Does relying on larger players result in better overall uptime for smaller players? AWS is providing me better uptime than if I assembled something myself because I am less resourced and less talented than that massive team.
If so, is it a good or bad trade to have more overall uptime but when things go down it all goes down together?
From a societal view it is worse when everything is down at once. Leads to a less resilient society: It is not great if I can't buy essentials from one store because their payment system is down (this happened to one super market chain in Sweden due to a hacker attack some years ago, took weeks to fully fix everything, and then there was that whole Crowdstrike debacle globally more recently).
It is far worse if all of the competitors are down at once. To some extent you can and should have a little bit of stock at home (water, food, medicine, ways to stay warm, etc) but not everything is practical to do so with (gasoline for example, which could have knock on effects on delivery of other goods).
users want to do things, if their goal depends on a complex chain of functions (provided by various semi-independent services) then the ideal setup would be to have redundant providers and users could simply "load balance" between them and that separate high-level providers' uptime state is clustered (meaning that when Google is unavailable Bing is up, and when Random Site A, goes down their payment provider goes down too, etc..)
So ideally sites would somehow sort themselves nearly to separate availability groups.
Otherwise simply having a lot of uncorrelated downtimes doesn't help (if we count the sum of downtime experienced by people). Though again it gets complicated by the downtime percentage, because likely there's a phase shift between the states when user can mostly complete their goals and when they cannot because too many cascading failures.
> AWS is providing me better uptime than if I assembled something myself because I am less resourced and less talented than that massive team.
Is it? I can’t say that my personal server has been (unplanned) down at any time in the past 10 years, and these global outages have just flown right past it.
When only one thing goes down, it's easier to compensate with something else, even for people who are doing critical work but who can't fix IT problems themselves. It means there are ways the non-technical workforce can figure out to keep working, even if the organization doesn't have on-site IT.
Also, if you need to switchover to backup systems for everything at once, then either the backup has to be the same for everything and very easily implementable remotely - which to me seems unlikely for specialty systems, like hospital systems, or for the old tech that so many organizations still rely on (and remember the CrowdStrike BSODs that had to be fixed individually and in person and so took forever to fix?) - or you're gonna need a LOT of well-trained IT people, paid to be on standby constantly, if you want to fix the problems quickly, on account of they can't be everywhere at once.
If the problems are more spread out over time, then you don't need to have quite so many IT people constantly on standby. Saves a lot of $$$, I'd think.
And if problems are smaller and more spread out over time, then an organization can learn how to deal with them regularly, as opposed to potentially beginning to feel and behave as though the problem will never actually happen. And if they DO fuck up their preparedness/response, the consequences are likely less severe.
It’s been many years since I built a website using Django. At the time, my favorite feature was that it provided a built-in admin UI with no extra work. So helpful!
Now that I live in the JavaScript ecosystem, I don’t have an equivalent tool.
I’ve been working on promoting my seating chart app for teachers, Shuffle Buddy, on social media. I had a 1M view pop on TikTok when I first launched and have now been clawing along to try for continued engagement.
It’s reassuring to know that social media posts are hard for everyone and that it isn’t supposed to be easy. I keep looking for ways to create content that is genuinely beneficial to teachers and also convinces them to try my app, but it’s hard.
As a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion if there's a separate US app under a non-TikTok name that only Americans can use.
Personally I just message a lot of people directly myself and get lucky with friendly responses because creators like my apps enough that they use it themselves (edtech market makes this easier as the apps are genuinely and wholesomely bettering). Then I convince them to start new accounts focused on my app promo, in addition to less frequent commissioned promo on their main accounts.
For doing it yourself you need to get multiple devices and multiple accounts going, there are tools to help with that too. You can also post the UGC content that you pay others to produce for you, onto your own accounts. It's too difficult to consistently go viral without more frequent rolls of the dice. Focusing on a single branded account made more sense before current social media algos which don't care about your followers and won't even show it to them if the content isn't engaging enough to go viral beyond your following.
The post screenshots in those links are… uh.. hey I look forward to all of the free time everyone will have to do more productive things than “organically” shill for attention on behalf of commercial interests.
It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.
People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the value of your output (hence why we have more of a "laborer" market than a "labor" market), let alone sharing that value back to you as is typical with UGC contracts. It's disappointing to see that kind of elitism here.
edit:
When you pay for ads/boosted content instead, all contemporary platforms have tried hard to make the paid ads look convincingly like “organic” content for long enough for the content’s hook to land - just look at X, Reddit, TT etc.
At least with “organic” promo, established accounts have a reputation to preserve or foster when they choose what promo work aligns with their audience and their values. As a consumer I can usually evaluate how much to trust a creator too by how scrupulously they choose their promo.
With paid ads I know I am just seeing it because they were the top bidder for my attention and that the only reputation protection from the platform is to avoid particularly criminal or other extreme content.
100% agree. Plus ”organic” is an important term that has real meaning when you try to grow a product. Diluting it with paid advertisement just makes it harder to communicate clearly. Plus we already have a word for it, paid sponsorship.
The term is used to differentiate content that end users see because it was boosted or a paid ad that the platform shows them due to payment instead of via engagement algorithms
Paid sponsorship is fine logically but isn’t usually used to describe UGC marketing. These are accounts that are set up to promote one brand, without any existing following, and without boosting the content - leaving it to be discovered organically.
(Paid sponsorship is usually used to describe promotion through someone’s existing following and is also usually communicated within the content as being a paid ad, though not necessarily. But even with paid sponsorship, it is a form of organic marketing per the use of this term when the content is not boosted and not being used for paid ads, it simply describes how the viewer is coming across it.)
I wouldn’t use the term paid sponsorship to describe how someone creates brand-focused new accounts and posts only about the brand in order to achieve organic virality, I don’t think that clearly communicates the strategy
>It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.
Others are raging about your use of the (very basic) term because it's the inverse of industry jargon. Putting it bluntly: that word you're using - organic - it doesn't mean what you think it means.
There's no elitism here, just more experienced people trying to tell you that you're making a fool of yourself.
The solution I built for this is Leopard. It is a Scratch → JavaScript converter. You can take an existing Scratch project and convert it to JavaScript code and then keep working, or use the Leopard library to create a new project from (ahem) scratch, following all the same conventions as a Scratch project.
i know it as a "web 2.0 thing", but i guess that counts as old-school internet now.
that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
Feels like late 2000s to very early 2010s. And note that it was never -er, the -r was invariably preceded by a consonant. Thankfully, subsequent naming schemes stopped disemvoweling words.
I have aphantasia and have long thought that my lack of a mind’s eye might be an asset for programming, much like how a blind person will typically have better-than-average hearing.
If programming is best done through abstract thought and doesn’t benefit from pictures, then I’ve been training since the day I was born.
The design of this blog post is lovely! Despite seemingly having no right to be. It goes against all of my design instincts, but it somehow nails a vibe while remaining pleasant and easy on the eyes. I love it!
I was thinking the same thing. The style reminds me of 90’s computer/game magazines or something… So it looks sort of professional (sans the first letter in the headings) but also whimsy at the same time. Love it.
I was expecting this to refer to different ways to represent the same diff. (For example, you could represent a change from `console.log(“hello”)` as `console.log('hello')` as +'-“ … +’-“ or as +'hello'-“hello”)
I don’t have a specific example in mind, but it seems reasonable that different languages could benefit from different ways of representing the same diff.
Totally agree. I’ll also add that although I am often tempted to work alone, sharing my work or ideas or output with someone else boosts motivation a lot.
If so, is it a good or bad trade to have more overall uptime but when things go down it all goes down together?
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