Software engineer working on very high scale systems, and dad.

Born and raised 🇫🇷, now resident and naturalized citizen 🇺🇸.

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  • 2 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • For more clarity: the amount needed to overdose on acetaminophen is quite low, you can enter liver failure quite easily if you overdo it. People have been known to sometimes take more acetaminophen when they start feeling the resulting liver pains, making the problem gradually worse, and sometimes ending up dying from it.

    So, if you’ve already taken acetaminophen as part of some medication, it’s not just that you don’t need to take more, it’s actually dangerous if you do.






  • Threads isn’t currently using ActivityPub, but vocally expressed that they are planning to in a future release, in order to “join the fediverse”. They have not expressed when, or what people will and won’t be able to do, or what the business goal is.

    About the latter, some are speculating that this is a typical attempt of a closed-source editor to pretend to join an open-source effort in order to destroy it, as has happened in the past. It could realistically be that, or something else, no one knows; but that explains why people are calling to defederate Threads when that becomes real.




  • My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.

    I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.

    Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉


  • The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.

    So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.

    And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.






  • It is, but it aged pretty well.

    Devs wanted to store state in objects, so it became object-oriented. It also gained a really solid full-fledged web framework with a strong community, with Symfony; and some strong micro-frameworks like Laravel.

    But it will always be interpreted and mono-threaded, and therefore never a good choice for high-scale solutions. Facebook has to invent a brand new language (Hack) and runtime (HHVM) that was close enough to PHP so they could spend millions spending their PHP codebase to it, in order to make it compiled and multi-threaded, and make it scale.