Jake Gold
Former engineer @ Tech giant Bluesky
Mountain View, CA
I like people and other animals, technology, programming, history, gaming, and a lot of other stuff. I probably like you.
Views expressed here are my own.
DMs open. Email: bluesky@jacob.gold
- Centralized social apps make you jump through hoops to get an exported version of your own records (posts, likes, follows, etc). There's no restrictions like this with atproto. In fact, the Bluesky app could actively sync all your records to your phone, putting them in the palm of your hand!
- Love this project as an example of the power and efficiency of bare metal. And this an EPYC 7xxx CPU, which is already a few years and a full generation behind. Not enough devs are making the most of the windfall improvements in CPU core count/cache, memory bandwidth, and SSD/NVMe I/O performance!
- As a 90s kid, the name Bill Gates will never stop sounding a benchmark of wealth and intelligence to me. But I just checked and Bill is using GoDaddy as his domain registrar‽ Forget vaccine microchips. This is the real scandal. Welcome to Bluesky @billgates.com!
- Modern computers are so fast that a lot of traditional software adds artificial delays and animations to avoid confusing users. AI powered software does not have have this problem 😆
- It can be a real flex when companies open source the code that powers their service. You check out the code, it's genuinely impressive work, and you feel even better about building on their service. Other times, you check out the code and decide that you can no longer use the service 😆
- The Bay Trail satisfies my need for biking, nature, and technology pretty damn well. It’d be hard to replace for me.
- This security bug was fun. Reminded me of a boneheaded one I found in Google Video (their old YouTube competitor): GET "http://video.google.com/docinfo?{"docid":"8794173241407131884"}" returned {"success":true,"video_data":{"UniqueKey":"GV_UP:johny2929@gmail.com:wsb64__46603_TDSDZTk1Ng.wmv",...}
- Being randomly locked out of your account, with no recourse but to beg, is something Bluesky is designed to make a part of history. Dan Carlin is amazing and I’m so happy he’s on Bluesky. His Hardcore History podcast is what I recommend to anyone that doesn’t think they like history.
- One of the best things about startups is that individuals can have such a huge positive impact on the quality and chances of success of the project. Dan did critically important work in helping to make the Bluesky app much more usable and polished at just the right time. Thank you Dan!
- Taking a break from your social apps seems like a really healthy thing to do. Hacker News even has a setting ("noprocrast") that lets you block yourself from using the site too much. The legacy apps don't have this functionality because of their incentives (ads) but Bluesky apps could do it.
- Like 98% compute/bandwidth is bare metal. The cloud is great for small projects (costs are low) and highly profitable projects (costs matter less). But it fails projects that need to scale as efficiently as possible. Moving Bluesky to bare metal reduced costs by 10-100x and saved many millions.
- Played a bit of Valorant for the first time in a long while. Biggest thing I forgot and relearned quickly: the difference between the mid ranks and the top ranks isn’t fighting skill or even game sense. It’s just comms! The top rank players can communicate effectively while playing.
