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Why do writers like this feel so entitled to engineering effort from companies? Maybe companies don’t want to plow millions into microoptimising their sites so

Why do writers like this feel so entitled to engineering effort from companies? Maybe companies don’t want to plow millions into microoptimising their sites so a handful of people in Antarctica can access them, when the vast majority of their clients can use their sites just fine.

theodote 2y ago
The author puts a lot of effort into emphasizing that it's not just "a handful of people in Antarctica" facing such issues, but quite a noticeable percentage of global population with unstable or otherwise weird connectivity. The internet shouldn't be gatekept from people behind such limitations and reserved for the convenient "target audience" of companies, whoever that might be - especially when solutions to these problems are largely trivial (as presented in the article) and don't require that much "engineering effort" for companies of that scale, since they are already half-implemented, just not exposed to users. People should not be limited from employing already existing infrastructure to overcome their edge-case troubles just because that infrastructure is not exposed due to it being unnecessary to the "majority of the clients".
croes 2y ago
You do realize it's not just Antarctica? There are lots of places in the world where the internet speed isn't great. I'm actually experiencing slow internet right now and I' m in Germany.
1oooqooq 2y ago
your comment is self defeating. for example, the audience of a site might be in southern Africa, with same bad connectivity, but the EU/UN site developers are in the north so they don't care and the consequences are in program adoption that fails to blame that. Or you might be doing business with a coffee producer and now your spiffy ERP is missing data because it's too much effort for them to update the orders, so your procurement team have to hire an intern to do it over the phone costing you an extra 2k a month. Or which is more likely for the crowd here, yall losing clients left and right because your lazy sysadmin blocked entire country ip ranges because once they saw a single DoS wave from there.
jabroni_salad 2y ago
If you do not want to write software that works well in the antarctic mission, just don't sell to them. Government contracts are pretty lucrative though.

theodote 2y ago

The author puts a lot of effort into emphasizing that it's not just "a handful of people in Antarctica" facing such issues, but quite a noticeable percentage of global population with unstable or otherwise weird connectivity. The internet shouldn't be gatekept from people behind such limitations and reserved for the convenient "target audience" of companies, whoever that might be - especially when solutions to these problems are largely trivial (as presented in the article) and don't require that much "engineering effort" for companies of that scale, since they are already half-implemented, just not exposed to users. People should not be limited from employing already existing infrastructure to overcome their edge-case troubles just because that infrastructure is not exposed due to it being unnecessary to the "majority of the clients".

croes 2y ago

You do realize it's not just Antarctica? There are lots of places in the world where the internet speed isn't great. I'm actually experiencing slow internet right now and I' m in Germany.

1oooqooq 2y ago

your comment is self defeating. for example, the audience of a site might be in southern Africa, with same bad connectivity, but the EU/UN site developers are in the north so they don't care and the consequences are in program adoption that fails to blame that. Or you might be doing business with a coffee producer and now your spiffy ERP is missing data because it's too much effort for them to update the orders, so your procurement team have to hire an intern to do it over the phone costing you an extra 2k a month. Or which is more likely for the crowd here, yall losing clients left and right because your lazy sysadmin blocked entire country ip ranges because once they saw a single DoS wave from there.

jabroni_salad 2y ago

If you do not want to write software that works well in the antarctic mission, just don't sell to them. Government contracts are pretty lucrative though.