bfz

Some more respectable commentators suggest the current environment is the start of a second tech bust, and although that seems sensational, it might be fair given current trends of shrinking credit, de-globalization, explosive inflation and rapidly collapsing discretionary spending seen at present.

A reasonable starting point might be where it was prior to Covid QE and rate reductions (-61%), add one company-specific shock due to missed growth expectations (-30%), maybe +20% for real growth experienced over Covid in the meantime, and that already leaves us with $6bn, before accounting for the effect of the fed beginning to unwind their balance sheet (which starts in June, initially at around 1% per month)

Incrementally buying at $18-$25 would definitely feel tempting in that scenario, assuming the fed delivered its claimed targets, and only with the understanding the IPO price should not be considered a floor.

This is all before considering the reality their product isn't much more than a commoditized fly on the windshield of bigger vendors, and it's easily possible to imagine a Lightsail-like competitor appearing in the meantime.

I was thinking somewhere vaguely along the lines of easy credit as something like heroin addiction/withdrawal, that's where poison came from. I guess it is awkward

It warms my heart to think I could still be graded on language use so late in life. How would you describe it?

Worth recalling there are >5 rate hikes priced in for the remainder of the year, and that the problem with CloudFlare isn't just the speculation, but for their legitimate business, the credit fuelling many of their customers, which are significantly concentrated in the tech sector. The coming tightening of hiring will also inevitably mean the tightening of infrastructure budgets. What built CloudFlare's excellent sales pipeline can just as easily obliterate it, but in any case will certainly leave at least a major dent.

It's probably a great time to be getting into finops, and I don't think CloudFlare's fair value is anywhere remotely near $18bn.

I think we'll discover before the end of this year just how many of the tech darlings were largely side effects of the poisonous sandbox constructed by the US fed.

FWIW many of these yield generation products work by selling options under the hood.

I think most of this comment can be answered by highlighting the difference between supposed "Internet friends" and "real friends". Over corona there have been a wide range of studies published on the negative effects virtual communication has had on education in particular, the strength and quality of the relationships children have managed to develop, and even the severe effect it has had in some cases on development of vocal skills and the ability to read emotion.

Information technology is only a tool, it is not, never has been and never will be a replacement for the real thing. A child cannot develop motor skills by climbing a virtual tree, a toddler cannot take shelter from a storm by dwelling in a virtual home. You cannot raise a child on an aeroplane without substantially reducing its quality of life and damaging its early growth. Thus continuance of the society that produced us and all the freedoms and privileges we enjoy (including air travel) is largely incompatible with these new tech-centric ideals.

In the normal case for that society to continue functioning, long term physical presence is required for development of its next generation, and nomadic world citizenry is largely a temporary (and abnormal) trait of those who are young, unwilling to reproduce, and primarily misallocate their capital to consumption and selfish pursuits. This trend is a significant contributor to the collapse in population growth rates across the western world and consequently directly impacts GDP, which is to say, the steady decline of our way of life.

Often immigration is offered as a solution to the population growth aspect, but immigrants quickly assimilate our culture and consequently our growth rates within a single generation (predictably as a result of their new privilege), meaning the qualities our culture celebrates cannot be worked around by importing replacement people to breed on behalf of the laptop class exploiting the spread between income and the cost of a beer in some remote reach of the world. Finally there are many signs that immigration may have reached a local peak as resource access concerns are beginning to dominate global politics for the first time in half a century.

For a little more context, I'm a tech native that has lived on the Internet since around 1998, this is mostly written as a rebuke of my former self, who had little idea of the practicality or implications of all the grand empty promises of technology. You cannot now and never will be able to replace a physical address with a transaction on a blockchain.

Mostly Asia. I stopped for exactly the reason in the previous comment.. I realized that what initially seemed like a fun and academic idea about the people I was meeting absolutely did develop into a fundamental life choice, after the umpteenth drink shared with someone who might have initially seemed eccentric and interesting, but had very little depth and purpose almost immediately below the surface.

The choice was to either seize the endless excitement of travel permanently, and further develop my own eccentricities at extraordinary risk of accomplishing little material, or swallowing my pride and acknowledging the dream of travel may have been a substantially emptier experience than originally promised.

This is not to say I did not "develop" - I met numerous people, swap emails, send Christmas gifts, had amazing experiences, and so on, but the question is what permanence these actions and relationships have, and at what cost those experiences are gained. I still itch - regularly - to jump on a plane to a country I have never been before. It is so easy to indulge in that sense of adventure. But I notice this comes most often during times of stress, and nowadays I always weigh that adventure against the actual costs of what I am leaving behind. Due to this, adventure holds very little of the appeal it once did, and I often wonder how many of those life-loving expats I met who did not admit to running from their old lives were still on the run from something, perhaps while living with complete delusion that they were only having fun.

On the other hand I did meet people who had found a real sense of belonging and purpose in their life through the foreign communities they interacted with, but even if I were one of those, over a long time horizon, I don't imagine the outcome to be so much different on every occasion. There are only so many children to educate and schools to build before the satisfaction gives way to the wariness of ones own ephemeral relationship to their environment, the only answer to which is yet more adventure, or the cold reality of going home and discovering what was missed in the meantime.

As another reply suggested - travelling with purpose makes a lot of sense. Some of the most interesting people I met were NGO or higher education placements there temporarily to accomplish a specific task.

Just for some context, I was nomadic for well over a decade and consider that time an extravagant extension of youth, and a needless stunting of my growth into adulthood in absolute terms. By my late 30s I see no reason to encourage nomadism, or to celebrate or encourage others in the belief that it is a healthy way to live, it essentially amounts to the epitome of the dark side of individualism. When my children are of age, I would strongly discourage it for all the reasons in the original reply. Floaters don't grow - in the worst case they turn into "professional expats", and those (according to anecdotal experience) tend to develop into some of most fragmented and purposeless personalities on the planet by the time they reach middle age.

I'm not sure I have the faculties to address what bothers me about this comment, but there is so much tied to traditional society the comment seems to ignore.

- Voting districts - obviously tied to physical land, with different styles of vote counting system per area, often according to local cultural needs. I come from a society where special voting considerations exist in order to achieve actual peace. Prior to that system being introduced, there was war. The right to vote and the manner in which the vote occurs is an essential and inalienable attribute of all democratic societies, often deeply saturated in historic customs taking centuries of diplomacy to achieve stability.

- Public services - voting and taxation are directly related to policy in a local area. The tax that I pay my local council is accountable almost directly to me because I can schedule an appointment with the very people whom I elect to spend my taxes as I desire. My physical address in that locale entitles me to an opinion on the use of those taxes, and a stake in ensuring awareness of local policy, and that the policy works for myself and the people around me.

- Land rights - a requirement for a physical address, or the alternative of no requirement for a physical address, (is/is not) an implicit endorsement of land ownership and encouraging long term placement of people within fixed communities. Community quality and composition varies greatly across every region of the world, and for folk spending most of their life inside cities, it is easy to forget the concept of a community exists. Establishing a physical local presence is essential for many kinds of growth, not least, starting a family and therefore the continued growth of a healthy society.

So to summarize, I think what bothers me is that the only possible way to arrive at what the parent comment suggests would be to avoid participating or contributing to any of these essential traits of civil society, which is to say it is an opinion explicitly rooted in contributing to civic decay. It's not "incredibly outdated", a physical address comes with many essential implications that ought to be encouraged.

> It is a fundamental problem of a "graph".

So why are we using it for so many naturally non-graph problems? 90%+ of developers' exposure to graphs is through tightly abstract interfaces, I could name maybe 3 graph-related algorithms off the top of my head, but could implement none of them without reading.

We could represent the text of this comment in a graph using one node for each unique character, but the result would be stupid, the operations would be slow, the representation needlessly complex, and implementations guaranteeably hard to work with

> Tim-Berners Lee told me that if you can't send the whole graph you should send a subset of the graph that contains the most important facts.

Indeed, I also caught the ReST buzz around the 2000-2003 timeframe, and turns out 20 years later nobody does that either, because in its purest form it's a pain in the ass for comparable reasons to the topic at hand

I've yet to encounter a GraphQL off-the-shelf server (from Python and JS spaces) where hitting a slow query didn't immediately turn into half a day's work

The whole concept is what happens when you let a smart person work on a small problem for far, far too long

Perhaps it can also be renamed "SHP" (strict homepage processor)

Why would anyone prefer a tool dead set on undoing their productive investments with each new release? Decisions like this are a massive red flag. It doesn't allow the feature to be removed (interpolation still exists and isn't going away), I doubt it simplifies the code much, it just breaks existing projects out of essentially a stylistic preference. That's not a tool I'd ever want to depend on

Article makes a variety of already well understood points, but only briefly touches on the most interesting one (from my perspective): durability.

If the thing you're integrating is an evolving, improving moving target, and it's coming out of a team of only a handful of people, double any visible costs associated with your application for the sucker who must build it in 2 years time to add some new feature. It is possible to build a strong and easy to communicate case for avoiding frameworks using long term maintenance costs as the basis.

jQuery was actually pretty good at this, it only had one big flag day that I can remember. In that sense, jQuery was much closer to what you get for free working directly against the platform interfaces. Deprecation cycles are much, much longer, and burden of proof much higher for new features in the browser than pretty much any third party framework.

Somewhere here on the thread there was slander directed at Closure Library / Compiler. In this context, that is so totally tone-deaf, Closure Compiler/Library projects from 2010 still build with little to no changes today (based on local experience). I can't say the same for any alternative I have used in the past decade.