e-ink is a wonderful thing. But, it’s really only useful for e-readers and maybe price displays in stores. It has a frame rate in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. That’s fine if what you’re looking at is pretty static, but for general purpose displays it’s pretty useless. But man, it is just great for e-readers.
Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.
Except AWS-US-EAST-1 is one of the big boxes, and so is cloudflare.
Nice, what was the “Host” in that case? www.cloudflare.com?
Maybe, but OP’s found the ideal site if you just want husky bloopers.
X is pretty small.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.
As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.
Interesting, good job cloudflare for at least being able to serve the correct error message.
Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.
Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.
You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/
People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.
Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.
We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.
This makes me curious, was there actually a cloudflare error page with the error on the cloudflare cloud? I’m used to seeing the one where the error is on the host. But, for an error where the error shows as being on cloudflare, cloudflare’s systems would have to be working enough to serve the error page where they show that their cloud is the issue, but broken enough to not be able to serve the cached content.
Blusky: the social media site where people post bloopers of pet videos featuring huskies. It’s a very small niche.
What was that?!
Flying saucer.
Oh.
Were you thinking “I can’t believe this is WoW” or “I can’t believe how good this looks?”
Because, I haven’t experienced the first one. To me, once I’m in the game, there really seems to be an amazing consistency in how things look. After a while things look “realistic” but in a “realistic for WoW” way. Like, obviously Orcs and Demons are not realistic, but the consistency is so strong that how things look, and move, and behave is so strong and predictable.
The trouble with photorealism is that you very easily stumble into the uncanny valley. In addition, something that often looks “photorealistic” today will look really dated in a few years.
If you go with artfully styled games, it can actually be much harder. You need to adopt a consistent artistic style and have that style be used by many different artists. Unlike with photorealism, there isn’t always going to be a reference available. You have to watch that over time, and as the scope of the game grows, the style remains consistent. But, when it’s done well, it can be amazing.
One of my favourites in terms of artful styling is the game Interstate '76. It came out at a time when full motion video cutscenes were the style of the day. You’d have low resolution graphics, and then come in with a VHS-quality cutscene with real actors and real sets. Then back into low resolution graphics. Interstate '76 chose an amazing artistic style, then did in-engine cutscenes, which kept the style consistent.
The other master of this, IMO, is World of Warcraft. It must be a gargantuan undertaking to have a game with that many different models and to have a consistent style for all of them, but they mostly do. They often do out-of-engine cutscenes, but their style is so consistent that their cutscenes just look like even more detailed shots from that same world.
Even if the abstractions aren’t pointless, there’s a limit to how many levels of abstraction you can make sense of.
I’ve seen some projects that are very well engineered, with nice code, good comments, well named variables and functions. But, the levels of abstraction and nesting get so deep that you forget why you were digging by the time you get somewhere relevant.
What’s frustrating there is that you can’t blame someone else. It’s just a limit for how much your brain can contain.
But we’re not talking about getting money in the future. We’re talking about getting full ownership of a house in the future, while being able to live in it for the full 50 years that it is being paid off.
The bank also isn’t talking about getting money in the future, they’re getting a steady revenue stream for 50 years.
So, I don’t see how this really applies to 50 year mortgages.
Poor timing? You bought at the absolute peak of something known as The United States Housing Bubble. Your experience is not typical. You’re one of the unlucky people who had the absolute worst timing possible.
The idea of using a home as part of your retirement should be a lie, but unfortunately for the vast majority of people it isn’t. The world would be much better off if people only got what they paid back when they sold their houses. But, the reality is that most people have been absurdly lucky and their homes have been going up faster than all but the best stocks on the stock market. You just happened to be someone who jumped on the ride at exactly the wrong time.
You wouldn’t even need to encourage people to use it. A lot of previous innovations in the tech world were primarily spread by word of mouth. The usefulness was so obvious that as soon as a friend showed you, you wanted to try it out for yourself.