.copySystemConfiguration` or a flake-based system will store the config in the store itself).
A system that has neither a store nor the config (container image) not easily reconstructable as you miss too much metadata.
microlink's cards [1] I discovered years ago has similar functionality, and microlink itself [2] is much more sophisticated on leveraging a headless chrome.
