You miss the possibility that when all the compatibility problems start to happen, a possible organic adoption (by other than hobbyists) would be hampered.
At the same time, hobbyists that could be joining the network because of their initial ethos, would also refrain from joining given the blur and dilution of its values.
I came here just to share my appreciation to the writing. You beat me.
What a wonderful read. Very insightful. I had already read about this strategy before, but the way it is explained, the first-hand examples, and the depiction of what the true goals of decentralized networks should be is extremely clear and insightful.
It's very counter-intuitive to understand how adoption can go against the success of a software project, and it's also very easy to think that adoption is the goal, when in reality, maintaining (or organically evolving) the ethos of the software is the actual goal.
I wish I knew more people interested in reading what this writing talks about.
Yes. There are those who have read up on the history of what 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' means and that the methods are different over the years and cleverly hidden by companies like Google, Meta and especially Microsoft but the strategy has always been the same.
That applies here in this case. But unfortunately, you have Mastodon cheerleaders here who are asking for 'adoption' without knowing the trade-off of instance centralization and continue to blindly accept companies like Meta as a win for 'adoption'; unbeknownst to them signing up and bound to NDAs and getting themselves extinguished as Threads will add more features unavailable on many instances and then it becomes the biggest ActivityPub-compatible network that the users will use.
The warning from this article is totally accurate and Meta is already winning before many techies here have started to realize this.
Basically, this post explains how to implement a workflow that allows to deploy a new version of a webapp on every merge to a master branch in a GitHub repository using GitHub Actions.
On a merge to master, a GitHub Action is executed. This Action will build a new image of the webapp, and this new image will get pushed to AWS ECR, finally, a GitHub versioned release will be created. The creation of this new GitHub release will trigger the execution of a GitHub webhook which in turn will send a request to a webhook listening in the webserver, which will finally download the image from ECR and deploy it.
It's been some years I've been thinking that given that nowadays it doesn't take much effort to scan all the internet (masscan, etc), it might not be hard to find all trackers and then crawl all the DHT.
I'm not sure if this is feasible, but it might be an interesting start.
I've played around a bit with DHT indexing recently and a very simple python program using libtorrent to send sample_infohashes (BEP51) and download metadata (to get names/files) was enough to get me 1-2 .torrent files per second without any special effort or aggressive settings. The bottleneck (by 10x) has been the embarrassingly parallel info hash to .torrent step, so speeding things up shouldn't be very hard.
After running it sporadically for a few months I ended up with 1.4M torrent names and 30M info hashes, but I never put any work into estimating the size of the DHT, so I don't know what sort of coverage that represents.
Both Catalan and Spanish are the native language for people born in Catalonia. So most likely he wanted to be polite to them so they didn't feel bad for not being understood.
I can tell you that you are highly misinformed if you think the preference is Catalan > English > Spanish :)
I got the same impression as a tourist too. People had no interest in speaking Spanish with me. Admittedly, my Spanish isn't great, but then people in the service industry in Barcelona don't necessarily speak amazing English either. I got the impression that they'd just rather communicate in English. I think you would have to speak Spanish very confidently and fluently to do things in Spanish without feeling like a bit of a putz.
I'm Catalan, and I can see where you are coming from having worked as a waiter on my young days. Even if you speak broken english -which I did at the time- (a) you are there to serve, so you feel the obligation to be the one making the effort; and (b) you are usually more used to it than the visitor, because its part of your job anyway.
Hence, the usual result is that whenever you get spoken at in "broken" spanish you instinctively switch to english. Hell, I've went on to work on tech circles, and I still feel more comfortable speaking english with people who have a strong accent, even if they are germans/whatever and english is not their native language either!
With catalan it is a different situation. Anyone trying to speak catalan is not just trying to survive (they would do that in spanish!). They are actively trying to learn your native language, and it makes you and your culture feel respected by that person. In such a situation, you do your best to try to understand that person and help him improve further without being pedantic.
For a comparison, I've felt a similar "gratitude/respect reaction" when trying to say a few things in Gaelic while I was visiting northern Ireland.
Native from Catalonia here. Specifically, from Barcelona.
First of all, let's talk about the language because I see many concerning posts in this thread. Anyone that tells you that you won't be able to speak Spanish in Barcelona is highly misinformed to say the least. I've worked with people from around the Spain without any issue, either for them or for me. No issue either when you visit the city, go to restaurants or anything like that.
What is more, my parents are from southern Spain and I can tell you that my mother still does not speak Catalan after 30 years, just because she does not want given that she feels more comfortable speaking Spanish.
Obviously, as with any other bilingual nation, people here feels more comfortable speaking either Spanish or Catalan, or both. In my case, being raised in Spanish and talking with about 80% of my friends in Catalan I feel comfortable with both. I've seen native people having trouble both with Catalan and Spanish, but you, as a foreign, most probably won't be able to realize that. Funny thing, I'm from a town 20 miles from Barcelona, and when I moved to Barcelona I was surprised how much people defaulted to Spanish.
What's not debatable is that when people speak one to another, they might do so using Catalan, so in those cases you might not be able to understand it - at least for the first half year, given that if you understand Spanish you will only need some time to train you ear to understand Catalan too.
Another point, answering other posts. In some cases, Spanish accent is really complicated. Depending where do you go, sometimes not even a native Spanish speaker will be able to fully understand everything (e.g. you go to Cadiz). The same might happen with Catalan if you go to Mallorca ;)
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Regarding the tech/jobs scene. Right now, Barcelona is living a bubble in the tech field. People saying that the salaries are low or tied to the cost of life are people who might have been living abroad for some years being unaware of this fact, at least in Barcelona's case.
What's happening in Barcelona is that many foreign companies are opening branches here because it's easy to attract talent from around Europe (good weather, great lifestyle, safety, beach, mountains/forests, etc) and college here are quite good too. As someone has stated, senior salaries for developers go around €50K, which is a LOT taking into account the cost of life (e.g. nice flat in Barcelona's downtown might be €800, daily lunch menus are €10 - first, second dish, desert). In general, educated people not in the tech field here might do about €30/40K and have a very good lifestyle.
There's a lot of foreign cybersecurity companies operating here, many dev startups too, big consultancy companies and, as I said, many other companies coming from abroad which make the salaries go higher and contributing to the bubble.
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Lifestyle is unbeatable here. I was in San Diego, CA for more than a year, so I know what I'm talking about :)
What most people coming from abroad miss is the opportunity to get the best from two worlds. Being able to work and experience Barcelona while living in a suburb where you can walk to the beach and bike/walk through the forests. That's something Madrid cannot give you.
One last thing, whoever tells you it's perfectly OK to go around with English only is highly misinformed too. Not everyone speaks English here. If you go around the streets trying to talk with people it's quite likely you might find people who don't talk English. Another story is in your workplace. Most likely people will ""talk"" English if you work in a tech job. But bear in mind, when I say talk I mean babble. You'll have trouble understanding them in the beginning, but I guess they will improve over time as you will with Spanish.
The cost of flat rental has risen enormously here in the past 18 months. €800 will not get you a nice flat in the centre any more. If you're lucky, you may get something OK for about €950. Lunch menus at 10 euros are not that common anymore either. €12-14 is more usual.
That said, it's the only city in the world I want to live in. I came here for a month in 2002 and never wanted to leave.
I can agree with that! It's been about two years since I looked for a flat in downtown, the same goes for lunch menus. I guess it will also depend on the area someone's looking for. But I can agree with those numbers.
SMS are not only being charged in developing countries. lol e.g. Spain has symmetric 300Mb (home) connections for ~50€/month but SMS are still being charged.
At the same time, hobbyists that could be joining the network because of their initial ethos, would also refrain from joining given the blur and dilution of its values.