stevecrox

Uhh how?

The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.

Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.

MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn’t. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.

You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn’t want to encourage contributions that is his decision but…

KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn’t have.

The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs

deleted by creator

Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory…

Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious…

I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc… Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

So I know thats a joke but…

With Java 11’s inclusion of ‘var’ I have successfully copied JavaScript code into Java without needing to change anything.

I judge the direction Java is going in

I thought server side anti cheat was the most effective. Since it can’t be modified by clients and tracks clients for impossible behaviour.

I wish a company would build 4.5"-5.5" and 5.5"-6.5" flagship phones, put as many features that make sense in each.

Then when you release a new flagship the last flagship devices become your ‘mid range’ and you drop the price accordingly, with your mid range dropping to budget the year after.

When Nokia had 15 different phones out at a time it made sense because they would be wildly different (size, shape, button layout, etc…).

These days everyone wants as large a screen as possible on a device that is comfortable to hold, we really don’t need 15 different models with slightly different screen ratios.

I actually researched my list, most the technologies were used internally for years and either publically released after better public alternatives had been adopted or it seems buzz reached me years after Google’s first release. So I am wrong.

Between 2012-2015 I used to consult on Apache Ivy projects (ideally moving them to Maven and purging the insanity people had written). As a result I would get called in when projects had dependency issues.

The biggest culprits were Guava/GSon, projects would often choose to use them (because Google) and then would discover a bug that had been fixed in a later patch release (e.g. they used 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 had the fix). However the reason they used 2.2.1 was because a library they needed did. Bumping up the version usually caused things to break.

The standard solution was to ask’why’ they needed Guava/GSon and everytime you would find they are usually some function found in one of the Apache Commons libraries. So I would pull down the commons library rewrite the bit (often they worked identically)

Fun side note in 2016-2017 I got called to consult on a lot of Gradle projects to fix the same kind of convoluted bespoke things people did with Apache Ivy. Ivy knew the Gradle ‘feautres’ were a massive headache in 2012 and told you to use Maven for those reasons. Ce La vie.

We tried using Protobuf in 2008 and it was worse than the Apache Axis for JSON conversion (which feels too harsh to say), similarly I had been using AMQP or Kafka for years and tried gRPC when it was released (google say 2016 but I am sure we tried in 2014) and it was worse in every metric I still don’t understand why it exists.

I was using Vaadin in 2011 and honestly thought GWT was released in 2012. I had to use it in 2014 and the workflow, compile time and look of GWT is just worse than Vaadin.

The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.

If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc… there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.

The Google staff just don’t think to look outside Google (after if Google hasn’t solved it no chance outsiders have) and so wrote something entirely from scratch.

Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great “Its by Google so it must be good!” Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.

The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren’t owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc…).

I switched my computer illiterate family members to reduce the effort of helping them and they didn’t notice.

As a helper…

There are distributions focussed on the latest and greatest (Arch, Fedora, etc…) and ones aiming for stability (Debian, Ubuntu, etc…). Think of them as groups with different views.

So Linux Mint is Ubuntu but it has the latest Cinnamon desktop. Ubuntu is Debian but focused on fixed releases and adds ‘snaps’ and includes “non-free” by default.

People have different views on how the desktop should work. The two big desktops are Gnome and KDE.

Gnome is like Marmite. Its works completely different to any other desktop and people either love it or loathe it. Its often the distribution default.

With Windows 10/11 I think Microsoft were trying to steal some of KDE’s best features. By default it looks very much like a Windows desktop but lots of people mod it to look/act like macos. Some people struggle with the options it provides.

Then there are lots of other desktops, for example Cinnamon takes Gnome and turns it into a normal desktop.

Personally I would suggest Kubuntu as your first attempt. This is a fairly decent install guide.

Ubuntu tries to minimise the choices you need to make and the 6 month update cycle keeps it fairly stable.

Kubuntu is Ubuntu it just makes KDE the default instead of Gnome.