pc_edwin

To go further, its crazy how much cognitive dissonance can penetrate even the smartest among us.. If you had some understanding of how modern systems at twitters scale works, you'd know such a bug is highly unlikely.

You have multiple clients (android, ios, web) and a whole cluster of microservices calling each other. The microservices calling each other will easily use up more requests.

IMO the likely culprit is rate limits being triggered by a huge increase in scraping caused by the new api pricing.

Its funny how the entirety of silicon valley just forgot that Twitter was infamous for their unholy mess of a codebase which at some points looked like it had a secret mission to increase world entropy and terraform the planet.

I still remember watching podcasts, reading blogposts, hearing prominent VC's like Elad talking about etc.. Now everbody silent because Elon is the baba yaga...

I'm inclined to agree with your line of thinking but my comment was on the second and third order consequences of what just happened.

When you put rational people in extremely chaotic situations, they tend to make very irrational choices.

As of just a few hours ago we just entered a world where the following is an actual possibility, albeit an unlikely possibility: Prigozhin closes in, creating an existential crises for Putin and his inner circle. They believe this is a western backed coup where defeat isn't just personal but also defeat for Russia. Putin & his inner circle are put in a position to consider retaliation under the context of a rapidly deteriorating existential crises.

I'm a voracious consumer of history and I can tell the one thing you learn from history is how a set of seemingly unrelated harmless dominos change the world overnight whether if its the death of a duke from a second tier power or the ambition of a failed artist.

I've had the exact thought, it looks as if we are further descending into apocalyptic territory.

You have people capable of extreme destruction being cornered into an existential state, leaving them with very little rational options. This is when the irrational options starts appearing very rational..

True or not, what if this appears like a western backed coup to Putin and his inner circle. The kind of retaliations such an action would call for is unimaginable.

Was it risky? Yes. Should they have hedged? Yes.

Was it a "huge gamble"? NO! Banks are literally in the business of long duration.

The Feds were draining liquidity at the fastest rate in recent history and they did this right after an extremely over leveraged bull run leaving the entire system very fragile.

A collapse was inevitable, SVB just happened to get the short end of the stick and yes they put themselves in that position through incompetence/arrogance.

If not SVB, it could've been maybe a bank over exposed to the commercial real-estate market or literally any other area left too fragile.

The particular case of SVB is rather illuminating. They weren't risking money on some high risk mortgage bonds or memecoins for that matter (illegal).

They were literally buying US government bonds based on outlook given by THE government agency which gives OUTLOOKS & sets POLICIES on these matters.

They literally did the you are "supposed" to do and they were called "greedy capitalists" or chumps for not doing sophisticated active player stuff like hedging.

These articles and comments are to put politely, very silly.

Banks and the government have an agreement where banks operate as if deposits are stable in order to buy long-term assets, while the government insures deposit stability.

These assets primarily comprise of lending to governments, businesses and mortgages. In other words, the banking system essentially acts as a quasi-arm of the government, enabling the welfare state to function both explicitly by buying government debt and implicitly by expanding the monetary supply.

You can prevent the bank runs and massive economic booms/busts by simply prohibiting banks from monetising deposits. We wont do this because it will collapse the nation-state as we know it.

The reality is that we haven't had a free market for banks since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, so it wasn't a battle between "evil bankers" and "poor poor lidl workers," but rather a game of king-making.

The funny thing is, Adobe greatly overpaid for Figma and they know it so this is like a godsend.

They would much rather just pay the $1 billion breakup fee and forget about that 2 years when all of tech got a little "loose" than be forced to go ahead with such an expensive mistake.

Best case scenario it will take Adobe nearly a decade to grow into that valuation with their figma product.

And even thats really pushing it.

It doesn't kill of 3rd party Apps, it just requires them to do a minimum amount of monetisation.

The pricing is actually reasonable. 1/4the of Twitters price.

Its not ridiculous though. Its 75% cheaper than the Twitter API pricing and the free tier is good enough for MVPs & experimentation.

The pricing is actually reasonable, thats the annoying part. The free tier is good enough for tweaks and MVPs, this is the opposite of what Twitter did which effectively ended experimentation on their API.

The paid tier is reasonable, $12k for 50 million requests (1/4th of twitter api) means Opollo will be paying $1.68 million a month. Thats entirely reasonable for such a popular Reddit app.

This gets us back to the original point, users got used to subsidised pricing (free) so Reddit was inevitably gonna get blowback no matter how they spliced this. To put it in perspective, $1.68m is 168k users paying $10/m a month. They have 1.5m active monthly users. Thats means they only need 10% of their active users to be paying customers.

P.S. Its not just a need to generate revenue, if they don't become profitable soon its game over for the current investors and management team. The IPO markets have dried up and nobody is touching anything series A and above.

SV's darling Stripe had to cut their valuation by 50% to get some money, Reddit wont be able to get anything near that. The best they'll get is some private equity type deal (FATAL).

Its unfortunate for Reddit, they have been forced in between a rock and a hard place.

They need to become profitable asap since the markets have dried up but users have gotten so used to being subsidised.

There is where the Netflix side of the equation comes in. You can sell or gift your MovieKey like a DVD but at the end of the day its a license to stream on our platform.

All content is DRM protected and we'll ban your account from the platform if you pirate or clone your keys ad infinitum.

I'm personally not a fan of this solution but the technology is just not here yet to do this without a centralised control system.

So I get where my friend is coming from, no artist will want to have anything to do with us if people can just pirate the stuff or clone their keys ad infinitum.

The world we live in today is very different the world web0 was created for, its older than me.

Don't get me wrong, standardised protocols play a very important role in the current world and it will play a bigger role in the future of the internet (Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Matrix..).

Its just not enough, we need a decentralised way to provide consensus on the internet. People wont set up their own servers, companies that provide these services will always look like a Pareto distribution (FAANG or MAMAA).

In other words, FAANG or what ever the next incarnation of these companies are always incentivised to get rid of interoperability. Selfish reasons aside, after a certain point interop will directly stand in the way of providing better user experiences.

This is why web3 is such an elegant system. It provides a substrate that directly incentivises interoperability. Auth and payments is taken care off, the only thing remaining is custom features but that gets rapidly commoditised, then the only frontier remaining is interoperability.

A good example of this is the NFT marketplaces: Auth is just connecting your wallet. Payments are taken care off. Then you build cool features but everybody else copies you and you copy them so thats a stalemate. Then you have to be interoperable, like OpenSea going multi chain or Magic Eden supporting Eth.

The key here is, the moment someone else supports interoperability, if you dont you are put at a large disadvantage. The same kind of dynamics will happen to decentralised social media platforms.

Yeh most of decentralised cloud companies are very silly.

Again I'm in agreement with everything you are saying here including the part with "other efforts".

I just think we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because the space got ravaged by zero interest rates, VC's, scammers, charlatans, snake oil salesman and even worse, it doesn't mean the technology and the premise was wrong.

Having a ledger that is secured by decentralised consensus is not only useful but will be a necessity for the digital first future we are heading towards.

We are reaching the limits of the current paradigm. We see companies like Meta having to be the arbiter of consensus. We've seen platforms showing their true faces and commoditising peoples data and network which wasn't really theirs to begin with.

I tend to agree but where we diverge is in the thinking that these problems cannot be solved with technology, I believe the opposite.

The point of web3 is to abstract away things like sysadmin by commoditising consensus. Once a blockchain gains mass & momentum it opens up a whole new world of possibilities to hack/reinvent social media.

You could use multiple different types of social media and still maintain a single identity (auth). This means you could find friends and friendlies everywhere you go.

The key is the consensus layer and the ability to store & and read critical metadata. I'll give a personal example:

I've been helping a friend to create a combination of Netflix and DVDs. We package the movie licenses into NFTs (MovieKeys) so when the user signs in with their wallet they can stream all the movies in they own.

There are so many possibilities with this but lets focus on the social part. In theory, a social media service could scan their users wallet for MovieKeys and create a social graph based on that. Heck you could create entire forums just out of the people who owns a certain moviekey. I wont go further because we go a lot of things cooking atm.

The general point is, the technology and the UX to make these things possible is just an arms length away. The entire space got ravaged by scam artists instead of trying to build real magical experiences people actually want.

I believe we'll have more of these oh s** moments soon when people will finally realise why we need web3. Yes the whole space was full of scammers, charlatans but the technology and point was to create a substrate for networks on the internet.

The idea that these networks and communities need to run on centralised servers is archaic. The technology exists where people should be able to own their own network (followers, subs, following, posts).

There is a huge difference between being homeless and choosing to camp on a public street in metropolitan areas.

Its not only illegal, its immoral. If they aren't mentally ill, you forcefully remove them to the outskirts of the city. If they still keep coming back then you imprison them.

If you think this is fascist, then you are dangerously loosening the definition of fascism. You must see how playing with these words like this is extremely dangerous? Does "the boy you cried wolf" ring a bell?

I don't get how these ideas are draconian.

Forget the fact that its whats the most liberal countries do, what else do you propose?

Whats draconian is the current state of affairs. Letting these people rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins here.

These people need help and those who don't need help are knowingly causing public harm. Public harm as in harming the public in the public spaces where the public pays ungodly amounts of taxes to keep them safe.

California spent $4 billion a year on homelessness. Thats roughly $35,000 per homeless person (115,000).

IMO it shouldn't even that much to institutionalise/imprison/forcefully remove these people but even if it did cost as much or more, it would still be worth it.

Imagine what would clean safe streets do for these cities, it would create such a huge rebound!

Ready my OP again, thats my exact point!

This is not caused by some unprecedented economic crash or poverty crises. As I've said in the OP, "this is an epidemic of uninformed tolerance and apathy ravaging an entire nation."

These are either addicts, mentally ill or uncivilised people. Every society from the most liberal ones to the most tyrannical ones have set up laws and institutions to deal with them.

You forcefully institutionalise the mentally ill. You provide an option of voluntary treatment to addict or forced. You forcefully remove the uncivilised people.

I personally have stronger beliefs when it comes to what to do with these peoples but that will get me banned (its a little biblical).

What I'm talking about here is the humane/liberal option. The alternative is to let them rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins.

I grew up around poor people. I remember watching my cousin cry to my aunt for money to buy pens/pencils whilst my aunt knew she didn't have the money nor did her husband working 12 hours on a pineapple plantation.

I have another uncle who threw away 15 years of his life being a truck driver in the deserts of Saudi Arabia just so that his son and daughter could get a decent education. Meanwhile his wife (my aunt) raised two kids alone, whilst herding goats, chickens and managing a rubber planation.

Don't talk to me about privilege. These people are scum. Low lifes. Not only do they have access to handouts (especially in europe), they have access to an infinite amount of jobs.

How do you think tens of thousand of UNSKILLED people cross the border illegally with no money, work low skilled jobs and make enough money not only to sustain themselves but also to send money back.

You have no idea how privileged and uninformed you are. All these stories I told is because of communism. We are from one of the most blessed regions in the world, rivaling california and florida in beauty but communism ruined my state. Now everybody above 90 IQ is forced to be flee the country.

Everybody I know including myself are expats. Nobody wants to leave but they have no choice, there is no future here. So yeh I would have unfettered capitalism over your delusional childish theories of good vs bad.

Side Note: price increased are due to inflation caused by the expansion of the money supply. Guess what expands the money supply? Also in central banking system, this expansion is done through the banking system creating massive bubbles and extreme money concentrations.

I can solve it in under a year.

These are either mentally I'll people or people who refuse to maintain the minimum amount of civility required by modern humanity.

They should either be forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.

Public streets are public property, this is no law that allows this sort of lunacy. Everywhere else these ... are atleast thrown away to some dark corner under a bridge or street.

This might sound tone deaf but thats seems extremely cheap to me. It means the cost range for chatGPT is between $300m - $500m per year.

If the 100m users is accurate, it means they only need to convert low single digit percentage to paying users to break even.

Now it makes sense why they chose to charge $20/m, I predicted much higher.

At best you can say, its an unnecessary burden which is artificially created with the purpose of dissuading customers from leaving.

Only a small group of cloud customers would find this "burden" meaningful enough in monetary terms to even generate a report. In my view, this does not rise to the level of severity, scale, or type that would warrant regulatory intervention.

I believe the difference of opinion is political in nature, I'm fundamentally opposed to the government taking a kingmaker/referee role in the free market.

This is why I abhor the three letter agencies in America, especially the financial ones. These regulators especially in Europe are given immense power to arbitrarily decide whats right/wrong.

I don't troll, I just use chatGPT to rewrite some of my comments so that I don't get flagged/banned.

I'm slightly autistic so I find myself constantly being scrutinised not for the substance of my comments but its insensitive style.

Take this topic for example, my original text had a lot of parts questioning the intelligence of the people who don't recognise how dangerous and short sighted this is. I did this using some colourful language which the prompt got rid off.

In an ideal world, I wouldn't need to resort to these things but we live in a world resembling that Black Mirror episode where the lady had to constantly fake politeness.

P.S. If you don't believe me, just put what ever I wrote into an AI detector. Also the autism isn't an official diagnosis, I had a doctor friend diagnosis me lol.

Regarding the political aspect, I strongly disagree with the notion of attacking these companies just for the sake of being actually really good (and big).

The EU alternatives are notably inferior, they constantly find themselves playing catch-up, which could be attributed to a weaker anti-tech ecosystem.

The tech giants in America are able to innovate at a rapid pace due to a robust ecosystem that encourages experimentation and dogfooding. Google, for example, developed MapReduce and Kubernetes out of necessity, while Amazon and Microsoft also heavily rely on their in-house innovations.

You can make a similar argument with Cloudflare and Akamai, these offerings were not only welcomed, they needed to exist in the American tech ecosystem.

You see similar ecosystem dynamics at play in China with hardware.

This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem. The cloud market is one of the most competitive in tech, with numerous strong and emerging players.

In addition to established giants such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are also healthy second-tier players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Digital Ocean. I can also list more than a dozen new startups in the space that got money thrown at them.

Furthermore, it's important to recognise that cloud companies struggle to lock in because of the competitive dynamics at play. You have 2 levers to pull, money and tech lock-in.

You can't go far with money without quickly reaching diminishing returns. At the core you have compute, databases and object storage. All off these have been abstracted to a point where its very tricky to create lock-in without creating strong adverse reactions from customers.

As someone who has been closely observing the industry for almost a decade, I have noticed a strong trend towards reduced lock-in.

Just be brutally honest with yourself and do the right thing, what ever that intrinsically means for you.

Even if you don't believe in god, you have an unconscious that keeps a track of these things so act in a way where you might get/deserve chance to rebuild yourself after all of it.

P.S. I've been in a similar situation (smaller level) and the way I handled myself resulted in a downward spiral for years, never truly trusting myself to fully commit to anything while also not fully giving up. Basically running around in circles, each time losing a little bit of heart/spirit.