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I am on a quest for the epistemological primes. These are the deep foundational knowledges which underpin everything. Somehow relates to that "high-leverage generalist" concept, but it's like the next level above that. We're talking level 3 jack of all trades here.

The epistemological primes of mathematics might be logic, set theory, category theory, model theory, graph theory, and a few others. Things that can't be reduced any further; their own whole ways of thinking.

These primes exist in everything. Doing drugs (the way I do them) involves knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics, and cognitive psychology. Cooking also involves chemistry and thermodynamics, and the knowledge of "flavor profiles" (which cores does that come from?). Doing projects involves some kind of "how to work" prime.

"Physics" is not a prime, but kinematics probably is a prime.

It's hard to figure some of them out. Demographics feels prime, but is probably actually a few things mashed together. Same for metrology, photography, color theory, emergency rescue, asset management, rhetoric, etc.

Any thoughts?

I work for a metal fabrication shop. We're making a tool to do a thing because we can't find any like it on the internet yet.

I have talked to the owner about making this tool open source. He's not totally against it but he wants to make sure nobody will be able to "steal it" and take our customer base, and it for sure wants to make a profit by selling it to similar companies.

We have no "infrastructure" to speak of, in terms of servers or cloud stuff, and I'm such a local-only FOSS nerd that I have no idea how to do any of that DRM suckery like checking license keys and making people's programs stop working out of nowhere. This program won't be a main source of revenue and we don't have the time or resources to dedicate to restricting it (at least I assume we don't, unless you all know of an easy way).

Since we have no infrastructure, I think we should make the tool free (I'm biased on that point to the extreme) and make money by offering setup and training, as well as (the main thing really) selling the pre-made materials library, because who wants to add thousands of materials manually when we sell the whole package for $1k or whatever?

I've thought about not going full open source, and instead using something like the Functional Source License.

I assume the folks here on this site have more experience making money with open source than I do. What do yall think?

Howdy!

I hate to use this card, but I'm autistic and I'm struggling to think of what kinds of jobs I could apply for. So far all the jobs I've had have just kind of fallen into my lap before I knew I even needed the job.

For the past several years I've been doing freelance carpentry, remodeling, and general handyman stuff. Work was booming for a while, but died out when lumber prices skyrocketed. I haven't had any jobs in months except for little oddball stuff family has me do out of pity (installing a door 2 weeks ago is the highlight of the entire winter season). I really need to find a job if I don't want to end up homeless, but I don't want to "just get a job" and be a mindless laborer.

Before the carpentry stuff, I was a project manager, 3D CAD guy, and SysAdmin at a small industrial metal fabrication shop. I handled over $1M in (gross) sales one year, and I handled the company's 2 highest-sales customers. I was single-handedly responsible for making the company compliant with legal regulations: I wrote the employee handbook, created the SDS books, arranged for annual maintenance on fire extinguishers, etc. I also standardized the company's aesthetic, color palette, document templates, fonts, and all sorts of other "public image" type stuff. I developed an application (in Excel) to estimate the prices of jobs, and they still use it today to price every job. I also re-designed the entire manufacturing process for a particular JIT machine for the automotive industry and cut the time-to-manufacture down by over 50%.

I'm into tech as a hobby, and I've been going to school for InfoSec just for the free financial aid money (because I need money since I'm out of work). I just generally like to tinker and hack on things. I've been into Linux since my early teens, and I've recently gotten into Emacs. I've been script-kiddying with programming since my early teens too, but in the past year or so I've been putting a lot of effort into learning more in the way of programming my own stuff. I've been learning C and Emacs Lisp, and in school I'm taking a python class. I also started building a data center in my bedroom (only 1 rack server so far). Sometime soon I plan on learning more about microelectronics and hardware programming.

I don't have any certifications or degrees. I have massive gaps in employment because I've tried to do so many things on my own.

Does anyone have an idea of a job that would be a good fit for me? I really like to hack, tinker, and take on projects that require me to think a lot and come up with creative solutions. I'm not so good at grinding out tasks that just need to be done. I tend to try to find ways to avoid doing a lot of repetitive nonsense work, which means I usually try to find ways to automate it or negate the need for it. That's what caused so much stress at my project manager job. They expected me to "just get the work done", instead of working on ways to make the work unnecessary. I want to improve things, not just keep mindlessly churning stuff out.