Lol! We're open-source, so there's no point hiding. Our actual non-devDependencies in our package.json is small, but there are a lot of transitive dependencies — downside of the Node ecosystem.
I doubt we're particularly different in that regard from Claude Code, since we use the same frameworks (e.g. Ink for terminal rendering).
Most cultures that cremate their dead won't throw the ashes into the Ganges (not even most Hindus, historically - the vast majority of Indians don't live within walking distance from the Ganges), but bury them in urns, which are often very recognizable in the archeologic record.
If I am a Director of Engineering with 5 reports and you are a Director of Engineering with 10 reports then you are going for the VP of Eng role on next promotion.
Like it or hate it that's why every company bloats up over time.
I was once interviewed by Lyft and I told them that a 64 GB Mac Book Pro is sufficient to run the core business.
The interviewer didn't believe me.
I did the calculations in front of him.
This was the time, I just learned Rust.
I did the full analysis and showed him that QPS is great.
Of course, my design didn't include 500 microservices, 50 deployments of Hadoop, Kafka, Elastic, Mongo DB, and 500 slightly different dashboards that different teams in Lyft probably use. Most modern tooling in ZIRP phenomenen.
How do you define "core business"? Any laptop os would crumple purely by running out of resource handles on the connections, even without doing work. I've run into file descriptor / handle size limits on small clusters before, I can't imagine trying to deal with 1m+ concurrent tcp connections.
MacOs is a terrible server OS, unless you want to YOLO lack of synflood protections. That said, if 64GB macbookpro means 64GB of ram, that's enough for a lot more than 1M file descriptors. I'd still tend to pick other hardware; I don't see the sense in buying Apple hardware to run a different OS; especially as they move farther away from mainstream hardware.
The Mac Studio running Linux seems like it'd actually make a pretty decent server. Not the most cost-effective option but not terrible when you also factor in power consumption.
Apple should really license the M architecture for servers. They could even have someone else manufacture and deal with delivering it. They're leaving free money on the table. I don't think it would cannibalize their Mac sales at all.
"core bussiness" is finding and dispatcching drivers including payments. Everything in-app.
> I can't imagine trying to deal with 1m+ concurrent tcp connections.
2 million connections on a BSD mchine is doable though not trivial and that too even in 2012.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011
You'd think that with all the advances in hardware, computers would get faster. No, this modern computer takes 20x longer to open the calculator then windows NT
The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.
Our economic growth is based on a growing productive population.
Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
Different parts of the world are dealing with population collapse.
Look at Japan, a xenophobic country facing population collapse. The total GDP has remain stagnant over the past 20 years.
Look at UAE, a country facing population collapse and acknowledging reality by handing our long-term residency permits to affulent immigrants, mostly Indian Hindus. They are even building the first Hindu temple in Islamic middle-east in Dubai!
Look at Africa, where the population growth combined with sectarian warfare is making for a troublesome living - https://pudding.cool/2018/07/airports/
South Africa is even regresssing. Rich businessman of Asian Indian origin who have lived for generations are already heading for UK/Canada. And with them tax base would collapse like Uganda (90% tax revenue came from Asian Indians in Uganda in 1972 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36132151).
Look at USA/Canada/Australia, all of them have low birth rate but compensate by being genuinely immigration friendly. They will grow while sucking even more productive population out of rest of the world.
The Europe would keep importing cheap labour (by choice) and welfare-loving immigrants from middle-east & Africa (by virtue of proximity). And they would transform Europe, how they tranformed Lebanon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc, further imagine how the voting blocks would look like when whites are rich & old while non-whites are poor & young. Why would they not demand higher taxation and lower welfare policies?
China would have same fate as Japan. Xenophobia with a collapsing population. China would appear a lot of more timid.
12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose, Tasmania lost connection to mainland Australia, and this lead to decline of knowledge and tools over time.
We might see the same in our world.
So, I believe population collapse is a huge problem.
Your reasoning is very flawed for a single reason. If by let’s say 2075 the population was reduced to 1975 levels, the demographics would still differ widely.
1. Age distribution would look like an inverted pyramid instead of a pyramid
2. The geographical, racial/ethnical and cultural demographics would also look like the totally different. The share of global population of the global south, which is currently highly dysfunctional, would be drastically more important, especially in the younger age groups.
Note that the increase of wealth of the “third world” is mainly due to China / India, followed a bit by Indonesia / Bangladesh / Vietnam. Nearly all of them have already a TFR < 2.1
Other countries’ economies even lost complexity and the share of their economies that are basically commodity exports increased
Four billion is a goal that doesn't happen overnight, ergo it takes decades to get there during which time global education continues to improve and the application of automation to bulk resource handling increases.
Today, in my state, we extract and move more raw iron ore for steel production per year by a considerable factor more than the US ever achieved, and with far fewer people per tonne - largely due to better techniques and automation.
If you look about the world as it is you will realise that we are capable of having greater production and better lifestyles across the globe with a lower population and less by product from consumption than we do today.
The means and levels of consumption today are problematic to say the least.
> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
Yet a growing productive population, in modern societies, relies on cheap (usually fossil) energy, which brings two problems: 1- fossil energy is not unlimited, and we're soon at peak production. 2- fossil energy brings climate change, which is very very bad for our survival at large.
I think the refusal to marry and have kids (regardless of it being necessary or by choice) is basically the ultimate worker’s strike. So far capitalists have relied upon the fact that there will always be workers to exploit, since they consider any care work necessary to raise families (for the next batch of exploited workers) as simply just given. Now that this is going away (people can actually choose to not bear the burden of reproduction!) first in Japan and South Korea but also in China and the rest of the developed world, the ultimate factor that has propelled economic growth so far is withering away…
There’s difference between working and being able to afford to buy your own house so you could raise a family,
And rent being so expensive even with dual income that having kids does not make financial sense.
Everyone, especially women should have full control of when/if they want to have kids.
Yes, population is collapsing. 50 years ago population was exploding, and we somehow figured out that problem. We’ll figure out the collapse problem as well.
>> The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.
Maybe the second derivative of world popultion is collapsing but not the "world" population (at least if you mean world as a whole and not "developed world" only, because population of "developed world" maybe getting there).
>> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
If by prosperity you mean key economic indicators like GDP, then yes. But those economic models are so primitive that I question they usefulness and validity. The nature of work changed so much for last 100 years due to technology that it amazes me that we still belive that it can be summed up with few simple agregate numbers. Even the most important domains such as Agriculture, despite growing population, are needing less and less people to produce almost enough (if we include the food waste it's more than enough, but lacking fair distribution).
At this moment about 800 milion people are working in or around farming - that's only 10% of overall population. In year 2000 agriculture was employeeing more than 1 billion, that is - 16 % of population.
This is the real reason of production growth - technology advancements and popularisation, not population growth.
You’re missing the knowledge gained over time in your equation. You only need more people assuming that we don’t have technology that increases productivity.
I’m happy to see population numbers decrease and I’m ok with the stock market getting hit or having to make some sacrifices on lifestyle if that means a more sustainable way of living.
We keep hearing of food production issues caused by climate change. Why would we need more people? To starve them? To give them busywork? To have to figure out welfare?
I’m ok with going through shrinking pains, it should be a lesson that the fake reality we built for ourselves was not sustainable.
Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds.
It, simply, lack the DNA to build good products from scratch.
My gut feeling no one will care about Threads, 6 months from now.
EDIT:
- Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully gone.
- Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well.
- Facebook also launched dating a few years back. That project is dead too.
- Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed - https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/
Groups has also slowly become a killer feature of FB. There are very strong niche communities there; it’s a direct competitor to Reddit in that way. It’s pretty much the only reason I keep opening the FB app, but it is enough to keep me opening it.
As well as local area groups there are quite a few niche hobby groups on Facebook. I'm converting a van into a campervan and on Facebook there are groups specific to converting my van that have the same number of users as the whole vanlife subreddit.
The only thing I don't like is it is tied to my real name and friend circle... I see in my feed friends posts in groups I am not a member of, so I guess it does the same for me. In my recommendations was a BDSM group... Yeah not on Facebook :D
That's a byproduct of pages you've liked, people you follow and groups you've joined. Beyond that, content you've engaged with.
Take time to prune and shape your network. Unfollow people / brands you have no interest, friend/follow those you do. Maybe join a group that matches your interests or local community groups.
Kind of like clutter in your house, taking time to clean up as your interests evolve, or to some extent undo sins of the past, can make for a better experience.
The last point is that they show you more of what you engage with. So if you want to see more friends and family, actively seek them out and engage and they'll start being more prominent.
They're horrible for archived data. And in technical ones, they encourage people to post the same shit questions over and over. Meta won't encourage any effort, because effort stops people from using it, so you end up with tons of low quality, disorganized, unsearchable shit.
Facebook Groups are very popular in the country I live. (Reddit is too American-centric to have ever really caught on.)
I'm in groups on legal stuff (19,000 members), boardgames (16,000 members), family stuff likes activities for kids (9,000 members), roadtrips (5,000 members), camping (9,000 members), food (41,000 members), dog lovers (14,000 members), and a general city group (150,000 members), a group for my neighborhood (22,000 members), a musicians network (3,300 members), pens (montblanc, etc; 8,800 members)
Most those groups are just for my city (i.e. the dog lovers is just for dog lovers in my city).
On french facebook there's a whole community that's actually exactly subreddits, it's called "neurchi de [...]" ("neurchi" is "chineur" reversed, which translates to "bargain hunter"). Any niche, or not niche, topic has its neurchi group that range from low hundreds to 100,000+ for some.
I tried Marketplace a few times but always gave up because the search filter was so bad. There was no way to force it to include a particular search term, e.g. searching for "rtx 3060" would return tons of posts without "3060" or even "rtx" anywhere in the title/body. The distance search was also useless, since no matter how I tried to restrict the search to around my city, it would just randomly return posts from cities hundreds of kilometers away.
Perhaps the bad search was by design to show you as many posts as possible? Either way, it's worse than reddit search, which is saying something...
It's a terrible product on many levels but is clearly successful because it uses all the usual Meta dark UX patterns to hack attention and engagement. I (horrifyingly) find myself clicking on marketplace and just browsing all the time.
More so, as a seller... it gets far more leads than the other classifieds options around here. We've been casually selling berries and misc produce off our small farm on it, and it's kinda crazy how many people reach out for random $10 containers of red currants or fresh garlic scapes, etc.
Maybe it's specific to numbers or tech or something, but in our area fb marketplace is THE place to sell/buy used baby/kids clothes. It's mindbogglingly high traffic. Put up used but decent looking item from sought after brand and you get literally tens of requests in minutes. If you're looking to buy then good stuff is gone like in half an hour. And were not even a big city.
Marketplace is so horrible on so many fronts that it's unimaginable that it's successful, but it is. Most likely thanks to the network effect. It's a good target for disruption IMHO.
eBay is too international, Craigslist is USA only. FB marketplace is probably a local focused, but for each country. I'm just guessing here, I don't have the data to back this up.
How was messenger an acquisition? wasn't it simply taking FaceBook Chats and making it a standalone app? It seems that meta just has a very curated list of products, and most seem to be hits, and most seem to be regularly iterated upon.
> Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds.
Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to succeed? It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their existing social graph. That means you have followers/following immediately.
They even have the market opportunity as twitter stumbles.
Facebook Messenger existed prior to the acquisition. Beluga was a mobile only product that was essentially an acquihire of the 3 member team to work on the existing Messenger mobile platform.
>Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well.
Facebook Messenger platform is still very much alive and well in both the games and the support / chat bot / reservations space.
They have pretty much killed messenger for me, I used it everyday to chat with most of my friends but now its bloated and filled with ads so we moved on to different platforms. Its too bad because I loved messenger but now I only open it once a week.
> games / chat bot / reservation space
Yea thats the bloat that killed it for me, I just wanted something that lets me send messages to my close friends, nothing more, nothing less.
I could believe that they slapped too many ads on it (though I've never seen them?), but I struggle to believe that adding games/chatbot/reservation integration bloated messenger on your end. Isn't that all purely server-side integration that doesn't affect you if you're not using it?
Similar happened with LINE. They used to have a Lite app that only had the ability to encrypted chat + send files + make voice/video calls (& had a dark theme with no trackers). But they killed it off last year to make everyone ‘upgrade’ to the full app which is packed to the gills with games, trackers, delivery, etc. & the download is tenfold+ larger. When I didn’t upgrade they swept my account under the rug & despite a supporting Win/Mac/Chromium apps, your primary device must be Android/iOS or they won’t let you access the account (similar to Signal’s shenanigans).
> Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to succeed? It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their existing social graph. That means you have followers/following immediately.
Reels and Stories, while directly ripped from TikTok and Snapchat have probably taken quite a bit of market share from each of those apps from people who already use Instagram as their main platform.
I suspect this has some potential to keep users who were getting FOMO on Instagram from signing up to Twitter.
> Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully gone.
For what it's worth, their cryptocurrency project is absolutely NOT gone. It's gone in the Facebook-ownership sense (in that it was barred from continuing the project by the SEC (?)), but the code and teams are absolutely still iterating on what began at Facebook. Aptos, Sui, and 0L are all projects that have launched to fanfare within the last year.
I'm up for lambasting Facebook as much as the next guy, but I don't think government blocking their projects existence counts as failing.
Getting blocked by the government was hardly a black swan event; it was a major risk factor. Facebook absolutely has the lobbyists and political connections to have a good understanding of the risk, as well as have some influence on it.
They got it wrong in this case. It happens, but Facebook doesn't deserve a complete pass for chasing a high profile project that ended up being a dead end for them.
All of your examples are unique, distinct separate product and problem spaces, whereas Threads is pretty aligned with Instagram as-is. A lot of the plumbing for Instagram is likely reusable for threads, and a lot of the same optimization techniques might apply just as well (or with minor tweaks). I don't think this is as much "launch something new" as it is "instagram with a mask on".
So. multiple attempts at cloning Snap, HouseParty, IRL etc. into standalone products were unique. And this one is just a minor tweak on Instagram?
Let's discuss this in another 6 months.
I can't predict what the future of Twitter is, but Threads would have been shuttered by then.
Snap was cloned extremely effectively within Instagram (stories). So was TikTok (reels). I'm actually surprised they aren't taking the same strategy here. Why create a new app? Why not add Threads to the existing Instagram, in the same way as Stories and Reels?
What apps are you referencing that Meta/Facebook launched and failed to clone Snap/Houseparty/IRL? Their snap competitor is Instagram, and it's still doing very well. Instagram is _also_ their TikTok competitor, and Reels has done a solid job in that space as well.
Thing is, these were intentionally created as experiments with the expectation that they would be eventually shut down, with whatever learnings integrated into the mainline apps.
Since about 2017-18 there has been a unit at Facebook called NPE, New Product Experimentation, tasked with producing these.
NPE was created in 2017.
Facebook had "Labs" in 2011-12.
The same idea keeps showing up again and again every few years thanks to a hugely profitable ads business.
Facebook gaming is huge platform that exists within the Messaging platform. While they may have consolidated from a standalone app to a service in an existing platform, that is not a "fail" by any measure.
The same goes for Facebook Events, which is hugely popular within the Facebook platform.
I understand what you asked for, but it's a distinction without a purpose as indicated and just by that measure is misleading.
Many of these experiments are intended to start out as standalone apps that have their best features folded back into the main product and the user's transitioned over. That's by design. Framing it as a failure is not reasonable from that perspective.
This is especially true of many of the products you listed that are arguably some of the most used function of the main platform like messaging, gaming, and events. They all contribute a significant amount to the DAU for Facebook.
Facebook should make a LinkedIn copy. LI has taken the majority of the feed eyeball time.
LI must have more DAU/MAU than Twitter - most people are just scrolling the LI feed, adding random people to their network (better than adding "friends" on FB), posting/re-sharing longer text+image content.
I'm not the target audience for either, but how is your LinkedIn feed even remotely similar to Facebook? On Facebook I see what my grandmother does, on LinkedIn I see female recruiters posting pictures of themselves with some text about some position they're recruiting for, or how to leverage AI from the same people people who used to push growth-hacking. Completely useless as social media.
I will do the counter-argument: this app is from Instagram, so it might have an higher success rate. To have worked in big corporate, new products are often entirely managed by a division, and only a reporting is done to the central entity.
Also worth nothing Instagram has been pretty good at eating other apps’s lunch, specifically Snapchat and later TikTok. Obviously Snapchat and TikTok are still things and are quite popular but the instagram versions of those features are quite good and the network effect is important.
That is true, I’m a bit baffled they didn’t integrate this in some capacity into instagram itself. With that said I think this has a higher likelihood of success than instagram apps made for instagram users since this is an Instagram app using Instagram to launch a twitter replacement.
Fair point although I think “Hi there’s a new Instagram tab that is twitter” would be a more effective way to gain users than “go download a different app that you then have to log into using Instagram”
> However, it is not good at launching standalone apps either.
That's ok, and in many ways preferable and transparently communicated in many cases. They spin off an independent application, build an audience, figure out what features best convert and migrate those to the primary platform and transition the userbase over to it. Rinse and repeat.
It allows them to try, learn and refine in a sandboxed environment and bring the best over.
They often talk of this process in terms of their "experiments"
> Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed
Nonsense. Facebook added the news feed in 2006. FriendFeed was founded in 2007. Facebook acqui-hired them for employees, in particular to hire Bret Taylor as CTO, nothing else.
My gut tells me you’re quite wrong about this one. I’m quite the cynic, but I think this is a lovely confluence indeed. It feels like when you can tell that the batter is about the hit the ball out of the park just a second before the bat has even made contact with the ball.
You won't find one because you've given an arbitrary limitation that is contrary to how Meta do business. Threads is not even standalone because it uses the Instagram graph.
I’ve never used it in the US, mainly because not many people in the US use FB so the user base for that feature would be dead. Abroad it’s pretty popular.
