u/Decaf_GT

I am NOT the original author. I found it on Twitter floating around and I think it makes some incredible points. A few excerpts I like:

If we are to accept unconditionally that time spent has value, we have no choice but to also accept that time saved has value too.

...

But when you argue that forgiving their student debt would be unfair because you had to pay yours, you’re asking me to agree that they should suffer through it too for no other reason than that you already did.

Sure, make them pay back every penny. I mean, you’re not getting any of those years or any of that money back, but hey, thank God it was fair. God forbid someone else gets a slightly better shot at life.

...

I think a much bigger problem is that a lot of people just don’t have anything interesting to add to a particular discourse. If you’re repeating an opinion I’ve heard a hundred times, what am I supposed to get from hearing it again from you? LinkedIn was famous for this before AI, and God knows what it looks like now.

...

What a fucking luxury to have generations of people choosing your examples for you, and then compare them with whatever annoyed you on your feed this afternoon.”

Then perhaps that should be the narrative that you give for your app, as opposed to making a title that makes it seem like it's entirely about replacing Spotlight. Those first impressions matter.

Next time try asking your LLM to do some research on what the most generic "just launched" or "i built" thread titles are, and what seems to turn people off, and to help you come up with something that is honest and far less wordy than those posts.

I respect the hustle, but I don't have to sugarcoat my words. Hopefully you don't take it the wron gway.

"Hey Claude, give me a promotional post for my Reddit thread to launch my app"

That's why.

I guess it's that time of the year when someone makes something interesting in open source and then everyone rushes it to add it to their paid slop app.

If you want this functionality but don't want to pay $30 for a weird AIO tool, it's full free and open source here: https://digup.si/

It's using an embedding model that runs locally.

Or you could just use Mole.

It's because there's a subset of people within these local/self hosted communities who don't think farther than "corpo bad, local good".

I love open software. I love the idea of running my own models and the privacy it gives me.

But involving other people like this completely negates their right to privacy as well. I'm just replacing one gatekeeping wiretapper with another, only this time I'm the gatekeeper/wiretapper. It's absurd.

Your thinking is flawed as you're assuming corporations are going to violate privacy the same way parents do.

Not all corporations care that much or distrust their users. If anything that says a lot about you.

Do you see what I did there?

If you're about to fire back assuming that I'm trying to claim that "corporations are better than family", congrats, you've missed the entire point. So maybe stop and do some introspection before you reply.

It's here that we can start to see the logic behind "corpo bad, local good" break down. It's kind of sad to see a complete lack of critical thinking here.

Unequivocally, if I'm in a shared situation where I have to choose between my family or my roommates being able to see what I do on the internet, and having OpenAI/Anthropic see what I do on the internet, there is literally zero argument whatsoever for me as to which one I'd prefer, and you are absolutely insane if you think the former is better than the latter.

No you're right, the people in your family that handle all the IT/tech stuff are always absolute angels of ethics and moral fiber.

Not sure what there's to feel "conflicted" about here.

OP basically built a domestic wiretap in their living room, forced their whole family onto it, and is weirdly..."proud" of it?

At OpenAI or Anthropic, your prompt is just another anonymous string hitting an automated cluster. Nobody in San Francisco knows your name, nobody's reading your prompt history over morning coffee...literally nobody gives a shit what you asked at 2 AM.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you'd say: "you don't know what they anonymize, you can't really trust their terms", which, sure, cool, but on the other hand, now on your home box, every single query your family types is sitting in plaintext on your own damn drive.

If your kid or your partner asks about an embarrassing medical symptom, relationship drama, private doubts, or maybe even something sensitive about you, that search goes straight onto your machine with their identity stamped right on it. And the person who who is capable of seeing all of this stuff knows eaxctly who they are and could even guess why they're looking up any particular thing at any given time.

Say whatever you want about corporate terms of service, and I know the knee-jerk retort is "well big companies lie all the time anyway", but there's at least an actual retention policy, compliance liability, a paper trail. On a home box, your family has literally zero rights. No retention limits, no deletion requests, zero rules about how long you hoard their private thoughts or what you do with them.

When big tech "cares" about your data, it's to train a model, serve targeted ads, or broker it off to someone else for a quick buck. Not that I'm saying that's "fine". But As an individual, they literally don't care about you. You're just not that important or that interesting (something that a lot of open source diehards seem to be convinced otherwise of). But when the person reading the log is sitting across from you at the dinner table, that's completely different. It's an actual, creepy breach of trust. If you wouldn't trust an anonymous cloud provider, why the hell would you trust this guy? Because...what, he's my parent? My spouse? Because those people never do anything wrong/unethical...right?

The whole post is the exact kind of performative tech-flex that gets upvoted like crazy on local AI subs because it checks every knee-jerk feel-good "de-googling and sticking it to the cloud" box, but what they actually built is just so casually dystopian.

Honestly I don't believe the story for a second.

Why would I trust your word on that? You're ingesting all of my data.

Are you starting to see the fallacy yet of your logic? You could do anything with my data at any time, and tell me any lie you want. And since you've forced this upon me I literally have no choice.

Wow, lots of text.

1. I don't give a flying fuck about Tinycast and am not directly comparing you too except for the fact that Tinycast is still open source and still accepting community involvement. I am not remotely associated with Tinycast nor do I care what your beef is with him/her.

2. Your decision to go paid is not really what bothers me (I'm quite certain I've paid for more software on macos both perpetual and subscription than you ever will). It's the fact you completely abandoned the V1.

I don't expect you to keep running a project forever. SuperCMD v1 was free and open source and was built by your hard work and your time volunteered.

What I do expect of any open source maintainer of a popular project who decides that they can't sustain it (which again, I am not criticizing you for) to make sure the project still has a way to grow.

Let me repeat this: Absolutely nothing that I take issue with has anything to do with you not wanting to maintain a free product on your own time. I am not remotely entitled to that and you won't hear me make that argument. Read that again. What happened to you in your real life is heart breaking and genuinely, I feel for you. There is no universe in which through all that you should be expected to continue working on and providing support for an open source app.

Got it? Okay, maybe now we can actually address the problem.

Do you know what does bother me?

Where is your message on the readme asking for new maintainers?

Where are there any requests you've made for more contributors?

Where can I find discussions where you evaluated possible alternatives to SoulverCore with community feedback? Did you look at other open source launcher tools with calculators to see what they were doing?

Are there any posts where you say that the calculator feature is going to have to be retired if there's no solution?

When was the last time you visited your own old repo and reviewed the growing number of pull requests or bugs?

Did you even once consider what it feel slike for users and potential contributors to see that the last merge accepted was two months ago and the last release was three months ago?

Did you even consider using the GitHub "archive" feature at all to make it clear that you had to let go of V1, instead of leaving it there in its zombified state?

Do you realize now that people are trying to fork your project to keep it going but they don't have the audience or any of the previous maintainers or any of the reach to keep it going?

Do you understand that the spirit of open source is that if you're not able to continue maintaining it, that the least you can do is make an effort to hand off the reins to someone else, or at the very least archive the project to make this implicitly clear?

Do you know what I would have respected? A message on your readme like this:

Hey everyone. I am sorry to have to say this, but the development of this app has reached a point where it is just not sustainable for me anymore. There are a couple of reasons for this, including the cost of SoulverCore.

Here is a link to a discussion where I am reaching out to people who may be interested in becoming a maintainer and anyone who has ideas on replacing SoulverCore with something else. Until then, you should consider this project on hold. I won't be able to review and accept PRs or process bugs.

For those of you who are interested in supporting me, I have started a V2 project that is not open source, but it will help me remain sustainable in the future. Thank you for understanding, and as always, feel free to fork this code and make something of your own!

But instead, you just...left the repository dangling there, and you even actually advertise it on your main site, with all the original promo info. You don't mention at all on your site that it's no longer maintained, you left all of the promo info that talks about what it does, and you even left the GitHub sponsorship link in place. What on earth are they "sponsoring"??

That is what I find unethical. That's what I find to be against the spirit of open source.

So no, I can see you're really angry about Tinycast and maybe you have a point, maybe you don't (I don't really care, Tinycast is an alternative but not even my fulltime launcher, I still use Raycast).

I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors, but I have no intention of supporting your paid products when you exited open source the irresponsible way that you did.

No, screw SuperCMD 2. Reposting my comment from before:

I won't touch SuperCMD with a 10-foot pole. The developer has poor judgment at best and is unethical at worst.

He marketed his original app happily using Raycast's name for the sake of showing off that his launcher was compatible with its extensions, which, fine I guess, because he made the whole thing open source. He was very active and it racked up a lot of contributors including me.

Then he just flipped the script and decided to launch a new native swift version of SuperCMD, made it paid only, and completely abandoned the open source app. Something about a licensed package costing too much? I didn't even fully understand. It's been 2 months since we had a release and 1 month since anything was merged into the repo. He still has time to make new apps though (see Twitter).

His new v2 is happily still touting Raycast extension compatibility and I have no idea how much of my contributions made it into that paid software (which legally is fine, MIT license is what it is) but that put a hugely bad taste in my mouth and made me not ever want to trust anything by him ever again.

So no, screw that developer. Support Tinycast, since it respects its users and respects open source.

Wow fuck me, if thats the bar for being a smarty pants I guess I'm Stephen fucking Hawking

Literally ANY service that has both a monthly rate and a discounted annual rate uses this terminology, so sorry that special snowflake you couldn't handle this.

Fucking lol, makes no sense to many of its customers, I'm sure you in all your armchair CEO reddit wisdom know more than Raycast does about their internals and their finances.

What a fucking clown show. Good bye.

No, that puts us right back to the "It should cost what I think it should cost" fallacy I mentioned in my other comment.

So few of you seem to understand the difference between the value of a product and the cost of a feature.

I'm not "offering an argument" because we're not playing the same game.

Raycast has subscriptions. It is how it makes money, and it is how it has always made money.

Maybe in your head, we're in la-la land where we get to start over fresh and clean, but that's not the case in the real world. I literally can't argue a theoretical which is why I'm not bothering (again, I'm sorry that this concept is too difficult for you yo grasp).

Like I said, you type so much but say so little, and you probably think you're super smart. I'll let you have your delusion, but I won't entertain it.

:)

It's not vague. Just because you don't know what the word "From" means doesn't mean the rest of the world is confused.

It costs from $8/month up to $10 a month. If this is difficult for you to visualize, this means the cost is anywhere between $8 and $10 a month, depending on whether you choose to pay for a month or a year.

Sorry that you're struggling with something that no one seems to be, I guess.

Yep. Your post is an example of people that just type words and think length somehow translates to intelligence.

You're just doubling down on rent/subscriptions vs ownership. You are unable to grasp what Raycast is because you can't fathom a world in which different models of software development and funding exist.

Your entire post is just useless, disingenuous drivel and I'm not even going to bother dignifying the rest of it with a response.

Congrats on missing the point so thoroughly, although I guess it helps when you have a vested interest in missing the point.

That's a nice paragraph.

Isn't remotely related to anything I said, though. I said nothing about buying vs renting. I said paying for. Pretending like I said otherwise is definitely an interesting way of diluting it though.

You know what has a constant cost? Running Raycast as a company. Paying people to build it. Paying people to run the business, the sales, the marketing, the support, the infrastructure costs. Making a profit to pay back the VC that funded it in the first place.

There is more to the cost of software than simply does it cost the developer something to run.

But that's not something I'd expect someone like OP, who just wants this one feature for free to understand.

If this isn't something you agree with, huge shocker, there is always the option of not engaging.

I've paid for Raycast Pro for the last 4 years because I've felt that since Day 1 it has provided me enough value for an app I open several hundred times a week that I want to support the developers. I didn't sit there nitpicking about but but but BYOK doesn't even cost them money whyyyy.

Because again, it's not about the feature, it's about the value of the product. If you can't understand what is different about the value of a product and the cost of a feature, then we're not having the same conversation.

Raycast owes you nothing, and Raycast has no financial interest in taking a feature out of the paid tier and giving it to you for free, especially not when your argument is "it's not worth any money anyway".

Yeah, I was about to say, life doesn't really get much better on the $100 or $200 plan.

Anthropic has either massive disdain for non-enterprise users or is just absolutely incompetent at running a business.

My money is on both. I stopped caring. My sub lapses this month and thank god for that, waste of money.

I'd much rather go with OpenAI where for any faults they have I at least feel respected as a consumer.

...is this your first day paying for a subscription on the internet?

Yeah right.

You don't consider it worth paying for now, why on earth would you consider paying for it when the feature you want becomes free?

What a bunch of entitled nonsense.

Try to read this comment all the way through before you react. If your gut instinct is to say "bro its local and running on my machine why should it be paid" then you already are missing the point.

I don't understand why these same complaints keep coming up. If you don't think BYOK should be a paid feature, that means you are saying it's not worth any money.

Why on earth would Raycast give you a currently paid feature for free when you don't even consider it worth paying for?

If they aren't going to make any money off of you either way, what exactly do you think they lose if they lose you as a customer?

This is such a slippery slope and none of you people who whine seem to understand. You can easily whittle away every paid feature by saying at least give... Where does it stop?

"You guys have a lot to monetize"...like what? Please enlighten us on your business prowess. What else do they have to monetize?

Because every single thing you say, someone else can (and almost certainly already has) make the flawed argument that it should be free.

Color themes? No, we get posts about that every week that it should be free because they're just colors and you should at least be able to change the color for free.

Cross-device syncing? No, we get posts about that too, from people who feel entitled to say Just let me sync through iCloud, at least that should be free.

Clipboard history? No, we get posts about that saying that the already-ludicrous 90-day clipboard history saying at least let that be free.

At least. At least. At least.

It's never-ending and utterly insufferable. So much whining. The truth is that you don't want to pay anything for Raycast but you still want all of Raycast. Surprise, that's not the way paid products work. You either like it enough to pay to support them, or you go find a different app.

All you're doing here is admitting and confirming that BYOK is worth something to you, and if I were Raycast, I sure as hell would not make it free for someone like you.

So here's a suggestion; stop whining, and go use something else. If you need a recommendation on a truly free, open source app that is phenomenal (and clearly meets your budget), then go use Tinycast. It's great, I've literally contributed to the source code myself. https://github.com/abue-ammar/tinycast

Your comment is exactly why people don't like AI-written responses.

The OP's request was clear; he was looking for app suggestions, not strategies on how to search. Nothing in your comment really says much of anything.

I can't understand why people like you think these are helpful, insightful, or valuable comments. If anything, they make you sound utterly incompetent, as though you are unable to comprehend written language.

Here's a tip; if youj're going to go to an AI and say "Give me a reply to this Reddit comment" with no other instructions, you probably don't actually have anything worth saying to begin with, and the LLM is going to make up something, and people like me will assume you are in fact a moron.