😂 a very perfect explanation for a lot of situations:

“Friend Camp as a website lives on a server, it's a computer, which means it's a piece of metal with etchings on it, and you put electrons in it, and electrons all move around, and it's connected to the internet through, you know, the phone, or whatever, I don't know.” —@darius 👏

@darius I’m standing right behind you standing by it, I wish I had said it 🤗!

It’s kind of the antithesis of your talk but, one of my favorite things about my day-job is I make software for 50 coworkers. We’re never going to have thousands of users/coworkers, as the CTO is fond of saying. I can call/walk/fly to help someone having even a small problem. I can do a short binary search through the user base to get a good sense of the feeling about a feature I’m brewing.

There’s a lot of value in not-scaling tech-wise. It’s… fun and I hope more devs get to try it.

@darius haha I should have known, nobody would bring up etchings and electrons without having some deep dark secrets about silicon doping 😂 an electrical engineer, one of us 🤗
@jlapoutre

@darius my favorite thing I learned about Hometown is that it’s a “universal reader”. I have been looking for a phrase that captures how I use Fediverse and how that scope can naturally expand, and this is a great phrase for that.

“Hometown is microblogging for writing, but its goal is to accept many content types for reading. So while I don't plan to let Hometown users publish massive blog posts, I would like your Hometown instance to be your one-stop shop for viewing all sorts of things on the Fediverse” https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/More-content-types 🎇🚀

@darius that is an alarming claim to make and sigh I can see why someone (I’m choosing to imagine Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes) could claim that and then smirk while an adult stammers and tries to explain why that’s ok. I’ll try, and forgive me if I’m mansplaining stuff you know, trying to make sure I understand myself, here goes—yes it seems unfair that the FDIC backstopped all deposits (even beyond the 250k insured limit), but the fact is that banking regulators are so freaking good that if they’d done their usual, even those above-the-limit depositors would have gotten back say 95% of their uninsured deposits. That would have taken a few days max. But to avoid panic and contagion, FDIC Treasury et al. chose to write a blank check for all deposits at the cost of being on the hook for that 5%-ish. So. It’s not a big deal—FDIC insurance isn’t broken, moral hazard isn’t running rampant, and maybe I’m misinterpreting the author (I apologize I’ve tried to summon the spoons to read yet another take and, lol, tomorrow I promise).

I will stammer and also try to explain why I don’t think the analogy to the SNL crisis is apt, because back then the banks owned risky shit that was priced wrong—strong echoes of 2008, The Big Short, “vampire squid” etc. Regulators improve with each bout of instability. So SVB’s assets weren’t bad. They weren’t unique. (In a macro sense. Sure they had a lot of startup warrants that most other banks lacked but those were microscopic.) Rising interest rates have put all banks in a pinch and they’re working out how to fix it. Some will do it well and others less well, and when any of them are unfortunate enough to be the target of a bank run, they will go into FDIC receivership and society will continue.

Not sure if that was remotely helpful to anyone but me 😅 thanks for giving me the prompt to try and sort out my own thoughts 🙇

@darius whoa. Darius, is this quote unironic? It seems to me that the current turmoil beautifully highlights the efficacy of banking regulators—they can’t prevent the forest from getting dry over the summer, they can’t predict which tree is gonna catch fire first, but when the conflagration happens, like now and like in the SNL crises of the 90s (and the oil bank collapses in TX and OK in the 80s, and 2008, and 2020), they step in quickly and clean up the mess.

If the conventional wisdom is that banking regulators have failed, that’s deeply concerning to me.