zhubert
Born on December 23, 2011•365 Karma
I think there's a trust continuum that culminates at giving money no strings attached, but it starts somewhere else. If my goal (as creator of CleverCrow) is to get more people to support maintainers, then I have to open the funnel wide and connect with where people start (transactionally, I'm assuming).
As an aside, when you do login, CleverCrow shows projects that you've starred on GitHub to help find things you might want to support.
Regarding rewarding maintainer effort, I'm shooting for the value prop of "free AI", this only works if reconciliation is per-phase and liquidity is accessible across as many repos as possible. So if I had each reconcile drain the pool, there would be a lot of stalled work and human intervention required.
That said, there are probably some maintainers that don't want "free AI" and that's okay.
I think it's a cool idea, don't get me wrong. But it has to be a very good solution to get adopted, like, it would have to significantly streamline the operations of getting bugs resolved by a FOSS maintainer, and I think it's going to be tough for you to try to beat "fire up my favorite agent in my terminal with an already optimized setup and give it this issue that has $X attached" rather than "I have perhaps inefficient token spend from a platform I have no control over and I have to take 20% less of a donation for that privilege"
In other words, I think you've built this solution for donors, and not FOSS maintainers, but really the bottleneck and problem and who you would be selling this solution to is not donors, but rather FOSS maintainers, and that's who you need to solve for if you want a platform like this to work. The donors have the easy job: they throw money at the problem to help it get solved faster. The FOSS maintainers have the hard job: They have to understand, accept the issue, propose a sensible solution, build it out, test it, etc. And your solution just makes it harder for those end users, because now they have two paths in their development workflow to getting issues resolved that they have to maintain, the non paid path and the paid path. So you're significantly increasing the overhead burden on these people and the material gain promised to those end users as the tradeoff is not convincing at all.
I'll be posting a Show HN soon, but the idea is to let the communities around GitHub repos fund the specific issues they care about while giving the maintainers of said repos agents of their choice to work on them (that they control entirely).
It's certainly possible that it's something much more surprising / sinister, but there is a fairly logical combination of settings that I could see a company could argue lets them use the data for training.
I'm also very certain that few users with these settings would expect the images to be shown to actual people, so I'm not defending Meta.
I know some of the criticism of Meta: many people don't like the way their products are optimized for engagement. I've heard about their weird AI bots interacting on their platform as if they were people. And I know people of all political stripes have had complaints about content moderation and their algorithm.
But all of that is within the bounds of the law and their terms of service.
None of it would remotely approach something like: bypassing the well-advertised features in the glasses that show when the camera is in use and secretly recording things to train AI. It's hard to imagine any company's lawyers approving something like that. (this sounds like what many commenters believe is happening)
FWIW, I suspect this is the relevant section of the Privacy policy:
> "When you use the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses (if available for your device), we use your information, like Media and audio recordings of your voice to provide the service."
from: https://www.meta.com/legal/privacy-policy/
if so, "to provide the service" is doing a lot of work
Two examples that are top of mind…
They exploited browser vulnerabilities not unlike malware to track users’ behavior across the web: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...
They bought a “privacy” VPN app and used it to harvest data, then abused Apple’s enterprise app deployments to continue to ship the app after it was banned from the app store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/jury-finds-meta-...
I think it's anything but logical, if users (like yourself) have no idea what those settings are, as evident from your previous post.
Read the book series. Battle with a culture different than your own. The absolute depression by the third book helps you experience this more than this bullshit Cliff’s notes.
Spend a few hours. Jesus.
I didn’t draw the original premise. I just pointed out that they didn’t understand the Dark Forest. At all.
We had an awesome book club talking about historical sci-fi and modernity. He always saw the optimistic side, how humanity could conquer, but I, child of Amazon, could see the end-stage capitalism.
Makes for fantastic dialogue. Read the book series. It’s worth it!