Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part?
My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
> Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
You’re underselling this. Running it locally also gives you access to all cores and all RAM. Wasm is very limited comparatively - perf is not even close.
Great phrase. "social media is barely a sharing platform anymore.. its just decentralized long-tailed broadcast media." really captures the essence of what is happening.
I'm less confident. Your description highlights a real problem but this particular solution looks like an attempt to shoe horn a technical solution to a political people problem. It feels like one of these great ideas that years later results in 1000s of different decoders, breakages and a nightmare to maintain. Then someone starts an initiative to move decoding from being bundled and to instead just defining the data format.
Sometimes the best option is to do the hard political work and improve the standard and get everyone moving with it. People have pushed parquet and arrow. Which they are absolutely great technologies that I use regularly but 8 years after someone asked how to write parquet in java, the best answer is to use duckdb: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47355038/how-to-generate...
Not having a good parquet writer for java shows a poor attempt at pushing forward a standard. Similarly arrow has problems in java land. If they can't be bothered to consider how to actually implement and roll out standards to a top 5 language, I'm not sure I want them throwing WASM into the mix will fix it.
I've probably spent 400+ hours a year sharing content because I wanted to. However the wanted to, was partially because of the good feeling i got from knowing I was helping semi-specific people and then later meeting those people. It's sparked numerous interesting friendships and discussions. That latter part will no longer happen as the AI sits in the middle and becomes the known source. It has massively put me off creating more content. I wasn't creating content to generically help humanity move forward, I did it to help people similar to me facing particular situations. As that becomes diluted, the incentives won't hold to the same degree.
After AI scrape the ad free content, they'll probably turn around and show end users the AI summary with Ads. It never ends. The problem is a much deeper flaw at the heart of capitalism. Enshitification of everything.
It's as great as it ever was. I like it as its very stable and has a good model of interaction but if you want a modern embeddable map or embeddable chart stick with web interfaces. If you do go with swing definitely check out flatlaf to make it look modern.
Similar to you, based on years with databases I saw sorting as a huge advantage and often performed this step as part of optimizing any data access. I've tended to see the same pattern of problems over the last 15 years. Imagine my surprise when I read a blog post that showed not perfectly sorting your data could often result in faster overall result time for a wider range of queries. Duckdb: https://duckdb.org/2025/06/06/advanced-sorting-for-fast-sele... continues to surprise me with novel improved approaches to problems I've worked on for years.
Legally I think not being responsible is the right decision. Morally I would hope everyone considers if they themselves are even partially responsible. As I look round at young people today and the tablet holding, media consuming youth programmers have created in order to get rich via advertising. I wish morals would get considered more often.
This, right here, is why I take the stance I do. Too many ethical blank checks get written ultimately if you don't keep the moral stain in place. If you make a surveillance tool, release it to the world that didn't have that capacity, and a dictator picks it up and rolls with it, that license of yours may absolve you in a court of law, but in the eyes of Root, you birthed it. You made the problem tractable. Not all problems were meant to be so. I used to not care about it as much. The last decade though has sharply changed my views though. It may very well be a lesson only learned with sufficient time and experience. I made my choice though. There are things I will not make/make easier. I will not be complicit in knowingly forging the bindings of the future. Maybe if we mature as a society as someday, but that day is not today.
>kind of wished that Azure Data Studio (now discontinued) had directly supported loading CSV/TXT etc into an in-memory or temp db for queries and portability
QStudio supports right click query csv,txt,parquet via duckdb. It also supports more exotic data sources like rest apis by placing the data into a temp table. I called it babeldb https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/csv-file-viewer
