Notices by heapwolf@fosstodon.org

What's much harder than any language is clear, critical thinking.

I spend a lot of time reading people's code. And in general, I don't see many programmers who are excellent at clear, critical thinking. I mostly see pattern matching and heuristics.

Programming languages are designed with clear syntax rules and limited vocabulary to reduce ambiguity.

Anyone can learn to program. Programming isn't a high signal for intelligence.

Natural languages — like English or Chinese — are more complex than most programming languages.

They have evolved organically over centuries with tons of irregularities, nuances, and contextual variations.

C++ getting all these safety features makes Rust pretty much irrelevant — https://youtu.be/cu-QQaoSEac?feature=shared

#AWS: Free if you have no customers.
#P2P: Free forever.

So many developers have just resigned to thinking that Cloud costs are just the costs of building software. They say, we’ll deal with the bill when we get it. It’s not my VC money — it’s not my problem.

@aral also, I think it’s nice to help people set up servers and run websites, but it will always be limited in what people can build. Because cloud costs always scale up with demand.

@aral The number of people who have the money, time, and expertise to run servers prohibits this from ever reaching critical mass. Check out what’s happening recently in P2P, we just shipped https://sockets.sh, that’s step one. This month we’re open sourcing the P2P libraries that make it possible for users to communicate without servers, even if people are offline. No servers == no landlords.

@aral servers are and always will be landlord-tenant oriented, this is antithetical to a free and open internet. I don’t object to commercial ventures but the fundamental stack must be absolutely free and open. No black boxes. No gate keeping. No rent extraction.

We designed a packet relay algorithm that was originally intended for partition tolerance, however its design also makes it suitable for *significant* partitions (hundreds of hours at the moment)

Does anyone have any numbers about how much money it costs to run #twitter? I’m curious how much it would cost to run #mastodon at the same scale. I’m also curious how many times you’d need to split that cost to make it affordable to run on donation and philanthropy.