Largest blue screen of death ever!
ritswd @ ritswd @lemmy.world Posts 2Comments 93Joined 2 yr. ago
ritswd @ ritswd @lemmy.world
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https://www.thespherevegas.com/
My guess is the blue screen picture is fake, but it’s still pretty funny.
I think there’s !games@lemmy.world, right?
My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.
I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.
Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉
The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.
So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.
And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.
It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)
It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.
It hasn’t. But letting terrible people have power affects the world in normalizing violence and hatred. It’s not about left or right, if they were American racists against Chinese people, I would have the exact same problem. I’m personally quite on the left, but without the hate.
I am living safe and not being targeted with hateful violence like the Uyghurs or North Koreans are, so this is far, far more important than what can affect me.
I think Kbin is something good being built by good people, I get what they’re trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t have a lot of faith that it will turn out to be a successful project.
In terms of technical scaling, I’m puzzled that they went with an interpreted language if the goal is scale. I get that the basic usage of Kbin’s features may not require a ton of CPU-heavy operations, or a fine handling of the memory; but once it meets sufficient scale, there will have to be some scale edge-case bottlenecks where you’ll want to step out of the beaten path and get lower-level, so I’m a bit confused about why they chose a technology that will make those harder to get past rather than easier. PHP is great for rapid prototyping, but I’d argue that’s not what the vision should be here.
About community scale, I’m not expert, but they seem to really care to offer a karma system; and we’ve seen the karma-farming behavior that this has been incentivizing on Reddit. I don’t see why it would be any different here if enough people end up joining. Lemmy is intentionally not offering a karma system, and it really feels like the healthier move long-term.
I think all it would take would be for the Lemmy devs to admit that they’re in over their heads, and that their political affiliations have been a hindrance to the project, to the point that they transition the governance of it to other people. I really hope they do that. If they do soon enough, they’re so far ahead and built on so much more long-term thinking, that I think it would pretty much make Kbin kinda obsolete. I have no special information about this, so I could be wrong, and I hope for them that I am; but I can see that as a pretty likely outcome.
(That, and on the shorter-term, I wouldn’t contribute to a product I don’t use, and I can’t use it for now because my usage is 100% mobile, and the current lack of API means no native client. I wish the mobile web was better than it is as an application platform…)
planning for long-term growth
Which is part of any scaling effort, and you can’t really guess through predicting and resolving bottlenecks, it takes some serious expertise. And as far as I know, the Lemmy devs have never built a high-scale service before, and I think that is possibly the single biggest risk to the growth and success of the Lemmy project in general.
Source: that’s my job, I’ve been doing that for some of the most high-scale services in the world for about a decade. I absolutely could help, actually I’d love to, but I definitely won’t under current Lemmy leadership, for reasons: https://lemmy.world/comment/596235
Obviously not an actual paranormal experience, but the power went out once when we were watching the Blair Witch Project as a teenager with a bunch of friends, and while you rationally know that there’s nothing supernatural about this, and it’s just a power outage with poor timing, your brain cannot stop itself from freaking out about it when you’re in the middle of it!
Thankfully everyone involved survived the night. 😉
I’m thinking because it’s as nice as it’s pointless, thereby showing that the devs were detail-oriented in how to delight players.
If you want to see it in action before your instance is on 0.18.0, here’s a hardcoded link to view this post on an instance that’s already on 0.18.0 right now: https://sh.itjust.works/post/374636
I’ve been intrigued by this, the only source I’ve seen about the Lemmy devs being tankies is one user posting on Mastodon that they reported quite pretty despicable tankie comments on that instance, and the Lemmy devs (who also admin the instance) refused to take them down. Which I would get and I don’t think it makes them agree with the comments, in the “I disapprove of what you say but I will fight to the death your right to say it” kinda way.
Was there anything else? This is the first I hear of them actually removing content.
“Reopen this, or else!”
But they’re carefully avoiding to say or else what. My guess is every next step option would cost them resources at the scale of subreddits they’re reaching out to, so they’re hoping that the empty threat alone will cause some to relent without costing them anything. Right?
Yeah, it’s amazing how much of a pass Vegas gets about the complete lack of sustainability. Like, for instance, I don’t know, having tons of thirsty tourists and gigantic pools in the middle of a freaking desert! Kinda nuts…