This is fine, basically geocities. But you may have a hard time introducing the term "agentic" at a time when AI "agents" are on the rise.

everything is agentic now

Honestly, there's nothing better than the Cracking the Cryptic app for sudoku, called "Sven's Sudoku Pad." People who love sudoku have congregated around that channel. It's updated regularly and there are a lot of puzzles that can be imported into it. It gives you very helpful pencil mark controls including colors and differently placed marks. There really just hasn't been another app that compares to the level of production for this Sven's.

Also the novel rulesets make it so much more interesting than vanilla sudoku. Oftentimes the puzzles have really abstract/mathematical/beautiful break-ins. Definitely adds a lot of variety and replayability.

Chat is not asynchronous communication. It's not the best synchronous communication, sure, but it's certainly not asynchronous. Dropping typing indicators isn't necessarily going to make everything more asynchronous. There are business patterns and pressures that push us to need realtime or semi-realtime answers. And so often, the tool we use for that is chat. True asynchronous communication is a change in business, not just the tools we use.

Typing indicators can be useful in some situations. It's nice not having to wait for someone to finish a thought to know that an issue is being addressed. Heavyweights can jump into a conversation and pause it immediately so people aren't spinning their wheels trying to figure out something they really don't know much about.

It's also useful in 1:1 chats to know if the person on the other side is there or not. If I don't see an indicator (or read-receipt) in the next few seconds, I'll go make another cup of coffee.

> It’s costly to have government employees because you have to pay benefits and they are unionized.

Sometimes people say the quiet parts out loud.

Driving to work is not a choice for a lot of people particularly lower class. Our cities our built around cars. As people move out of the city to save money, that makes driving even more necessary and makes public transit less of a viable option. This program relies on a very naive belief that people can control their amount of driving, but we don't control sprawl at an individual level, we don't control infrastructure. Who is this going to benefit but the bougie Tesla owners who work remotely anyway?

You're making some assumptions. Why can't programmers be workers in the coop and be part of the equation? Why can't forms of capital available to other startups be available to coops?

> Why can't forms of capital available to other startups be available to coops?

... because then it wouldn't be a co-op. The whole point of a co-op is that it is owned by the workers/producers/consumers instead of equity investors.

As long as the members co-operators own 50%+1 you can take external funding - doesn't always workout as Poptel found

Hmm, they probably could be. But it may be difficult to recruit and retain good ones. Coops tend to have a compressed salary spectrum, which is good for lower wage workers like taco drivers, and bad for higher wage workers like programmers.

Actually, there are a lot of high wage workers like programmers who opt to work in co-ops because the ownership model aligns with their values and they find the work both financially and also intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. You need look no further than Ampled.com, which has a robust team of "contributors" who are all working to build and improve the platform on a volunteer basis. Ampled has built a system to track everyone's contributions which will be honored down the road once the co-op has more $ in the bank. And these are top notch folks who have come from Kickstarter and other related platforms (and who also clearly have a lot of economic privilege to be able to work in this arrangement for the time-being).

Agreed, people who believe it ideologically will be attracted. It just seems like that would still make it hard to recruit if the money is much worse, though -- there are only so many people willing to take a huge pay cut.

I would personally give up half of my income to work at a cooperative. Weirdly enough, I don't see many cooperatives hiring software engineers specifically.

You're in luck! Driver's Seat Co-op is currently hiring for a software engineer and UX/UI designer. The founders are smart and committed and also just really thoughtful and kind guys. https://www.driversseat.co/careers

Thank you! Seems like a great opportunity. Applied :)

Does depend on coop - a fully flat worker coop is very rare

Not fully flat, no; just compressed.

Why would a VC invest in a co-op? What would be the exit strategy that would allow them to be paid off at the multiple needed to compensate for the risk? In a worker-owned co-op, there is none, so they won’t have access to venture capital as Uber could raise.

They can get different types of financing perhaps.

Unless they use revenue-based financing, a VC wouldn't invest in co-ops. As you point out, their need for an exit strategy that revolves around an increase in the price of equity doesn't align well with co-ops striving for building longer-term wealth for their community. That's why we see co-ops funded through loan funds, angel investment, and a new breed of equity funds trying to fill the gap, like The Equitable Economy Fund (https://www.equitablefund.net/)

I can't believe these questionnaires have become so pervasive that it's spawning an industry. I hate these things. They are such a burden on the small, niche software vendor.

We totally agree! At our last company these were a major PITA and slowed us down a lot because when we first started working with other businesses, we were not prepared to handle them at all. We want to help remove the burden from small software vendors, and we think our pricing model is super user friendly :)

> Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to improve every year.

Improve how? Should I need economic growth to get better health care? This whole techno-utopian argument seems to hinge on extractive growth because it fails to actually tackle the problems of inequality by providing true redistribution of wealth in any meaningful sense. Trickle-down AI is a sham.

I'm very skeptical of this. It doesn't seem like something that could scale. By accessing database files through PHP, you are begging for race conditions while serving multiple requests simultaneously. At best, you will hit write-errors while other requests are working with the file. SQLite has a good explanation of the problem here: https://sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

You are correct, it is suitable for small-medium traffic websites with less write operations and more read operations. We have a simple file locking mechanism to handle this situation. The caching part makes it a static storage by combining multiple files per query.

Seems great for blogs and marketing sites, especially if you've got a CDN in front.

I went into this article with so much skepticism, but yeah, the author addresses all of my concerns. This is a cool project and now I get why you'd do it this way.