Engineered Addictions
291–300 of 467 posts
Re: Engineered Addictions
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea. That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's u…
One small question: how did those places manage to change the economic system for the entire population?
Usually extremely violent revolt
I don't think the appetite is there in most places
Re: Engineered Addictions
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an oppo…
> People pay for software all the time. Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs. Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work…
i think that people vastly overstate the costs of this sort of thing and it's super bizarre. if you're treating this as a big official corporation™ and such and want to pay 500 devs like $200k/year or something to make work, then yeah you're gonna have problems.
but if you want to build a social network and aren't dreaming of being gazillionaires for it (which is quite reasonable), then you can get by very easily. how do I know this? because... well it's being done successfully. not was done successfully, is done successfully.
you can probably even get people to help out on it.
you can build a social network with a dedi running nginx hosting your Python application running on a Linux box backed against Postgres (and redis for session storage, although even that is a bit overkill) for like $80/month deployed with a "deploy.sh" script that you run to kick the damn thing into running (Docker is used in dev only, but could easily work here). should you probably add health checks or whatever? yeah. it still works really well.
this scales well past the 100k users mark.
what about video/images/etc? well, this nginx server happily sends out user uploaded video storing them as files on a bog standard ext4 filesystem. backups exist of the site.
the "stack" i mentioned here isn't fancy or particularly tightly optimized, it's in fact pessimized in a lot of ways. hell I know there were a gazillion ways we could improve performance of our application. show the backend app to a game dev and they'd probably want to start strangling people with how poorly optimized most of the actual app is.
and still, it scales well.
again, I stress that this isn't some theoretical idea, this is actively being executed. the entire venture makes money for the team from the users who willingly (and unforcibly in order to use the service, the actual site is free to use in its full form) give money. this isn't ZFS. this isn't Rust. this isn't using some blue-green deployment. this isn't spending hours toiling away at which sysctl to set to squeeze every last cycle out of each box. this isn't behind some massive CDN with "internet scale" boxen or even (for the video serving part) behind any anti-DDoS service.
it's just a matter of doing actual engineering and being willing to actually build the things you want to build.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care. Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
> We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care. Those aren't very productive, our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status. Older systems people destroyed value for others in that chase, creating wars or other miseries, we have much less of that today. I'd much rather have another billionaire than another authoritarian warmongering…
> our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status
I don't think most of the people who have extremely high status are doing anything remotely close to producing value
They just own capital which they use to pay other people to produce value, which they then take credit for, which boosts their status
So it would seem that we're pretty divorced from the idea of "produce value -> get status" these days, if you can just pay people to produce value for you instead
Re: Engineered Addictions
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, maybe social networks are a utility, like electricity or ISPs
You effectively need or greatly benefit from gas, water, electricity and an ISP. What do you really get out of social media? I mean other than most of you getting crippling anxieties about things that aren’t even real, of course. Sure sure, I know, everyone wants it because they need to share photos of the kiddos with grandma out of country. No one needs it because they enjoy the shallow bullshit and dopamine and sna…
Social media is relied on by a lot of people for official notifications. When I was in high school, my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days. I'm sure there are lots of valid reasons for schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, official media networks etc. to have social media accounts, and for regular people to follow them.
I've always thought it would be a good idea for governments to run their own mastodon servers for this, but something else with accounts (not publicly) tied to real identities could be interesting.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#296https://xkcd.com/927/
Came here to comment this only after reading the first line!
Re: Engineered Addictions
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care. Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
> We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care. Those aren't very productive, our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status. Older systems people destroyed value for others in that chase, creating wars or other miseries, we have much less of that today. I'd much rather have another billionaire than another authoritarian warmongering…
Billionaires are the warlords of the 21st century. The only difference is that we've switched the map. We don't compete on the land, we compete on economic territory. But the results are the same - they fill the same role.
Expansionism, cult of followers, dispensing boons, and absolute control over their territory? check. The only reason we don't recognize them as warlords is because they don't wave scimitars and wear turbans. Neolibrral warlords wear Patagonia vests and beige slacks.
We're terrible at mistaking asthetics for function. Fortresses have been replaced by platforms; trade routes replaced by data sharing agreements. Armies have been ursurped by legal teams and lobbyists. We barely escaped feudalism and it's not clear we're out of the orbit of neo feudalism.
If we're able to be honest with ourselves, we need to learn that asthetics and function are different things. Just because they look different doesn't mean they don't fulfill the same function.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The company is the product. If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick. Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed. Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive cu…
Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality? There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much. It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money en…
A lot of the time I feel like the software economy is just a bunch of well-moneyed individuals betting on horses.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders. We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.
Even better idea is not to have shareholders. After all there are millions of business running without external shareholders.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People pay for software all the time. Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs. Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work…
i think that people vastly overstate the costs of this sort of thing and it's super bizarre. if you're treating this as a big official corporation™ and such and want to pay 500 devs like $200k/year or something to make work, then yeah you're gonna have problems. but if you want to build a social network and aren't dreaming of being gazillionaires for it (which is quite reasonable), then you can get by very easily. ho…
I like stories like these, but I think you just never hit a breaking point with the infra and approaches you got. You've never exceeded your ext4 volume size, so no need for object storage. You've never had a server die, so one dedi box is fine. You've never had a paying customer call you with an issue, so oncall support is not needed.
So I totally agree with your approach.