runawaybottle

inefficiency.

Sir (Madame?), I ask you one simple question:

Was Twitch built in 10 years, or over just a few?

Steam was built since I was in FUCKING high school. Im old now, well over 30.

Apples, and blueberries.

Bluebarry, Drewbarry, tomato, ToMaHtoH.

Fuck their stupid ass streaming code, it’s a giant crud app, only their devops team can take credit for scaling, everyone else is not worth a shit, sorry, thats life, I gotta Leetcode too, and ur code isn’t worth me reading it, leaked or not).

It’s just luck. I mean, if I was a storyteller, what story would I have to tell if there was no story.

They hit.

It’s sort of like we all hold Golden dice, so we marveled, by our own eyes, at the gold.

Dealer: You rolling those?

Us: no, it’s gold.

They fucking risked it. It’s not a engineering feat, we’re all a bunch of pussies.

Twitch is easiest site to build, you might as well show me a todo app (which will be sieged and dismantled), scale is solved, we will eat your applications, the barbarians.

Rome falls.

I’ll grant you immature, nothing else.

I’m so misread, Twitch is a lot of luck, so is all of these companies. Show me the the source code for luck. I don’t give a fuck if you leaked a video streaming crud app code lol.

Does it take a genius to figure out how to build twitch? It’s a modern crud app with video streaming.

What the hell do we do in this industry if that’s not the case?

Every book can be digitally taken out.

Actually he was promoted to C-Level, CII, Chief Imperial Intern ‘For Life’.

It’s a great accomplishment to be be fair, comes with a lifetime weekly stipend and access to whatever Frontend books/courses you need to be a great web developer.

Will never touch ops again.

It’s because that blockchain someone made is being used as national currency somewhere (and contributing needlessly to global energy consumption), and because that photo sharing site is causing body image issues, and that ad-tracker is building a digital trail of everything you do, and that ML algo is identifying protestors, and and and …

We are not discussing the shit show, we are the shit show.

It’s hard to find the proper analogy since the phenomenon is so new. On a legal basis, it was actually hard to build a case against the Mafia until racketeering laws were passed. It was difficult to prove that it was ‘organized’ crime before then (where before the criminals could say these are all unrelated events, and there is no larger organization, there is no boss, there are no lieutenants, you are imagining connections that don’t exist).

I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?

Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.

We were explicitly dividing the union legislatively due to slavery. This was an existential threat to the whole concept of America. I can promise you the vast majority of Americans in the 1800s didn’t give a shit about the morality of slavery.

With respect to our current situation, change won’t come because everyone will realize that social media promotes some of the darker patterns of human nature (narcissism, vanity, compulsion/compulsive/obsessive consumption of gossip/conflict, grandstanding, etc), it’ll change for more … practical/clinical reasons. We don’t want our data and our privacy encroached upon. There won’t be a shred of human enlightenment involved.

To add to your point, there’s not a soul in tech that ever went ‘I wonder if the results of this A/B test are ethical?’. Our industry is just not built with this sensibility, the same way Finance is not self-aware of greed.

If it makes money in Finance and meets regulatory guidelines, all is fair.

If it’s the optimal solution in tech, and doesn’t break laws or cause a noticeable usage drop-off, all is fair. When the FB algos drop engagement, we’ll see quasi-ethics from the company (perceptively to us, to them, it’ll just be an optimization).

She’ll get a book deal, it’ll be okay. I’m certain she thought this through and has political connections that she made deals with. Remember, attacking social media is the same as when politicians sit around and debate Abortion. It’s mostly a non-issue (in the way Roe v Wade won’t ever be overturned, but will always be a discussion point to pretend like you are doing something without doing anything). Politicians won’t be able to curb social media, but they sure can act like they are on top of it. It’s the ultimate punching bag.

It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit.

FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.

What do you expect from an industry that will sell any bullshit composite metric to indicate YoY growth?

To be honest, in certain enterprises (probably many startups as well) there’s just no need for UI other than tables. We get an api, mangle the result into some grouping, and then dump it into a table, over and over again.

Sometimes we let the user click a row, and do something about it, hah.

We almost went down the ‘this is a subterfuge to delete whistleblower evidence’ rabbit hole.

It was interesting to visit the subreddits of random countries (eg /r/Mongolia) and see the top posts all asking if fb/Insta/WhatsApp being down was local or global. I got the impression this morning that it was only affecting NA and Europe, but it looks like it was totally global. The numbers must be staggering of the number of people trying to login.

I think the mods throttled logged in users to discourage over-discussion and thread creation. There’s no rhyme or reason for read-only to be snappy and logged-in to be crawling.

And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like a giant global, societal parental control setting.

Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids.

How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.

Yes people said the same thing about television and by and large most people think Television had some pretty bad side effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began manifesting in people who were sold an image of ‘reality’ via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of ‘journalism’ into 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.

The main issue with WhatsApp as the primary platform of communication is that it’s exclusive. You can’t actually switch to Signal and continue with business because you’d need everyone to switch with you. Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.

WhatsApp cannot be pointed to another network, it’s total vendor lock-in. Today happened at a non-critical time. If this happened during a hurricane, or any other disaster, the critical nature would be exposed.

Right now we’re just amused, but the implications are real. Facebook has way more accountability in all of this than just, as Zuckerberg said ‘Senator, we sell ads’.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2021/3/3/mapping-internet...

Apparently HN is a giant Facebook groups page with a custom theme.

‘He was then subsequently attacked by “OverTheCounterIvermectin” for his tweets on transgender bathrooms from several months ago’.

Slashdot is still very good. The UI is horrendous, but I’m sure there are apps that clean it up.

HN basically forces you to build a modest amount of karma capital if you typically post controversial comments (eg your comments have net 0 karma, +5, -5). My karma hasn’t budged in ages because everything I post has a bunch of people agreeing and disagreeing with it. But, I’m okay with that since I built enough capital to do this. If did this around 50 karma, one or two comments on a tough thread would have put me under.

That’s extremely sadistic. I fear those who can take part in something like that more so than explicit acts. Just rob the place, but don’t do demented stuff like that.

Melatonin works well for me, possibly due to it actually working, or that I’ve created a trigger behavior that my body acts on (pop melatonin == time to sleep).

Often the security services routinely surreptitiously break into your house and rearrange shit in your fridge

That sounds like horrifying gaslighting. Any evidence of this? It just feels like now days you need a camera in your private rooms (at work and at home) because god knows what kind of allegation someone can throw at you, or if the cops come and say you did some shit when you really didn’t etc. A camera connected to the cloud at all times.

To your larger point, I agree that humans can crack. It doesn’t take much when you are alone and no one believes anything you are saying. Imagine someone follows you around and briefly points a laser pointer near the ground. Imagine they do this daily, just for a second. Try explaining it to to others, they’ll think you’re mad. Try explaining it to cops or a shrink. You’ll go crazy in no time.

You better record every waking moment if you want to stand a chance, but by then, you’re already insane.