HN user
i don’t know. the past decade has been everyone shouting about network effects, yet i can’t count on either hand the number of matching-related apps i’ve both left and joined over that duration. on the other hand, i’m still using basically the same http networking protocol during that same duration. network effects are real (hence http still dominating), but the higher you crawl up the stack the “softer” the effect.
say BTC rises from $30,000 to $300,000. two scenarios:
1. 10% of all BTC holders want to cash out. nobody lost their keys, so 2M BTC hit the “supply side” of the market.
2. 10% of all BTC holders want to cash out. half of them lost their keys, so only 1M BTC hit the supply side of the market.
this is the way it makes a difference. in the latter scenario, BTC spot price would likely reach a higher value.
sorry to come off as pedantic: it's not my intent. everyone has different experiences on Twitter, and this relates to an experience i don't have much of.
a _lot_ of people complain about "anonymous Twitter users", and i want to understand what they mean by that. i think it's the sort of "[anonymous] asshole slides into my timeline and then leaves" behavior. and if so, i suspect it's not actually identity or its form but _reputation_ that matters in these interactions: "non-reputable asshole slides into my timeline" (and so considering reputation becomes important in your interactions). but they could equally mean "this person could have multiple identities on this site and that doesn't work for me" (e.g. some person could be playing both a left-leaning and a right-leaning account and using those multiple identities to drive a wedge into some community), so maybe they really do want to avoid interacting with people who don't have a verifiably singular identity (this isn't easy).
i should have distilled it to that point: when a person says they don't deal with anonymous users, do they actually care about identity, or are they using identity as a proxy for reputation -- and reputation is the more direct concern?
i'd be really curious how the author approaches DMs. microblogging didn't make sense to me until i realized that the timeline can just be used as an approach to easily create surface-level connections, with the more fulfilling interactions happening in DMs (or more often, Matrix chatrooms, since i use ActivityPub instead of Twitter and in my corner Matrix is ubiquitous).
i’m frequently confused by people referring to “anonymous” accounts on Twitter. every Twitter user needs a handle, so it’s not really possible to use it anything less than pseudonymously AIUI.
by “anonymous”, do most people mean pseudonymous users who haven’t established an identity (i.e. few to no posts, or no bio, or egg avatar)? or do most people mean to capture all pseudonymous users under that “anonymous” label? (in which case, how does one evaluate if the user is pseudonymous or using their legal name? even blue-checks can be pseudonymous).
one usually hears the opposite argument: Bitcoin becomes more scarce as users lose their private keys. lost keys => smaller supply => higher price per unit. i can see the opposite argument though: lost keys => less desire to interact with bitcoin => lower demand => lower price per unit. so it might just be a wash.
Eth fell by about 10% relative to BTC pretty much immediately as the Terra/Luna stuff went south. yeah, there's absolutely connections between all the different currencies out there, but they're not equal strength. it's hard to draw good conclusions from price data just because there's so little of it. the last year's been stable with Eth:BTC confined to within 0.06 - 0.08. but zoom out just one more year and the range triples. over more meaningful durations, the different currencies show a lot less correlation.
I’m also never going to rely on anything but .com because I don’t trust ICANN.
what's wrong with the other 2 of the "original 3" gLTDs: .net and .org?
i spent an afternoon digging into the ownership of all of this stuff, and .org felt like the safest option. .com and .net are more directly owned/operated by a US for-profit company (Verisign) who has complied with US requests to seize .com domains in the past. .org at least still has structural ties to a non-profit with chapters across the globe, even if it's incorporated in the US.
Most world governments and taxing authorities work for their populace, they could be easily voted out if people saw what other nations are benefiting from such innovation.
you've got a lot of faith in "most world governments and taxing authorities". here in the US, i look at other countries who include in their tax statements a breakdown of where all your tax bill is going. that looks like a thing those other citizens benefit from, so please tell me: how can i vote this into effect here?
it's about the economics of mining _using an external source of capital_. the more significant interaction is not between the ASICs and the bitcoin rewards, but the companies and their investors. in that sense, it's more accurate to say it has "everything to do with public stock markets".
the author gives the oil analogy. the oil wells themselves have very similar economics to mining. it's the relationship between these similar operations and the investors which sets them apart more than the activity they're involved in.
modern day i expect to not have to turn off/on my receiver: it should wake on input and go into a standby state after so much inactivity.
hence my problem: i’ve got the Technics receiver + stereo speakers i inherited, but if you leave the receiver on for more than a couple days without explicitly venting it’ll cut out (even if it’s inactive: its idle power draw is incredible). that’s fine for me, but if i’m the only one who cares about audio, it’s a hassle for everyone else in the house to manually flip the rocker switch on as they use the tv and off when they’re done.
now i think about it, there’s probably some “smart outlet” i could get to make this transparent.
we used to have a phrase to remind each other not to give attention to the bad actors: “don’t feed the trolls” (doesn’t capture 100% of attention sinks, but it’s catchy, and a certain percentage of people understood that the phrase could apply more broadly). it occurred to me that i haven’t heard this phrase in several years now.
for the HN readers who aren't clued in to everything Elon Musk says over the last two years, i believe parent is referring to this tweet (AFAICT Elon deleted the original, hence screenshot): https://twitter.com/panoparker/status/1318157559266762752
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." (2020/07/25) -- topic being a coup in Bolivia for their lithium.
i have no background in this situation. personally, i think it's a little ridiculous to allude to this sort of thing and just expect that readers know wtf you're talking about.
1) although federation enables any user to _contact_ any other user that's distinct from saying every user's _experience_ is the same everywhere. the ELI5 thing to point to is the "local timeline". although your "home timeline" will remain the same wherever you home your account, the "local timeline" is a way to see everything happening on your server without following each user individually. it's really akin to a "group" on more familiar social media, with the condition that you can only be in one of these groups at a time. for the instances below Dunbar's number, or maybe those above it which have a well-defined theme, the local timeline can be a really cozy place. it could be the primary way you interact with the system.
a longer explanation would mention the different _software_ each instance might run. you might interact with very different front-ends (how they present UI themes, render threads, notifications, etc). and backends have different support too (emoji-based post reactions; quote-replies/boosts; chat features/integrations). although there's _some_ tendency for the backend features to converge, they often converge only to the level of compatibility (a :100: emoji reaction from one server will show up as a flair-less 'like' on an server that doesn't want the full feature) and sometimes one region of the space _really doesn't want a specific feature_ (Mastodon.social famously is dead-set against quote boosts). your preferences will directly shape which feature set you desire, and it'll tend to land you in an area of peers that share these preferences (shaping your local timeline and also drawing a circle around some peers where you can be reasonably confident that "this area of the fediverse will grow in a way that keeps our instances well-connected").
it's a really organic thing. your original question could just as well be framed "if the thing works regardless of provider, why isn't everyone just _their own_ provider" instead of "why doesn't everyone use _the same single_ provider". right now the forces oppose both ends, and you get a decentralized (not distributed) fediverse.
If I give someone a sample docker-compose file, they can immediately run my service regardless of OS
_if they're already bought into the docker ecosystem_, this is true. if not, then they first have to go read up on docker first: figure out how to install it (OS-specific), enable the docker system services (i think systemd more or less standardizes this step), configure a user that has permissions to manage docker deployments (also frequently OS-specific), etc.
not saying docker is or isn't a worthy tradeoff between balancing distribution work between the code authors and the OS packagers and the users. just don't blind yourself that it is another thing that users have to learn before they can use your stuff.
consider a slow-growth company free of a title system (e.g. where every engineer is just a "member of engineering"). the less-credentialed nature means you don't have to be as specialized to float ideas. the slow-growth nature allows the company to prioritize process over chasing chaotic payoffs to stay afloat. YMMV and i'm not sure all slow-growth, titleless engineering organizations turn out this way, but there's some correlation.
yes.
i'm not taking any stance on the risk v yield profile. i was just bothered by JumpCrisscross's mischaracterization of the earlier comment & wanted to correct that.
what's the alternative? of all the friend groups i've had only _one_ has ever been among a group that has all iphones. i'm having a hard time imagining that, in a world of 70% android share, finding yourself in a group that can actually make use of the iOS-only stuff could ever be the _norm_? like, the statistics of this just don't make sense to me unless the OS distribution is _extremely_ skewed along a handful of metrics and you find yourself at an extreme end of multiple of those.
> would convert a some portion of my savings into stablecoins
This is probably the worst choice one can make. It's accepting a 0% nominal yield against an unregulated counterparty. A Bank of America savings account is literally a better choice.
you clipped out half the sentence:
I would convert a some portion of my savings into stablecoins and spread them out into some interest accounts to try to minimize counterparty risk.
interest accounts. i.e. non-0% nominal yields.
can you imagine the faces of your loved one's? like, if one of them went missing, would you be able to help the investigators draw up a sketch of their face?
as far as i can tell, most people say "yes". for me, when i imagine my dad's face, i get a brief flash of a grin, where the wrinkles are (but certainly not how many, or in any definition), and the rough cut of his hair. there's no eye color in the imagery, for example. stronger than any visual experience when i imagine his face is something of an emotional/empathetic experience -- what it feels like to be in his presence.
from what i gather, for people like me (and maybe you) who experience "some" visual imagery but not "lots", it's just a skill like any other and there are exercises you can do if you care enough about it to strengthen it.
yeah but classes like geometry? i remember our section on conical slices. like, cool, you can make an ellipse by intersecting a plane with a cone, but (for someone with limited mental imagery: ) isn't that just a really tortured way to go about the task?
i'm sure perception is cool when reading, but arguably it's cool mostly because the imagery leads you to _feel_ certain ways? when an author describes a moonlit scene with the protagonist alone at the edge of a lake watching the patterns of ripples on the water... that instills some meaningful emotion in me. perhaps a feeling of solitude, or that of a calm evening where i feel in-touch with the world. so... to what extent does limited imagery decrease the emotional potency of a scene?
a few people have told me "yes, i still feel something when i read that scene. it's more that i can't imagine any of the character's faces". i haven't met anyone who says they feel literally no emotions when reading any scene, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean the emotional response isn't attenuated.
The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different.
to borrow cliched terms, big companies protect their position by either building a monopoly (Bell, your traditional telco) or building a moat (Apple). Netflix started with an effective monopoly on film distribution/streaming. at some point Disney & friends extended their moat vertically (Disney+), eating into the distribution layer that Netflix previously monopolized. perhaps leadership understood the monopoly would only ever be temporary and decided to build out their internal production house as such. whatever the case, Netflix still has the possibility of transforming this into a moat that stands alongside the other players in this space. maybe it can exist as this, but it will surely be less profitable than its monopoly days.
consumers don’t everywhere react instantly to price changes. the number of lost subscribers is likely to be greater than what you see today as consumers explore alternatives over time and change. though by how much i don’t know. (for example, it pushed me past the edge to install Jellyfin & friends, but i’m keeping Netflix as backup until i’m comfortable/confident with my new setup).
the myopic view: of or focusing on only the present. never did i say the antidote is to take a hyperopic view. obviously the appropriate view will lie somewhere in between. i even went out of my way to clarify that the extreme hyperopic view is not what i advocate (my second sentence). it's only my point that we leaned (continue to lean) further to the myopic direction because we don't really understand (or appreciate) the extent to which this impacts things over any other timescale.
and in its wake would be left space for more resilient structures to emerge.
i’m not saying “let it collapse”: a government has a duty to protect its own citizens of course. but i do think the myopic view which subsidizes a system once it becomes too big to fail runs counter to long-term prosperity by making the local optima more trapping than they would otherwise be.
But a collective action at this scale is pretty difficult to orchestrate.
maybe, maybe not. Mastodon & the Fediverse has been around long enough to establish itself as a Twitter-like "alternative". it's crossed the scope at which it's hard to get concrete numbers about how many people actively use it, but lower bound's around 500k MAUs across 10k instances. we get waves of new users _every_ time something controversial happens around Twitter. the largest instance (which accounts for about 15% of all users) gained 12k new users in the past week [1], so figure 50-80k across the board; some of which leave after a week, some of which properly embed themselves.
no, these aren't big-tech-co numbers, but it's a large enough base to be accommodating to certain types of today's Twitter users. not _every_ Twitter user cares about having 300M peers v.s. 500k peers, and bridging between Twitter and ActivityPub works ok enough to ease that a bit, especially if you were primarily using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed.
i feel like i'm out of touch. the premise is that most Americans don't like/agree with the political aspects of their social media: to which i wonder, why don't they disengage? even in 2022, it's not hard to find people who don't talk partisan politics. it's not hard to find people who value epistemics. the web-like portions of the internet make this easy. Google "rationalist community" and the first result is LessWrong. Google "neutral political news" and you get allsides.com. moreover, find just one person associated with a single thing you value and you can connect with them, chat with or browse who they're following, and recurse connections until you've embedded yourself in an environment of people you enjoy associating with.
this stuff is in easier reach than it's ever been. if you expect to consume the firehose and enjoy it, you're disillusioned: never has a single source appealed to every individual on the planet. you have to select your peers. curate your connections. if a friend repeatedly blasts you with bad political takes, cut or reduce the connection. the digital web isn't that different from the irl web in this aspect. it's your responsibility to craft connections that benefit your life. FB/Twitter/etc are tools to use in that (and far from the only ones), but you cannot abdicate your responsibility and expect good results.
EU membership is more fluid than US membership. and i’m not an expert on it, but my understanding of its origins is as an economic partnership first (promote a unified currency and compatible border regulations between member states). AFAIK the EU can’t declare war and has more limited funding/taxation options (e.g. rather than an individual income tax, the closest it can accomplish is a tax applied at the level of the member nation, and limited to 1.4% of GNP). that said, the US as a federal institution also started small and gained greater powers over time, so maybe this won’t be as significant as i assumed.
as for litigation, i thought it was the individual member states that were suing Big Tech. i thought the only role the EU itself played here was that of explicitly stating the conditions under which members can do such things.
a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently). one read on GP is that we don’t need something this rigid for every coordination problem. time-limited and domain-limited agreements to which only some (large) subset of states agree could, possibly, accomplish the same things — perhaps with less political backlash in the process.
for example, state AGs band together in such a process pretty frequently.