dahwolf

True. Chat feels alive. Quite different from posting on social media where next you have to wait whether anybody even saw it at all (usually not) and can be bothered to like it (which does nothing) or respond to it.

Good thinking and it's a rule I live by.

I do not share anything digitally that would backlash if revealed. Also not in private digital spaces. Not in work chat. Not even on a private device in a note. Nowhere.

Digitally, I do not gossip. I have no political opinion on divisive topics. I have no nudes. I don't swear in game chat. There is no smoking gun to be found at all even if you get full access to my entire digital life.

He predicted the privatization of social networks 5 years ago. Which isn't that brilliant, the trend can be casually observed.

I remember the circles concept working for about 2 weeks.

I'm into photography and people started creating "best photographers" circles, one of them had 700 posters in it. You could follow the entire circle with a single click after which your feed is pretty much done.

A handful of circles would be massively followed which means whoever was lucky to get in early, ruled the platform or niche.

Relatable.

My idea is that a profile should indeed be sliced. Personal, professional, specific niches (cooking, tech, whatever) and that we have a reliable labeling system that accurately detects the "channel", preferably fully automated. The signal to noise ratio would improve drastically and you could once again get value out of a social network.

Likewise I propose the same for moderation. Let me pick my comfort level. Ranging from "give it to me raw" to "I need to call my therapist because I saw a micro aggression" and everything in between.

People don't want this. They say they do but they don't.

Social media is 15 years old now. Watching what your friend had for dinner or some other mundane non-event is just not that exciting anymore.

True. And Mastodon's paranoid safety culture is why they could have just used chat.

Even the public personas are having a rough time. Twitter is falling apart and then there is Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and just generally a very fractured yet crowded space where you're up against dirty tactics of your peer influencers.

I don't feel sorry at all for commercial grifters, but there's also genuine publishers. Institutes that just want to share a message and get it out to the public, as a service. That model is now quite broken.

I think my aunt is great and much cooler than my peers.

I object to this weird anti-family culture. I don't give a shit what is "cool". It's a made-up concept, unlike family. Family has my back, and I have theirs. But I guess on "social" media being social isn't cool.

There's nothing more natural and important than socializing with your family.

It's an annoying word in itself, and yes, it's simply business as usual in startup land. Invest aggressively at a loss to accelerate growth, then later monetize, if you get that far.

Can't we do better? Have a stable business, organically growing and profitable from the start?

No. Tech is winner takes all. You need to be first and grow the fastest or somebody else will.

Facebook doesn't care about the tiny amount of content on Mastodon. And it's the wrong type of content anyway. Mastodon is for misfits, nerds, anarchists, Tumblr-style far-left politics, doomers, weirdos and very bad artists.

Instagram and Threads couldn't be more different. It's commerce. Beautiful people. Beautiful places. Shopping. Mainstream pop idols. Grifting influencers. Celebrity gossip. Lifestyle. Fashion. Interior design.

Facebook prefers the latter group as this is where advertisers thrive. The typical Mastodon user would have an anxiety attack when they see an ad.

The article touches upon this. You can phrase it as social media becoming just "media" again. A small group of heavy posters is responsible for the content backed by an algorithm that broadcasts it.

I think the cognitive effects are already visible. We become lazy, addicted, complacent, distracted and anxious.

It is. On Facebook you can sort your feed that way and also on Twitter. Not sure about Instagram.

In my opinion, people are bored out of their mind also on a chronological feed from their friends. Not because they dislike their friends, it's just all very repetitive and time-consuming with very little to show for it.

Hardly a new insight, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the future of the public square is private, about 5 years ago.

It's not aggressive and being critical of work deliverables is the very point of quality assurance.

It doesn't mean you have to be mean about it, but you can just spit it out.

Me neither. I would reply with:

"Thanks that you liked it, I'm always happy with positive feedback so will share it widely within the team and towards my manager. When I get home I'll also tell my wife and put it in the family's group chat. Grandma's FB post should be up soon".

Don't lie to my face. I'm not a moron nor a child. You didn't like how I tackled it at all. You can just say that and point to tangible things where I went wrong. Any working professional should be able to handle that. And not just that, embrace it, it's a learning experience.

Well, that's the entire problem now, isn't it?

You're missing the point entirely. It's not about the Mercedes. If anything, Google makes it impossible and unaffordable to serve up the useful information you desire.

Don't ever build anything large on top of Google Maps.

Beyond the free tier and 200$ credit, prices are so insane that they would make Musk and that Reddit CEO blush. Have a look yourself:

https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/#pricing-grid

Hosting the simplest of maps (static map) cost 2$ per 1,000 requests. Imagine you integrate such a map into content. Even for smaller projects it's not uncommon to get traffic into the hundreds of thousands or even millions on a monthly basis. I'm talking page views, not unique visitors. That would set you back hundreds per month or even 1,000$. Just to show a bloody map. Actually, not a map. It's a static picture of a map.

Add some basic map interactivity, even just things like pins using the JavaScript API, and it becomes 7 times more expensive than that. I'm not kidding.

Say you make a map with pins showing current wildfires. Now consider this costing 14$ per every 1,000 requests. Do the math of your page gaining some basic popularity. 100,000 page hits? Not a big deal. That'll be 1,400$ please.

In most projects you want your map to be more useful. Add (reverse) geocoding, place details, etc. That's 3 APIs. Assuming equal usage, that's over 5,000$.

In one month. For a smallish audience. To enable fairly basic functionality. You can rent a goddamn Mercedes AMG for that kind of money.

Well, perhaps because they can't afford it?

Because that would be unreasonable and impractical.

Next question please.

Many people are politically disinterested even to the point of not bothering to vote. And like you said, even those that are engaged are still not qualified to comment on the more complicated issues, of which there is a growing amount.

It's an odd contrast with the perception that everything has become hyper-political, intersectional and everyone is an activist now.

Obama once had an insightful remark about it. Sending a mean tweet is not activism. Political activism means reading legislation, learning how the political system works, learning law, and doing a huge amount of work on the ground. It's a lot of work, often unrewarding.

Hence the Tweet. Zero effort. Immediate reward. Nothing changes.

The truth of the matter is that most organizations are fundamentally incompatible with agile.

Organizations obsess over details. They want detailed plans and cost estimates months ahead. They have a low or zero tolerance for failure. They think in hard promises/contracts and punishment for those that don't deliver. All of this is entirely opposite to the core of agile, which "discovers" reality as it progresses.

It's a ridiculous thing to say that any version of PHP is slow. You could run PHP5 today and it's still not slow by any modern standard. Even on the hardware of 15 years ago almost any script you throw at it finishes in single digit milliseconds.

How is that slow? I'd like to meet the developers that consider this slow.

The good thing about Scrum is that it introduces frequent moments of accountability. They are not popular but much needed in many teams and better than the alternative of the traditional waterfall approach.

It should also very frequently reveal issues. In misunderstandings, planning, underestimation, dependencies. This is a good thing as you can then course-correct early.

That said, it is soul crushing. Some jobs/tasks just don't fit into SCRUM yet one is forced to adhere to it anyway. There's way too many meetings. The boundaries of roles are not respected. Quality is not rewarded, only story point delivery. There's typically no feedback loop from users/the market as to whether actual value was delivered because you're working on the next sprint. Product owners are not actual owners. Scrum masters act as project management.

A typical scrum team easily costs 1M to run even here in Europe. And yet they produce so little. If you'd hire 3 A-class players in a high trust environment they'd produce 10 times more at superior quality.

True comedy is found in "scaled agile". This is where the SCRUM elite of the company get the teams together and ask: tell me for the next 6 months which stories you will deliver and figure out all the dependencies.

Mind you, near-zero input is given. You might as well roll a dice. And still we're all here to pretend that this insanity is normal. I no longer fight it.

I actually feel bad for business owners. They're setting on fire some 50-70% of their hard-earned revenue on talking and book keeping.

I personally believe that I've been in a short-lived "wet bulb" situation twice in my life. In both cases, in the Amazon, pretty much at the equator, at some of the hottest days of the year. 40-45C, humidity near a 100.

A cold shower does nothing, it actually makes it worse as it activates your body to warm up. Stripping naked does nothing. Sweat just streams down the entire body as if a tap is open. It's near impossible to keep up with drinking water.

It was short-lived as the weather was extremely variable, but the feeling of being completely unable to cool down despite throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it, is memorable.

As is the case with the new social media meme where "Europoors" don't have ACs and should be ridiculed for it.

I agree that there's friction between the greater public good and private interests.

But I don't agree with the reductive take that compromised security means companies don't care or are greedy. Companies that do care and have an army of security staff still fuck up.

The reality check is that security is incredibly complicated, expensive, very easy to do incorrectly.

If anything, us software developers should do some reflection on our software stack. It's honestly quite shit if it requires daily updates and a team of security gurus to not get it wrong.

Agreed.

I think they should negotiate a security test beforehand. For their own sake but also to get a buy-in. And if a company categorically refuses, you can then publish that, or share that you worry about a lack of track record in known security audits. That's a professional way to hold them accountable.

Breaking into a system unannounced and then stating "do what I say...OR ELSE", is neither legal nor professional. When you're surprised that this will be perceived as an attack instead of being helpful, I don't know what to say.

Can't believe the pushback I'm getting here. The use case is stunningly obvious.

Companies want to dump all their Excels in it and get insights that no human could produce in any reasonable amount of time.

Companies want to dump a zillion help desk tickets into and gain meaningful insights from it.

Companies want to dump all their Sharepoints and Wikis into it that currently nobody can even find or manage, and finally have functioning knowledge search.

You absolutely want a privately trained company model.