What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.
Seems obvious the parent comment was making a point about how much money it is and not just whether it feels nice to donate money. 400k can go a long way
I don't feel the parent post is about bad envy. There is also good envy, when you feel happy for someone's blessings. But you also would like to have it for yourself.
In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.
Not sure about the motivation behind the comment, but small donations help too and provide you with a good feeling. Almost anyone here can probably part with the equivalent sum of money of a mobile phone plan in their country and split it across their most valued open source projects. I've honestly come to the conclusion that if you rely on open source software you simply should.
Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of use spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.
Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.
Unhappiness and happiness are surprisingly orthogonal. Removing unhappiness does not make you happy, it makes you not unhappy[1]. Being not unhappy is a requirement for happiness, but it's not sufficient.
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
The person you are replying to agrees that money can get rid of things that cause unhappiness. The point is that removing unhappiness is only part of what creates happiness, and money can’t buy the other part.
> Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer?
At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were.
More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).
So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.
I don’t agree with you. Most of the things you mention are the same level of pain and unhappiness regardless of if you have, or not have money. The one with the peers is misguided because with enough money maybe you don’t need your peers! Freedom of choice.
Money won't cure pain and suffering (although it does make trial lawyers happy) but even there it can buy better care. But pretty much everything else in life is better and more enjoyable with more money. You can live in a nicer house, in a better neighborhood, with better schools, with better goods and services, with more things to do, etc. You can travel more, in a more comfortable style. You can support other projects, artists, charity, etc.
And the remaining unhappinesses can end up in starker relief, as you continuously try to remove all unhappinesses from your life to nearly impossible and sometimes distorted degrees.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.
That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.
This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct).
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
No it's not. It might vary by country and culture but in the west that amount has consistently been found to be well over the poverty line and more often over double the median household income.
People conflate the ideas of happiness, and comfort. Money buys access to increasing levels of comfort, but comfort becomes normalized very quickly. Once you've become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, the luxury of it wears off and it becomes a new norm. You also have an expectation to, at a minimum, maintain wealth so that you don't lose access to your current level of comfort.
When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.
> Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it
What a hyper-capitalist statement. You are living a sad life if money and status is all that is driving you.
This person is free to do what they like. Family, friends, hobbies, philanthropy, … But apparently they have been stuck in a hamster wheel, chasing money and status their whole life, without ever stopping to think what they actually want or like, what is important to them.
I mean, the answer is so obviously in front of our faces right now... :-)
Use the free time to learn some Zig! And start a life of happily giving back powerful and useful GPL software to put your own 2 cents on the mountain of society building blocks that allowed you to thrive in such a way to begin with.
Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding.
Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up.
Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
The kinds of people that become billionaires are not those who are happy, the hole in their sole is why they are billionaires in the first place. Yes there are exceptions, just like with everything.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
People who get rich by accident (e.g. lottery winners) typically spend it all and end up back where they started. Money is hard to hold on to for people who are unsophisticated about money. Predators and grifters come out of the woodwork to take a lot of it, and the rest gets frittered away on trinkets.
It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level.
Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim.
I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.
I really appreciate the "it's okay to be weird" sentiment. It has never been easier to try out a crazy idea. We may as well embrace it and try to learn something.
This is great IMO. I like zig as a language and the idea behind it. But boy, it has a syntax issue. I with they figure out better syntax before 1.0, developer ergonomics I think are as important.
Zig has multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but it's one of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
I wish Rich people did this more often. Not just rich people but rich companies. Not just rich companies but rich governments. But we are a broken society. People should be paying more to OSS for building digital infrastructure.
> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source.
> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.
Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)
(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)
I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.
Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.
There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)
This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
As things are right now, I see this as a respectable way of operating.
Michael has made his views and usage of AI known. The Ghostty project has a detailed AI policy for users to see and the team is willing to devote resources to enforcing a middle ground policy. The Zig project has a detailed policy taking a strict stance and as a result I expect they do not have expend as much resources when a contribution is suspected of being AI assisted.
A strict policy on either side is easier to enforce based on finite resources (mostly people). I'm sure many projects would like to have a middle ground policy but cannot currently devote the resources it would require long term. We might never see a shift in moderation abilities and this remains for the longer term, or there could be advanced in moderation that allows projects to adopt a more nuisanced policy that's right for them.
I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs.
In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)
It is very likely that most billionaires are very bad.
That does not mean that there are no good billionaires. There are even billionaires who have become billionaires by being bad, but who nonetheless have attempted after that to do only good things, perhaps to atone for their past sins.
Mitchell Hashimoto appears to really be one of the good ones.
I have recently discovered the ghostty open-source terminal emulator, written by him in recent years, which appears to have some advantages that I value, over its competitors, and I have switched to it, after using a very large number of other terminal emulators in the past, and switching between them whenever I encountered a better one.
Therefore I am grateful to him for his good programming work, shared with the world.
Most of ghostty is written in Zig, so there is little doubt that he likes the language, thus there is no surprise that he is choosing it for a donation.
I’m not going to personally donate a little under 0.1% of my net worth, and I may seem a hypocrite, but at some point you have to acknowledge that it’s a maddening, life changing amount of money that in no way would have a noticeable effect on his life. On the other hand, it could hurt most people’s ability to pay rent to give away that money.
Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.
Billionaires have an extraordinary economic footprint and level of influence. They employ teams of people managing their affairs through their family offices [0].
I do not think they should be thought of or spoken of as individuals, they are brand entities. Their true intentions are as unknowable from scale and complexity and opacity as, I don't know, Macy's.
Commenting on if any specific billionaire is a uniformly good or bad person distracts from the more important conversation on what the optimal number of billionaires should be and what the tradeoffs are in recalibrating the system.
I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist.
The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1].
Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.
I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.
Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of use spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
> Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Was it too hard to read beyond the first comma?
Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer?
At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).
So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.
And money does certainly buy health in the US.
For example, money can pay for better medical care.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
But spending your life pursuing an unsatisfiable goal (because the goal is “more”) probably isn’t good for your happiness.
Not to mention, there are very satisfying ways to contribute to things you think are important that don’t necessarily involve a lot of money.
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.
I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.
What a hyper-capitalist statement. You are living a sad life if money and status is all that is driving you.
This person is free to do what they like. Family, friends, hobbies, philanthropy, … But apparently they have been stuck in a hamster wheel, chasing money and status their whole life, without ever stopping to think what they actually want or like, what is important to them.
Use the free time to learn some Zig! And start a life of happily giving back powerful and useful GPL software to put your own 2 cents on the mountain of society building blocks that allowed you to thrive in such a way to begin with.
I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding.
Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up.
Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...)
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/
Most of it goes to contributors.
Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim.
I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.
> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.
Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)
(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)
I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.
Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.
There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)
This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
Michael has made his views and usage of AI known. The Ghostty project has a detailed AI policy for users to see and the team is willing to devote resources to enforcing a middle ground policy. The Zig project has a detailed policy taking a strict stance and as a result I expect they do not have expend as much resources when a contribution is suspected of being AI assisted.
A strict policy on either side is easier to enforce based on finite resources (mostly people). I'm sure many projects would like to have a middle ground policy but cannot currently devote the resources it would require long term. We might never see a shift in moderation abilities and this remains for the longer term, or there could be advanced in moderation that allows projects to adopt a more nuisanced policy that's right for them.
In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)
I thought all billionaires were bad?
That does not mean that there are no good billionaires. There are even billionaires who have become billionaires by being bad, but who nonetheless have attempted after that to do only good things, perhaps to atone for their past sins.
Mitchell Hashimoto appears to really be one of the good ones.
I have recently discovered the ghostty open-source terminal emulator, written by him in recent years, which appears to have some advantages that I value, over its competitors, and I have switched to it, after using a very large number of other terminal emulators in the past, and switching between them whenever I encountered a better one.
Therefore I am grateful to him for his good programming work, shared with the world.
Most of ghostty is written in Zig, so there is little doubt that he likes the language, thus there is no surprise that he is choosing it for a donation.
Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.
I do not think they should be thought of or spoken of as individuals, they are brand entities. Their true intentions are as unknowable from scale and complexity and opacity as, I don't know, Macy's.
Commenting on if any specific billionaire is a uniformly good or bad person distracts from the more important conversation on what the optimal number of billionaires should be and what the tradeoffs are in recalibrating the system.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office
In particular Lauren Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Warren Buffet is essentially bequeathed the majority of his wealth to good causes.
A lot of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is phenomenal (despite the recent and disturbing Epstein news).
George Soros has funded a lot of good causes, depending on how far you want to believe the conspiracy theories.
Harris Rosen funded free daycares and university tuition to benefit an impoverished Orlando community.
Dolly Parton's philanthropy is legendary.
A lot of the Robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller's) bequeathed to causes that Americans are still benefiting from today.
Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, pretty much gave the company away for environmental causes.
Chuck Feeney pretty much gave away 99% of his wealth.
The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
[1] https://jangafx.com/
I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).