Kistaro Windrider @kistaro@dragon.style

I have deflated the large accumulation of balloons making my office awkward to navigate, and replaced them with a smaller number of even larger balloons that are arguably even more inconvenient.

I am not sure what I find so compelling about this but it’s stronger than the anti-libido effects of the SSRI. >..>

Escitalopram is making me feel a lot better, except it's definitely causing me fatigue. My sleep is improving with a bit more rigor and scheduled use of melatonin, but I feel drowsy much more easily than I did without it. I'd been blaming that on the cannabis, but it hasn't cleared up; I think all the negative effects cannabis was really responsible for werethe headaches (which were bad, fwiw), encouraging me to stay up too late, and encouraging me to sit around instead of doing things. Those are good enough reasons for me to stop it (especially the last one) but I'm frustrated that the fatigue hasn't resolved.

It does get better with light-to-moderate exercise, so I need to get used to responding to feeling tired midday not by slowing down and looking for a chance to snooze, but by standing up, pacing around, doing something physically active; that all helps more than a nap, and I wonder if I'll sleep more soundly at night with less sleep (that doesn't help much) during the day. Increased water intake helps too.

Our local get-to-know-your-neighbors program is sponsored by the United States Postal Service, which keeps delivering me mail intended for vaguely similar addresses in a three block radius

One of many problems with the standard hip-worn badge retractor (“hip wheel”) at work is when my badge gets caught in my chair, I stand up, and find myself strapped to my chair. Today’s bonus: my badge releasing itself from the chair and whipping me in the buttocks

It is winter and I have turned on the air conditioning

me: trying to cut back on caffeine

also me: WHY SO I FEEL SO TIRED????

I have felt inexplicably exhausted all day.

Patreon is unsustainable on a 5% rake. It cannot exist unless they raise the average fee.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90295558/patreon-is-on-track-to-reach-1-billion-in-total-payments-to-creators includes an estimate that Patreon will clear $500MM this year. That means they have to run off $25MM.

A mid-career software engineer in California costs about $200K in direct compensation. Benefits and overhead are usually estimated at equal to comp, so a SWE costs $400K. Patreon can pay for approximately 60 SWEs with their money assuming they pay for literally nothing else.

Patreon cannot live on SWEs alone. It is a content distributor, so it incurs substantial server costs and ops costs. Ops engineers cost the same as software engineers. Patreon also has customer service staff, including Trust & Safety, attempting to deal with social issues across the entire platform. Add the cost of office staff, administrative staff, executive staff, and the many assorted other professionals required to run a modern, Internet-centric business ready to respond to a world that demands rapid answers for everything.

I don’t have estimates for these costs. I do know that while SWE and ops engineer staff costs scale sublinearly with service cost, customer service costs and server+bandwidth costs scale *at least linearly* with use, and diseconomies of scale (more staff requires more management, so salary growth is at least O(n lg n) instead of O(n), disregarding how employee pay expectations tend to increase as a company ages and individual staff can gain increasing seniority) suggest these costs are super linear.

Patreon is not a 20-SWE project. Since they allow adult content, they have to do an awful lot of reinventing the wheel on payment processor stuff; entire companies with hundreds of engineers do that work alone, and they are also a content distribution and content feed platform. Is it a 60-SWE project? Maybe, except then they can’t pay for any computers or any customer service staff or any managers or any Internet bandwidth.

As they grow, SWE costs don’t increase as much as income can, but what about their per user costs - servers, bandwidth, and the statistically guaranteed increase in problems Trust & Safety must cover? Those are linear and superlinear. If there’s a sweet spot where Patreon so much as breaks even, it’s a small one.

Patreon is essentially increasing their fees to 8% and trying to pretend users get something for it. No, this is not a better deal for creators compared to today, but it’s probably a better deal for creators compared to Patreon not existing, and I’m pretty sure that’s the alternative. I’m surprised they think they can do it at 8%.

Tetris 99 is like PornHub. The goal is to fuck as many dudes as you can all at once.

(Or at least that’s optimal strategy)

It is technically winter and the park between buildings at the office today includes shirtless beach volleyball

cat /dev/full > /dev/null

Time to switch Masto clients, this one doesn’t support accessibility text for images. Any recommendations iOS users? Must support very long toots (dragon.style allows 7777 chars) and, of course, captions for images.

what the FUCK, month of March