David Crawshaw: [00:20:18.21] I think that is exactly the right way to frame the question for a business, and I don’t know the answer to a lot of those questions. I can talk to some of the more technical costs involved. What the benefits would be to the company is extremely open-ended to me. I don’t actually – I can’t imagine a way to measure that. Based on talking to customers of Tailscale who deploy it, thinking about the [unintelligible 00:20:43.07] And so to go back to something you said earlier, about how you use it and you don’t pay for it… I think that’s great, because Tailscale has no intention of making money off individual users. That’s not a major source of revenue for the company. The company’s major source of revenue is corporate deployments. And there’s a blog post by my co-founder, Avery, about how the free plan stays free on our website, which sort of explains this… That individual users help bring Tailscale to companies who use it for business purposes, and they fund the company’s existence.

So looking at those business deployments, you do see Tailscale gets rolled out initially at companies for some tiny subset of the things that it could be used for. And it often takes quite a while to roll out for more. And even if the company has a really good roadmap and a really good understanding of all the ways they could use it, it can take a very long time to solve all of their problems with it. And that’s assuming they have a really good understanding of all the things it can do. And the point you’re making, Adam, that people often don’t even realize all the great things you can do with it is true. And I’m sure a tool that helped people explore what they could do would have some effect on revenue.

In terms of the technical side of it and the challenges - there are several challenges. In the very broad sense, the biggest challenge with LLMs is just the enormous amount of what you might call traditional, non-model engineering has to happen at the front of them to make them work well. It’s surprisingly involved. I can talk to some things I’ve been working on over the last year to give you a sense of that… Beyond that, the second sort of big technical challenge is one of Tailscale’s core design principles is all of the networking is end-to-end encrypted. And the main thing an LLM needs to give you insight is a source of data. And the major source of data would be what is happening on your network, what talks to what, how does it all work? And that means that any model telling you how you could change your networking layout, or give you insight into what you could do would need access to data that we as a company don’t have, and don’t want. And so we’re back to - it would have to be a product you run locally, and have complete control over… Which is absolutely – my favorite sorts of products are that. I like open source software that I can see the source code for, compile myself, run locally. That’s how I like all things to be. But trying to get there with LLMs in the state they are today is actually, I think, pretty tricky. I don’t think I’ve seen an actually shipped product that does that really well for people. There’s one, there’s a developer tool that I hear a lot of good talk about, that I don’t – I’m just trying to live-search for it for you. Nope, that’s the wrong one. That’s Magic Shell History, which also sounds really cool. I should use that one.

Jon Calhoun: It’s funny, because I feel like Cory and I deal with completely different audiences, in the sense that his audience is probably corporate people bringing a trainer in, and a lot of times I’m dealing with people who have not the most programming experience in the world, especially web development, and stuff like that. So I’ve actually taken the exact opposite approach of if you’ve seen something like Rails or any of those others, you’ve probably seen MVC, where it’s thrown into Models folder and a Views folder, and I’m like “It’s just gonna be easier to start with that. Let me just show you a way that you can get stuff going with that”, and then I very much do encourage people to spend some time refactoring.

Try a different layout, try reorganizing your stuff, try doing something different… But I want them to see that you can get productive very quickly in Go, even if you don’t do things the exact perfect way, or maybe it’s not the way you’re gonna do it ten years from now; but it’s good to have something to start with.

So I think that just knowing your audience and knowing what all they have to learn… Sometimes when you’re just learning about all these things, you have no idea how to encrypt passwords, you have no idea what CSRF is, you have no idea about all these different things… Trying to tell them “Okay, now we need to learn about context. We need to learn about what’s the context of this comment, where it could change from time to time” - that’s a lot to wrap your head around, so I think just having a way to skip over that is very valuable for some projects.

I think sometimes you can get caught up and think “Well, what if we have to refactor this later?”, but like Cory said, there’s always a chance for a v2… But also, it’s not that hard to start pulling things out and redoing it if you need to. I’ve done this to my own projects several times, and I actually do this pretty frequently as a way to – like, if I have an idea like “I wanna see what if I design my code like this, what does it turn out like, what are the flaws”, I will take an existing database, an existing app, and I’ll be like “Can I rewrite this in this other way?”, and see how it does, see what I think of it.

Drew Wilson: Yeah. So what happened to me was I had sold my company, Plasso, to GoDaddy. And it was literally a dream scenario. An all cash deal, with the option to jump on as an employee, and get a good paycheck and additional payouts if I stay on. So I stayed on there for two years. But with that initial cash sale, I paid back my investors plus some, because they made money on the transaction… And then paid some of my employees that had equity. I made sure everyone who worked with me had equity, so folks made money. And then I had money. And I had never had money before. As a matter of fact, in order to get Plasso to where it was, I had to take out a bunch of loans on the same day, so they would not know about each other, and they wouldn’t show up on the FICO score thing, the credit report. So I took out a bunch of loans on the same day just to keep the company going.

[00:38:24.08] I was making enough for myself, but that’s it. And I needed these other employees to help sell the thing. And so I took on massive debt. The amount of debt that would take me my entire lifetime to get out of if things didn’t work out. And so yeah, I took on that debt… But then, just as I had to fire my last employee, being like “Sorry, I don’t have any money”, literally, that was on a Friday, that was their last day… I came into the office on a Monday, and there’s an email in my inbox from GoDaddy saying “Hey, we’d love to talk about partnering.” And acquisitions always happen under the guise of partnerships. I didn’t know that. And then three months later, I had sold my company. A little over three months. But to me it was like 10 years of my life. It was just so exciting, and at the same time – it’s like a rollercoaster of emotions, because things are going your way, not going your way, is it going to happen, it’s not going to happen… It’s going to happen… Oh, man.

And I didn’t have anybody else. It was just me. I was the only person doing negotiations. There was no advice giver on my end. No lawyers, nothing. It was just me doing it all. And so it was a great experience. It was a great experience. The company acquisition team at GoDaddy is super-nice.

So it was cool, got through it all, made some money… Then I was like “Well, I’ve never had money before. What the crap do I do with money?” And I’m like “There’s got to be a site somewhere –”

Birk Jernström: Yeah. So most of our users are doing Stripe, even though we do offer the Open Collective route. In like complete transparency, this is on our GitHub as well, but I definitely foresee and I’m excited about expanding our payout possibilities in the future. Like PayPal, direct ACH payouts as well to your bank, to just scale that more internationally, and to make it more convenient as well for developers.

Cory Doctorow: Look, there are individual moves, but there’s a limit to the power of individual action, right? If you cannot think of yourself as being part of a group or a polity or class, then there will be a limit to what you can accomplish. Here’s an example that is pretty contemporary, because it deals with the question about AI art. And I’ll just say, as a blanket kind of disclaimer, it’s not artificial, it’s not intelligence, there is no learning. It is statistical inference, or whatever you want to call it. We have to kind of concede a lot of ground to call it AI. It’s like if they decided to call it magic miracle technology, and every time you talked about it you have to go like “Magic miracle technology…” But for the sake of like clarity, let’s just call an AI art, right? So Taylor Swift - very powerful recording artist. She’s arguably the most powerful recording and touring artist in the world. Spotify had colluded with the big three labels to do some extraordinarily dirty stuff.

So when Spotify was launching, they needed to license the catalog of the big three labels Universal, Warner and Sony control six 70% of all the sound recordings in the world, and 60% of all the all the compositions. So you can’t make a move without them. They didn’t invest in that music, they just bought the companies. Again, anti-competitive mergers allowed them to acquire this market dominance. And so when Spotify started, they needed to get the labels on board, and the label said, “Okay, you have to make us your business partners. We want large equity stakes, and we are going to tell you how Spotify works.” And so Spotify did that. And what the label said is “We want the lowest possible royalty rate for the music that you license from us, but we want a minimum guaranteed monthly payout.” So like if your Sony, say, 1/6 of a cent per stream, or whatever it is, and you’re guaranteed $10 million a month… Maybe all the Sony streams streamed this month only add up to $5 million, but Spotify owes you 10 million. The other 5 million are what are called unattributable royalties, and you can do whatever you want with them. You can do them for like new artist development, which might just be sending executives around the world to shows, or you can spend it on studio upgrades, or you can give it as dividends, or whatever. It’s your money.

But the other reason they wanted that rock bottom rate is that every dollar they took out of the company as licensors was a dollar that counted against its cost basis, and made the shares that they had as owners less valuable. Because Spotify gets less profitable the more it has to pay for streams. And so they not only negotiated this, they negotiated something called “most favored nation status”, which means that Spotify could not pay anyone more than they paid the big three, except the other labels, the 30% of labels and independent artists who aren’t the big three - they don’t get minimum monthly payouts, free inclusion on playlists, free advertising, and they don’t get shares. They just get six tenths of a cent per stream.

[42:12] So they then got these huge tranches of shares, which then were worth 10s of billions of dollars when Spotify IPOed. And Taylor Swift was changing labels. And Universal really wanted her to change to Universal. And she said, “I will do that provided that you share that money with the artists, and that you share it with them on a net basis.” So if you make an album, you get paid in advance, and you owe that money back to your label, and then you go into production, and all the money spent in the production is also owned to your label, right down to the taxi fare, to your launch party, and the champagne they serve at it, you owe every penny of that back to your label.

The labels pay you extraordinarily small royalties. The Beatles used to split one penny for ways per LP, but not the whole penny. They got 85% of a penny, because 15% was held back for promotional copies, right? So you will never pay off that debt. And so there are lots and lots of artists who saw their advance and never saw another penny. And if Universal will share the money with them when they could just go in and they say “Okay, well, you owe us $300,000 that you’re never gonna be able to pay back. We’ve just applied some of that Universal money to your account. Now you owe us $200,000 that you’re never gonna be able to pay back”, and they wouldn’t actually give them a penny. Taylor Swift said, “No, you’re gonna give everyone a check.”

Mireille Reece, PsyD: Yeah, and so I would even get real nuanced around happiness and joy, because I would differentiate happiness as more of a positive emotional experience that can be more susceptible to change quicker… As opposed to joy, which is a more deep, abiding, enduring emotional state. I can be joyful and have joy without a sense of happiness, and part of that comes from like “I know the long-term payouts.”

Part of even going to graduate school for psychology was around joy. It wasn’t always happy or fun, but it had so much meaning that that was significant for me to endure all the other things, and that’s what kept me going.

Tobias Koppers: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a problem for contributors or for me that it’s public. I don’t think so many people look it up, what I earn or what contributors earn. Technically, you can download all the contributions, all the payouts to contributors and all the payments by sponsors… It’s basically a [unintelligible 00:26:39.27] but I don’t think it’s used or that anybody cares about how much the contributors earn. It’s not like they’re earning so much that you should have problems with it, so…

Jerod Santo: So only that local browser knows your browsing history to do the payouts?

Adam Stacoviak: I guess what was a little unclear to me - and is maybe still unclear - is how Code Fun sits inside of Gitcoin or ConsenSys… Because you’ve said “you and a developer”, and “we” a couple times, and I’m trying to track how that applies in payouts. Is it autonomous, is it by itself, is it part of Gitcoin, is it a subproduct? What is the state of Code Fund right now as it pertains to Gitcoin, or even ConsenSys at large.

Adam Stacoviak: And you can have big payouts, too.

Andrew Godwin: Oh, you mean for the Channels. Yes, we had a formalized Channels one from the start. Django, as it grows as a project, we like having formal ways of doing things so there’s no skirting around the problem. When money’s involved, accusations of fraud or favoritism. We have a neutral committee that I’m not on that approves that stuff, and there’s a process. I work with the person who has a proposal, we put it to the committee, they discuss it and then come up with a result. We have a separate structure already for Django called the DSF - the Django Software Foundation; they handle the money and the payouts and stuff as well. So it’s all very well formalized; I’m very happy with how above board and understandable it is. It’s very hard to accuse of favoritism in that respect.