I figure you could "build a Steam" in a couple of years, with the right engineers hitting the main features. There's very little magic at the technology level, and you can make life simpler and forget about minor things like the hardware survey or the pretty graphs. I'm not saying this is trivial, but it's definitely doable.
This is a far different statement than "You can build something and compete with Steam in a couple of years". Most of the really hard problems are not technical. Success ain't gonna happen without a bunch of pain, sweat, and strategic stumbles on the part of the competition.
Steam was built since I was in FUCKING high school. Im old now, well over 30.
Apples, and blueberries.
Bluebarry, Drewbarry, tomato, ToMaHtoH.
Fuck their stupid ass streaming code, it’s a giant crud app, only their devops team can take credit for scaling, everyone else is not worth a shit, sorry, thats life, I gotta Leetcode too, and ur code isn’t worth me reading it, leaked or not).
A lot of the secret sauce of such things are not that secret but just take a lot of work.
Building and maintaining infrastructure simply takes a lot of people, time, relationships and whatnot.
They get good at it over time which I guess could consider some secret sauce but there isn't like some secret code that makes the whole thing way better that now you'll see tons of competitors.
"Building apps is easy as long as you don't have millions of users. For that you have to actually think about bottlenecks, the larger architecture etc."
(I agree with that)
What I wanted to express is that lots of engineers I personally know instead say
"Building apps involves thinking about every bottleneck in advance and optimizing for every possible user scenario and a global user base, regardless if the number of users is only ~100."
"Building apps involves thinking about every bottleneck in advance and optimizing for every possible user scenario and a global user base, regardless if the number of users is only ~100."
I would advocate the exact opposite. If you need to scale to X users focus on making a great platform for X users, even if it’s only 100. If you try to over-engineer instead you’ll prematurely optimize and will make poor decisions that’ll come back to bite you when you actually DO need the scale and the requirements change.
I’m so misread, Twitch is a lot of luck, so is all of these companies. Show me the the source code for luck. I don’t give a fuck if you leaked a video streaming crud app code lol.
You're missing the _hard work_ part. Sure there's always an element of "luck" in any story of success, but that mostly has to do with timing, and is much less weighted than the perseverance and hard work of the people building it.
Twitch is a full-featured, very mature application with many moving parts outside of just the video streaming, and building all those parts took an incredible amount of time and effort.
It’s just luck. I mean, if I was a storyteller, what story would I have to tell if there was no story.
They hit.
It’s sort of like we all hold Golden dice, so we marveled, by our own eyes, at the gold.
Dealer: You rolling those?
Us: no, it’s gold.
They fucking risked it. It’s not a engineering feat, we’re all a bunch of pussies.
Twitch is easiest site to build, you might as well show me a todo app (which will be sieged and dismantled), scale is solved, we will eat your applications, the barbarians.
You don't need a genius. You need a few good people, and a lot of hands. I think the best way to look at things like Twitch is to compare them to cathedrals, bridges, things like that. You might be able to have the idea and sketch the plans by yourself, but it's physically impossible to build it yourself.
Like all things web, the problem is scaling the platform and moderation/security. It wouldn't be hard to build a toy Twitch clone no. But it takes tons of people and money to scale it / secure it. And even with all the security, they still got hacked...
This reminds me of the Albertsons guy on Blind who inadvertently created a meme when he said that Facebook could be rewritten with a small cluster of Oracle dbs. The meme is that Albertsons people are so elite, they work and think in a higher level of existence, way above the scalability bs us commoners are accustomed to.
Actually he was promoted to C-Level, CII, Chief Imperial Intern ‘For Life’.
It’s a great accomplishment to be be fair, comes with a lifetime weekly stipend and access to whatever Frontend books/courses you need to be a great web developer.
It’s because that blockchain someone made is being used as national currency somewhere (and contributing needlessly to global energy consumption), and because that photo sharing site is causing body image issues, and that ad-tracker is building a digital trail of everything you do, and that ML algo is identifying protestors, and and and …
We are not discussing the shit show, we are the shit show.
It’s hard to find the proper analogy since the phenomenon is so new. On a legal basis, it was actually hard to build a case against the Mafia until racketeering laws were passed. It was difficult to prove that it was ‘organized’ crime before then (where before the criminals could say these are all unrelated events, and there is no larger organization, there is no boss, there are no lieutenants, you are imagining connections that don’t exist).
I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?
Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.
At least in case of the Nazis it was not so effective. The Nazis did not come to power by propaganda. In elections they did not exceed about 1/3 of the votes. The got to power by having another party voting the power to them. Afterwards they actually used plain old violence and economics to achieve their objectives (i.e. it paid to "come along").
Interesting to add that Hitler specifically used "cancel culture" techniques copied from the communist party in Germany at the time to dispatch those who were standing in the way of winning that power. Making the decision to "come along" the default. (Shirer, 1960)
To add to your point, there’s not a soul in tech that ever went ‘I wonder if the results of this A/B test are ethical?’. Our industry is just not built with this sensibility, the same way Finance is not self-aware of greed.
If it makes money in Finance and meets regulatory guidelines, all is fair.
If it’s the optimal solution in tech, and doesn’t break laws or cause a noticeable usage drop-off, all is fair. When the FB algos drop engagement, we’ll see quasi-ethics from the company (perceptively to us, to them, it’ll just be an optimization).
This isn't even close to being true. For example, when we ran A/B tests at Instagram, we would often dig into the results with breakdowns by important protected demographics. Engineers and data scientists who cared about justice would go out of their way to build tools and spend time ensuring that "good" changes didn't adversely affect small groups which were hard to measure.
I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity (although the changes were minor and helpful for other reasons).
> I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity
Something tells me that "the poors" not having access to the problematic content/software isn't the the ethical dilemma that's being discussed.
That's like saying "I ran the analysis that determined that powder cocaine being expensive was causing a disparity in access, so I helped invent crack cocaine so that even minorities could experience cocaine addiction".
Definitely not true. There were tests we ran at Netflix that would be considered "successful" based on metrics but were not implemented for social reasons, most often because they increased engagement with kids too much.
She’ll get a book deal, it’ll be okay. I’m certain she thought this through and has political connections that she made deals with. Remember, attacking social media is the same as when politicians sit around and debate Abortion. It’s mostly a non-issue (in the way Roe v Wade won’t ever be overturned, but will always be a discussion point to pretend like you are doing something without doing anything). Politicians won’t be able to curb social media, but they sure can act like they are on top of it. It’s the ultimate punching bag.
It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit.
FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.
I don't really disagree with what you wrote, but it is pretty defeatist.
> The business model straight works, and money talks.
Yeah, well, so did slave labor for most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in America. People had to rise up and demand change that went against money. Until our collective greed abates or society comes unraveled, I guess we'll have to just sit around glued to our screens like the helpless pawns they want us to be.
We were explicitly dividing the union legislatively due to slavery. This was an existential threat to the whole concept of America. I can promise you the vast majority of Americans in the 1800s didn’t give a shit about the morality of slavery.
With respect to our current situation, change won’t come because everyone will realize that social media promotes some of the darker patterns of human nature (narcissism, vanity, compulsion/compulsive/obsessive consumption of gossip/conflict, grandstanding, etc), it’ll change for more … practical/clinical reasons. We don’t want our data and our privacy encroached upon. There won’t be a shred of human enlightenment involved.
To be honest, in certain enterprises (probably many startups as well) there’s just no need for UI other than tables. We get an api, mangle the result into some grouping, and then dump it into a table, over and over again.
Sometimes we let the user click a row, and do something about it, hah.
I saw a couple of people clearly guessing something along these lines but none of them seemed to be claiming that it was actually happening, more like “isn’t it convenient that…”
The timing was uncanny. I still don't see a reason why it couldn't have been an intrusion/rogue employee? Like someone had access to a system to push router firmware updates or something?
A rogue employee would have been very easy to detect and that employee would have known this. The core network infrastructure involved is extremely sensitive and is quite unlikely to be accessible in a break in.
Also IIRC an employee was posting on Reddit saying the incident started shortly after a network update was posted this morning.
When you know more about the tech and systems involved a mistake seems infinitely more likely than sabotage.
I could have believed it given Facebook’s record for unpleasantness, but I think the fact it must have cost them tens of millions in advertising revenue is evidence against this. Even the closest thing we have to a cyberpunk dystopia isn’t going to throw that much money down the crapper to bury bad press.
