Announcing The Libaudioverse GoFundMe
Austin Hicks
Hi,
Every other version of this is getting detailed introductions to Libaudioverse, but presumably everyone here already knows what Libaudioverse is and does, so I’m going to skip over that.
We’re really really close to an initial release that’s super stable and does everything on the initial release to do list, but I need a few months of full-time work to really make Libaudioverse happen and my life is now at a point where I need to focus very hard on projects that make me money. Consequently, the Libaudioverse GoFundMe. I’ve set the goal at $17000. I’m going to lose $2000 or so of that to GoFundMe fees, then another $1000 or so to hiring someone to do something that sighted people can appreciate so that I can maybe keep bringing in money.
In terms of demos, we have a graphing calculator prototype. This is useful in itself. I’ve got at least one friend for whom this is the first graphing calculator he’s ever had access to, and i’m hoping it might bring in money from people in the accessibility community. I’m looking into the possibility of making a weather sonifier, an idea which keeps getting bounced around but which no one ever does. Christopher toth has an old FPS prototype which I can probably upgrade the Libaudioverse prototype in, then post. I’m going to keep promoting and building momentum, and I will of course always post to this list.
Since the GoFundMe is already at $1000 and since I also had a bunch of mathematics suddenly become completely understood as opposed to completely mystifying, stay tuned for long-needed HRTF improvements. I will write a blog post on what exactly I did to it after the fact when I know what all is required and have written it.
People ask me if there’s a deadline. The answer to that is: June 1 at the earliest. After that, it depends if/when I find something full-time that offers a salary or if my life goes off the rails in one of a number of ways I’d rather not go into here and which are beyond my control. In the latter case, potentially much longer. But I’m really hoping not—I’m the gay atheist in the conservative Christian family in Florida. There is nothing here for a tech person in terms of jobs, nothing here for a gay person in terms of being gay, no public transportation, and enough tension at home that I don’t feel at home. So I want to move out as soon as possible, and I’m putting the pieces together to make that happen, and if I can’t fund Libaudioverse then it may very well become a casualty to me building a life. I will be doing work as we bring in money now, so if we don’t meet our goal then we’ll just end up with a release that doesn’t have everything I might want in it, but nevertheless is stable and better than where we are at the moment.
I will be writing a Libaudioverse status blog post hopefully later this week, as well as a blog post on my Rust compiler work which appears to be finishing this evening at long last. The Libaudioverse one will spell out where we stand, and basically boil down to “You should use this project.” I will also be making API compatibility guarantees in said post and specifically mentioning which ones need to change and/or disappear in the short term. The goal right now is keeping the project as stable as possible both in terms of bugs and in terms of not breaking existing code.
Or, put another way, news.