>I guess you are hung up on the fact that OP used hyperbole to say that "nobody" is going to focus on local-first software and you are trying to win an argument by taking this statement literally.

Well, I was mainly responding to the closing paragraph.

>So yeah, sure, if you were to build a piece of desktop software from a clean sheet of paper today, this is a really good guide on how to do that. But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.

I could be more charitable and invent other things that I think they meant to say rather than focus on what they said. You are not the first to suggest it is a failing of mine that I do not do this.

Personally I think that if someone says say "But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.", it is reasonable to point out that there are plenty of motivations beyond 'business sense', and to point this out is fair comment, rather than getting hung up on anything.

You just used 103 words (541 characters) to basically confirm that your reply is just one "Well, actually...". This makes a discussion forum extremely annoying and makes me regret wasting all this time writing for you.

If I am not the first one to point out your failure of understanding the Principle of Charity, do us all a favor and focus on that before continuing discussion with others online.

The flip side of being a charitable reader is that a writer should also behave decently; that involves trying to be maximally accurate about claims and factual statements one communicates. "Well, actually" comments are justified if the author failed at their duty, and welcome in honest discourse.

I understand the principle, I just think the principle of charity is more misused than not. Also, you didn't waste time writing for me. You probably did waste time counting the words in my reply though. Sorry to have annoyed you, perhaps you are taking me too literally and it might help if you imagined a version of what I said that is more pleasing.

If you truly think such a principle can be "misused", then you really haven't understood it.

Really? I could have sworn that there were a whole host of techniques within the field of political rhetoric that could quite easily be relabelled; "Many interesting ways to misuse 'The Principle of Charity'".

The point at which I start to think it might be being misused is when it is not being used to look for a more gentle version of what could be unintentional ambiguity, but rather is being used to change meaning from the literal sense of a sentence to something in favor of a current position in a discussion, as this invites people to try and have their cake and eat it.

Yeah, either you really don't understand it or you are full-on bullshit mode to avoid conceding that your only objection to the OP was based on your misinterpretation of an hyperbole...

When using 'nobody' as hyperbole, it is generally used to mean 'very few', though some people also use it to mean 'nobody important', with themselves acting as judge of what, or who is important. One reason I feel free to treat the statement somewhat literally is that I am already including the hyperbole. It doesn't change my point if we shift from 'nobody' to 'very few', or 'nobody important'. There is a hell of a lot of stuff that people do that makes pretty much no business sense, or only ends up making some sort of rather inefficient business sense by accident because someone is trying to justify the fact that someone built it. There are wide open fields of this kind of stuff. A surprisingly large amount of it is in business.

Honestly, you still arguing over the meaning of nobody sort of indicates that either you don't want to get the point from OP or you just want to nitpick.

If it makes it easier for you, forget the "nobody" paragraph or substitute for "a very tiny minority compared to the total population of people/companies that make software for a living".

With this in mind, think of how many companies would actually benefit from focusing on "data used by the software is local-first" vs "the software should get things done faster/help the user make more money/help the user get laid"?

If you actually argue that companies in fact would benefit from focusing on this but can not due to some technical limitation, then we would have a legitimate point of discussion. But it seems you can't, so all I am getting from you is this insipid argument over semantics.

It would be great if we could actually get to the point of OP after all this time. How about we try doing that?

(The same could work from the demand-side of the equation as well. If you argue there is a significant amount of the population of software users that say are more concerned about the software "to be local-data first" than "the software must help me do my job faster/make me more money/get laid tonight", then you have a point. And no, pointing out to Richard Stallman and saying "well, actually there is this guy and a bunch of other aspies that don't care about getting laid or more money" is not really a valid refutation of OP's point)

>If it makes it easier for you, forget the "nobody" paragraph or substitute for "a very tiny minority compared to the total population of people/companies that make software for a living".

I did just do that in my previous post and noted that my point does not change, but hey, please go right ahead and keep telling me what point I should be discussing and what it is that others meant to say.