I recommend looking up The Deathworlders for a similar feeling. Or better yet, the origin story for that from the Humanity Fuck Yeah community. I forget the exact name, but something Jenkins.

Their arguments assume businesses operate in good faith. We fundamentally know that it's not true, from overseas child labor by fast fashion to coal mining to IT security. This economist of theirs can fuck off

This community is on lemmy.ml, which explicitly leans hard left. Maybe a memes community on another instance would be less like this

Our parents thought "free handouts" weren't good for us and were only for "bad people" which was inexplicably often black people

Yes, curse the world because you feel powerless rather than try to do something about it.

The current system sucks, but the average human is pretty chill. Most people just want to feel safe, eat good food, and enjoy time with friends and family.

Some people are in shit situations and are easily manipulated into becoming hateful creatures, and some people in power understand this and abuse it. Systems that create these situations are the issue, and we have continuously improved systems throughout our existence. We usually change systems when they hit a threshold of hurting enough people, which is not the best strategy, but it's how we're wired. But it takes enough people getting pissed off and doing something about it rather than bitching and giving up.

So quit bitching and do something. Volunteer for a group that combats climate change. Find a job at a sustainable company. Advocate to friends and family why they should care and what they should do. At the very least, you can be at some peace with yourself for doing your best

In pointing out one's deficiencies, you should help them fill in those gaps. Otherwise, you're just being an asshole.

Explain what communism is. Comprehensive education in communism is not part of many places' standard curriculum

The fuck is this article? What are the differences in ideologies between the military and the government? Is there any history of this conflict? How long has this president been in office? Most BBC readers probably have no idea about anything in Niger, myself included. The article should supply at least a little of this info.

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.

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.