Where does that leave GM?
11,232 karma · joined February 11, 2013
> "your feelings about how I might receive this are your problem to manage, not mine, just give me the information."
Followed immediately by
> a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content
So it's not "your feelings about how I might receive this" but rather "my feelings about how I might receive this are my problem to manage."
EDIT: Ooops I found a comment expressing this thought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372043
Cheap computers with hardware constraints have been around for decades. Now Apple ships one with pretty damn good performance, and they've invented "cheap computers with hardware constraints." HA!
My first computer was a Commodore 64 I found in a pile of trash a few years after they came out. My first PC was a 33Mhz Cyrix Instead I bought off my first college roommate. Now there are some real hardware constraints!
But yeah, necessity is the mother of invention. No doubt about it. Just not seeing how a $600 polished and performant laptop fits that bill ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI (reuters.com)
~yesterday, 273+ comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47349806 US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says (marketscreener.com)
115+ comments
Of course, like email / domain names, there's no universal search for picking them. Big ones get network affects or advertise. Small players have to be found organically.
https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse
That's a big flippin' list of Fediverse networks. But "a clear way to search" being layered on top of "decentralized" and "anyone could theoretically bring up a server at any time"... there's always going to be friction.
Whether you join any of them... well that's up to you to decide if you're curious enough, you suspect there's value there, etc.
The monetization and network affects of corporate social networks has always lent itself to incentivizing popularity contests and "emotional" content that pulls people in. If you want to escape the bad sides of those, there's also compromises on the independently funded networks.
Can you do one search on one server, and find any email address that exists anywhere? (not that I know of)
Can you send email regardless of what server the email lives on? (with some exceptions, but mostly yes)
Federation is not infinite or unlimited, so no, there is no "one search to rule them all" within the confines of a single instance. (But then there's no way to access all email, or search all email addresses across mail servers to find someone.) Still if you're on an instance, and go out and find people on the internet that interest you, regardless of how you find them or what instance you are on, you can follow them, and their content will begin to be federated into your feed, on the instance you use.
The server you choose matters, but it's also not something you can't change. (Like getting a new email address.) If you use Gmail, but someone uses a mail server that has been blacklisted because of bad players using a domain name or IP address, you probably can't get email sent from those servers.
But initially, you can either go with the biggest instance, or the first one you see on https://joinmastodon.org/servers that seems fine and then try it out for a while. It's not a single decision you have to make for the rest of your life. It's just something new, and a new way to have access to some people connected to each other through some instances, topics, follows, etc.
It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.
After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
... anything. Just does what he wishes without regards to legal limitations.
Calling bombing dozens of cities of a country anything but a war is being duplicitous.
Do you have a "three letter" reference?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186677 I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk (twitter.com/secwar) 5 days ago, 1083+ comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189441 Anthropic says it will challenge Pentagon supply chain risk designation in court (reuters.com) 5 days ago, 37+ comments
https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-10-2025-age-assurance-appr... Our Approach to Age Assurance September 8, 2025
I'm in the U.S. but not a state that has this requirement. No idea why it's requiring it for me (nor why it's so broken.)
https://imgur.com/a/nCodoF5 <- broken age verification prompts.
Breaks on both Firefox and Edge. I don't have Chrome installed to test it on.
See also: https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528... Bluesky's age assurance sucks, here's how to work around it.
> Thanks Unblocked for supporting today’s article!
> AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap in rework and tokens.
> Unblocked changes the economics.
Yeah I was reading through this going... huh? This is the same font and layout as the article. uBlock let this slip through. Maybe there's good content here, and maybe they need advertisements to pay the bills (as a well-paid Engineering Manager...) but I couldn't finish the article knowing that it was deceptively formatted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154983 The Pentagon threatens Anthropic (astralcodexten.com) ~1 day ago, 115+ comments
What in the world is a fake OF model?
Does "OF" stand for "of food"?
DNS is a phone book, I think!
But yeah, maybe "bad examples" by the author.
The one that really confuses me is this, though:
> You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
Sorry, what are you saying? Software exists to unzip files. It used to be a "dedicated app" like WinZip, 7zip, WinRAR, etc. Now it's built into Windows. Or you use the 'unzip' command in Linux.
Whatever works for large numbers is what will happen.
But overall, you and I (and many) will try to push back and insist on consent.
The sign-up form with an unchecked "sign me up for your newsletter" option.
The first-run experience with a question... "do you want us to notify you of new features?"
But this is not the norm, and even if good actors get rewarded by a few childish customers, bad actors seem to get rewarded much more by a massive infusion of funds.
Personally, I never got into Twitter. I'm on the Fediverse now, and check in on it occasionally, but it never draws me in. I don't connect with people on that kind of platform.
Some forums work for me, mostly because there's a small enough number of participants, or, importantly, there's a place I can go to read content from specific people. Even if we don't become friends (or IRL friends), I still feel like I know them to some degree. The people matter.
Twitter / Fediverse / Bluesky seem to be about topics, and as such, I lose interest quickly. Because no matter how much I like photography, birding, cars, board games, computers, software, etc... I don't really care what the masses have to say on those topics. I want to know about Alice, Bob, and Carol have to say on things that interest me.
Early Facebook was, as described in the article, people you knew, who held some sway in your life, sharing their life events (however inane), or their opinions. I care more about that than I care about a celebrity or complete stranger declaring some thing as good or bad or interesting.
But the network effect was always going to matter. LiveJournal/Xanga/MySpace all had some network effect where some of your friends were there, and you wanted to be there, too. But Facebook figured out monetization, and they still seem to hold the greatest network effect despite how terrible the experience has become. I can post photos there, and dozens will respond, all people I know. If I post in literally any other place, I will get less than dozens of responses, and almost none of them will be from people I know.
There is no new place like early Facebook, or even current Facebook. But of course what I want is a place where I can share with the people I know, and no one has to pay for it, but the monetization doesn't drive the service towards enshittification. This isn't a very realistic desire. Discord has been the closest for me, where I have dozens of contacts in a shared space, and very frequently get interaction with people I know about things I care about. But it also feels like enshittification of Discord is also inevitable even though there's a paid subscription option.
I also vastly prefer typing to the horrible swiping keyboard my phone uses. So for communicating via text, a computer is a much nicer solution, in my opinion.
My facebook account is deactivated but I can keep on messaging. But... facebook.com/messages requires you to log in to your facebook account (which reactivates it).
So Mobile app would be my only option. Right now a lot of family members use Messenger, so it's not trivial to move away entirely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052007 Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026 (dzrh.com.ph) 33+ comments
Dupe of:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042390 Meta: Messenger.com is no longer available for messaging (facebook.com) 20 hours ago, 8 comments
I am not fine with mass surveillance.
Over 16 million new cars were purchased in 2025 in the United States.
Meanwhile, there are about 242 million licensed drivers in that same country.
So that's than 7% of drivers buying a new car in a year's time.
But what is the point of your question, in response to a new car announcements? That new cars should not exist... ? You do realize how much harder that would eventually make it to buy a used one, right?
So yeah, sure. "People" would be well-advised to consider buying a 2-3 year old vehicle that has depreciated. Let someone else carry that depreciation cost. (But "someone" has to.)
(My used EV depreciated 57% before I bought it, 2 years old with 20,000 miles on it. It's a great way to go!)