While FAANG undoubtedly have chosen profit over safety I'm not yet convinced non-FAANG social media is significantly safer, in terms of mental health, antisocial behaviour or predation.

> Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when microcassette voice recorders were a fad, and pretty much everyone found they just weren't worth it.

They really were worth it if you had a secretary to transcribe the voice recordings.

People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on.

It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.

FOSS just does not have the aggressive scaling mindset. Even success stories like Linux' game compatibility and Chromium can be traced to just regular tech companies, as opposed to non profits.

Maybe this is ok?

Many non open source apps do get critical mass but they eventually go bust. Emacs, git, Linux and I think even Mastodon have a slower uptake but do not seem to have such a high risk of collapse. While YouTube and Facebook et al seem to have an insurmountable moat and collection of users the reality is recent history is littered with boom to bust failures:

MySpace, Vine, Yahoo all the way back to GeoCities.

I would be patient and only worry if mastodon is actively dying.

For me it's the only social media app I have installed.

What is the aggressive mindeset of Bluesky?

I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX resulting in a richer pool of accounts.

It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.

Once "normies" have tried and moved away, I think it's too late. Unfortunately such services don't get a second chance.

It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.

> search is better

Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.

> My first thought is to lean towards small companies that are not looking to grow. They are hard to find, and usually have no time/energy to "train" me.

If they're not looking to grow themselves then why would they invest in growing you?

also if they are not looking to grow, they are probably not hiring.

Compared to a fast-growing company, true.

But they still need to replace employees who retire and such.

EDIT: The reality behind the 'no time/energy to "train" me' is often that small companies do too little hiring for IT-type positions to support any sort of formal training, or even coherent documentation of their current stuff. (It may be quite different if you'd been hired as their junior-most bookkeeper or lathe operator.) And their tiny IT staff needs to be jack-of-all-trades problem-fixers - so if you need formal structures and training to get things done, then you're a poor fit anyway.

I rewrote it to make a bit more sense to more people :) this was written by a friend of mine, and I enjoyed it, so I thought I'd share it.

This is very frustrating, but I'm not sure it's a problem only with classic JRPGs - recently I sat down to play Bayonetta 3 and it had a similar problem (along with.. others).

FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?

> FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?

Except when you use the Knights of the Round summon, then you go grab a coffee while waiting for the animation to finish :).

It the same with Spiderman: Miles Morales. There are some cut scenes you cannot skip. Worse they they are cut scenes that don't actually affect the main story arc.

This makes replays painful as the story isn't particular interesting and in some places actually quite nauseating to watch (Miles is constantly conflicted on very straight forward things), but the game play itself is quite fun. I've looked for a mod for this game where you can skip all cut-scenes but it doesn't seem to exist.

Most of the Final Fantasy games have been like that, which is why I've (most of the time) been a fan since since FF4/2. I can't remember how many times I've been turned off by a game when it starts with the protagonist being woken up by his mom, followed by endless wandering around town.

I am determined to play this on Saturn at some point. I had the Playstation version as a kid and I didn't notice any of the flaws, it was just a brilliant game with a much more interesting and fun battle system than Final Fantasy. But now I see all the mismatched textures which have been ported right up to the modern HD "remasters".

Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..

It would be great to have the saturn version + translation as well as the improved movie sequences

maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?)

otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel

Adding friction, reducing "accidents" and ticking the "we tried" box.

Yeh, for all Google's faults in this arena, YouTube Premium is such a good buy. I consume so much YouTube I think it would be unethical for me not to pay.

(I still use uBlock of course)

"Don't Repeat Yourself" is a great rule of thumb which, at least in writing Terraform configuration, became absolute tyranny. Strange webs of highly coupled code with layers of modules, all in an effort to be DRY - almost everywhere I've seen Terraform.

Trying to explain why a little duplication is preferable to bad abstractions, and specifically preferable to tightly coupling two unrelated systems together because they happened to sort-of interact with the same resource, was endless and tiring and - ultimately - often futile.

On the terraform comment, things that change together ship together is a good mantra.

If you keep having to make edits in two independent systems every time you want to make one change, something is wrong. If you’re leaving footguns around because changing one thing affects two or more systems, but you aren’t at liberty to change them both in production, that’s also something wrong.

I don't do too much terraform. But isn't the DRY really happening on provider level? And when you are using it, most of times it really doesn't make too much sense to try to not repeat yourself. Unless you are dealing with actual identical resources. Or deploying multiple times say dev, test and prod.

testability and developability, ideally you structure your terraform/terragrunt code in a way that you can bootstrap an almost equivalent test environment. For example when using "AWS Well Architected"-method you would be able to bootstrap a similar environment on a separate AWS account that's part of your organization.

Unfortunately, terraform module system is extremely lacking and in many ways you're totally right - if your module is just replicating all the provider arguments it just feels wrong.

Were they deduplicating incorrectly, or does terraform lack the ability to do so well?

Bit of both, really. There are some common techniques that would be a lot simpler or more robust if terraform would support variables and expressions like lambdas in more places (tofu is getting there…) but it’s also a failure to realize that terraform is ,rant to composite many small modules together and not just pass 150 different inputs into an Omni module.

you can shorten to:

> writing Terraform configuration, became absolute tyranny.

Explaning is hard. Examples often work better. You need to be able to show an example where deduplication would be made worse by applying DRY, otherwise it's hard to argue using just vague descriptions.

I totally agree with deduplication, but only when it's shown. Otherwise it's too easy, and I've seen people try to use this argument to justify slop many times.