anonymoose33282

I still don't know why seemingly no one has been able to create a good clone of 2010-2015 Twitter. Mastodon is clunky, BlueSky was invite-only for so long that people lost interest, and any "free speech" version gets flooded by the "I want to say slurs without consequences" crowd.

It's definitely a double-standard that is especially prevalent in the US. In a gas station you can buy alcohol that will kill you, nicotine products that will kill you, processed food that will kill you. I don't understand why only 1 of those seems to ruffle feathers.

> It's great that people are experimenting in this space. It's less great that people are getting multiple millions in funding and selling a phone and web service as an "AI device."

This is the best two-sentence summary I've seen so far. People tend to forget just how many wacky flip phones and PDA-type devices had to come and go before the touchscreen smartphone as we know it came into being. Which is what these new AI gadgets remind me of.

However, the difference I see now versus 20 years ago is that companies today are just trying to get the most cash and deliver the cheapest product (and pocket the difference), rather than stick with their product and reinvest into R&D.

Very glad that I don't work somewhere with an immature "thought leader" at the helm. Imagine having your entire department cut as the result of a Twitter Poll because your CEO was bored one night on the toilet.

It's also not exclusive to China/authoritarian countries. Plenty of European countries have de-facto decriminalized cannabis by rarely enforcing laws on possession (I'm reminded of how often I saw people openly smoking weed on the street in Berlin years ago), yet politicians don't want to be the one to stick their neck out and say that the war on drugs failed or cosign the use of a particular substance -- even if their electorate largely would agree with them.

I think “violence” is at times such a silly measuring stick for modern justice.

Instead, we should see it as lost/ruined human potential. What is worse, violently robbing one bank of $10k, or “peacefully” robbing a massive number of people for billions of dollars?

I sure as hell know what I think, and it’s absolutely not in line with SBF’s sentence. He should rot in Ryker’s with people who have, unfortunately, done less harm but still found their way there.

I feel like there are PLENTY of "AI" apps someone could have made and still been first to market, long before they got down the list to "eat this fungus, trust me bro" territory.

Yeah, I remember in 5th grade we had a day where each kid got a turn on the classroom computer to see how far they could go.

What’s interesting is you also see the is was sponsored by Chevrolet (on the title screen), so it seems monetization-wise, it’s no different than today when YouTubers have a sponsor read at the start of a video. I just wonder if then it’s simply a matter of more creators competing for less ad-money-per-person, which leads to the kind of “optimized” content we see today.

Yeah, $500 seems basically impossible for an "Apple" product. I mean AirPods are $200 minimum. The latest phones are $1000. Their laptops are all $1000+. I'm not sure how Apple would make a product that has a screen and sell it for the price of a couple pairs of ANC bluetooth earbuds.

I think there's a "too many people in the pool" problem that happens with everything virtual. Facebook was a big deal when I was in High School and early college, and I remember how quick the fall-off was once Instagram came out. Our parents had slowly been signing up for FB for years, and all the young people flocked to Instagram to have their "exclusive" club again.

Reddit is another great example for me. 2010-2015 was a magical time there, and if you look at it now it's filled with bot accounts pumping subreddits full of reposts. Back in the day people farmed Reddit karma to flex on other Redditors, now they do it for the financial incentive and no actual user would care about their "Reddit Score" these days.

It makes me wonder if it's possible to both be a successful platform and a GOOD platform, because ultimately something that is successful will get hijacked by bad actors who see a way to profit from it (either by money directly or by indirectly influencing opinions).

Titan Panel I think was the name? It was the one that kinda "unified" a lot of UI elements into one bar (total gold, repair percentage, stuff like that).

"How do we make the cooler door a more engaging experience?"

Imagine getting your raise request denied, meanwhile the guy asking these questions is an executive at your company. I could sadly see this concept coming to fruition in the future as a way for stores to make more passive money by playing ads on them (like gas station pumps do now in the US), but man do I not know a single other good reason to have them.

According to this article from CoinTelegraph, Telegram denies making any agreement like this. Sees like it’s MTS trying to boost its advertising services (and charge clients more) with false promises:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/russia-mts-announces-ads-serv...

I stopped noticing several years ago, it seems every place has all 4 on the "We proudly accept" window decal. But I do remember checking 10-15 years ago to make sure places took my Amex, because not all of them did.

This has always seemed like a somewhat short-sighted take from regulators. While I do think that platforms have some responsibility to police content that users post, I can’t help but feel like it just creates this cycle of

1. Latest political event creates rise in related disinformation

2. Regulators issue ultimatum

3. Platforms make big public statement that they’ll “address it”, ultimatum paused

4. Next event occurs before 3 is realized (if it even can be, reasonably)

5. Repeat

To me the much smarter investment would be making serious “online literacy and critical thinking” programs to help decrease the effect of disinformation on populations

Yeah we're definitely seeing a slow return to "this is on-demand cable". And all I see is that independent content (like YT videos) will continue to grow. I can definitely say that I watch probably one tenth as many shows and movies now as I did 7 or 8 years ago, simply due to how fragmented streaming services have become.

I keep a Netflix subscription running for my parents, get the free few months of Apple TV every year or so from buying a new device, and beyond that I just watch more and more YouTube in my free time and go to the cinema maybe twice a year.

Sure, YouTube doesn't really have any blockbuster/high-budget/studio-level content, but there's simply so much and so many niches that it keeps me entertained just as well as anything else, so I subscribe to YT premium and that's it.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the 90s (or even early/mid 2000s) just for a day to remember what that vacuum of "stuff to do" in every day life was like.

I lived it, I remember "being bored" or having "nothing to do", but I truly can't access it in a meaningful way. I would love to go back to those days of playing games or engaging in my hobbies where I didn't feel that constant pressure of "but you better get stuff done, we don't have all day here".

I agree that that's probably the most "mass adoption" use case for these things, rather than just gaming or content consumption.

I would love to be able to have essentially a pair of "triple monitor setup goggles" that I can throw into a backpack, but right now the cost and battery life isn't there quite yet. But I have hope!

> MTS was used on a production basis at about 13 sites in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and possibly in Yugoslavia

I’d love to hear a story about that last one

I grew up in an area with quite a few Amish, and it is interesting how tech from the past 10 years has affected that community.

Like the article says, not all Amish follow the same rules, nor do they abstain entirely from electricity (only some do). For example, it’s very popular for some Amish to have phones and do business with locals via FaceBook.

Would be wild to see one of my old neighbors now, cruising down a dirt road on an electric bike, holding onto his straw hat.

I think it’s also how we interact with them. I remember being “chronically online” as a teenager 15 years ago without a phone, just playing MMORPGs all day and me and my friends (all internet friends the same age, didn’t meet IRL until our early 20s) didn’t have the same issues that teenagers are dealing with now.

I think there’s something inherently comparative and consumerist to social media. I’ve travelled a lot, despite being under 30, and in the last couple years I really felt like a lot of it was just to earn some “achievement” after seeing other people I know traveling places.

I haven’t been on any social media for over a year now, and that latent background noise of “I need to do this, go there, buy that” has faded.

I’d usually consider myself pretty immune to stuff like that but social media often feels like MTV Cribs, just for every social class, and that’s maybe what’s so insidious about it.

I feel the same way about any media: podcasts, TV, movies, etc.

The creator put in a lot of time and effort, so to not give it your full attention is a complete disservice. When I watch something, I want to hear every line and not miss any dialogue. When I read something, I want to absorb every sentence.

Can't wait to hear someone critiquing our "consumption-obsessed society" in an Amazon review of an economics audiobook they listened to at 6x speed on their morning commute.

But given the choice, isn't SMS a stronger first authentication factor? It's temporary and randomized, whereas users don't change passwords that frequently. So a password is much more susceptible to keyloggers/malware/brute-force than an SMS code.

I actually wrote to Telegram’s support team to get more info about this, and it seems the article has a lot of errors. The support rep linked me to this, https://telegra.ph/Wired-Errors which is Telegram’s response to all of it.

No, you can only reset it with an email (that you add when setting up the password) or using an already-active device.

I remember in 2017 I went to my GP in the US for a physical + bloodwork, and when I said what I was there for, the doctor recoiled a bit – because allegedly I had been booked for a 15 minute slot, rather than 30. And there was no way to do everything in 15 minutes.

I had no idea such a thing even existed. Sure, there's a schedule to appointments and you can't just take all the doctor's time, but I had never ever heard of anything like that. As if at 15:01 into the examination, we'd both turn into pumpkins or something. Or the idea that really any health problem someone had could be observed, diagnosed, and treated in a quarter hour.

Turns out that the hospital system she worked in had been aquired by nameless-faceless-health-conglomerate, and that's how they (and many other) hospitals worked now. Everything was KPIs, everything was maximizing people-in-and-out every day.

When I asked the doctor how she felt about it she obviously tried to be as democratic as possible about voicing her displeasure at the new system. Annnnnnd about 6 months after that, she transferred to working at a senior living facility where she just gets to chat with elderly people all day, refill their prescriptions, and make sure they stay healthy.

That and the fact that reported "10k layoffs at tech company" doesn't mean 10k developers, sysadmins, and the like are now out of a job. It generally is a mixture of all roles at the company – many of which may not be "techy" in nature (customer service reps, etc.)

Not that anyone losing a job is ever a good thing, but I think a lot of news stories make it seem like a mass-extinction of fullstack devs, when the reality is more complex.

I wish the author would just stick to hard facts instead of going on so many conspiratorial tangents:

"Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Telegram and the Kremlin have appeared even more in sync... Telegram [is] a vital source of information for Russians, with Meduza and other outlets sharing reports via public channels on the platform. But pro-Kremlin disinformation far outpaces journalism."

I don’t see how the appearance of disinformation makes someting ‘in sync’. By that logic, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, etc. are all "in bed” with the Kremlin. And if we’re measuring a platform on its Journalism-to-Propaganda ratio, I think the internet as a whole would fail to pass.

This reminds me of an article I found shortly after the Elon acquisition: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

After reading that, I understood just how much pressure is on social media companies from different angles, and it's impossible to really have "Free Speech" online due to the nature of sharing content (versus simple verbal/written discourse).