At least in some countries authors get a compensation every time their book is borrowed from a library. So you might still be indirectly supporting the author when borrowing from a library. Also if there’s enough demand, the library may acquire additional copies and the prices for libraries are higher than for consumers.

https://equityatlas.org/how-do-authors-make-money-from-libraries/

Conversely, when you are borrowing a book from an author you like, you probably are supporting them and do not need obliged to purchase it for yourself.

I guess they were referring to this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/

In one of the Tantacrul’s videos he says that UI/UX people do try to help and share their expertise, but the programmers running the projects ignore them or are actively dismissive, so they give up.

https://youtu.be/12TJ-zTgiH0 Around 16:20

While more donations and contributors are always welcome, the thing open source projects really need to break through are project leaders and UX designers to polish the software to make it more appealing.

Blender has come a long way in recent years by concentrating on these. There are also excellent videos by Tantacrul about his work on Musescore and Audacity after he made a video about Musescore and they got in touch with him to fix the problems he brought up.

Delta was first one I have heard of, but when you think about it, it would be surprising if it was the first one when email over network has existed over 50 years. What other ones are there?

I guess that’s why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.

https://delta.chat/en/

I wish it would just be these small scale maintenance tasks with clear purpose and results. But instead it’s endless uncertainty and insecurity about your health and job and finances where you never know if you have done enough or if your efforts even matter. Keep grinding every day just to be rug pulled by something you could not have anticipated or have no control over. Descaling coffee machine is simple and rewarding: you see a problem, you have the means to address the problem, you do the thing and you have the satisfaction of a job done also reaping the benefits immediately.

You ask an LLM to code something and then just run the code blind without reading it and if it seems to work, publish the application. You can imagine how many performance and security problems it produces.