mark
A lot of people seem to be talking about whether PHP has enough developer support, but that isn’t the main issue.
The issue is that code written in PHP is probably at least 10 times less efficient in terms of CPU and memory than the equivalent code written in Rust.
This means that loads of hobbyist developers will be able to run lemmy instances for a fraction of the ongoing cost of kbin.
The fact that Kbin is handling the wave worse than Lemmy is not unrelated to the fact that Lemmy’s tech stack is much lighter weight and more efficient. It is a fundamental issue with the technology. If either are going to become major players then they need exponential growth, and Lemmy is just better at that.
I think that Johnson’s truth distortions have got to the poor lady and she no longer knows what “I am resigning with immediate effect” means.
breaking federation
Federation doesn’t imply that everything is open to everything. It can’t do, there are too many people that just can’t be civilised to each other.
If federation is to work and build enjoyable and productive discussions, then people’s behaviour cannot be completely free. And the work to notice and block individuals will largely be done on an instance level. You can’t have every instances maintaining a blocklist of every undesirable account across the entire ‘fediverse’
If instances are not able to keep on top of bad users then unfederating those instances is the built-in check. Hopefully that will not be required too often.
There are plenty of instances whose entire purpose is to facilitate discussion that is fundamentally distasteful. They are free to do so, but we should feel no obligation to allow that to happen through our site.
I’ve no problem with maintaining a minimal blocklist in as far as we are a small site and are less likely to face problems, but we should be prepared to block where not doing so makes the experience worse.
It is really hard to get a feel for big numbers, but important to try.
In terms of “buy everyone a house”. What could William do?
Well according to a random website, he has a personal wealth of about £100 million, and controls the Duchy of Cornwall worth about £1 billion. If we combine that with all the other assets controlled by the Crown or the Royal Family, then that is more or less £30 billion.
Now suppose he decided to give absolutely all of that to “everyone”. So he liquidates the lot, sells off all the palaces, all the land, all the businesses and shares out the proceeds evenly.
(This rather begs the question as to who could afford to buy it all, but let’s ignore that for now.)
How much would this windfall be?
£30 billion, divided by £70 million people is a smidge under £430 each.
So no. Even in the most extreme case, where nothing is left of the Crown’s fortune, William could not get remotely close to buying everyone a house. Maybe, just about, if he held on to one of the larger, cheaper estates, there would be enough left to give everyone a small plot of land and a cheap garden shed.
William is rich, very rich. But not even close to “resolve the country’s problems” rich.
Okay, so how many do you need? Let’s concentrate the entire resources of the monarchy on buying houses. The average price of a terraced house or flat is about £250k. So you could maybe buy 120,000 houses. According to shelter there are 271,000 people homeless in the UK, so this might just about work.
But it hasn’t done anything to address any other social issue, whether education or health inequality, the millions living in poverty, … So undoubtedly in a decade or two, a whole new set of people are now homeless, and there is nothing left to help them.
Meanwhile swathes of the UK’s land and historic houses are now the private possesion of foreign oligarchs. And all the rental income of the houses and businesses that form the Crown Estates that were sold to raise the money are now going to the global elite instead of mostly going to the UK government, so public spending will have to be cut on an ongoing basis.
That is an unanswerable question that humans have been having a go at since forever.
In an odd twist of fate, a lot of the cheaper operators (e.g. iD mobile, Lycamobile, Giffgaff) still have free roaming in the EU+.
If you are serious about working in a terminal, then I highly recommend learning modern replacements for the old tools.
In this case ripgrep (or rg) https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep is phenomenal. Especially for searching recursively in a large directory tree it is unbelievably quicker than regular grep.
It won’t be installed on any random machine, so grep is still useful, but if you regularly need to text search in files then there are better tools.
