As a communist, I gravitate like a moth to the light towards any anti-capitalist news media. So thank you for posting that this was fake, because I also like to believe real things, and it’s frustrating with stuff like this happens.

On the other hand, it is also frustrating that capitalist news media takes these stories and runs with it without doing any research whatsoever.

How many times has an “onion” story been reported on by some news media?

Yeah, this was a quick and dirty thought, but effectively that’s exactly what I mean. An application built from scratch today using modern high-level programming libraries will take more RAM and more CPU to do the same thing than an app written in 2005 does, generally speaking.

Of course, for those people who still write C, C++, or choose to write Rust or Go, or some of the other low-level languages, or even Java, but without major frameworks, can still achieve the type of performance an app written in 2005 could. But for people coming out of college and/or code schools nowadays, you just reach for a big fat framework like spring or use a high level language like JavaScript or Python or Ruby with big frameworks, and your application will by default use more resources.

Though the application might still be fast enough, I’m not even saying that an application written in Python will be slow, but I will say that an application written in Python will by default use about 10x more CPU in RAM than a similar application written in Rust. I mean, maybe the application only uses 10 megabytes of RAM. When the equivalent efficient application would use 1 megabyte of RAM, both of those are very efficient and very fast and would be just fine. But when the difference is between 10 gigabytes of RAM and 1 gigabyte of RAM, yeah, at that point in time, you’re pretty much just taking advantage of RAM being cheap.

And it’s not even necessarily a bad thing that we do this. There’s just a balance to be had. It’s okay to write in higher level language if it means you can get some stuff done faster. But major applications nowadays choose to ship an entire browser to be the base layer of their Application. Just because it’s more convenient to write cross-platform code that way. That’s too much and there’s already a lot of work going towards fixing this problem as well. We’re just sort of seeing the worst of it right now.

More high level in that, think really deeply embedded JavaScript frameworks. In this situation, even Java is comparatively low level. Although a lot of people just rely on spring and spring boot, and don’t understand how it works.

Yeah, I’m not one to use insulting terms, it’s more of a natural process of an industry lowering the bar to entry.

But there really is something to be said for those old applications that were built rock solid, even if they only came out with a new version once every four years.

More frequent releases of a smaller feature set isn’t wrong. I’d be happy getting high quality application updates every month or so.

But as with all things, the analysis falls on the side that capitalism just doesn’t incentivize the right things. Quarterly profit drives lots of features delivered poorly instead of a few good features delivered occasionally. Of course the developers get blamed for this when really they are just a product of a broken system. We invent insulting terms for them instead of going after the real problem, Because, of course, we don’t have an understanding of materialism in the west.

Oh well.

Without giving anything specific away, I am a software developer and a consultant, and mostly work on web stuff.

I’ll try to keep this short, but in general, yes. Basically, computers keep getting faster, which allows software developers to use higher-level libraries, which are actually less efficient, and thus your average piece of software actually takes more processing power and RAM than back in the day.

As well, because of those high-level libraries, programming is a lot easier than it used to be. Unfortunately, that means that we just hire cheaper developers that aren’t as skilled, and they have a harder time tracking down and fixing bugs. Which is doubly worse because those higher-level libraries are black boxes, and you can’t always fix things that arise inside of them easily.

But software development companies have basically figured out that shitty software doesn’t really hurt their bottom line in the end. For the most part, people will use it if it’s a name brand piece of software, like Google or Apple or Microsoft. They don’t need to build high quality software because it’s basically going to be used by default. The money will come in if you corner a market or if you build something unique, or contract with another business. It doesn’t actually have to be high quality.

As well, websites make more money the more ads you put on them. So it doesn’t matter how efficient you build it, it’s going to be slow. And it doesn’t matter how slow it is, because you’re going to make more money the more ads and tracking you have. All you need is good search engine optimization and you will get traffic by default. SEO Is easier said than done, but the point is nobody really focuses on performance when it’s more profitable to focus on search engines.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Whenever you hear about those “the world is getting better and better every day, nearly a billion people have come out of poverty in the last X years” statistics, just know, all of those people were pulled out of poverty in China, by their (kinda) socialist government.

Few people if any come out of poverty in capitalist countries and countries imperialized from the West (rather, as many people fall into poverty as get out of poverty).

Socialism is pulling people out of poverty, feeding them, housing them, give them healthcare, etc. Capitalist nations keep the global south poor in order to exploit cheap labor.

It’s about trends and direction. The USSR back in it’s growth days pulled 300 million people out of poverty. This is a core feature of communism, to feed, house, and heal, every single person.

https://youtu.be/7ApjSrB6E1c

You use your money to influence politics so that you can make more money so you can influence politics better so you can make more money faster.

Whoever has more money has more power… Too make more money lol.

Nice, reasonable explanation comrade! Just in case anyone didn’t know, TheDeprogram has a good wiki page on whataboutism that covers this nicely as well.

But yeah, people will find that we communists do criticize socialist governments, past and present, and do find flaws in China’s system. You just have to come to the communist subs and read around, or ask honest questions. But on platforms like this, where obvious lies, biases, and if nothing else, just one-sided reporting is rampant, we need to balance out the rhetoric. Of course capitalist countries (past and previous) have jailed journalists and those that have pushed back against American imperialism. Native Americans, Middle Easterners, Mexico, are just a short list of those that we constantly oppress.

China keeps making the news because western media keeps putting them in the news, even if it is for things that the USA or western Europe is also currently doing (You don’t think the USA and Europe don’t ban websites, do you? Have they ever forcefully sterilized people? Yes. Have they ever taken journalists prisoners… obviously yes… Oppressed religions? Duh… The list goes on and on). Calling out these non-western nations for doing these things is simply adding fuel to the fire to create a monolithic opinion that the USA or Europe is the best place on earth.

If you are on Elysium, things looks pretty great, and you can look down upon the others and judge them easily, while extracting their resources and causing their struggles in the first place. Being taken out of your bubble feels really uncomfortable, but it’s the first step in learning.

Developers find some pretty good use out of it, but it’s not useful for fully building applications or anything. More like helping debug simple problems and predict reasonably easy code.

Regular people are using it as grammar checkers, but since it can explain grammar rules more thoroughly than other tools can, it’s more useful for learning why some rules exist.

I use it to summarize long articles. Right now I’m using Kagi the most for summarizing websites into small paragraphs so I can see if there’s more details I would like to read about in the article. Kagi actually has some good search features too, and it can summarize the top findings into an explanation. It’s a great starting point to search non-political and mostly non-controversial information.

Lol, you might be right.

You should probably stick to the software side of the fediverse. I think you’re out of your league here.

Please keep your eyes open in the future to the media also using these terms. For example, every single time a peaceful protest gets pushed by the police into going violent. See how the media uses extremely charged verbiage during those situations.

Or how about every single time China or North Korea or Russia is brought up. No matter what the news story is about, they will always be labeled the bad guys. And sometimes they are, but sometimes they’re not.

Notice how the media will always talk about their “regimes” compare to our “government”, their “worker camps” vs our “prisons”. By the way our prisons also do force labor, and also torture people. How come our prisons aren’t worker camps? Or torture camps?

You’re going to see this if you keep watching osely, Communists have been talking about politically charged rhetoric for a very long time. We started calling out the government for using biased language long ago. See: Michael Parenti, for starters.

I think you’re negative votes speak for themselves, but this is pretty obviously showing that there is Media bias.

I mean obviously it’s nearly impossible to prove that the media is not biased, what would a test for that even be? But showing where similar events get wildly different coverage does lead towards evidence that the media is biased.

Now, of course, the media can’t cover literally everything equally all the time. But let’s be honest, we know where the military lies, we know what the government is saying in official speeches, and we know what the media is pointing to. When everything lines up, it’s pretty fucking obvious.

“Made with natural and artificial flavors”… So just… made with artificial flavors then…