Readit Newsrom16384 commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...
Great read, and an interesting warning sign about overly-controllable configuration files. If there's no conceivable good reason to to much of this, then the ability to do so becomes bad design that fails to protect your users.
The Postgres defaults in debian are understandably conservative to make it run everywhere. When I first installed Postgres I found it rather slow even on a good server. Only after reading guides on the web I found out why, the default RAM usage is limited to something like 32 MB which is way too low.
The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even.
What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a competitive advantage in a competitive market. Duh. I’m sure I knew and said that in college and for years before my own startup attempt, but this time I really felt it in my bones. It suddenly made me realize exactly why everything in the market is mediocre, and why high quality things always get worse when they get more popular. Pressure to reduce costs grows with the scale of a product. Duh. People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Duh. What companies do is pay the minimum they need in order to stay alive & profitable. I don’t mean it never happens, sometimes people get excited and spend for short bursts, young companies often try to make high quality stuff, but eventually there will be an inevitable slide toward minimal spending.
There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.
I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want to pay the least amount possible, and don't quite understand if a repair should be expensive or not. This creates a downward pressure on price at the expense of quality and penalizes the mechanics that care about quality.
rom16384 commented on Gandi March 9, 2025 incident postmortem news.gandi.net/en/2025/03... · Posted by u/wilsonfiifi
I am transferring all my domains away from them. This is too much of a hike.
What registar do you recommend? I used Gandi because it was a no-nonsense registar, even if a bit more expensive.
rom16384 commented on Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten picower.mit.edu/news/dopa... · Posted by u/gmays
can someone build a script that extracts the names of all this stuff like neurotransmitters, messengers, proteins, hormones and visualizes their amounts per metabolism around/at the time of the measured effect/observed behavior and or during the time of conditioning -- when stimulating (chemical, physical, psychological) measures were taken? a table to start with would be fine.
please? all that lingo is above my pay-grade
Ask Google Deep Research, I'm sure it will do a good enough job
[1] https://bucardo.org/check_postgres/
[2] https://github.com/lob/pg_insights