I tried this myself too and when I try p2p with 4 people, out of 10 tests about 50% of the time I won't be able to see all 4 people or someone wouldn't be able to see all 4 people.
It was really hard to make p2p work and debugging the ice connections was even harder.
WebRTC + networking is frustrating. IMO it is a leaky abstraction. There was a hope that ICE+TURN would work everywhere and users would never need to worry. That isn't true so we need to do a better job educating developers about what/why things went wrong.
I am working on a Open Source book that includes a WebRTC networking chapter[0]. Would love your opinions/feedback if this would have actually been helpful when learning this stuff!
I too experimented with a p2p golang webchat setup. All the jargon was confusing and very hard to look up. This post has already given me much more clarity!!
iOS and Safari is riddled with WebRTC bugs like this. Sounds similar to my experience. Everything consistently works great in Chrome and Firefox and then only kinda works Safari. worst browser on the planet
I've jokingly referred to Safari as SafarIE for the last 5 years. It does tick all these boxes:
1. Backed by an OS manufacturer that doesn't care about the web
2. Spends more time working on features that suit itself than meeting standards agreed upon by a body of which they're a part.
3. The only sanctioned/allowed browser on their platform (MS didn't even achieve this holy grail)
4. Lagging behind most other popular browsers by years in some cases
But due to it being the ONLY browser that'll run on iOS, I have no choice but to dumb down user experience for it. This year's lovely issue has been MediaRecorder - but supposedly that's made it into the most recent release.
I use firefox on iOS, it’s even set as my default browser. Curious what you mean by “safari is the only browser that works in iOS”? For in browser video chat? Genuinely curious, what are the limitations?
Ah I see, thanks I had no idea (I assume most average users are in the same situation). I assume IpadOS is the same, and only MacOS allows a true non safari browser.
iOS binaries that are not signed by apple are not permitted to mark memory pages as executable if they have previously been writable.
This restriction makes exploiting buffer overruns very difficult on iOS - particularly important as objective-c doesn't give you much help avoiding them.
However, you can't write a runtime compiler unless you can generate bytecode (write) and then execute it, and nobody has found a way to write a performant javascript or CSS engine without some form of runtime compilation.
So, Apple does allow you to write your own browser backends, but they won't give their signature, which would permit you to use riskier techniques to gain performance.
In practice, that means any browser not using the safari engines would be unacceptably slow on the modern web.
Yeah, it made me feel like I had to read the manual but there wasn't any. Seeing such a bad one reminded me how spoiled we are with beautiful abstractions.
That's probably Network Address Translation (NAT), which requires TURN (a fancy name for a central relay for all media) to "punch through". TURN literally stands for "Traversal Using Relay around NAT". And it's just a traditional, centralized. non-p2p fallback for people on paternalistic networks that don't allow them to create UDP connections or TCP connections on any ports other than 80 or 443.
Which, as it turns out, is a lot of users. I've seen estimates in the range of 10 to 20% of users. Which means, for a random selection of 7 users, you pretty much have a 50/50 chance of not being able to peer everyone using just STUN.
I think it is likely also bandwidth and cpu issues with mesh peer-to-peer.
Unless you're capping the video bitrate, the browser will try to use whatever the browser's default target is, for each connection. On Chrome that's 3mb/s, which is a lot of network bandwidth, and turns out to be a lot of cpu as well just shuffling those packets through the encoding->sending->bandwidth-estimation and receiving->decoding->rendering pipelines.
Capping the video bitrate is more complicated and confusing than it should be. It's better now that the browser implementations are all more or less closing in on "WebRTC 1.0" compliance. But you still need to reach into either the raw SDP you are exchanging during signaling, or the RTCPeerConnection objects, and set the encoding bitrate target.
The SaaS platforms that offer WebRTC APIs and infrastructure all do a lot of work under the covers to set bitrate caps, track constraints (resolution, for example), and other bits and pieces of WebRTC config that work well on a wide variety of networks, devices, and browsers.
The only numbers I have ever seen published are Whereby's[0] they saw 17% used TURN.
There is a little more nuance then just paternalistic networks though. In same cases like NAT Mapping exhaustion you just can't give an individual user multiple long lived mappings. Address Dependendent filtering/mapping also makes sense in some cases. It makes P2P harder, but does give you the ability to provide your users more sessions at least!
We see about the same numbers Whereby does at Daily, globally across our whole user base. Bounces around a little but is usually just under 20%.
Way more for customers that are mostly serving corporate users, of course (firewalls). And more for mobile-heavy user populations.
Actually, that's a good reminder that it would be nice to understand the mobile data networks breakdown in more detail. Most of the US mobile data networks require TURN, as far as I remember when I last looked at this. But I don't know if that's true everywhere in the world.
Thinking about it, v4 addresses and oil have a lot in common. The exhaustion/depletion is coming, but we keep finding ways to circumvent it. For oil you got fracking and sand. For v4 you see wider adoption of wide/carrier-grade NAT. In both cases it temporarily solves the supply problem really effectively. However it also ruins the environment.
I always assumed everyone is behind NAT, you're saying on 10 to 20% of people are, and therefore only they need TURN. I'd love to see where you got that number.
If I were to guess, the problem GP is facing is bandwidth, a mesh network uses exponentially more bandwidth. For each user, the bandwidth is linear, N more people requires N more bandwidth. This is fine for downloads, but uploading N more can be much more challenging for certain networks.
He's mistaken that NAT always requires TURN. Consumer NAT typically still allows incoming UDP, using STUN/punch-through, or TCP with uPNP support. He maybe meant to talk about only about more restrictive NAT situations or campus/corporate/ISP/nation-state/scientology-compound firewalls.
Im not sure about UDP hole punching and how it relates to WebRTC, i don't see it being talked about much. In general hole punching is a rare thing to hear, I cannot find much resources about it.
And uPNP (Universal Plug and Play) sounds like its for device discovery in the same local network, so again, it doesn't sound related to webRTC, we can connect directly with each other on the same local network anyway.
The 10-20 percent would reflect people with symmetric NAT, which is rather common with mobile networks, corporate NAT, etc. Symmetric NAT requires TURN relays. Typical home router configurations are not symmetric NAT, and usually work with just STUN.
The worst one for me so far is mDNS not working on my local network so the one circumstance you should basically be able to guarantee an easy P2P connection doesn’t work.
when food breaks down in the soil, the compost is integrated into the soil so it's already used. Plants then grow better apparently, I've never had to buy soil from the shop
I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product / features we have built, and also the different technical tradeoff decisions we had to make.
I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking about it / teaching people how to use it.
Explaining how you did the thing that you already did cuts into the time for building the next thing. The difficulty that people wrestle with isn't whether or not documenting something is valuable, but rather whether documenting that thing should cut into their sleep, recreational activity, or The Next Thing.
Personally, I'd rather not immediately jump into building the next thing. After having worked on any significant project, I find writing documentation helpful on a selfish level: I use it to wind down and let my brain idle for a while. I don't think it's a good thing to go full tilt from building one thing to the next. It's good to pause in between, appreciate what's been accomplished, reflect on lessons learned, and take a well deserved break. I find writing documentation an excellent vehicle for that.
I look at it like this: explaining how you did the thing is part of doing the thing, so it's not complete until it's explained well enough for whoever your audience is. Not writing documentation cuts into time for doing the thing, i.e. cutting corners.
I don't really enjoy writing tests at the best of times, for example, because I've never had the enjoyment of inheriting a readable test suite. Most of the time you're looking at coverage hacks that test the runtime and, hopefully, cover some behaviour, and you're lucky if they can give you confidence through a refactoring. Mocks and stubs and spies are helpful tools but I've lost count of the amount of times that the actual purpose of the test is faked without anybody realising it.
But now, this time, there is a purpose and also organisational remit to change this situation and I'm going all in on rebuilding test architecture and writing examples of what we want to see. I'm actually enjoying something I never really enjoyed.
So it is with documentation, or dealing with bugs, or tech debt, or anything like that. It's not really about want or don't want, but why... and if you're on board with the why then it's gonna be better for you than if you're not.
That, of course, depends on solid leadership. So ultimately you're looking at how tight your org ship is.
The problem is documentation is a different skillset to coding. Spend enough time doing only documentation and suddenly you're no longer a programmer, you're a documentation writer.
I actually like writing tests and documentation however i end up hating doing it for many reasons
- If I am able to focus on code, documentation or tests, I like doing it. Writing tests is sometimes lot more challenging than writing the code it tests. However context switching to difficult. I hate having to switch between the three
- The pressures of delivery makes it quite difficult to allocate meaningful time for either without cutting into scope.
- If your team does not value both to either read docs or maintain tests it become frustrating to be the only person doing it. If no one values it it can be demotivating.
- I have also seen teams either just focus on arbitary metrics like code coverage but not quality of tests or look at metrics like comment coverage/ number of lines of documentation, not whether docs are useful, how quickly someone is picking up by reading the spec, does it reduce bugs etc, quality and simplicity of language etc.
- It is a constant battle to keep both in up sync since i find it difficult to write code, tests and spec together. Once or twice a month I spend few days in trying to update both, which annoys me as they are out of date and I can only spend so much time on them.
it's almost like a form of solipsistic narcissism (the way The Last Psychiatrist describes it). Nobody else exists except as a supporting role. Why should they have to explain their genius work to anyone...
Or they are stimulated by new ideas and and general patterns? To those kinds of people writing how something that already exists works is supremely boring. It doesn't require narcissism
The difference is in whether you are willing to do the part that is not the most simulating but useful or whether you expect others to put up and do it instead of you.
And generally z others are as bored by that work as you, as simulated by new thing. Pretty often, the difference is not in how much you like boring parts, but in whether you are willing to do it anyway.
In January, I took 2 weeks PTO from work to visit this community to checkout what they do: https://wheaton-labs.com/
What I saw was incredible! They were making homes that keep cool during the summer and warm during the winter and you can grow crops on the roof because the house is covered in mud (wow!).
For 2 weeks when I was there (during the winter in Montana) I woke up earlier than everyone so I can light up their rocket mass heater. A few blocks of wood heats up this mass that dissipates heat throughout the day. The house stays between 66 degrees (coldest) to 72 (warmest) in the morning when the fireplace is on. As a Californian, I never thought there were so much efficiency to be gained from something as simple as a fireplace.
They lived a healthy lifestyle with minimal waste and energy usage and it helped inspire me to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
Having been hooked on Diablo 2 in high school, I made the terrible decision of playing Path of Exile (POE) last year during thanks giving break (cuz we had 5 days off, I thought hey maybe I can play POE for a few days).
Since then, I have been playing POE non stop. I'd wake up at 3am and play until 8pm. I'd drink alot of water before going to bed so I can wake up early to play.
I stopped caring about work, I just played the game. To complete my work tasks, I hacked together my tasks in 30 mins before the end of the sprint with some of the shittiest code I've ever written.
Somewhere along this journey I decided that the only way I can stop my addiction is to completely finish it. I spent around 12k buying stuff for the game. The way it works is... you play to find and collect "currency" in the game. But instead of spending the time, I buy in game "currency" from other players. Its frowned upon and getting caught will get you banned, but part of me secretly wished my account would get banned so I could quit. I never got banned, so I got bolder and eventually I was spending $800 / day.
This week, I finally feel like I have finished the game. It finally got boring after building my character to the point where I could breeze through everything in the game. I was finally able to work this week and correct the bugs I introduced and get back to focusing on work.
I have yet to digest what happened in the last 3-4 months.
This reminds me of an anecdote I once read or heard about a person curing their World of Warcraft addiction. The person used an unofficial server with cheats to instantly get the best gear, then proceeded to one-shot the toughest boss. After that, playing normally felt pointless to them.
I've done pretty much the same thing with idle games. They make me really obsessive. I edit a save file or inject some javascript in the console once I've decided to quit. Once I have infinite resources, I can see how shallow the endgame is and I lose any will to play.
"The person used an unofficial server with cheats to instantly get the best gear"
> Smart, unfortunately I didn't think of this. I feel like if I did, maybe I wouldn't have spent so much time on this game. My addiction to the game really took a toll an people around me who cares / loves me. I feel bad, but really there was nothing I could do except finish.
I'm wondering if there is a certain personality / mindset that is susceptible to gaming addiction.
I really appreciate you talking so openly about it. It really can be one hell of a drug. I don't really think the personality traits are quite different to people who go to casinos or lose all their money on the stock markets. It's this idea to get better, better, better at all costs. Just one more thing and I'll stop, however after this thing there's another thing waiting and so on and so on. It never ends (well, except as how you did it :) Hope you leave it all to rest now before the next addon comes. Actually, I think the developers are quite user oriented so if you would ask them to ban you, they probably would.)
You could press Shift IIRC, particularly if the skill you were using was bound to LMB. That way hold LMB down to move around and hit shift when you need to attack.
It is unfortunate we do not strive to make "work" as enjoyable and as addictive as some games, while also allowing employees to share significantly in the wealth they help generate. It feels like many video games show us how much potential is hidden away inside people.
PoE is effectively a gambling addicting simulator.
I quit shortly after I bought my first tabs on sale. I'd stalled on mid-tier mapping playing solo self-found and decided I needed to grind currency to continue if I wanted any hope of better rolls. I've never paid into any gachas, so it really caught me off guard when I realized what I had done and how impulsive and out of character it was.
The base game is very comfortable and alluring. I rolled several toons and got to where I could sprint to 80 in a week, then get to high 80s mapping until I hit the natural limits of playing SSF.
I haven't picked it up since, and thinking about how deeply I got into it before has been an excellent deterrent from relapse.
I was borderline addicted to D2 during my high school and beyond years. I'd literally do nothing but play D2 for a solid 4-5 year period.
Then I discovered POE, this was back in the alpha days, I created the wiki (which eventually got sold to Curse which is another story) and played PoE pretty muich daily for a few years.
I'm entirely burnt out now, but just hearing the D2 music has got me in the mood to play it again.
Think you learned your lesson? I am the same, and I won't touch addictive games anymore - it takes far too much effort to get unaddicted. Not to mention all that time lost where I would have had more _real_ enjoyment, and enriched my life - reading books, going outside, watching good TV shows and movies, single player games, etc.
Yup... I think finishing the game (in the sense that I've done everything fun about the game) put a closure on my desire to play MMORPG games in the forseeable future.
So am I right in saying that this money went to other players/farmers, rather than the devs? Did you manage to sell your account in the end?
Do you intend to seek professional help about your addiction? From my perspective, it definitely seems this did not happen as a result of some addictive quality of the game, rather your own personality/current situation.
So am I right in saying that this money went to other players/farmers, rather than the devs? -> Yes
Did you manage to sell your account in the end? -> Nope, still have the account as a sort of trophy / reminder.
Do you intend to seek professional help about your addiction? -> Yes, scheduled something last month. But as I mentioned, the game slowly lost its appeal.
> it definitely seems this did not happen as a result of some addictive quality of the game, rather your own personality/current situation.
Putting blame the victim is always the easiest way to go. Good job.
This year I actually gave away all of my money and now my bank account has only ~$3k (after 8 years of earning software engineering salary). I didn't donate my money to non profits and instead I just gave out money to people I know who are not as fortunate as me. For example, someone I know got into a car accident last week and now couldn't drive to go to job interviews so I gave him 5k to help him out.
I have a few people that I'm giving 2.5k / month to help them take care of their families and so they don't have to spend every waking hour door-dashing for people like me.
I don't understand how society became so unfair and cruel and I didn't see the point in having savings when so many people around me have so little savings and no job.
Hearing MacKenzie giving away 4B of her 60B is not really impressive because you can live pretty nice with even 1B. To put it in perspective, If I made 300k (my yearly salary) / month for my entire life, I still won't have 1B.
It's not a contest though, is it? I'm sure we can all help one another in some way, and it's disheartening to see comments such as yours discrediting (passively as it may be) the help some people give, as if their help is less worthy than others.
It's because the GP is discrediting MacKenzie Bezos that he or she is being discredited in response. If GP is going to find fault with someone donating $4 billion and ask "why not more," the question rightly comes back to "well what have you accomplished compared to her?"
The issue is GP has made sacrifice but MacKenzie doesn't have to scarify as much as GP. GP am not saying MacKenzie have to make sacrifice but he is just pointing the fact we live in society where richest people hoards money instead of using it for betterment society. And most of the donations are just plain PR strategy or some tax escape strategy.
You may argue they earned hard for that money but some people are just lucky and don't have to struggle and are so greedy they don't care about anyone else.
The used metric was "impressiveness", not raw percentages.
The OP argued, that assuming she had donated 59B out of the total of 60B, while this would (probably) be a higher percentage than the OP, it still would not be "impressive". She would retain 1B, which, I hope we can all agree, is more than enough to live a wealthy life, and certainly more than the 3k left on the account of OP.
I think the fairer point is to generalise both her and OP's behaviour. If everyone at a professional salary level was giving as generously as OP we could go a lot farther than even every single multi-billionaire throwing in a few billion.
Truth is, the entire net worth of all American billionaires together pays for about one year of national healthcare give or take. We could fleece them all and it wouldn't get us that far in the long term.
While some people may give charity as an act of sacrifice, others are aimed at helping people. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the former is not a defining aspect of charity.
Assuming that someone who has read much Jack London and knows about his life would come to the same conclusions as you regarding his expertise on the matter is an easy trap to fall into.
Two philosophers were crossing a bridge over a koi pond. One pointed to two fish swimming in the pond and remarked: "Boy, those are some happy fish." The other replied: "You, not being a fish, don't know whether they are happy or not." The first said: "You, not being me, don't know whether I know they are happy or not."
I disagree she's helping more people. That money came from Amazon, from the value of other people's work. Those people deserve the full value of their work and not for Bezos to siphon off the vast majority of it. Bezos employees and therefore harms over a million people every day. Giving back some of this doesn't undo that harm.
Are you for real? 2 months ago you posted "I can't quit my job to take a break because my wife and kids depend on my salary for money". Now you state you gave your life savings away?
Does your wife know you have done this and support you? This seems like unstable, possibly manic behaviour to me. I don't know what to make of you between this and lying about having kids as well.
Sounds like a man about to get divorced who really resents his soon to be ex wife and didn't want her to get a single penny from his lifetime of hard work.
I lie about details online constantly. It helps me stay more anonymous in case anyone had a beef with me and tried to track me down.
> Sounds like a man about to get divorced who really resents his soon to be ex wife and didn't want her to get a single penny from his lifetime of hard work.
Sounds like you are projecting your deepest fears. I'm lucky, my wife is capable. For now at least, we don't have the issue that you are forecasting.
When it comes to giving away a significant portion of your wealth, gotta make sure you talk about it as the idea is forming, WAY before action is taken.
> Hearing MacKenzie giving away 4B of her 60B is not really impressive because you can live pretty nice with even 1B.
> If I made 300k (my yearly salary) / month for my entire life, I still won't have 1B.
It would take more than a millennium of making 300k a month to match what she gave in 4 months.
I cannot begin to comprehend how one could donate this much money in such a short time, it would require a lot of planning and execution. I think it's impressive from that standpoint.
I am wondering more specifically what life experiences caused them to do this -- I assume they were not always like this and more likely an event triggered this less than sane behavior.
The fact that you give money to people you know rather than to nonprofits suggests that your motives are not as purely altruistic as you'd like them to be. A good nonprofit is massively more effective per dollar, able to literally save multiple lives for the 5K you gave to your acquaintance.
Now, if you just think about your donations as a way of making you feel good, the same way other people would spend their entire savings on cocaine, then you do you. But don't get so high and mighty on it that you denigrate the vastly more important work that MacKenzie Bezos is doing.
> The fact that you give money to people you know rather than to nonprofits suggests that your motives are not as purely altruistic as you'd like them to be.
It doesn't really have to be altruistic. There's certainly nothing in what he said that suggests he is doing it simply due to altruism, either. He has more than he needs and injects the excess into things he cares about (specifically, people he knows)
> A good nonprofit is massively more effective per dollar, able to literally save multiple lives for the 5K you gave to your acquaintance.
The goal wasn't to save lives, but to give someone they know money to help them find reliable transportation to get to job interviews. I'd reckon a nonprofit would not be able to ever perform the same service for that person, so you're kind of off base when you say they're massively more effective per dollar - they aren't helping people like his acquaintance.
> But don't get so high and mighty on it that you denigrate the vastly more important work that MacKenzie Bezos is doing.
In what way is her work vastly more important than what he is doing? Him saying he didn't find the donations impressive in comparison to her wealth doesn't say anything about her not doing good.
> The fact that you give money to people you know rather than to nonprofits suggests that your motives are not as purely altruistic as you'd like them to be.
I think this is passing alot of misguided judgements. I'm not thinking to myself, "I want to be altruistic today" and donate, no. I see someone who is struggling with life because of monetary and I give them help (even though I don't get to write off these donations on my taxes).
> A good nonprofit is massively more effective per dollar, able to literally save multiple lives for the 5K you gave to your acquaintance.
I don't interact with people whom nonprofits are specifically targeting and I don't have bandwidth to reach out. How do I have time for that to save lives for X amount when people around me are struggling? Just turn a blind eye and donate to save "X lives" that I've never made and feel good about my actions? How is this altruistic behavior?
I would suggest, instead of spending your money on superficial acts, invest that money into your own company to HIRE people who are less well off and train them with your skills. You would do much better for society.
What if they don't have time nor skill to teach people fishing and just happen to have fish? Perhaps they must drop other things in their life to turn this into some grandiose altruistic social enterprise? Because I guess they own these people something?
And also a strong proponent of effective giving. The charities he gives to (generally malaria-focused ones) can save a healthy human life for less than $5,000 on average. https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
>Hearing MacKenzie giving away 4B of her 60B is not really impressive because you can live pretty nice with even 1B. To put it in perspective, If I made 300k (my yearly salary) / month for my entire life, I still won't have 1B.
What you're doing is impressive and commendable, no doubt. But imagine if you didn't have any of those friends to give money to - how fo you then know how to allocate your money? Or let's scale up your salary so that you're now a millionaire. How do you divvy up that money in a useful way to your friends that are in need? There comes a certain point where your friends are no longer usefully absorbing money efficiently.
2.5k a month definitely helps out a couple with kids. Now if you increased the amount to 100k a month, would you say they're efficiently spending every penny, or would a portion of that be better spent given to other families? TBH, I think spending 4B in a year is already pretty good considering it takes a lot of time to figure out how to donate in an efficient matter, outside of straight up giving cash to everyone. Otherwise I could easily see these charitable donations getting soaked up by select brand name orgs that just sit on most of the money as a warchest.
> But imagine if you didn't have any of those friends to give money to - how fo you then know how to allocate your money?
Not sure tbh.
> Or let's scale up your salary so that you're now a millionaire.
I really don't see this happening, I plan to give out exactly what I make for the rest of my life.
> ... Now if you increased the amount to 100k a month, would you say they're efficiently spending every penny, or would a portion of that be better spent given to other families?
Judging from my other engineering peers, I would say 0% of my peers are "efficiently spending every penny". Or 100%, depending on how much you value mental health. One could argue that buying a Peloton is great for mental health. :shrug:
I remember talking with folks about gambling and they said you should gamble a certain percentage of your funds, but it wasn't like 80% it was more like 5%. This let you stay in the game longer.
But yeah, this is a black swan kind of time and good people are needing help more than normal. And good people are the kind of folks who don't stomp right over and ask for help.
1 incredible developer could potentially be as good as 100 in the extreme case. But 1 software developer will never be as good as 1000 developers, which is why organizations operating effectively at scale dominate in success.
Similarly I believe giving money to random people is primarily making you yourself feel good. This is fine, but it isn’t very effective except to make yourself feel altruistic.
I prefer to give to organizations that are focused and organized. One of my personal favorites is Liberty in North Korea https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org
I firmly believe an organization dedicated to helping slaves in a communistic dictatorship escape is better than me giving $500 to my friend. But this should be an analysis you make for yourself in regards to your philanthropic giving.
"Similarly I believe giving money to random people is primarily making you yourself feel good" -> I don't think this is true.
Parting ways with my money was an incredibly painful experience internally. It went against every value I grew up with.
I'm also scared to get to close with the people I give money to. I'm too afraid to become too emotionally involved in their problems to be able to reap any rewards of feeling good.
I haven't "bragged" about it to anyone either, the only people that knows are are the recipients, readers here, and my wife.
I do what I do because I think life is unfair and I don't feel I deserve the money I have.
>> I prefer to give to organizations that are focused and organized
I have a hard time donating to an organization when I personally know someone who could use a bit of extra money. Hard to look at them in the eye kinda thing.
Some people are literally incapable of feeling happy no matter what they're doing when they see so many people and friends in utterly fucked situations in life, especially when it's purely because of finances.
If you make quite a bit of money, and have never even remotely felt this way, you may actually be a clinical psychopath (not that this is in any way a bad thing. Really... can't be helped with our current state of medicine, even if the person would want it)
I have a good bit of personal anecdata that psychopaths that are financially better off do seem to enjoy youth-middle age a good bit, but crossing over into older age leads them towards some rather harsh methods of suicide fairly quickly.
Also, on a slightly different note - if all your wants in life are to be able to spend your time playing video games... well, many, many things can be said about this and related to why this person feels the need to financially help others. May want to consider some self reflection... or not. In the end, the world really owes you nothing, nor do you it. Enjoy your time here in whatever way you find yourself able to.
There's empathy and there's giving away so much you're a step away from making your own life a disaster by giving away everything. I mean, given possible life situations, OP is on average likely to help more people by skipping one or two months of giving and building some buffer to make sure they're able to keep helping in the future. Giving away almost everything goes past plain empathy and is an interesting choice.
The replies to your comment is correct. If you are making 300k+ a year, you can borrow money easily for rainy day. I also have many close friends and I have a developed a habit of reaching out for help early when I feel mentally unhealthy. So I think "a step away from making your own life a disaster" is not likely.
"OP is on average likely to help more people" -> A few years ago, I've come to conclude that the goal of achieving "more" is a toxic goal and I've come to accept the mindset of doing just enough. Helping only 1 person is good enough for me, I don't have a desire for helping a statistically significant number of people.
That was supposed to be "help people more" rather than "help more people", sorry. What I had in mind is that if anyone you're helping comes to rely on your continuous support and you're suddenly unable to work for a year due to health issues, you'll have a problem anyway. Unless you have a home with no mortgage and other people can step in to both support you long term and the people you've been helping.
I'm thinking less of "achieving more giving" and more of "what's the plan when you're current support system fails long term".
> If anyone you're helping comes to rely on your continuous support
From my experience, everyone I've helped is trying to get out of the situation so they are not depending on me for 2.5k / month. Compared to a real job, my help is unsustainable in the long run and depends on my job / health / lifestyle. They know that, I think its common sense. Also, 2.5k is not alot of money to rely on for their families.
> and you're suddenly unable to work for a year due to health issues, you'll have a problem anyway.
I have a great network of friends / family. Alot of friends I grew up with, I helped them get jobs in early 2000 and they are all millionaires. My family is not poor either so I think I have a cloud to fall back on (thankfully).
> I'm thinking less of "achieving more giving" and more of "what's the plan when you're current support system fails long term".
Despite a strong support group (family and friends), I'm always prepared for the worst case scenario. I've worked with a homeless person before, someone whom I really respected. I don't mind living homelessly. As long as I am a good person at heart and have good intentions, it doesn't matter what financial situation I live in.
I feel like when they say 'all my money' they probably have other assets. Plus at $300k a year, it's only two weeks until another $11k paycheck, right?
Giving money to other human beings that are emotionally meaningful to you so they don't have to live what's perceived to be a shitty life by the giver or even be turned to commit suicide because of their financial situation (if you don't think this happens regularly congratulations you're ignorant) I can understand :)
Like I said. Enjoy your life of video games - but realize that's not what makes quite a large amount of the population tick.
I would be more comfortable believing most of the world would rather be playing video games than working 8 hours a day for someone else (other than for their immediate family of course).
Your giving is going to crack the brain of a decent amount of the HN userbase. Don't let their snide comments get to you. You're doing something that is highly likely to be a very morally correct thing to do with regards to prosperity of those in your life and the nation in which they reside.
> I'm sure many billionares are only doing it for the PR - but if they want to give away $4B for good PR then isn't that a still a benefit to society?
I'm not sure. Growing up, I'm only occupied by achieving "success" and it was the only thing that mattered. "I'll help people when I'm a billionaire" is what I used to tell myself for years. I distinctly remember a few people who could have really used a friend, but I didn't have time for them.
I could've been a better person growing up and I blame part of my "assholeness" on the glorification of billionaires.
I don't understand peer to peer. Is every fork on everyone's computer? Who holds the latest source of truth? How does a client know if they are up to date if everyone else around the client is behind?
Is there a good resource for learning p2p and how the protocol works around establishing who owns the most up to date data?
I've always wondered, given enough time could any species on Earth become "intelligent"? If one day humans all left Earth, then in a million years when we come back to visit, is it possible for Octopus to have made octopus space suit and fly in octopus craft and visit the moon?
I think its possible. I think if humans just helped them a little it make take alot less than a million years. It would be cool for Humanity to just foster civilizations in all species on earth. It would really interesting to see how other species's approach to technology.
It’s possible but far from inevitable without intervention. It seems a confluence of unlikely (and still debated) factors combined to make tool-wielding + symbolic reasoning + language + culture etc an evolutionarily winning strategy. This is sometimes called the cognitive niche. But most species reach an evolutionary local maximum where increased intelligence offers no further survival gains; for example, sharks and crocodiles have been relatively unchanged for millions of years.
I like this term "cognitive niche" a lot. The term "Evolutionary winning strategies" kind of implies an ordering, as if there was only one winner in the grand scheme of things. Humanity may seem like the apex predator on Earth but we live just where we live, in the circumstances we find ourselves in, that our genes have adapted to. In other circumstances, spaces or timescales, other lifeforms prevail. And on a cosmic scale, who knows...
This is called uplifting, and it should be possible to do it in the 21st century by using genetic engineering to give creatures progressively bigger and better brains with each generation.
When a brain is of sufficient capacity for consciousness to emerge, we can begin to educate these sentients, and teach them all we know, leaving them to figure out how they can apply our knowledge to their perspective of the world, which is alien to us.
Octopus for instance may begin to construct tools that will allow for them to practice aquaculture and build more civilized social structures that move them away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles. When they are not farming, they could develop written language to record their history and debts. Surely if you checked back in tens of thousands of years you would find advanced cities and societies as complex as human ones, except entirely underwater with occasional structures breaking above the surface.
Other creatures like chimpanzees could be taught how to work with humans as a cheap form of labor, digging ditches or mining resources.
It was really hard to make p2p work and debugging the ice connections was even harder.