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It is increasingly important to be able to see that many things are true. There is no single "truth". Many things are true at the same time, and in all aspects of life. Each brain is like a band pass filter, and the effort we should make is to try to imagine the points of view of others, which are just different slices of the same world. Then embrace the slices we like, and just ignore the ones we don't, but don't argue or fight for our slice as it if was the only one.

Different opinion != being weird.

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.

I use Ghost TTY coming from iTerm for no other reason than I saw everybody else using and praising it.

Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.

This is not the main reason for the ban. You can read the linked post in the article that explains the AI ban thing in more depth.

You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.

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 us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.

The most beautiful form of power.

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!

what was your original comment? I’m pretty sure it was a lot more critical sounding.

Then do?

In the case of Zig, You can see their financial reports here:

https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/

Most of it goes to contributors.

https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials

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.

https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html

Can you elaborate on what you find to be an issue?

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 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.

It's because you only hear about the loud ones. There are lots doing good work.

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.

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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office

Giving away less than 0.1% of your worth over 6 years doesn't prove anything about anything. It's cool for the Zig project though.

There are billionaires who gave over 99% of their wealth away by the time they died who make for much more debates with much more interesting exchanges.

I am sure there are some bad billionaires. That moniker is used to demonize them for the most part.

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.

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.

Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.

I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language:

- No hidden control flow.

- No hidden memory allocations.

- No preprocessor, no macros.

Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.

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).