mrsvanwinkle

You may have convinced me that this phone tapping thing may, and I am being super serious here, lead to something much much bigger than mere social networks.

I am convinced that this weird Phone Tapping thing may be the next evolutionary step from both social networks and the dead Internet theory (evolution not meant jokingly i.e. both naturally selected and the baby only got the recessive regressions).

The real solution hinges on maybe a future Turing award or Fields medal on physical cryptography for auth/integrity/privacy... but even without that. This is how Facebook got its "grassroots" userbase, from elite students verified via .edu email.

If a Friendster 2.0 actually doubles down on this physicality, and actually concentrate its efforts on making the very act of having to RE-TAP the physicality of a social connection, for example your friends may have an option to fund your trips to meet together if about to get disconnected.

Or of course it might end up being Facebook 2.0 and sell your Physical data to Cambridge Analytica 2.0 to make Grok beta emperor of Great North America CoProsperity Sphere

Is your name based on Pale Fire by chance?

Love it, also love how Datenschatten can also imply that it disappears when someone shines light on it

Heya. At first I wanted to pile on the negativity due to really. Really bad red flags from the title alone signaling slop, sociopathy (calculated sensationalism), sociopathy (guiltless artificial scarcity peddler), and some really big "Gretchen stop trying to make Friendster 2 happen" energy. But as a longtime HN lurker who lost my first account and now have to carry the "account created after 2022" stigma when I had been training GPTs in my own slop in 2018, I value a storied post history pre-dead internet and it may be your best investment yet. (also you have shared positive posts about some things I like).

So just wanted to say I am rooting for you and I may be able to provide some acutely specific but embarrassing input(s) about how a Friendster 2 can happen, based on my Friendster 0 experience (it is definitely not about breaking up in high school where deleting profiles sends the news rippling to the whole universe) (it may involve learning that Indonesian black hats were scary and many and also how the social graph was uncached and always computed server side per profile visit). Now that you own the "Friendster" trademark, I hereby greenlight your soci-emdash-ability to manipulatively hint at the "possibility" of restoring profiles via the Friendster archive project, but keep it as a possibility until you big enough the patent trolls be phone tapping (this is really weird)

It's not a search problem it's a grammar problem: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html

JG Ballard's Crash led to Baudrillard's brand of Postmodernism (Hyperreality/Simulacra entering pop culture especially with The Matrix) and iirc Ballard was weirded out by Baudrillard's analysis of Crash (which, you know, is saying something when Crash is car crash erotica). Wikipedia claims Nabokov's The Eye+Despair to be the proto/first "postmodern" novel that led to Pale Fire that led to works like Pynchon's V and Wallace's Infinite Jest and Danielewski's House of Leaves etc. though those mainly apply Postmodernism to form, whereas Crash questions the nature (i.e. natural/"original"/"correct") of biological arousal when the object is a literal car crash.

Amazing recommendation! I was hooked by that most powerful New York Times Bestseller endorsement but in 1600s. "Many say: I wanted to learn, but only found madness. But those who seek wisdom will not find it elsewhere."

Just joined the "family member battling neurodegenerative disease" club and plunged into resigned frustration when I could not find even some vibecoded assistant that does the simplest critical dementia caregiving tasks proactively, and ChatGPT and Gemini voice subscriptions dont have that capability yet. My mom thankfully still has at least perhaps a 1 hour attention window. It's enough for her to read an old, long letter I wrote about her life for mother's day reminding her about how she lived her life sacrificing for her family and how she always worried for everyone else but herself (to a fault). She lives with my sister but she is closest to me and I still have a lot to learn on how to deal with this illness from her psychiatrist especially the acceptance part. I have been spending most of my free time face timing her. Grateful for anyone who could share existing solutions that are already available.

Was hoping to find that good end in your story and found it, happy for you. I'm thankfully healthy but found myself in an adjacent circumstance as the child of a newly diagnosed dementia patient who forgot who I am. I was able to reintroduce myself and she has not forgotten again so far but she is at the point where she will believe anything without ground truth as basis. I find myself clamoring for time with her, pioritizing FaceTime calls with her over anything else, as each time I talk to her I can sense her drifting away. I don't mind her forgetting about me, which finally convinced the psychiatrist who said she didn't have a problem the previous year that yes she is in stage 5-6 dementia after all. She woke up once not knowing who she is, and that is something I can't have her forget. This is the closest I've experienced something like what you've survived through and what op is going through, something that puts Everything in perspective. So I'm thankful for threads like this on HN especially given this point in history where everything is happening all at once, which makes this Total Perspective Vortex (HHGG) thing all the more epiphanic (the TPV in HITCHHIKER'S was meant to destroy you by showing you the evident infinitude of your insignificance, but the reality of mortality just shows an indifferent universe being equally, coldly, largely ignored)

Agreed, but I'm mainly informed by the r/personalfinance article that I don't have on hand right now, which lays out the exact details of the evidently tangible difference in material reality jumping from a low ten million net worth to 100 million and beyond (low 8 figs to low 9 figs), the most significant being material wealth translating into political/social clout, where the author worked as a director for such estate and was responsible for these big name correspondences. Even something as casual as a dinner invitation will get an audience with someone in the 10 figures. The common ideas of "ultra rich" perks are attainable and peak at 8 figures, such as having your personal pilot (this surprised me) above the usual payrolled estate of assistant + personal chef/nutritionist.

Okay this lit up my life for the day

Like real mold on fiber or

Yes, reminds me of Proce55ing in its prime, used for complex webviz like this. I love this so much.

Agreed with other comment thanks so much for posting.

As an American I'm a huge fan of HHGG and Rowan Atkinson (not just his Bean character). I'm also a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and his Harvard generation's work for The Simpsons. Would be far ahead of Adams' time. Though while I find them _okay_ I never laughed so hard that my face and stomach hurt from laughter when watching Monty Python anything, not even Black Adder. For other American comedy what made me really, really laugh so hard was Kenan & Kel and The Lonely Island's work for SNL.

I've tried to find something as funny as HHGG for so long that I've read P.G. Wodehouse as Adam's main inspiration. Also watched Fry & Laurey. I guess Sacha Cohen as British humour? Since he's Cambridge Highlights alum after all. Found his works extremely hilarious though the parody of racism was disgusting.

Here is Conan's best (natural) performance roasting the Google CEO and gOogLers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s

this is the best HN thread of this year so far, loving all the comments

laughed and was warmed by the end reveal. i support gushing over literature in HN

I love that better! I was also just in Italy recently and you made me double take this tablet hanging on a canopy in one of the peregrination churches and they ARE interpuncts but for names only

just the fact you instinctively thought of the use case to understand and empathize with this disability better, is very cool of you

best HN story ive read in a while. i want a raccoon that eating tinyfist-fuls of cereal steaight from the box it opened, watching TV

"other people's same problem easier" i see, but have never seen messiness as example at least in communities w adhd comorbid with depression. personally the concept of other people cleaning my private mess, even/especially if they are close family/friends is terrifying and already overloads my head and i can only project the same sentiment (and some extrapolation of my own experience helping friends/family with cleaning... it is super hard, we are talking about intruding on what the person values as trash or not trash, and that itself can be a source of great shame i.e. my mother who lived to much worse abject poverty than the children she helped raise with a better life. sorry for being dramatic about an otherwise straightforward point but yes in my experience that "cold" reduction of the problem into something actionable would be key, though people arrive there differently i noticed, e.g. me and my "armchair courage" that any unseen sideeffect is not my problem, for my mom (okay sometimes for me as well) it is about being able to forget that she has problems just by the appearance of having the luxury to give advice

big early-Sabine Hossenfelder energy

Poverty-sculpted packrat brain here. I believe this specific behavior became a nuanced social issue starting with the Marie Kondo "Cleanliness" movement from years ago to present, at least my experience of this is through the Tumblr commentaries about how tone-deaf the movement was to people in or who grew up in poverty. so for "never-poor" people like you, the specific nuance would be whether you had space to keep these backup parts like an attic or garage or even extra closet space where this behavior becomes a "tidiness/organization" issue otherwise. hope this perspective gives a better picture

This is extremely helpful to me, thanks so much for sharing.

snortèd

I can objectively say your reply minimizes the previous two posts who shared childhood traumas by the objective fact that you are implying (if they are not able to satisfy your Scientific Endeavor) that, if there is no delineation, then their repression of childhood trauma is equivalent and minimized or perhaps exalted if coffee is your religion to the repression of your religious experience of this coffee shop. If you were perhaps a child victim in this coffee shop maybe? You literally erased the trauma part. That is the delineation if you still need to think about this out loud

Thank you so much, the parent thread was truly an uncomfortably disturbing read and your post is a necessary contrast to "rational" "objective" "minds" armchairing something so delicate with gross finality.

+1 for kvetch

Might be based on Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ray Kurzweil uses this as a major motif for "The Singularity is Near" about how Harry Potter can be rewritten with all magic replaced with "advanced" devices with handwaved theoretical feasibility explanations. A more specific issue than sci-fi vs. fantasy is the "hard/soft" sci-fi delineation.

Not a fan of his other works but his short story The Egg (not sci-fi) is up there with Asimov's best shorts (I'm not a fan of Asimov's Foundation series either). I'm more of a fan of Frankenstein and Singin in the Rain sci-fi that explores the social/personal disruptions introduced by technology. Much like how Stand Alone Complex (not Ghost in the Shell) focused on the media ecology i.e. interfaces between human and machine interactions and some of their (social) network topologies (rhizome for example).