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They are identical in the same way that my Hacker News and Facebook are identical. They are both places where people post stuff and comment on stuff but the community in each is very different.

If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?

Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?

Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?


100%. I used to love meetups in sf via meetup back in the day, really genuine people wanting to learn new things at the time. When that platform collapsed, it basically wasn’t replaced at all.

Same thing could be said of the academic side of Twitter. It’s now fragmented across Twitter, Bluesky, mastodon, and the level is discussion is very diminished


Hacker news is the only online space I participate in regularly. But I also wonder if my life might be better if I cut it out too.


It depends on what content you watch on TikTok. Many comedy content creators on TikTok have identical, mirrored copies of their content on Instagram (an example is Leenda Dong, who has been very popular on both TikTok and Instagram).

This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/


That's similar to the idea I had for combating texting spam: - If your number is in my address book then texts are free for you - If this is the first time you are contacting me then you pay me $1

There are probably downsides and ways this will screw up real relationships but it will certainly increase the cost of spam.


One issue I can forsee:

- Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.

- After a while of half their clients not doing that and lots of fees on their end, contractors stop providing a phone number at all, asking you to please install ContractorApp to communicate with them.


I love every part of this. Not having things in writing is one of the most common tactics with bad contractors. And I miss their call backs because I have unknowns goto spam, so I have to remember to disable that feature...


Here they do already use watsapp, viber etc for communication, maybe because they are cheaper.

>Every contractor (plumber etc) you hire will ask you to please add them to your contact list first so that they can message you.

This is reasonable. If they want to reach me, they should whitelist in advance instead of hoping they can randomly get through.


aye. i have a business relationship with these people, let me know how to communicate with you ahead of time so I can whitelist or clear that.


Maybe when you first receive a text you see:

This message is from an unknown number. (Accept / Block / Charge sender $1)


Well, that just invokes we-had-a-baby-its-a-boy


They had a baby.

It’s a boy!

That said - perhaps harder to change the name that shows up as quickly as you could leave a recorded name? :)

Still one of the best ads ever made.


Ha! Okay, I like this, I think it changes my mind on the whole thing being viable. There's probably some reason it wouldn't work in reality but the satisfaction from pressing the charge $1 option on spam would be huge.

I disagree about the we-adda-baby-itsa-boy issue. I don't see how that'd apply given that you can charge them $1 from the very first message.


They already charge $200 so I doubt $1 extra is going to matter.


one click to add from the first message = $1 total cost.

contractors can add this to their invoices if they care.


You just made the new scam ‘persuading you to text me’. I get $1 for everyone I fool!


Presumably the money would go to the telecom company, I think. Still very good for trolls though.



Look up “convivial computing”. This fits within that ethos.


Aren’t plants literally making food out of thin air? They take a series of photons and pull the carbon out of the “thin air” to make food.


Yes, but inefficiently. The idea is to do the same thing with much less land area, so we can stop using 40% of the planet's land to feed ourselves.


Yes- it's carbon fixation.


The most amazing sky I’ve ever seen was when I arrived in Urubichá in Guarayos region of Bolivia in 1998 before the electricity arrived in the area. I traveled by bus to visit my friend’s childhood home. The bus only went to the big city an hour away so I road in the back of a jeep the rest of the way, at night. I remember vividly not understanding what this super-bright light was in the sky. I know now it was either Venus or Jupiter, but it looked artificial because it was so much brighter than I was used to seeing.


Venus always appears near the sun (hence the "morning star" moniker).


If it's near the sun you cannot see it in the middle of the night (except in polar areas during summer). But why only morning and not evening?


Mornings and evenings.

It is because its path is closer to the Sun. So when looking towards it you are always partly looking towards the Sun.


So you are saying the morning star name is technically wrong? It should be the morning and evening star? Of course star is wrong, too...


Venus is known as either the ‘morning star’ or ‘evening star’ depending on where Venus is in its orbit relative to Earth.

It actually just recently (start of June) went behind the sun; it’s still too close to the sun in the sky to really be visible at all at the moment. As it moves further out from behind the sun it will start being visible in the evening sky in late July right after the sun sets, so it will be the ‘evening star’ again for the next eight months or so before it passes in front of the sun, disappearing from view for a bit, then comes back as the morning star next summer.


It is just so fascinated for me


You'd prefer the more accurate and historic Wandering Star?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet


The profound beauty of our universe when seen under the right conditions.


This reminds me of my professor's (probably very poor) description of NP-complete problems where the computer would provide an answer that may or may not be correct and you just had to check that it was correct and you do test for correctness in polynomial time.

It kind of grosses me out that we are entering a world where programming could be just testing (to me) random permutations of programs for correctness.


Well we had to keep increasing inefficiency somehow, right? Otherwise how would Wirth's law continue to hold?


Most of the HW engineers I work with consider the webstack to be far more efficient than the HW-synthesis stack; ie, there's more room for improvement in HW implementation than in SW optimization.


That’s just a standard chemical rocket for the initial push and then a few gravity assists right?

Couldn’t an ion engine with a nuclear reactor providing the electricity accelerate more over that period? I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know the answer.


Even an ion engine needs fuel. We shot out Voyager 1 in 1977. It has traversed 47 years of distance.

There has been the talk of solar sails as well, but gravity assist propulsion is already so much easier to achieve for satellites.


Recipe articles with hundreds of words of irrelevant text before the actual recipe.


Way more interesting than this old zombie company is that new podcast about cpu design. Cool!


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