Story time! A couple years ago, I found myself with pretty severe ADHD and no way to get treatment for it. (There may have been a global healthcare cataclysm involved...)
I wanted to make some progress on a personal project, but I had a history of abandoning things, without external accountability. I had a guy for that the previous year, which worked great, but our interests diverged, so I had to find a way to do it on my own.
I realized that I couldn't force it. I had to find a way to make it work without having sufficient dopamine. Without relying on willpower at all.
So I stumbled into environmental design from first principles. I simply designed around all the failure modes.
1. I noticed that if I skipped a day of working on my project, the chance of completely losing momentum would rise enormously. So I decided I have to work every day, but to make it sustainable it only needs to be an hour.
2. I noticed that if I put work off until later in the day, the chance of skipping a day would rise enormously. So I decided that I had to start working as soon as I woke up. (But only for an hour. I could keep going but I didn't have to.)
3. And finally I noticed that, if I started playing with my phone or surfing the internet, the day was basically over. So I made a rule that I had to keep them both off for the first hour of the day. (And I turned them off the night before for good measure. That way I am waking up into the correct state by default.)
And what do you know. I didn't miss a day for 3 months. Even my dopamine starved brain was able to persist on this project every day without fail for several months straight, because I simply made these small changes to my environment!
The project suddenly became the most fun and interesting thing I could be doing. I actually looked forward to working on it the next day, when I went to sleep at night!
The thing I really liked about Tiktok originally was the departure from the perfectionism of Instagram, and people being ok with participating in the dance moves and trends. It was pretty positive. The thing is once you have an engaged audience sometimes you might want to keep them captivated (and their attention farmed to resell ads to).
With that being said, I don't know if McDonalds is not a really usable comparison.
McDonalds is not an endless conveyor belt of food arriving in your hands 24/7 and beeping and buzzing you when it's not to learning how and what to put in front of you to keep eating endlessly until you can't eat anymore.
There's more useful studies that doomscrolling and shorts literally decrease brain size, increase depression, and lead to dopamine exhaustion.
Short Video players are digital slot machines. They seem to be designed to let people keep using it who might not be aware on how to build up defences, or of defences are needed. In a casino many of the things the games machines can and can't do are legislated by law. It might be surprising to learn how many of those things out right, similar to it, or unique to it can happen on a phone without circumstance. Casinos will also remind you to gamble responsibly, and be able to ban yourself if needed.
The line is really simple for kids - screens loaded with bright colors that are constantly changing with many layers of sounds from ages 1-5 pretty harmful at overriding their senses. Then, there's other content traps from there. The recent moves to schools that go screen free (or greatly reduce passive consumption) is critical. Putting a chromebook in front of a kid for 8 hours isn't always progress.
So perhaps don’t use kafka at all? E.g. Adyen used postgresql [1] as a queue until the outgrew.
In this case it seems there are a lot of things that can go south in case of major issue on the event pipeline. Unless the throughput is low.. but then why kafka?
RDBMS are pretty well understood and very flexible, more still with the likes of JSONB where parts of your schema can be (de)normalized for convenience and reducing joins in practice. Modern hardware is MUCH more powerful today than even a decade and a half ago. You can scale vertically a LOT with an RDBMS like PostgreSQL, so it's a good fit for more use cases as a result.
Personally, at this point, I'm more inclined to reach for a few tools than to try to increase certain types of complexity. That said, I'm probably more inclined to introduce valkey/redis earlier on for some things, which I think may be better suited to MQ type duties without an actual MQ or more complex service bus over PG... but PG works.
Especially for systems that you aren't breaking up queues because of the number of jubs, so much as the benefits of a logical separation of the work from the requestor. Email (for most apps), report generation, etc... all types of work that an RDBMS is more than suitable for.
If there's a reputation, that means it's reasonably widespread. 5% doesn't seem like much.
Does this mean there are so many advanced users sideloading apps to compromise them?
Except users aren't so advanced that they are getting scammed because of side loading?
Or might it be the cascading delays in security updates that don't seem to reach devices between Google, manufacturers, and telcos? This is a much more massive (the 95%) of security hole and backdoors for scams to enter.
These arguments don't really seem to fit together or make sense.
Happy to get some links to read more about all of the statements.
Scrolling for hits of satisfying novelty is a proposition that will not be sustainably met.
Part of me also wonders if things like this can be used for not so great things, can they be used for good things?
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