veaviticus

joined 1 year ago
[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren't here for freedom at any cost. They're here like a startup... Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn't pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I get that, and I agree with it in general, but there's literally no company on earth that would approach open source developers with the intent to pay them to work on a closed source product, or to buy out their open source work without having an NDA in place. Hell, even if Meta just wants to pay them to do open source work to support the community, there will still likely be an NDA covering what they can say to the public about the arrangement or anything they learn from having access to internal systems.

It's like saying "Meta has security guards at the doors to their datacenters! They must be doing something illegal in there!"

Meta is evil and is very likely doing something bad with these developers, but the NDA isn't the smoking gun evidence of evil... It's Meta's history in general

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't know why everyone is so upset about the NDA thing... It's such a standard business practice. Whenever I (a mid tier infra engineer at a mid sized software company) needed to talk to a vendor, get a product demo/consultation, get support on a licensed application, etc... We either sent an NDA to that company or bad one on file already with them. Nobody discusses internal processes, policies or roadmaps with an outside contact without an NDA first. It's literally just a standard business practice.

It could be nefarious, since it's meta afterall, but I wouldn't be shocked if there's thousands of people/companies who have standing NDAs with meta just so they could come on campus and demo their product to some team

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh I'm not saying what your doing over at programming.dev is wrong or insufficient... Honestly I don't know what your doing to ensure the lemmy server exists long term (though its great to hear you've got some policies in place already).

I'm more thinking the rust community should evaluate options and vote, or some rust subgroup of the leadership should set criteria to ensure that another reddit-type event doesn't happen again (the home of this community must be open-source, with data backups publicly available, with a governing body and a line of succession or something, etc).

If programming.dev meets those things today, I'd say sure lets move there. I think its better to have a lemmy instance for a concept (computer science) than a specific topic (rust), but that's just me

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 22 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I've replaced some "non replaceable" batteries in phones before... Only to find that after about 5 years of medium use the flash storage goes to shit (which causes massive slow downs), the chips begin to desolder themselves, the USB port gets janky and stops charging, etc.

Batteries are a great first step, but damn these $1000+ devices just are not built to last more than 3 years

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's not the tech here. Postgres can scale both vertically and horizontally (yes there are others that can scale easier or in different factors of CAP).

The problem is how the data is being stored and accessed. Lemmy is doing some really inefficient data access and it's causing bottlenecks under load.

Lemmy (unfortunately) just wasn't ready for this level of primetime yet... It has a number of issues that are going to be quite tricky to fix now that it's seen such wide adoption (database migrations are tricky on their own, doing so on a production site even harder, doing so on 8k+ independent production sites... Sounds like a nightmare)

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Idk. I'm conflicted on this. While I agree... For bigger/broader topics, I can definitely see that the quality of discussion and the repetition of topic is already really bad for smaller/niche communities.

When the subreddit had maybe 2k subs worldwide, and now is comprised of 50 subs spread across 3 instances... It's rough. That community is just dead and that sucks.

I guess I'd rather have one centralized community on one big (yet open source) instance where I know we can leave and move again, than have the community just die entirely

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's not that they're for this specifically... It's that they are self centered. They're the same 75% of the population that is willing to cross the picket line at Starbucks cuz they want their coffee. They don't think about the workers rights, they only care about coffee.

The same people just want memes and football and porn. They don't care about what's behind the scenes unless it directly impacts them. And let's be honest, the reddit changes (for now) impact like 10% of reddits user base. That's not enough for them to give up some dumb memes for

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 13 points 1 year ago

It's just amazing really. Had they rolled out a reasonable rated plan, and maybe even a discount to highly known apps, and even set a "the price will go up each 6 months for the next 2 years till we reach this higher, but still reasonable price"... All the apps would have added a subscription model for like $0.99 a month and none of us would have really complained.

Like, honestly most of us would have paid and maybe grumbled slightly but said "that's the cost of maintaining this huge community, and I get more than $0.99 in value from it" and just kept shit posting on Reddit all day.

If they wanted to block AI models, limit the API keys to only well known apps or those that are manually verified to be not-an-AI by reddit admins.

It's amazing how dumb a corporation can be sometimes (or has some nefarious endgame ala Twitter)

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not exactly the same but similar... There's 4 major providers who service my area, but only one of them extends down my block. So I can choose from DSL (which to be fair goes up to like 35 Mbps), but if I want higher, I'm vendor locked to Xfinity, who charges at least 2x the price of the local companies.

Ive asked several times, but they quote hundreds of thousands of dollars to trench fiber down my street, and it's just not worth it.

Except, you know, there's already fiber from Xfinity... They just wont share.

The physical cabling needs to be government owned and rented out to the companies, not exclusively owned by one single company. We'll never have competitive pricing unless it's nationalized infrastructure

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Nobody trains on a GUI desktop though. Training is done on a cluster. And the kind of models that can be run on a consumer grade GPU... Nvidia doesn't care about. They're focused on selling 50k a pop cards to AI companies not fixing the Linux desktop for $600 card users.

It's pretty clear that Linux users should buy AMD or Intel GPUs if you want to support even a semi open source world

[โ€“] veaviticus@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, apparently I was wrong about this (still learning lemmy and fediverse stuff...). Text content of posts and comments are "synced" to your server and stored in your database there. Then future requests for that content are served from your instance. So its not as bad as I thought it was (the network load should be lower since you aren't acting as entirely a proxy, more like a cache), but database bloat will be a huge problem (its already a big problem in other federated things like mastodon and matrix, where every server ends up saving everything they want into their own database).

I'm not sure what happens when the original server goes down, does the federated servers discard that data? Or do we each maintain a forever copy until we want to get rid of it ourselves? There's also some notes I've seen about how servers only incrementally cache federated content (only posts and comments that are viewed by someone are fetched, and new comments may not be fetched until someone wants to see it)... so not everybody has a "pure and full" copy of posts necessarily.

But overall I wonder how all the various sysadmins hosting these lemmy instances will deal with the expotential growth they're going to see, or if smaller instances will start defederating to save on hardware costs (no reason for my tiny instance that only talks about blue shiny rocks to federate with lemmy.world and store all that content)

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