> This has in common with a lot of other suggestions that it would eat the time I feel I should be spending on infrastructure work.

Hypothetically, would you be potentially interested in paid virtual work with flexible part-time hours working on open source projects, specifically in areas which have high potential for network effects such as for example improving the JavaScript ecosystem? Or improving “blockchain” technology in some fundamental way that speculatively might have broad network efforts on the Internet in general? Perhaps it would be helpful to clarify your definition of ‘infrastructure’ in this context.

My understanding is you want to choose work which maximizes the value to the broad Internet community of your limited time resource? Or more specifically the value to hackers or some other more targeted demographic?

> We typically respond to something like this by saying “looks like a market opportunity!” If there’s tech talent out there that’s not being taken advantage of, then there should be money to be made by harnessing it, right?

I put the word out in my circles. One replied that he was eager to offer work to Eric, but that he was very busy with several businesses and it would be a few months yet. He said he hoped that Eric would get a contract job in the meantime, not a permanent one.

> He’s asking for $60k a year, and someone of ESR’s skill is arguably worth at least 2-3x that on the open market,

He is worth a lot more than $60K. His reputation alone is worth a hell of a lot in the right situation, if it something he feels it worthy of attaching his reputation to, and that is not even including the value of his actual production. Additionally the technical writing he could do for a project, such as refining a whitepaper. Obviously he would need to be careful not to associate himself with some scam or investment pump&dump. And obviously he would need to evaluate the technology and believe in it and its (foundational) importance.

My last comment in this thread.

Even though Eric is a talented (even humorous) public speaker and uber talented writer, I am leaning towards what appears to be his original intuition that livecoding would not maximize his ROI nor his value to the community. I have wasted too much time in the third world, so unfortunately I have some intuition to not focus there in terms of high end technology, education, nor intellectual interaction (although they are obviously important future mass markets otherwise). I have learned so much from Eric when he is writing in his focused manner and he is a very valuable tribal leader, so I prefer not to see him reduced to becoming just a good entertainer or any less important work that can be done by others. I am hoping that Eric’s Magnum Opus was not CatB and there is something even greater to come yet. Specifically to foster his creative and learning stimuli even more if possible.

> If crumbling internet infrastructure is really as important as you think it is, then the world needs all the educational resources it can get.

Upgrading foundational infrastructure is critically important and especially when it is taken for granted by most. Yet my contrarian mind also contemplates that we are not omniscient and sometimes the free market replaces with a complexity reducing paradigm shift instead of maintaining complexity. For example, as I understand it NTP is about a total order on a mutual perspective of millisecond synchronization of global time. But in the broad theoretical sense, total orders don’t exist in our universe. For example, some newer designs for blockchains propose to completely do away with any notion of tightly synchronized network time. That is not to say Eric’s work on NTP isn’t very important, because I assume much legacy code depends on it and blockchains (or other paradigm shifts) will probably not replace all use cases (and not soon enough).