emseetech's comments

JSDoc is TypeScript.

I love it. I've had a hard time convincing clients it's the best way to go but any side projects recently and going forward will always start with this frontend stack and no more until fully necessary.

No, because layers of abstraction come at a cost and we have created a temple to the clouds piled with abstractions. Any option to simplify processes and remove abstractions should be taken or at least strongly considered.

Code written for a web browser 30 years ago will still run in a web browser today. But what guarantee does a build step have that the toolchain will still even exist 30 years from now?

And because modern HTML/CSS is powerful and improving at a rapid clip. I don't want to be stuck on non-standard frameworks when the rest of the world moves on to better and better standards.

They could have better ergonomics and I hope a successor that does comes out but they're really not that bad.

I haven't run into any steps that require one, there's always alternatives.

Do you have anything specific in mind?

I'm a fan of anything that allows me to build with javascript that doesn't require a build step.

Modern HTML/CSS with Web Components and JSDoc is underrated. Not for everyone but should be more in the running for a modern frontend stack than it is.

Everyone's suggestions feel designed to frustrate me. Instructions on how to cajole and plead that seem more astrology than engineering.

This is the pattern I settled on about a year ago. I use it as a rubber-duck / conversation partner for bigger picture issues. I'll run my code through it as a sanity "pre-check" before a pr review. And I mapped autocomplete to ctrl-; in vim so I only bring it up when I need it.

Otherwise, I write everything myself. AI written code never felt safe. It adds velocity but velocity early on always steals speed from the future. That's been the case for languages, for frameworks, for libraries, it's no different for AI.

In other words, you get better at using AI for programming by recognizing where its strengths lie and going all in on those strengths. Don't twist up in knots trying to get it to do decently what you can already do well yourself.

If you've seen Scrubs...

Also important is just how fast cheap hardware has gotten which means vertical scaling is extremely effective. People could get a lot farther with sqlite in wal mode on a single box with an nvme drive than they imagine. Feels like our intuition has not caught up with the material reality of current hardware.

And now that there are solid streaming backup systems, the only real issue is redundancy not scaling.

No I understood that.

Payment processors underpin ad systems and they have strong leverage to pressure ad buyers and can pull your ability to make those sales. That's on top of the advertisers themselves having strong positions on what kind of content they want to advertise beside.

Everyone has to pay for servers somehow. Especially at scale. And doing that without payment processors is difficult. Crypto has not proven itself to be something consumers will use.

In all reality, the solution to as much free speech as possible on a social platform is to limit reach. If people want to broadcast to millions or even billions, then of course that will come with limitations and restrictions. Everyone has to balance the varied interests required to achieve scale. Limiting individual reach means more potential freedom for users.

Right and I'm not a fan of algorithmic feeds at all. Social media users broadly are happiest with a basic chronological feed composed only of who they follow. That's why every social media platform starts with that, then adds algorithmic feeds when they want to attract advertisers and after they feel their users are "locked in" enough.

Especially when engagement is the primary metric, which incentivizes our worst attention-seeking behavior. Well thought out, nuanced posts get lost in the ether. Hot takes, trolling and extreme positions get pushed to the top.

Reddit and HN mitigate this somewhat with the downvote system, which is hardly perfect, but at least means negative feedback is not given a positive weight in rankings.

Sure but I'd argue there's a much greater chance of a subscription service having a fair and transparent process because you are the customer versus an ad-supported service because the advertisers are the customer.

And maybe users have a right to not be deleted without cause, despite it being a private platform. Maybe scale means that they have to play by different rules.

But what if the answer is reducing reach so only explicit followers can see what's posted? Do users have a right to being algorithmically boosted? Do they have a right to a wide audience? People who have had their reach reduced on instagram or twitter don't seem content to accept that but I don't see an argument against it.

In a federated system, spam and bots are a huge problem. One way this is handled is a shared blocklist. Something I toyed with was a propagated list like DNS to handle this problem, which would go a long way, but would also mean that being blocked by a highly trusted node could mean being blacklisted by the fediverse. This has already happened in a soft way when Gab was mass defederated. As the fediverse grows, automated tooling is necessary. Even if people have a right to contest being blocked, what's the reasonable mechanism for getting unblocked in a massive federated system?

That's not entirely true. The big platforms yes, but that's a combination of economic incentives and technical challenges at scale (such as moving data to cold storage).

But even then, that means there's resistance, but that's not the same as things being technically impossible. In federated systems, a delete is not a delete. It can't be because there's no way to confirm deletion on nodes you can't control.

And I understand your perspective as a realist on deletion generally, but that's not most social media users understanding when they're told they can control their own data, which is a common selling point of federation.

A centralized system which is properly incentivized to completely wipe all data associated with an account will be able do so, but a federated system can't.

For the record, people working on decentralization should not stop working on it. For myself, I have moved on to other approaches with different goals, but it's a worthwhile endeavor and if anyone ever cracks it, it'll change the damn world. And the people working on it understand exactly how difficult it is, so nothing I say is news to them. But everyone should be clear-eyed about it. It's not a panacea, it's complicated on much more than a technical level and it's already incredibly complicated on a technical level.

And even if it works, there will still be carry-over of many of the problems we've seen with centralized social networks.

It does if you don't pay to access the service as well, because the financial system is the underpinning of their ad network.

Even in a federated system, you can be blacklisted although it does take more coordination and work.

i2p and writing to the blockchain are an attempt to deal with that through permanence, but those are not without their own (serious) problems.

In a federated system, the best you can do is a soft delete request, and ignoring that request is easier than satisfying it.

If I have 100 followers on 100 different nodes, that means each node has access to (and holds on to) some portion of my data by way of those followers.

In a centralized system, a user having total control over their data (and the ability to delete it) is more feasible. I'm not saying modern systems are great about this, GDPR was necessary to force their hands, but federation makes it more technically difficult.

To clarify, I don't mean big P Politics, I mean political in the sense that each node is owned and operated separately, which means there are competing interests and a need to coordinate between them that extends beyond the technical. Extrapolated to N potential nodes creates a lot of conflicting incentives and perspectives that have to be managed. And if the network ever becomes concentrated in a handful of nodes or even one of them which is not unlikely, then we're effectively back at square one.

| if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad

It's important to note we're optimizing for different things. When I say third-order social effects, it means the way that engagement algorithms and virality combine with massive scale to create a broadly negative effect on society. This comes in the form of addiction, how constant upward social comparison can lead to depression and burnout, or how in extreme situations, society's worst tendencies can be amplified into terrible results with Myanmar being the worst case scenario.

You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience. You can always put up a website, blog, write for an op-ed position at your local newspaper, hold a sign in a public square, etc. The mere existence of a centralized system with moderation is not a threat to freedom of speech.

Federation is a little bit more resilient but accounts can be blacklisted, and whole nodes can be blacklisted because of the behavior of a handful of accounts. And unfortunately, that little bit of resilience amplifies the problem of spam and bots, which for the average user is much bigger of a concern than losing their account. Not to mention privacy concerns, which is self-evident why an open system is more difficult than a closed one.

I'll concede that "worse" was poor wording, but intractable certainly wasn't. These problems become much more difficult to solve in a federated system.

However, most advocates of federation aren't interested in solving the same problems as I am, so that's where the dissonance comes from.

I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself.

If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model.

Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again.

I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.

Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable.

I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.

Go is a great language.