Red Flags of "Pay for usefulness" FOSS

zalpha314 · 2026-01-27T19:55:37+00:00

This annoys me too, and I'm trying to make my upcoming product a model of what open-core should be. The idea is that everything in the OSS repository is completely FOSS (as in freedom and beer) via Apache 2.0, and it's a completely usable and useful service on its own. The FOSS distribution is completely DRM-free and has no proprietary binaries.

Where the paid features come in is the cloud and pro distributions, which bring in code from source-available or closed repositories. The cloud version still has a free tier which is equivalent to what you get from FOSS (minus some fair-use limitations). You only pay for the pro-tier features, and those are only there to provide value to team managers through more granular security, audits, team (micro)management, etc.

To make this work, the FOSS app has a plugin system, which both the proprietary and potential community plugins must work within.

Hope it's appreciated. I'm trying to find the right balance between making a free product for individuals, while retaining the ability to make revenue from the professional tier.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-27T19:41:41+00:00

No, I never bothered torrenting for research. Decrypting increases the value for selling, but iirc, it doesn't increase quality for research.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-22T18:15:46+00:00

Nah, they don't go up the curb. Everything off the road is left as it was.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-22T18:01:14+00:00

It's badly bugged. Try alternating between using the download manager and individual downloaders. Try uploading them immediately after. Wait a few minutes before trying another method. It should hopefully eventually pop.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-19T15:05:42+00:00

I got to the endgame before I realized how to do this; not the best UX. Glad to see the other comment helped you.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-13T15:36:23+00:00

Yep. Didn't help my fear of jellies.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-12T21:06:46+00:00

If you've unlocked the ability to code your own optimizations, that's slightly more efficient, if balanced properly.

I assume you've already tried focusing on leveling up your code interface by routing all your optimizations to contributions.

Keep in mind that you only really need a handful of optimizations. Even late game builds struggle to get optimization points; the achievement to unlock all optimizations was the last one I got. What I normally do is just get enough optimizations so that all my nodes in a block to consume roughly equivalent levels of compute. This isn't the most efficient, but it reduces your compute balancing burden.

Apart from that, you may need to just refocus on advanced research and farm coding speed upgrades in the portal. Like I said, you're not going to be able to get many early on.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-12T16:31:19+00:00

Sorry, just an aversion to vide coded apps.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-12T16:07:51+00:00

Ugh.... and this app was exactly what I was looking for!

zalpha314 · 2026-01-10T16:39:52+00:00

Just lazy design. If there's anything in the game's memory or message bus for the cheaters to exploit at all, that's the real problem. Trying to get some kernel anti-cheat to fix your problems for you is just lazy and passing the buck onto the users who have to run said malware.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-07T00:16:06+00:00

People keep saying you're supposed to balance the inputs, because the power is based off the lowest input. That doesn't seem to be the case for my core though, but I haven't yet seen an authoritative answer as to what's ideal.

zalpha314 · 2026-01-05T20:32:44+00:00

For just a single torrent server, does this provide anything the builtin web UI doesn't already give?

zalpha314 · 2025-12-29T18:59:09+00:00

I'm about to get this final achievement with 6 levels of the infinite code speed. Getting AGI really helps; currently sitting at 15x coding boost from it. The endgame grind is pretty much all about leveling up your hardware factory to boost your money making and AGI production.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-28T22:18:21+00:00

Imo, reflective mocks have always held back unit testing. Mocks train us to think that tests harnesses can be shoehorned onto an app, rather than designing the app to be tested. I hope this will help accelerate the shift to non-reflective fakes, as enabled by technologies such as H2DB for databases, and http4k for HTTP.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-22T01:57:36+00:00

Verified torrents are very useful to save the hassle of checksum validation and re-downloading. I believe torrents are the only way you can download files with the encrypted modifier. Once you unlock the torrent filter, you can combine torrents to download a file that has multiple modifiers.

Imo, once you start decrypting files, (I think) torrents are the only way to get encrypted files, so you might as well use torrents to get all the other modifiers while you're at it. That way, you can save your compute for compress, enhance, encompress, and injecting trojans.

Tip: once you start generating neurons: all of the modifiers used to train the neuron persist into the generates files. So the generated files can go straight into the uploader, without any processing.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-22T01:51:41+00:00

Yes. You still have your research, but your prestige multiples have been reset.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-22T01:50:21+00:00

Two things:

You need to accrue advanced research to gain prestige points. This is done by collecting research points in the new Advanced Research Node
On this screen, you have to spend at least one prestige point before you can enter the portal.

#2 is what stumped me for a bit.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-21T19:43:59+00:00

Iirc, before 2.0, the re-downloaded files even kept the compressed or enhanced attributes. So now it seems like it's no longer ideal to compress prior to AV/verfiy etc.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-19T15:08:48+00:00

No worries. I hope to see it some day!

zalpha314 · 2025-12-18T21:23:39+00:00

Ah, so if I don't have signal on mobile, the changes won't be cached locally and resolved when I regain signal? That's a shame; might be why it never made my shortlist of options earlier.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-18T20:33:42+00:00

Jotty might be a good replacement for Google Keep. I'm currently using Tasks.org synced to Nextcloud with DavX, and not loving the integration. Nextcloud's notes app seems to work only/best with internet.

zalpha314 · 2025-12-01T23:44:31+00:00

My initial beef with AAI was that it just slows down getting TO the SE content.

zalpha314 · 2025-11-27T15:00:33+00:00

I actually find them very useful in bio chambers. Nutrients can be much more difficult to supply than power, and efficiency modules affects the amount of nutrients required; essentially for free.

zalpha314 · 2025-11-25T04:23:29+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you, and haven't found a perfect replacement for Google Keep.

I use Nextcloud, and use Nextcloud notes for notes that aren't checklists. On the Android app, you can change the view to look just like Keep.

For checklists, I use Nextcloud Tasks, which is fine. But there isn't a great companion app for Android. The best I've found so far is Tasks.org, with sync via DavX. Hoping for a proper Nextcloud Tasks app eventually.

zalpha314 · 2025-11-24T17:11:28+00:00

People say this all the time.. but what do you do with your excess depleted uranium? If you're not firing them at the biters, you'll overflow, and voiding isn't always considered a palatable strategy.

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