[danielhlockard]

I can't imagine it wouldn't be easier to build something like early FaceBook today. There was no GCP / AWS / Azure / whatever back then. We were still racking servers, and we liked it.

[flashback2199]

> I can't imagine it wouldn't be

Whenever you have a double negative, flip both:

"I can imagine it would be"

If that changes the meaning too much, you can say:

"I can imagine it might be"

[a1369209993]

> > I can't imagine it wouldn't be

> I can imagine it would be

No. That means something completely different. They're saying (probably hyperbolically) that they cannot imagine the first of two possible situations, not that they can imagine the second.

[flashback2199]

Oh don't worry, I understand that just fine.

It's the speaker's or writer's task to iterate for a half second to find whatever non double negative sentence fits what they want to say.

English isn't code. You can't say double negatives in conversation or writing, and you have to find the closest thing without using a double negative.

[a1369209993]

> You can't say double negatives

It is in fact not the case that you can't say that. Double negatives, like sentences with a excessive number of conjuctions, are perfectly grammatical (when they don't violate some actual grammatical rule like the one "You do can say that." does); rather, they are in most cases stylistically bad, for much the same reasons that:

  stop = 0
  while(a() && !stop):
    b()
    if(!(c==d || !e())) stop = 1
    // should be `if(c!=d && e()) break`
    if(!stop) e()

is stylistically bad, namely excessive and more importantly needless complexity.

[flashback2199]

Thanks, we agree.

[a1369209993]

Oh. ... Okay, then. In that case I regret to inform you that your previous comment was extremely poorly phrased, to the point of seeming to mean almost the opposite of what you apparently intended. (Particularly in that double negatives are fine in conversation or writing, and can in fact be used, wherever they actually make sense - which is relatively rare in general, but occurs in the case we were originally discussing, since "can imagine it would be" means something different.)

[beshrkayali]

If you consider cost associated as an added difficulty, it’s possibly even more difficult now.

[fastball]

What has gone up in cost? The methods available 20 years ago are still available now.

We just have additional options now, which are actually cheaper to start, as you can get a lot of usage out of AWS' free tier.

Sure, once you get to "scale up" it's probably cheaper to do everything on-prem still, but that story is much better too with things like Golang, Docker, Elixir, k8s, etc, etc to make managing/building web-scale infrastructure much easier.

[saulpw]

There were 1 billion people on the internet in 2005. Now there are more than 5 billion people on the internet.

There were no smartphones in 2005 and everyone used the web to access "social media". Now any social media is nonviable unless it has an app for both of the smartphone platforms.

Youtube and streaming video didn't exist in 2005. Now it's table stakes for social media to allow people to share videos.

The bar has been raised by at least an order of magnitude. Sure, it might be easier and/or cheaper now to do what Facebook did...in 2005. But that won't get you anywhere in 2023.

[ddorian43]

There are no more vc funds (currently) to pay your cloud bill though.

[vasco]

Did you add the words "generative AI" to your pitch?