l0k3ndr

So, I am sure this video is very likeable and all. But I don't think metaverse is a total bullshit. Virtual is an experience as well. You can't for example experience flying without risk in real world and for some people experiencing those sort of things might be cheaper in the metaverse. Again I am not sure what metaverse companies are planning to form. But to me it looks like a interesting future.

This is too real. But not only big companies, even startups with good funding and mid-sized team can behave like this.

Nice read. Just curious that isn't this handled via rate throttling at load-balancer/gateway level? Like only forward requests to database as much as it can handle?

It can be used to transport battery while using it?

it might make more sense to use this to transport batteries while using them? Since the batteries are rechargeable - that would help the truck run and also transport the battery. Win-win.

Hey, it seems there is no way one gets notifications on their hacker news comments. So I couldn't reply to this earlier. May be I should use a better word - but I have none right now. When I said monopoly - I intended to say the dominance and control it has over widespread news, opinions etc. Your twitter feed can decide what you know today, and what you don't know today. That's so much damn power. Now ofcourse there are other sources of news as well - but it is becoming more and more centralised towards twitter. People are getting to know about what is happening in the world from twitter and I don't know what algorithm they use - but it's their algorithm. They can make the left look stupid, the right look stupid, the government look stupid, the citizens look stupid.. they can practically do anything by just tweaking a little of our feeds.

I have been working on rewriting a monolith into individual services during past year at work - and what we finally implemented for consistency across different databases of services was that we keep a signal queue - where whenever we encounter an inconsistency, a doc is pushed containing the info and we have a corrective service always reading from that queue and doing the necessary updates to tables. We made a heirarchy of source-of-truthness and we use that to decide what to do with inconsistent data. Though, users sometimes have to see a error messagge "We had an error and we are fixing it in few XXX time" based on current queue load - but it has been working fine mostly for us.

I don't like the government, but I hate monopoly of the twitter ever more than I hate the existing government or their opposition or any coalition of them. I hate any single entity owning this much power. So government bending them a little is a good thing at least right now.

Agreed. Although it's the concentration of power that is harmful in long term than who is holding that power.

Moreover, I am not sure how much manipulation humans are able to detect ; a small misinformation injected into twitter timeline or a small bias in facebook can cause ripples across the world's outlook over time that we can't even notice when it's happening. Social media companies which provide these feeds always get away by saying it's by the algorithm recommendation but who is tuning those parameters? Only a small amount of human population asks 'why' type of question and rest of them just absorb the content and it shapes their mind. I watched the movie Social Dilemma sometime back and slowly this has been dawning on me - wtf we are witnessing. World is falling in hands of these social media companies, they are storing our data, they profile us, they manipulate what we see, they tell us what they want us to see ; it's mind-boggling that the world is sleeping on this much centralisation of power happening in broad daylight.

The only positive I see in this is that these kind of government actions on social media giants can push decentralised web more. By it's nature peer-to-peer systems will be beyond control of government. Internet was not supposed to be just twitter/facebook combo which it has now become. A lot of news nowadays are coming just from twitter trends on indian tv channels which is not right all the time. Mostly it's celebrity or big boss gossip but we can't rule out that twitter can start a war inside any country if it wants.

I am not sure these laws will solve any problems with the current internet. Some problems which I would like to see solved would be:

1. Tracing people who morph images real people and ruin their normal life. If this is a criminal offence and what's the point if people can easily get away with this. Internet by and large can have a mechanism to trace and banish such bad actors.

2. Too much dependence on twitter/facebook/google. It's fucked up. Why CEO of these companies have so much power over our planet. Twitter can literally cause world war by sending misinformation if it wants. It's scary to just imagine how much power Dorsey has. May be he is a good man, but is it worth to trust one man over the stability of this planet?

3. Manipulation with bots. There should be certain amount of weightage given to verified accounts as well as posts with links to verified articles. I want to see the real votes of real people - not the trends of automated bot armies.

My suggestion to Indian government on these laws would be - Applying hammers won't solve anything in long term. What will be better is to make people question what is right and wrong for internet themselves; Bring this discussion internationally and use the international platform to tell what problems are spread on internet - and tell the options people can choose in long term. Have a vote internationally may be.

Although I haven't found any interest in Koo, but we SHOULD have more apps competing with twitter. The fact that one company decides the worldwide right and wrong of opinions and can manipulate it - is a big single point of failure for human society.

I agree to your points. For India's future growth opening of such markets is very crucial. But government could have just introduced corporate mandis where regulators would be there, and corporates will also be present. The regulators will plan the next season according to corporate demand. Slowly, the corporate mandis would have gotten more share and farmers would have felt safer. Nobody likes abrupt changes when they are at the receiving end of uncertainty. and that's what is happening.

Also, the world is seeing rise of social media platforms over governments where a celebrity can tweet and ask their followers to attack a building or start a protest. In such a novel volatile environment it's very important for governments to adapt and understand their population. And I also read that this change was in discussion already from a decade and also present in manifesto of the opposition party. It's a loss making system for government and the taxes we are paying are balancing that loss. As far as I can deduce, MSP has become a welfare scheme now. I wish, it would have not become the mess it is now and farmers could have also feel safer to move to open market and compete globally.

Exactly. Not all farmers are protesting. It can be good for some, but it's definitely risky for people who are already doing well with the existing MSP system. But social platforms show you what you previously liked, and people get conditioned to not see both sides of the coin. It can be good for poor states who are already throwing their crops due to low MSP rates.

True that. Daily you wake up and you see powerplay of tweeting trends. Accounts trying to just use their followers to build a wave of trends and then people against them doing the same.

It's not the number of tweets that should build a trend, but number of authentic facts that is backing it up. I wish there was a platform which shows facts leading up to a certain tweet - for both sides. So that immediately, I can compare the reality.

Just to add the context - the law does't target MSP directly. They are basically saying that now all farmers of the country can sell their produce without the control of government owned marketplaces called 'mandis'. In 'mandis' there is a minimum support price, so farmers have a guarentee of getting atleast that much for their produce. Now when market will be opened, this will probably kill the MSP system, as now this will be an open market where farmers will directly deal with corporates or their consumers. Right now the produce has to be strictly sold with government owned mandis, which I think is causing government financial losses.

The protests were generally peaceful, but recently on our republic day we cannot say it remained peaceful. I think government should have first spent time in making people understand the pros/cons of the changes and take their feedback if they are ready. Any protests long drawn, can turn violent.

My personal take on this is that farmers are not ready yet to face the corporate world as buyers. This law should come, but not now. And Government can build an intermediary organization to work with both mandis and corporates - but again, whenever government builds something in India, the officers appointed use corruption to take it from useful to useless. So that also won't work. I don't know, what can solve this issue apart from government holding off the laws. They are saying they can put the law on hold for 1.5 years, but the protest is at a stage where they want it to be totally taken back. The case is also in supreme court of India where I think they have made a committee to solve this. But I believe protesters are very concerned about livelihood post these laws. I guess that's the trouble with big changes like this, it can impact people positively/negatively in short term but might boost the economy in long run. It's important to protect people during these major changes also. May be NGOs can be used to first raise awareness - small A/B test can be done with experiment group. I don't know why governments don't do incremental changes slowly.

It surprises me that how much dependent we have become on these big corps (here it's a choice between Microsoft and Google in the article). But at the same time, Wikipedia exists and is an awesome thing without being owned by these firms. Brings me to the question which I don't have any answer - Why can't we have a open source app store totally developed and run by community and which recovers it's hosting cost with privacy-friendly ads and certain share of app revenues? It can host itself on a combination of clouds, and whether an app can be removed or kept; would be decided by community voting; not just whim of a bigco.

Thank you. You are an awesome person. It's a distant dream to have a society where one can restart anytime.