• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle

  • It’s a free market, right? Customers choosing what they prefer and all that? And then eventually the one that provides the best price-for-service ratio comes out on top? Something like that, right?

    Yeah, that’s lead to monopolies before numerous times. That does not change the fact that a monopoly is still a bad thing as as soon as there’s no competitors, the monopoly can jack up it’s prices or keep them artificially high.

    Assuming there’s up front costs you have to pay to be able to compete with that monopoly (infrastructure, marketing, etc), then you’re looking at losing a lot of money trying to break into a market where everyone defaults to your competitor. And in that time, your monopolistic competitor can afford to lose even more money to bleed you out of the market and then go back to high prices.

    And that’s just the financial barrier, that doesn’t count networks effects and platform lock in that can prevent customers from leaving.

    Monopolies are always a bad thing, and inherently need to be heavily regulated as they structurally break capitalism. Quite frankly any industry that creates walled-garden or relies on network effects needs to be heavily regulated as well, and steam checks all three of those boxes. There’s a reason that they are THE most profitable tech company per employee, and that’s not because they’re charging fair prices.




  • I spent a year at a software company that built software on top of Salesforce and was just flabbergasted by the decisions and restrictions they had.

    You’d hit hard limits on things like compute and number of requests etc with no literally no way of increasing or scaling them outside of paying absurd custom contract fees to salesforce. It lead to a ton of stuff having to use external platforms to do things and all of these horrible kludgy workarounds, whereas at any other software company it would have just been a matter of your infrastructure automatically spinning up another instance during high load periods.

    Then their frameworks and programming languages are just piles of garbage.

    Apex is their backend language and it’s basically an extremely old and limited version of Java, but not only does it not support any of the niceties of modern Java, it also doesn’t support any actual Java packages or frameworks so stuff like Kotlin or the Spring ecosystem is out of the question. It doesn’t even come with a framework for writing unit tests. On top of that, you then have all these insane restrictions on how your code files are organized. There’s no name spacing, all your code files have to be in a single flat directory, there’s file length restrictions and character restrictions and even casing restrictions… depending on where you reference an Apex class, it could use one of three different name syntaxes (i.e. MyClass has to be referred to as myClass in some places, MyClass in others, and my-class in others).

    Their frontend language was a pile of even shittier garbage, though was replaced with their own web component framework that is at least halfway similar to standard web components. But they still come with the crazy lack of name spacing and all the file naming and organization restrictions, they still don’t support TypeScript, and they come with literally no ootb methods for State Management, routing, etc.

    And all of their dev infrastructure has to run on an instance of a Salesforce server so there is literally no way of developing actually locally.

    A visualization of the year I spent trying to develop good software that users might like on top of salesforce: https://youtu.be/kSGEzpkgsu0?t=35s











  • Take your pet for a walk.

    Personally I find biphasic sleep pretty normal and easy to do when I’m working a job in a timezone that’s behind mine by a few hours.

    Go to bed at 12:30, sleep 4.5 hrs til 5:00, wake up with the cat at dawn, take them outside and enjoy the morning tranquility for a bit, go back to bed at 6, sleep til 9, get up to start my job at 10 or 11.

    I don’t do it when I have to be up early though, I both always struggle to go to bed early, and I find waking up and being up in the middle middle of the night, to feel more stressful than doing it at dawn.