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An odd thing. There is no scale-modeling hobby associated with internet tech. You can build model trains and planes, baking soda volcanoes, and even model computers/networks as digital logic demo experiments. But there’s no such thing as a scale model of a webapp or toy blog
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I think this happens a lot in software because equivalent of paper planes and airliners can look similar. It really would take only a weekend to create a “twitter paper plane.” Like a CRUD web app that adds posts to a stream. Even an “RC toy plane” that handles nontrivial load.
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Could be because there is no real scaling parameter for Turing equivalence. You just approximate a UTM in proportion to memory, so low-memory things aren’t very good approximations.
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I think they’re just different apps not toys. I’ve given up on static sites for now because they actually seem harder than blogs for me. Never got past hello world in gatsby. You guys have been focused on speed at large scale, hardly a toy concern.
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perhaps, with time, fuller-reimplementations of greater faithfulness will become a more-formalized hobby! and maybe, being able to populate a standalone service with LLM-simulated users can add more pizazz/life to hobbyist-versions – the 'train' that animates the scale model.
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The hard-walled gardens also prevent hobby experiments at the edge of the established networks, *which hurts the evolution of established network* b/c can't see compelling alternatives to embrace/extend/extinguish, which is how MSFT used to evolve.
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not exactly the same, but often it's a lot easier to build a v1 of a feature that you know won't scale past N users but is a lot easier to ship
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I think it's because it's hard to have scale data. what's the toy content? toy network? toy users? an app gets most of its actual structure from its data which doesn't scale down.
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