Railander's comments

TBF having a quick response time to real-world fraud (as in, not because there is a bug in the code, but because users are lying to each other) is not an issue a developer would normally have to worry about. Seems like he simply got scapegoated on that one.

I think it is very bold of him to claim starting from zero would be slower. He has accrued so much hate that if he were to start one I can't see how it would turn out any different than truthsocial or if Biden started his own social media platform.

Although I do think it's doable if he somehow kept the fact that he is at the helm a trade secret as he gradually grew the userbase until reaching a certain critical mass and finally revealing that he's the owner.

That will only happen when people can't do the things they normally could anymore on the browser. I was/am expecting it to happen with manifest v3, as I understood it it would break userscripts and make adblocking a pain, so far it hasn't happened so I still haven't bothered switching off Chrome.

Assuming this gets implemented, users might start being unable to access certain websites or services because their identity is deemed "insufficient", which would move them to use a different browser that does not have this.

> Lots of networking equipment works over HTTP only, still.

MikroTik has supported https for a very very long time, though it comes disabled by default and even if it didn't it wouldn't work because it requires the user creating/importing a cert to use with it.

At least the cert manager is quite intricate and they have a video (assuming the device has a valid WAN IP) on how to set it up with letsencrypt.

Considering they did lay off 50% of their staff, your analysis was spot-on.

He's definitely feeling the pain right now, you can tell by how much more docile he's gotten in the last 48 hours.

From his recent tweets he has said exactly the opposite; that he will build a "council" of diversified opinions and cultures, or something of the sort.

Whatever that means or if it's ever actually happening though remains to be seen.

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it.

"Stupid" is probably the wrong word here. "Gullible" is probably more apt, considering they keep falling for these.

>it almost might incentivize politician-style vacuous/feel-good statements

They for sure would since there's a word for that: demagoguery.

> repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up?

It absolutely does, and that is precisely why they keep doing it. It doesn't work for the kinds of people that browse hackernews, but that's not their core audience anyway.

It's like saying ads don't work because you and me never click them because we use an adblock. Clearly they do work, and quite well...

This is a technique called "getting the foot in the door".

You see videogames employing these psychological tactics constantly nowadays to completely min-max human behavior into spending money.

To be fair, doesn't seem like he's putting any effort into digging holes.

The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.

That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...

Also alternatively, turn on Safe Mode so if you lose access the router will revert to the configuration state when Safe Mode was turned on.

Their firewall is iptables wrapped in a really nice GUI.

The criticism on their firewall might as well be a criticism on iptables (which IMO is completely valid, even after years I still have doubts about what a certain rules structure is going to do).

iptables itself is extremely unintuitive (although extremely powerful and flexible), but their GUI makes it more manageable.

Agreed, MikroTik is extremely complex due to how feature-rich it is and because they run the same OS across all their devices, regardless of router/switch/AP/generation. Definitely not for the faint of heart that simply want to do some basic networking.

On the other hand, I'm not sure "unintuitive" is the correct word here. Having had the (dis)pleasure of setting up complex topologies on other manufactures like Cisco I found MikroTik to be considerably more intuitive (or perhaps "less unintuitive" would be more appropriate), possibly because Cisco has been built on for many decades and new features were constantly added on top of existing systems for compatibility purposes instead of redoing the CLI from scratch to make a more consistent user experience.

From what I understood the part they are changing regarding scripting is in the `routing filters` feature.

Your script is probably going to break due to the new syntaxes in v7, but no significant added new features on that matter that I'm aware.

As a Network Admin at an ISP in Brazil I can confirm their products are extremely popular due to the basically unbeatable price to performance and especially price to features. I can't think of anything close to their retail prices that can offer BGP, OSPF, MPLS, VRF, Wireguard, iptables, L3 hardware-acceleration, MLAG, ZeroTier, RPKI, VRRP, VXLAN, ECMP, Recursive Routing, LetsEncrypt, CA, REST API, etc. They have a 4x 10Gbps switch that has all of these features for $150.

You could potentially build a Linux PC to do some of the more basic stuff that most ISPs require at a similar price, such as PPPoE concentrators, but it's still a lot more hands-on work for no clear benefit.

I can't find right now what the market share of peering routers is in Rio's IX, but i feel like it's significantly higher than 10% (probably between 20 to 30%).

> So there’s nothing stopping someone from jamming your equipment

Nearly a decade at a small/medium ISP in Brazil (where illegal competitiveness isn't uncommon) and I've never seen this happening to us (or if it did, we never found out).

This is because jamming the spectrum requires a very powerful antenna that will _also_ interfere with every other antenna in the region, including probably their own. Instead of that, it's way easier to just grab some scissors and cut off your competitor's wires (which has in fact happened to us on numerous occasions).

So while there are anticompetitive practices I don't think this is one you'd ever have to worry about.

> free youtube content

This cannot be stated enough. I think just YouTube alone would be enough to justify Google's existence.

Meanwhile Amazon has Twitch, and people there don't seem to think too highly of how things are being managed (they somehow managed to break every single adblock available and at this point have won against adblockers).

> They could have prioritized websites with fewer tracking/ads/scripts.

The downside comes down to the end user experience if those websites being prioritized have lower quality material, which in turn might force those users to use a different search engine that might not care about that if it means they're getting more users.