Is there an obvious reason that the most popular youtube/twitch/radio/etc. folks are generally much more confident/loud/brash/etc., than the most popular writers?
E.g., the most widely read programming bloggers over time (https://danluu.com/writing-non-advice/) are mostly fairly confident, but the most confident/loud/brash among them isn't even close to the same league as the most popular steamers like xqc (video games), Hikaru (chess), Primagen (programming), etc.
If you look at the most popular streamers over time in any given niche, a huge fraction of them are cut from the same cloth as shock jocks like Howard Stern.
There are other strategies that work (banter with 2+ people, very attractive person showing off how attractive they are, actually informative videos, etc.), but the modern version of Howard Stern tends to dominate these when someone does it well (as in, gives people what they want) in way that doesn't seem to be true for writing.
@888826fe Yeah, doubly so when you try the app! Full real names required (no usernames), interface feels like a 20 year old flash app, etc.
I'm curious if taking a 20-30 year old approach to web dev and making the entire thing feel like it's 20-30 years old will be a successful strategy.
It's hard to imagine that using techniques that make it take 3 years to build a simple web app will result in success, but maybe "feeling old school" dominates velocity?
It's also interesting that they just say you can't initiate legal action against them: "you agree that you will not take legal action against the Company for any perceived damages relating to or resulting from the use of the Bridge IP."
LITIGATORS HATE THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!
Why do companies bother with arbitration clauses when they can simply tell you that you're not allowed to initiate legal action against them?
P.S. By replying to this, you agree to give me durable power of attorney.
For anyone more curious about the technical side than hilarious (to me, anyway) legal mumbo jumbo, perhaps the more interesting bit is that someone bought this company in 2020 to do a from-scratch re-write of the software and chose to implement the backend in C++. The app is launching now, 3 years later.
When's the last time you heard of someone building a web app from scratch in C++? Maybe OkCupid in 2004? Pretty interesting that a team would choose to build a card game web app in C++ in 2020.
This ToS is incredible!
As written, they claim rights over "the software that allows you to engage with this site, and any accompanying files", i.e., web browser, OS, firmware, etc., saying "You acknowledge that the Company retains the right to prevent you from using [this] at any time in the future and for any reason".
Apparently I'm also not allowed to use my browser on more than one computer at once now? "Use ... must be restricted to one computer at a time."
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/185/210/829/924/399/original/31b15cf468c5da26.png
It's also interesting that they just say you can't initiate legal action against them: "you agree that you will not take legal action against the Company for any perceived damages relating to or resulting from the use of the Bridge IP."
LITIGATORS HATE THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!
Why do companies bother with arbitration clauses when they can simply tell you that you're not allowed to initiate legal action against them?
P.S. By replying to this, you agree to give me durable power of attorney.
@269a2baa Yeah, when I was younger, I noticed this about the capital-A Atheist community as well as the objectivist community.
There's something about communities that are really "about" doing superior reasoning (as opposed to communities where good reasoning is important or instrumental, but aren't "about" that) that seems to cause something bad to happen. I wonder if Mensa is like this, but I haven't had enough contact with admitted Mensa folks to know.
As an aside, a reason I find the rationality community interesting is that they nominally respect the epistemic values I strive for, but they generally embody the opposite and are wildly overconfident (ofc. there are exceptions)
I remember reading the pre-LW stuff and thinking "oh, cool. Other people who are trying to mitigate the impact of cognitive biases on their own thinking" and then "weird. These people are super overconfident about things they know nothing about, especially the leaders"
If you don't use an all-time cherry picked example and pick the best young player in hockey (feel free to use baseball or basketball or w/e) and then ask, if you delete 99% of the competition, would that player have been the best in the world at 16, the answer is generally "no, and it's not even close"
I don't expect someone who doesn't follow sports to know this, but I find cultures where people love this kind of "clever" reasoning, totally disconnected from any knowledge of reality, quite odd
As an aside, a reason I find the rationality community interesting is that they nominally respect the epistemic values I strive for, but they generally embody the opposite and are wildly overconfident (ofc. there are exceptions)
I remember reading the pre-LW stuff and thinking "oh, cool. Other people who are trying to mitigate the impact of cognitive biases on their own thinking" and then "weird. These people are super overconfident about things they know nothing about, especially the leaders"
Since I had someone who doesn't follow sports (privately) ask why the above example is absurd, if you pick an all-time great player who's among the best young players across all major sports, like Gretzky, how old were they before they were the best player in hockey? You could make a case for 19, although I think most people would say 20 or 21. Now delete 99% of hockey players. Is Gretzky the best at age 16? Maybe? But probably not, and that's one of the most favorable examples possible.
If you don't use an all-time cherry picked example and pick the best young player in hockey (feel free to use baseball or basketball or w/e) and then ask, if you delete 99% of the competition, would that player have been the best in the world at 16, the answer is generally "no, and it's not even close"
I don't expect someone who doesn't follow sports to know this, but I find cultures where people love this kind of "clever" reasoning, totally disconnected from any knowledge of reality, quite odd
https://types.pl/@graydon/111144025966056604 makes me wonder, what other engineering truisms are overrated?
A related one that I often heard in contexts where it was wildly wrong was "engineer time is more expensive than CPU time", e.g., I would sometimes hear this from staff engineers at Twitter, but if you just looked at hardware TCO compared to eng compensation, they were roughly comparable and, at the margin, you could probably cut costs by 90% (WAG) if you seriously spent 10% of eng time on cost cutting.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/147/707/084/406/260/original/137181d6b824ae33.png
Another, discussed in https://danluu.com/nothing-works/, is the oft-repeated statement that you should focus on "core competencies" which, commonly used to justify buying a SaaS solution from some startup (which then, if you're lucky, and the company doesn't fold, often turns into buying something from Private Equity/Cisco/Salesforce/etc.).
Also, saying comments get out of date / code is self-documenting to justify not writing comments (thx https://mastodon.social/@asmodai/111147721770157534).
@11ecbe6c I remember hearing something about this, but not the details. In general, there was an absurd about of product fallout due to infighting in the big data space, e.g., the war between (and I'm not sure I'm remembering the names correctly) HDInsight and Azure Data Lake.
That thing that happened with GChat / Hangouts / Google+: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1504567918746431492.
More generally, all sorts of weird stuff getting tied to Google+, with threats to careers of people who didn't get in line: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1122617702080581632
Similar story, but on the infra side, for a migration that probably doubled the server infra cost of a $100B+ company and caused a huge amount of re-write churn (this decision later flipped around and is now causing re-write churn the other direction).
Or you notice that your bridge/euchre/canasta game is extremely white (and in some places, also somewhat asian). You might ask the one black pair you see where else they play cards, get an invite to a spades tournament, where you look around and are the only non black person in the room.
If you do this a bunch of times, you'll notice large non-racial demographic differences between each pairwise-related groups and you can pick through the differences to try to figure out which ones are causal.
I think it would be fair to say that people who take Approach 1 are engaging in a lot of confirmation bias, but that's a much more general term and doesn't really describe the approach.
Anyway, my question is, do Approach 1 and Approach 2 have generally or somewhat understood shorthand names or, if you want to explain to a bystander what these are, do you have to actually describe the behaviors as I did above?
With Approach 2, you would look at what activities white dudes do and compare these activities to what black people and women do and then try to figure out what the differences are. For example, if you do west coast swing dance and notice that it's very white/asian, you might ask the black folks you see where else black people dance, get an invite to go Chicago stepping, where you'll notice that you're the only non-black person in the room who isn't the significant other of a black person.
Or you notice that your bridge/euchre/canasta game is extremely white (and in some places, also somewhat asian). You might ask the one black pair you see where else they play cards, get an invite to a spades tournament, where you look around and are the only non black person in the room.
If you do this a bunch of times, you'll notice large non-racial demographic differences between each pairwise-related groups and you can pick through the differences to try to figure out which ones are causal.
With Approach 2, you would look at what activities white dudes do and compare these activities to what black people and women do and then try to figure out what the differences are. For example, if you do west coast swing dance and notice that it's very white/asian, you might ask the black folks you see where else black people dance, get an invite to go Chicago stepping, where you'll notice that you're the only non-black person in the room who isn't the significant other of a black person.
@cedfe296 Fair enough. If people find that it works for them, isn't flaky, etc., then that's more reliable information than the dev's opinions on some random topic that isn't directly related to their work.
@25b1da2f Personally, if I wanted to do that, I would've just tagged Jeff without the mealy mouthed explanation followed by what sounds like megacorp PR copy.
Not that I ever have done that or would do that, but when I've seen people snitch tag, they usually just tag the person without sounding like a corp PR drone.
Since Sam doesn't generally sound like a PR drone, e.g., see the quoted bits above, it really feels like he was writing PR copy.
@25b1da2f Speaking of optics, immediately after I wrote that, the CTO dropped in yet again to basically say "oh, sure, that guy spent the better part of a decade trashing Qualcomm engineers, etc., but he stepped down 9 months ago, so that has nothing to do with us", along with an anodyne statement about how Discourse is serious about Android.
This is also one of the two core things I was commenting on in the main thread — the tendency to pass the blame outside the company.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/067/754/955/176/886/original/1564a8fa67eb8e36.png
@25b1da2f Of course, as someone who's spent a lot of time in big companies, I'm familiar with the "blame the exec who headed out the door and wash your hands of all responsibility" move, but I think the move's optics are better when it's a hugecompany and there was a leadership purge than when it's one co-founder talking about another, after they had 9 years to speak up when their buddy called other engineers "terrible at their jobs" and spitefully wished for them to all lose their jobs.
@25b1da2f As someone who's worked for Twitter, I'm familiar with having a leader who writes checks the company can't cash. I'm not exactly a fan of that, but one thing that I liked about Twitter was that it had a culture where people felt comfortable publicly calling Jack out on bad comments, e.g., if Jack made a comment like the ones from Jeff or Sam that I've quoted, I'd expect @85f21341 and others to publicly call him out on that and for Jack to take it well (at least while he was still CEO).
@cedfe296 I don't think I can state a rigorous reason for this link but, as a hand wave-y reason, if someone looks at Twitter and thinks the entire thing is so simple that it can be done by a smaller team than ForumMagnum because Twitter has less functionality than ForumMagnum, what are the odds that they'll correctly think through the relevant design and technical decisions for their own software? That feels to me like it should be a fairly negative signal.
@cedfe296 [sorry, mid-message pause due to IRL thing]
If I were King of Twitter, there are at least three rankers where I'd want a team of ten people minimum (there might be more — that's just what I know of without ever having looked into ranking at Twitter) and that's not including anything that would've been in the ad exchange that Twitter sold for $1B, which is surely at least 10x the hypothetical valuation of ForumMagnum if it IPO'd today and at least 100x the complexity, maybe much more.
@cedfe296 From a product standpoint, this might be unfair, but I have some skepticism (in terms of if I'd like the software, not its odds of success) due to how overconfident the developers are, such as in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109374630690202023 (and I've seen other examples like this on FB, I just don't have a handy reference).
I think overconfident people often produce successful companies and products, but it's pretty rare that they produce a product that I personally like.
@cedfe296 I don't think I can state a rigorous reason for this link but, as a hand wave-y reason, if someone looks at Twitter and thinks the entire thing is so simple that it can be done by a smaller team than ForumMagnum because Twitter has less functionality than ForumMagnum, what are the odds that they'll correctly think through the relevant design and technical decisions for their own software? That feels to me like it should be a fairly negative signal.
@cedfe296 From a product standpoint, this might be unfair, but I have some skepticism (in terms of if I'd like the software, not its odds of success) due to how overconfident the developers are, such as in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109374630690202023 (and I've seen other examples like this on FB, I just don't have a handy reference).
I think overconfident people often produce successful companies and products, but it's pretty rare that they produce a product that I personally like.
@25b1da2f Fair enough. With respect to the Qualcomm trash talk, given that he's trashing engineers for being terrible for not hitting Apple-like perf, I would consider the trash talk to be backed up if Discourse had an implementation that was within a factor of two of what an all-time-great performance team could do, which isn't even close to the case.
I've tried using forums that use Discourse after that 2016 blog post and still find search to be unusably slow with annoyingly slow loading.
@cedfe296 When I've tried it in the past and found it to be annoyingly slow and also quite buggy (e.g., there was something that appeared to be a React state loss bug that would reset my scroll state to the top of the page on a semi-regularly basis).
I just tried it again just now and it seems much faster now, but I didn't use it enough to judge if it would be too annoyingly buggy for me to use.
If I were starting my own forum, I'd at least try it out to see how well it works for me.
@25b1da2f And if a founder goes around loudly calling engineers terrible an publicly hoping they lose their jobs for not hitting absolute cutting edge perf while their company produces a product that famously has worst-in-class performance, I don't think it should come as a surprise when people pick on the performance.
The same thing would happen if Casey Muratori or Jonathan Blow made a forum with searching-hijacking javascript that's too slow to use even on a massive dev workstation.
@25b1da2f Jeff seems unusually good at handling criticism in a lot of circumstances and I have a lot of respect for that, but if someone is going to spend years (coming up on a decade now) hostilely trashing engineers at a company for not quite achieving the best performance in the world, it seems quite funny to me when they then produce world leadingly slow software.
@25b1da2f In general, I'm not a fan of the missing stair / "that's just Bob" defense.
I don't think Jeff making a lot of statements that are equivalent to his statements that Qualcomm engineers are "terrible at their jobs" makes this better or should make Discourse more immune to criticism.
It's Jeff's prerogative to use his huge platform to shit on people doing work he doesn't like, but it shouldn't surprise employees that his company is going to get splashed with some shit as a result.
@25b1da2f And if a founder goes around loudly calling engineers terrible an publicly hoping they lose their jobs for not hitting absolute cutting edge perf while their company produces a product that famously has worst-in-class performance, I don't think it should come as a surprise when people pick on the performance.
The same thing would happen if Casey Muratori or Jonathan Blow made a forum with searching-hijacking javascript that's too slow to use even on a massive dev workstation.
@25b1da2f complaining this is "unfair", "nonsense", etc., when Jeff and Sam both put out stuff that's more hostile and, IMO, much more unfair as well. In the original threads on the Bing they, they're just having tantrums.
IMO, if they don't want people pointing out this out, maybe consider they shouldn't have their co-founders go around the internet, trashing things they don't like a super hostile fashion, especially when they bill themselves as a company that creates "civilized discourse"?
@25b1da2f In general, I'm not a fan of the missing stair / "that's just Bob" defense.
I don't think Jeff making a lot of statements that are equivalent to his statements that Qualcomm engineers are "terrible at their jobs" makes this better or should make Discourse more immune to criticism.
It's Jeff's prerogative to use his huge platform to shit on people doing work he doesn't like, but it shouldn't surprise employees that his company is going to get splashed with some shit as a result.
@25b1da2f I think the absolute rate matters here. The two numbers that have been stated as too much / attack-level numbers are 0.006 QPS and 0.5 QPS. I wouldn't add a cache for that level of traffic either. I'm just saying it's trivial to serve that much traffic and I'd expect a site that could be static, like a forum, would serve crawlers out of a CDN and not even notice the traffic even at 10k x that level.
For the other part, I have multiple Discourse folks and the CTO in my mentions,
@25b1da2f complaining this is "unfair", "nonsense", etc., when Jeff and Sam both put out stuff that's more hostile and, IMO, much more unfair as well. In the original threads on the Bing they, they're just having tantrums.
IMO, if they don't want people pointing out this out, maybe consider they shouldn't have their co-founders go around the internet, trashing things they don't like a super hostile fashion, especially when they bill themselves as a company that creates "civilized discourse"?
@25b1da2f I think the absolute rate matters here. The two numbers that have been stated as too much / attack-level numbers are 0.006 QPS and 0.5 QPS. I wouldn't add a cache for that level of traffic either. I'm just saying it's trivial to serve that much traffic and I'd expect a site that could be static, like a forum, would serve crawlers out of a CDN and not even notice the traffic even at 10k x that level.
For the other part, I have multiple Discourse folks and the CTO in my mentions,
@25b1da2f As I said, if someone wants to have a 100k times lower threshold for what's ok, that's fine by me.
My core question is how does one reconcile that with the opinion that engineers who produce 75% of humanly achievable performance "brutally bad", "terrible at their jobs", and deserve to lose their jobs?
It's a bit incongruous for leadership to trash people so harshly for getting moderately close to cutting edge perf when their own product is many orders of magnitude away from that.
@4958ec32 Sure, if I'm running on-prem, for things that are easily cached like crawlers, I might start worrying about at around 10k-100k QPS if I wasn't caching and much more if I was caching and you apparently worry about it in the single digit QPS range.
How do you reconcile this with your co-founder's opinion that engineers who can only doing 75% of the performance of an all-time-great team are "brutally bad", "terrible at their jobs", and deserve to lose their jobs?
BTW, the rants from Discourse leadership about how Qualcomm engineers are clowns who deserve to lose their jobs for not keeping up with Apple are a red herring.
I find Discourse unusably slow on fast machines, like the massive workstation I used to do log analysis across all Twitter logs.
Discourse hijacks ctrl+F and its custom search is too slow to use on a super fast dev box. Even if Qualcomm produced world-class workstation performance on mobile, that wouldn't be fast enough for Discourse.
I got a response from a co-founder and CTO of Discourse. Cool
Sure, everyone has a threshold for how much traffic is an attack. For easily cached traffic like this, maybe I'd start wondering about it at 10k QPS? 100k? If you think the threshold should be 0-1 QPS, fine
But how do you reconcile this with the other founder's opinion that engineers who produce 75% of the performance of an all-time-great performance team are "brutally bad", "terrible at their jobs", and deserve to lose their jobs?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/065/633/224/370/913/original/ead2b9cd9eea03a9.png
Yeah, the Bing issue is fixed because Bing came from the Microsoft lineage/culture of fixing issues that impact end users even if the problem is obviously a technical or product issue that comes from outside of Microsoft.
But in other cases, the "vendor" being ranted at either can't or won't fix the issue and end user gets stuck with the problem, although they do get some nice rants about how Qualcomm engineers deserve to lose their jobs, so at least there's that.
BTW, the rants from Discourse leadership about how Qualcomm engineers are clowns who deserve to lose their jobs for not keeping up with Apple are a red herring.
I find Discourse unusably slow on fast machines, like the massive workstation I used to do log analysis across all Twitter logs.
Discourse hijacks ctrl+F and its custom search is too slow to use on a super fast dev box. Even if Qualcomm produced world-class workstation performance on mobile, that wouldn't be fast enough for Discourse.
@e9f47639 Yeah, it wasn't intended to be an example of that.
I thought about including a 2023 example to head off this exact reply but that would also make the rant I wanted to highly less visible.
I've repeatedly pushed back against Casey Muratori's rants about how the developers of X are morons because they don't produce code that's as fast his Casey's code. There are a lot of reasonable reasons that people produce slow code.
But if you're ranting about how people who aren't quite capable of keeping up with not just a world class team, but an all time great team, should lose their jobs while you're producing slowest-in-class software, like, come on dude.
Yeah, the Bing issue is fixed because Bing came from the Microsoft lineage/culture of fixing issues that impact end users even if the problem is obviously a technical or product issue that comes from outside of Microsoft.
But in other cases, the "vendor" being ranted at either can't or won't fix the issue and end user gets stuck with the problem, although they do get some nice rants about how Qualcomm engineers deserve to lose their jobs, so at least there's that.
The Apple CPU org has, along with DEC in the StrongARM & Alpha era, one of the best executing CPU design teams ever assembled (and not coincidentally, they share a lineage via DEC->SiByte->PA Semi->Apple) and Qualcomm is at, what, maybe 75%-95% of the single-core performance?
If only managing to get to 75% to 95% of the performance of an all-time-great team makes you a clown you deserves to lose their job, man, I have news for you.
Of course I don't agree with this —
I've repeatedly pushed back against Casey Muratori's rants about how the developers of X are morons because they don't produce code that's as fast his Casey's code. There are a lot of reasonable reasons that people produce slow code.
But if you're ranting about how people who aren't quite capable of keeping up with not just a world class team, but an all time great team, should lose their jobs while you're producing slowest-in-class software, like, come on dude.
Anyway, the same thing that fundamentally concerns me about the Bing issue is what concerns me about the responses from the founder about Android performance where, in response to comments about performance being bad on a lot of Android phones, the founder has ranted, multiple times, about how the real problem is that Qualcomm engineers are terrible and deserve to lose their jobs.
I did a quick Bing search to find some examples and he's still doing this in 2023.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/064/900/759/469/311/original/9ef698ab7ab69bee.png
The Apple CPU org has, along with DEC in the StrongARM & Alpha era, one of the best executing CPU design teams ever assembled (and not coincidentally, they share a lineage via DEC->SiByte->PA Semi->Apple) and Qualcomm is at, what, maybe 75%-95% of the single-core performance?
If only managing to get to 75% to 95% of the performance of an all-time-great team makes you a clown you deserves to lose their job, man, I have news for you.
Of course I don't agree with this —
Why not just not charge people for a trivial amount of crawler traffic? If the backend is decently fast, it should basically be free to eat the load and not charge customers for it (and yes, I know the 0.5 QPS was for one site and it will add up; even so). My CDN doesn't charge me for getting DDoS'd because that traffic isn't really "my fault" and that could easily be orders of magnitude more traffic than all crawler traffic for all crawlers across every discourse instance.
Anyway, the same thing that fundamentally concerns me about the Bing issue is what concerns me about the responses from the founder about Android performance where, in response to comments about performance being bad on a lot of Android phones, the founder has ranted, multiple times, about how the real problem is that Qualcomm engineers are terrible and deserve to lose their jobs.
I did a quick Bing search to find some examples and he's still doing this in 2023.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/064/900/759/469/311/original/9ef698ab7ab69bee.png
because customers are charged so much for crawler traffic that they're leaving the platform.
And also that if anyone wants to change it, it's trivial to change the defaults and Discourse has a lot of weight to throw around because people usually don't change defaults.
Bing ended up fixing it because they were the adults in the room. When people pointed out that Discourse's change would cause problems for people, leadership responded with nonsensical angry comments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/handling-bingbot/84659/22.
Why not just not charge people for a trivial amount of crawler traffic? If the backend is decently fast, it should basically be free to eat the load and not charge customers for it (and yes, I know the 0.5 QPS was for one site and it will add up; even so). My CDN doesn't charge me for getting DDoS'd because that traffic isn't really "my fault" and that could easily be orders of magnitude more traffic than all crawler traffic for all crawlers across every discourse instance.
because customers are charged so much for crawler traffic that they're leaving the platform.
And also that if anyone wants to change it, it's trivial to change the defaults and Discourse has a lot of weight to throw around because people usually don't change defaults.
Bing ended up fixing it because they were the adults in the room. When people pointed out that Discourse's change would cause problems for people, leadership responded with nonsensical angry comments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/handling-bingbot/84659/22.
If you actually look at how forums scale up and maintain semi-decent discourse, having extremely highly weighted downvotes/flagging is one of the most effective tools (if you don't want all controversial topics killed, you can do what HN does and have mods manually rescue flagged items at their discretion; of course you can do the opposite and have mods try to chase down every bad comment and discussion, but that's harder to scale).
Discourse makes exactly the wrong choice in quite a few ways.
I wish I saved the link to this message, because there was a brilliant summary of the problem when someone asked a jerk why they wrote such a horrible reply
The jerk replied that they needed to let this other guy know they were an idiot an they couldn't downvote them, so they "had to" write a message explaining why the other person was wrong
It's a common fantasy that no downvotes or forced reply with downvote will make people amicable, but no one who observes people can believe this will work
One of the major design decisions was to have no downvotes, which was justified as a way to created "civilized discourse", the idea being that people should discuss their disagreements, resulting in "civilized discourse".
I predicted this wouldn't work because people sometimes have a very strong desire to express displeasure, and if they can't do it by downvoting, they'll do it by writing nasty comments. You don't even have to have used the internet to guess this, e.g.,
if you watch someone who's road raging, they often try to get the attention of their target and they keep getting angrier and angrier and angrier when their target doesn't notice they're being given the finger or whatever.
If you ever watched a forum migrate to discourse, you can see this exact thing play out. I read the blizzard forums around when I played Overwatch for https://danluu.com/overwatch-gender/ and it was exactly as you'd expect. The number of mean/toxic/jerk-y messages went way up.
Its backend performance also appears to be quite bad, e.g., they banned Bing from crawling them because they couldn't handle the 0.5 QPS of load that Bing was sending their way: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/981992814824378369.
But, computer performance continues to improve and discourse will probably be usable on a cheap phone within a decade and maybe servers will also become fast enough that they'll be able to handle 0.5 QPS of load.
The bigger issue is that the design is strongly anti-user in a lot of ways, e.g.,
One of the major design decisions was to have no downvotes, which was justified as a way to created "civilized discourse", the idea being that people should discuss their disagreements, resulting in "civilized discourse".
I predicted this wouldn't work because people sometimes have a very strong desire to express displeasure, and if they can't do it by downvoting, they'll do it by writing nasty comments. You don't even have to have used the internet to guess this, e.g.,
As a follow-up to https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109798007902048311, I wonder why there isn't a serious, well-funded, attempt to create a modern forum
If you look at Wikipedia's list of forum software, it's all ancient except discourse, and discourse seems unlikely to ever be something great for users
Its performance is famously terrible. People often point out how unusable it is unless you have a fast phone and the founder's response to this has been to rant about how Qualcomm sucks and need to make faster processors
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/062/668/520/262/408/original/c4f61ff3cc9eae6a.png
Its backend performance also appears to be quite bad, e.g., they banned Bing from crawling them because they couldn't handle the 0.5 QPS of load that Bing was sending their way: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/981992814824378369.
But, computer performance continues to improve and discourse will probably be usable on a cheap phone within a decade and maybe servers will also become fast enough that they'll be able to handle 0.5 QPS of load.
The bigger issue is that the design is strongly anti-user in a lot of ways, e.g.,
@7af24c68 The study says it uses GLI reference points for the DLCO LLN. Searching for `GLI DLCO` that turns up the study, which assigns 5%-ile as the LLN threshold, so roughly double the normal rate.
I'm curious what the long-term impact of covid is going to be. We're seeing more data come out, e.g., this study from yesterday where 11% of people who had "mild" covid had impaired lung function one year later, with no observable improvement in trajectory over time (measured as % of people impacted), which nicely complements studies that show long-term impact on the heart and the brain
The questions I'm most curious about are what the cumulative impact will be and what impact vaccination has.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/059/284/171/965/224/original/5e1467584d2660be.png
So far, most of these studies have mostly been on vaccinated populations, e.g., enrollment in https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0290893 was 20/05 to 21/12 and vaccines started becoming generally available in 21/08, so the population is likely to mostly be vaccinated people.
There's at least one cohort for which people have published longitudinal data on cumulative impact (and it doesn't look good), but there's a lot of heterogeneity between populations and it would be nice to see more data on this.
Since I had someone who doesn't follow sports (privately) ask why the above example is absurd, if you pick an all-time great player who's among the best young players across all major sports, like Gretzky, how old were they before they were the best player in hockey? You could make a case for 19, although I think most people would say 20 or 21. Now delete 99% of hockey players. Is Gretzky the best at age 16? Maybe? But probably not, and that's one of the most favorable examples possible.
@f0332c2d More generally, if you want to own a new-ish car, there's basically always a model you can pick up that's a good bet to not depreciate for a few years. The previous time I was shopping for a car, I almost bought a mazdaspeed 3 or a Saab 9-2X for that reason, but decided against it because I figured I'd just keep the car for decades, which makes the depreciation curve irrelevant, but I was right on which models you could sell for the same price years later.
If you actually look at how forums scale up and maintain semi-decent discourse, having extremely highly weighted downvotes/flagging is one of the most effective tools (if you don't want all controversial topics killed, you can do what HN does and have mods manually rescue flagged items at their discretion; of course you can do the opposite and have mods try to chase down every bad comment and discussion, but that's harder to scale).
Discourse makes exactly the wrong choice in quite a few ways.
@25b1da2f Speaking of optics, immediately after I wrote that, the CTO dropped in yet again to basically say "oh, sure, that guy spent the better part of a decade trashing Qualcomm engineers, etc., but he stepped down 9 months ago, so that has nothing to do with us", along with an anodyne statement about how Discourse is serious about Android.
This is also one of the two core things I was commenting on in the main thread — the tendency to pass the blame outside the company.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/067/754/955/176/886/original/1564a8fa67eb8e36.png
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Notes by Dan Luu | export