This is why I love IT conferences. I can chat up random strangers about topics that we're clearly both interested in. The vendors also send the most extroverted folks who are skilled in engaging introverted nerds. It's a great way for introverts to level up their social skills.
And the best part is that I never talk to those folks again ;) I found out that I actually really like making fast friends, I just hate the obligation of long-term close-knit friendships.
Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.
This is your chance to start Bluesky for discord. A competently built, VC backed competitor to exploit a misstep only caused by government overreach due to their colossal market share. 26 million daily active users is a nice guaranteed market to start whittling away at, with an effective marketing campaign to drive a wedge between "little gamers, and big corporate enshittification."
Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other platforms like Reddit, and it died.
Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.
WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.
The lowest grade I got in my business degree was in the "IT management" course. That's because the ONLY acceptable answer to any business IT problem is to move everything to the cloud. Renting is ALWAYS better than owning because you transfer cost and risk to a 3rd party.
That's pretty much the dogma of the 2010s.
It doesn't matter that my org runs a line-of-business datacentre that is a fraction of the cost of public cloud. It doesn't matter that my "big" ERP and admin servers take up half a rack in that datacentre. MBA dogma says that I need to fire every graybeard sysadmin, raze our datacentre facility to the ground, and move to AWS.
Fun fact, salaries and hardware purchases typically track inflation, because switching cost for hardware is nil and hiring isn't that expensive. Whereas software is usually 5-10% increases every year because they know that vendor lock-in and switching costs for software are expensive.
This is actually one of their smart decisions. "Copilot" is currently going through the corporate regulators, who know nothing about technology, but I can't buy it until they say everything is Legal.
So once we have signoff then my counterpart in Sharepoint/M365 land gets his "Copilot" for Office, while my reporting and analytics group gets "Copilot" for Power BI, while my coding team gets "Copilot" for llm assisted development in GitHub.
In the meantime everybody just plugs everything into ChatGPT and everybody pretends it isn't happening. It's not unlawful if they lawyers can't see it!
I'm in public sector IT and yes, Microsoft Canada is considered a Canadian company. And yes, it's dumb as hell.
As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.
Situational Leadership gets into this. You want a really efficient McDonalds worker who follows the established procedure to make a Big Mac. You also want a really creative designer to build your Big Mac marketing campaign. Your job as a manager is figuring out which you need, and fitting the right person into the right job.
Gabe is literally practising Noblesse Oblige, which is really funny but really shows that our billionare society is really just a reduction to old aristocracy. He's just the good Duke, whereas most Dukes are horrible, horrible people.
It was, repeatedly. It's a very important historical document that defined negative rights (congress shall pass no law) and inspired most modern constitutions.
The problem is the US never bothered to address it's technical debt, so it's patch on patch on patch. An updated constitution would probably cut through a lot of the bullshit in American politics, e.g. the interstate commerce clause being the entire justification for the federal government lol.
In parliamentary systems we see fractures and reformation all the time, including in the current political climate in the UK.
Duverger's Law is only really parroted by Americans, who's ballot access and districting is determined by a coalition of two political parties instead of an constitutionally defined apolitical government institution. Don't forget to vote Green or Libertarian! Oh wait, you can't because the dems and repubs struck them from the ballot :(
Hilarious that redditors think calling a call center will do anything, they've clearly never worked at one. Call center employees are nothing to Visa/Mastercard executives. And those same executives are nothing to the billionaire pushing this, he's going straight through the board.
People at the bottom really don't know how power works.
Bring on the Chinese, fuck the Americans.