TheBeege @ TheBeege @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

My dude, I think you're not super familiar with these technologies.

The most basic form of a content delivery network is a set of globally distributed servers that replicate content from a source of truth and a network to direct traffic to the closest server with a valid replica. So the cost here is servers.

With Lemmy, this problem is solved by eliminating the need for individuals to own many servers and a lack of need for trust between servers. The effort and cost is distributed among individual humans, making it manageable.

Now, if you're familiar with blockchain, you probably perked up when you heard "lack of need for trust." That's what the blockchain was built for! Perfect fit, right? Ehh, not so much.

There's two problems: acting as a proxy for content requires trust, and some single service needs to direct clients to the right local server. If I can arbitrarily join some network of serving content, I can always tell other servers in the network that I'm serving what they ask... and then serve ads. There's no (reasonable and fast) way for the network to verify that I'm serving the correct content to every client. There's no way to avoid the need for trust. Additionally, DNS, which directs you from mysite.com to 120.1.2.1, isn't intelligent. It can't direct clients to a geographically (or route-efficient, fucking ISPs) local IP. The best it can do is pick a random one from the pool. So when you go to lemmy.world, DNS can't pick the correct server for you. So some set of servers needs to do the logic to select which local server to actually get content from. Those servers need to be central for the whole content delivery network.

This company you linked is just another company using "blockchain" to get investment money. If you read through their page to get a cursory understanding of how things work, an easy question comes up: what is the purpose of media tokens? Sure, maybe you can buy CDN time with it, but when you pay that token to someone providing compute... what do they do with that token? It's worthless, just like crypto currency. Fucking scams. All that said, blockchain is a super, super interesting technology. There's just very, very few suitable applications of it.

I've worked in IT for about 12 years now. Everything from infrastructure monitoring to data analysis to data engineering to DevOps to backend engineering to product management. I've worked with systems serving tens of users and tens of millions of users. Happy to answer any questions. I love this shit.

If someone could figure out a trustless, decentralized way to implement a CDN, I'd eat that up in a second, but with my current understanding of the internet and available technologies, I don't see a way it can work. At least, not with making every web page take >3s to load, which would absolutely kill websites.

What are these answers...

Wrong place to ask, but whatever.

It depends on what you want to build. If you're not sure, start with Python. It's likely easiest to pick up and get running. There's a book called "Automate the Boring Stuff." I think there's an online version. (Edit: link - https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

If you don't want to set up Python (or any language, really) on your computer, there's a tool called a REPL that you can find online. So you can just search "Python online REPL," and you'll get a functional online environment to code. Now, you won't be able to do stuff interacting with your local computer this way, like reading files, but it's good for learning the basics of the language.

In terms of software for writing code in on your local computer, Visual Studio Code (NOT to be confused with Visual Studio) is a free, lightweight code editor. It supports every language via plugins.

If you do go the Python route, make sure to learn about virtual environments before you do 'pip' or 'conda' anything. Also, unless you're doing data science things, stick to pip. (Maybe some personal bias there, but I hate anaconda.) If you're starting from nothing, it'll be awhile until you get there anyway, so don't worry too much about it.

Most importantly, find a community that welcomes new learners. Learning to code is absolutely fucking brutal, so having supportive people available makes a world of difference. Bonus points if you can find an offline meetup in your local area.

In terms of tech, yeah, it's nothing special. But imagine having something like this in the US. Imagine being able to see which goods and services you received, how much you were charged per line item, what was and was not covered by insurance, and having the ability to interact with the various entities directly.

Again, from the tech side, you could do it with some basic Spring Boot shit, but actually getting the manpower and various organizations to integrate into a such a system is genuinely impressive. If the US had such a system, it would likely become a driving force in fixing the healthcare system... hence why it will never happen. The impressive part is the government backing and incentivization of private organizations to integrate into it.

It's not an impressive tech solution. It is an impressive political and organizational solution.

But fuck Modi for other reasons

If for some reason you want a secure password and aren't using a password manager https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

Fucking lol. $22m fine reduced to ~$111,000 due to "near-defunct status." Crypto is such a scam

I don't think you read what I wrote.

I'm arguing that living conditions have improved due to technology, not economy. Our generation's buying power is less than that of our grandparents. I'll pull some data for this tonight after work. It's true in several industrialized countries

So how does that relate to the original point...? The investment in and use of Chinese labor wasn't happening during our grandparents' generation, which is what we're alluding to.

I haven't tracked Chinese history very well. I don't know when the poverty reducing occurred in relation to the markets opening up. Intuition suggests the market opening up is what reduced poverty, but I'll see later if I can find data to corroborate that.

But I think China is subject to similar problems. Now that several areas of China are well industrialized, will the CCP ensure workers aren't abused? Unfortunately, I anticipate it won't. Given that the CCP doesn't permit serious criticism, there's no feedback loop for improvement. I'm hoping I'm wrong.

Saying Marx predicted everything is not at odds with mostly free market economies.

I think most people will say that free markets do provide economic opportunity, generally. The problem is when those free markets are completely unregulated, where those with wealth can create fascist plutocracies, which is the trend we're seeing now. This is what Marx predicted.

We have two options: 1) reinstate proper regulations and ensure capitalists keep their hands out of government or 2) come up with a better system. To my knowledge, 2 hasn't happened yet, and I think most people would be quite happy with 1.

All of these arguments are missing the point. They're attempts at strawman arguments, though I don't believe it was out of malice. Technologist progress is a function mostly of population and time. Both the US and USDR made significant technological progress, so economic system is a less important (still important though!) factor.

The argument is that the modern economic system compared to our grandparents' generation is worse. We have less buying power. We have less publicly funded welfare to act as a safety net. Workers have less bargaining power than times past. Large corporations are taking advantage of consumers and workers at huge rates.

We could have had all of the technological progress we've made PLUS our grandparents' economic situation if our parents didn't fuck everything. That's the argument.

Oh man, that brings back memories

They seem better because they're references you're more familiar with

Ahahaha that's pretty good. Thanks for sharing. I hope they sorted things out

Yo, that's super cool. +1 on the who was on the phone?

Thank you! I was really tempted to try to put moves on her, but I was in a relationship at the time. When I got home and told the story, my girlfriend at the time said she totally would have given me a pass. I have regrets. Of course, I probably would have failed anyway, but it's fun to think about.

I was invited to Valve's Game Developers Conference after party. I met Felicia Day and swing danced with her. She's super fucking cool. During that same GDC, I started interviewing at Riot Games and ended up getting hired by them.

There's other fun stuff I've proactively done, but I think that's the big one that happened to me

The core features of Twitter aren't rocket science, and Meta already knows how to scale. Computer science students often build tiny scale Twitter clones as a portfolio project. Another shitty take from Musk

I had a discussion with a security guy about this.

For software with a small community, proprietary software is safer. For software with a large community, open source is safer.

Private companies are subject to internal politics, self-serving managers, prioritizing profit over security, etc. Open source projects need enough skilled people focused on the project to ensure security. So smaller companies are more likely to do a better job, and larger open source projects are likely to do a better job.

This is why you see highly specialized software has really enterprise-y companies running it. It just works better going private, as much as I hate to say it. More general software, especially utilities like OpenSSL, is much easier to build large communities and ensure quality.

You just know the original sender is on board with it. They probably think this is the stupidest shit and realize they have a bullshit job. I bet they hope an auditor or some superior will someday find the document and have something to say about the waste... but probably not

There are technical ways to solve this. If we can identify some way for instances to determine users' interests and allow instances to query based on interests, that can reduce load. We can do all sorts of caching to reduce load even further.

It complicates the system, which is a risk, but it leads to a better user experience and better performance.

We just need the right people with enough time and desire to implement these kinds of technical solutions.

Guess it's time for me read the ActivityPub spec.

For his argument, length of use doesn't matter. He's more concerned with the new user experience, which can be determined on the order of days.

His criticisms are valid. Getting started on the Fediverse sucks. Let's accept the criticism and get on fixing it