I expected nothing of that movie, and I was still disappointed.

Matrix 4.

I think sometimes the studio thinks “this is going to be a massive movie, let’s pay someone to make a different studio credit to show how massive and special it is”, but all massive movies don’t end up being that special.

Yeah, I think that’s probably more accurate than what I was thinking, and that leaving belongs to acceptance rather than depression.

I was actually aware of that, which is why I wrote depression/acceptance, meaning they probably moved from bargaining to either one of those, thinking either of those 2 stages could prompt people to leave. By fast-tracking, I meant that moved happened faster than they would have if the rebranding hadn’t happened. It’s still a fascinating bit, I have known about the stages of grief for a while, but only learned recently (like, this year) that they didn’t have to happen in order.

I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.

I mean, I guess that depends. History is littered with countries that got destroyed because they got suddenly wealthy, like what happened to Nauru; but also of countries that thrived and are still thriving on a well-protected, sustainably obtained natural resource. I’d be more worried if the situation was more sudden and taking people with their pants down, but it’s been a very slow burn over decades.

And to consider another looming environmental catastrophe: the currently rising water scarcity can’t scare you too much if you live next to one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169

The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.

Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.

So true.

With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.

It hasn’t. But letting terrible people have power affects the world in normalizing violence and hatred. It’s not about left or right, if they were American racists against Chinese people, I would have the exact same problem. I’m personally quite on the left, but without the hate.

I am living safe and not being targeted with hateful violence like the Uyghurs or North Koreans are, so this is far, far more important than what can affect me.

I think Kbin is something good being built by good people, I get what they’re trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t have a lot of faith that it will turn out to be a successful project.

In terms of technical scaling, I’m puzzled that they went with an interpreted language if the goal is scale. I get that the basic usage of Kbin’s features may not require a ton of CPU-heavy operations, or a fine handling of the memory; but once it meets sufficient scale, there will have to be some scale edge-case bottlenecks where you’ll want to step out of the beaten path and get lower-level, so I’m a bit confused about why they chose a technology that will make those harder to get past rather than easier. PHP is great for rapid prototyping, but I’d argue that’s not what the vision should be here.

About community scale, I’m not expert, but they seem to really care to offer a karma system; and we’ve seen the karma-farming behavior that this has been incentivizing on Reddit. I don’t see why it would be any different here if enough people end up joining. Lemmy is intentionally not offering a karma system, and it really feels like the healthier move long-term.

I think all it would take would be for the Lemmy devs to admit that they’re in over their heads, and that their political affiliations have been a hindrance to the project, to the point that they transition the governance of it to other people. I really hope they do that. If they do soon enough, they’re so far ahead and built on so much more long-term thinking, that I think it would pretty much make Kbin kinda obsolete. I have no special information about this, so I could be wrong, and I hope for them that I am; but I can see that as a pretty likely outcome.

(That, and on the shorter-term, I wouldn’t contribute to a product I don’t use, and I can’t use it for now because my usage is 100% mobile, and the current lack of API means no native client. I wish the mobile web was better than it is as an application platform…)

planning for long-term growth

Which is part of any scaling effort, and you can’t really guess through predicting and resolving bottlenecks, it takes some serious expertise. And as far as I know, the Lemmy devs have never built a high-scale service before, and I think that is possibly the single biggest risk to the growth and success of the Lemmy project in general.

Source: that’s my job, I’ve been doing that for some of the most high-scale services in the world for about a decade. I absolutely could help, actually I’d love to, but I definitely won’t under current Lemmy leadership, for reasons: https://lemmy.world/comment/596235