I'm taking this out of the reddit thread to discuss it directly.
Kienan was moaning about how .win is less searchable than reddit and how searchability is somehow vital to the success of sites.
This is patently false. Search is not what determines the success or failure of a site. Having a compelling, active community that people want to participate in and spread word about is what makes or breaks a site.
Every time a person types in communities.win, or selects it from their bookmarks, that was a LOSS for google. A loss for reddit. That was traffic that reached us, without them. IN SPITE of them. A net lost customer to them.
That is the power of the internet.
The power to look at any site and decide "you're dead to me", walk away, and deny them all power and go directly to the sites you actually WANT to use.
To those of you who still use reddit: I doubt your commitment to the great work of defeating reddit. In my eyes you are a failure by your own choices as a consumer. You give them power OVER YOU by your continued patronage.
The only answer is to walk away, make this the best we can, use it for everything, and BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE.
'Memberberries post incoming...
Remember when we had a President who'd take unlawful jamming of civilian radio within range of the US border in violation of ITU regulations as grounds to send in some fighters with anti-radiation missiles?
FYI: This is a rant.
This is something I've been thinking about for a few days. Every couple weeks or so on the Timcast show, Ian Crossland will sperg out and insist that sites like Facebook and Goggle and AWS should be compelled to give up the code.
This has always infuriated me. Not because I have a problem with open source (I happen to like open source), but rather because it strikes me as him, as a self proclaimed "cofounder of minds.com"... as being incredibly lazy as well as reflecting how little he actually knows about the web middleware space.
The "secret" of Facebook is 100% network effect. Any half competent app design team could hammer out Facebook's UI in a quarter, and some have. There is nothing about "the code" that is special. It's just pure network effect.
Google... once upon a time involved a bit of secret sauce in indexing, but nowadays they TOO are largely just network effect (this time from the advertisers).
But then there's AWS. That must be secret sauce in the code, right?
Well, no. And really AWS is the most interesting of the three because this is a fight that's been going on for fifty years, namely, mainframes vs boxes. It's a fight that's seen reversals of fortunes and the only certainty is that the current king will always be dethroned.
AWS doesn't do anything "new". Conceptually everything it does in hosting and running code can be traced back to products that IBM and Oracle and Unisys have been selling since the 80's (and in IBM's case, even longer). But AWS managed to strike a nerve because in the 00's the mainframes were getting pretty fucking obtuse about how difficult they were to set up and maintain.
People who think that AWS is somehow an undefeatable singularity are naive. In ten years, AWS will be what WebSphere was ten years ago, and the new hotness will be something that does everything it does but in an on-prem, physical package that can be amortized.
Both houses of Florida's legislature have passed their social media bill. But with a very specific exception.
"doesn't apply to a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex"
Don't mess with the mouse.
And what's hilarious is how it's so just goddamn brazen. LIke, wtf are you even doing mentioning theme parks in a bill about online speech?
Some news from the middle of nowhere. Adventureland Park in Des Moines opens this Saturday. Masks are NOT required.
There are only two Gerstlauer Infinity coasters in North America, and they've got one one of them (the other is at Knots in California), the Monster. It has a beyond vertical 101 degree drop hill, and a night lighting system that changes the track color as the cars roll.
They'll be bringing an S&S Freespin online later this summer, and their other coasters include two woodies, the Outlaw (a CCI design) and the Tornado (the park's original), as well as a Maurer spinner.
This might not be the most popular take but...
Daunte Wright should be alive. He's dead because he was dumb and a cop was dumb and Minnesota law is dumb. Yes, he had an outstanding warrant. The warrant was bullshit. He was wanted for POSSESSING a firearm. That's it. Not committing a crime with a firearm, not recklessly using a firearm, just POSSESSING a firearm. It was a warrant for a misdemeanor.
He shouldn't have resisted. But he did.
The cop shouldn't have pulled the wrong weapon. But she did.
The officer in question, is guilty of negligent homicide.
I'm gonna drop some truths here, fite me.
Is loli a form of pedophilia? Yes. It is. Its consumers are terrible people. They are not criminals, in that the law is only concerned with preventing the exploitation of actual children. Our bill of rights is exceptionally permissive of offensive ideas, but simply because we tolerate something to exist does not constitute a moral endorsement.
Lolicons are like people who abuse ritalin. It doesn't make it "not meth" simply because you're not cooking it from Sudafed and batteries.
