311–320 of 521 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere, which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard worker, and deserves credit
For someone who claims to work extremely hard he seems to spend a lot of time antagonising people on Twitter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's all he is doing - paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?
> paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same? is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences? Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate t…
There are lots of people that have those things and are still not a tiny fraction as successful. Most people could be given all of those things and they'd quickly waste them all in a spectacular fashion. Often the people that are the loudest on this issue don't even have their own absolutely trivial finances in order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all. Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be st…
Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?
Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years. The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving server…
When spam means you're either flooded with garbage or are forced to just totally block potentially innocent senders (like people running private mail servers)...
...and probably 95%+ of people I know use Gmail for their personal accounts...
...I'm not sure e-mail is the best example of federation working great.
So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code t…
Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results. I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back. I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the l…
Mastodon itself is fairly meh software. ActivityPub itself is reasonable as a potential starting point, though it won't satisfy the purists.
In the meantime, we are potentially seeing the beginning of an exponential growth curve on Mastodon. It could fizzle out. But it's a net positive thing, from the POV of this old wizened/grouchy Internet veteran.
So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere, which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard worker, and deserves credit
For someone who claims to work extremely hard he seems to spend a lot of time antagonising people on Twitter.
One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part because he's a household name. Everything he does, from naming his child X Æ A-12 to producing a house track, is to proliferate the public perception that he is an eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da Vincis and Franklins of old.
It may not seem like "real" work, but if Elon Musk and I both started different companies on the same day, who do you think is going to attract funding and top talent more quickly?
- the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
- the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
- and the completely empty personal feed
Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc).
And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years. The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving server…
Replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496458 Email is an example of a federated system failure.
30 years ago, AOL may have been most popular email provider, it was displaced by Hotmail, then Yahoo, now GMail. Having different leaders over time is evidence of the resounding success of email federation, those domains still exist and can still send/receive emails universally. If email had hypothetically been non-federated and proprietary to AOL, it would be dead today (or as close to it as gopher)
Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instanc…