TFNA

As the Wikipedia article for Anne de Montmorency explains, he was named after his godmother. Anne has always been a predominantly female name, all the way back to its progenitor St. Anna.

Kim is the name of the protagonist of one of the most popular boys' novels of all time, and there are a number of examples of well known male Kims from the twentieth century.

Obtaining an ID card in most developed democracies costs money, sometimes modest fees, sometimes rather hefty fees.

The past tense "was" had me at least looking for an obituary. She is still very much alive

In my EU country, making an appointment got extra steps asking about one's mental state, namely depression or loneliness. One wonders if this age of social atomization, people (probably mostly those elderly) are making unnecessary appointments just to have someone to talk to.

No, it is noteworthy. Even within Europe and decades ago, when I trained in a field where much important literature was in other European languages like German or French, most undergraduate students were no longer interested in learning those and wanted everything to be provided in English (or the local language). Major academic publishers had already been comissioning, to guide students through the history of the field, volumes of classic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century papers that had been translated from the original German etc. into English.

The US is competing with China in the Pacific. Keeping those islands healthily populated by USA-sympathizers helps maintains overall US influence in the region.

Norway has everyman's right, so for some holidaymakers that means no accommodation costs. It is also popular to do one's grocery shopping on the Swedish side of the border, or even drive up from Germany with a full load of food for the length of the holiday.

Are they just peeing now? One of my indelible memories in India from 20 years ago is seeing a rickshaw driver in Connaught Place, the heart of historically respectable Delhi and no isolated slum, crouching behind his rickshaw and defecating right there on the street.

Facebook declined even in countries that don't have high levels of political polarization. Younger generations in the West and new internet users in the developing world favoured platforms that were designed as mobile-first (Facebook, even with an app developed later, was not), since they rarely use computers. Connected with that change of interface was a preference for image posts, not long text, so Instagram and then TikTok overtook FB.

In many developed countries, the hacker events and board game nights are organized over Facebook groups; Facebook itself is dead, except for the events niche because people don't see a better place to announce these things; people aren't necessarily doing flyers posted on a message board like in the 1990s.

Also, in not all countries is it acceptable to talk to strangers in public, like your pizza place example. In Finland this will make people very uncomfortable, though you might get away with it if you are a obvious clueless foreigner (or an unusually charismatic foreigner). About the only place it is acceptable is bars after a certain level of inebriation, but that is not the kind of interaction many people will find worthwhile.

The Nordic countries have been like that for long years, but I think this taboo is spreading because young people in some Central and even Southern European cities, even with a history of cafe culture and large student populations, are complaining online about the difficulty of meeting anyone when out and about. Telling someone that they should just take the first step isn't necessarily a solution, because like climate change or recycling, this is maybe something that cannot be solved by idealistic individual action but requires policy changes.

I agree with the GP that GPS has opened new possibilities: some modern bikepacking routes were designed around a GPS. For example, there is simply no paper map that would safely get you along the 2000 kilometers through remote desert of the Baja Divide. The trail is not always easily identifiable, and not having a line on a screen to follow risks straying away from sources of water or help in the event of breakdown.

With regard to "GPS brain", a way to avoid it is to do OSM mapping while one is out and about. Then you are forced to get your bearings in a way that activates those parts of your brain, and in most cases you could backtrack or do the journey a second time even if the phone map were unavailable.

It also doesn't help that in the Mastodon website styling, threads segue pretty much straight into comments, and one of the first comments to appear is by an obviously mentally ill person. Posting on social media like this just makes one susceptible to other content appearing next to yours that undermines your message. A blog post on their own site would have allowed them to control their message better.

Even the Max Headroom hacker thought it was neat to broadcast some dominatrix (very) soft porn.

Men in the Arab world are already porn consumers and have been for decades. I hitchhiked around Egypt for a few weeks in 2009, and men would occasionally show off short porn vids on their Nokias or iPods. Internet cafes in the whole region would, upon request, give customers the details for connecting to a proxy to access forbidden content.

Fast forward to now, and the big porn video sites have content expressly tailored to the Arab world. Everyone has smartphones, and everybody finds some alone time to wank.

Or one is living in a country where all banks require a phone as the second factor for authentication. Or living in a country where access to government services, public transportation and/or the healthcare system is now via smartphone. And just try living in China without WeChat at all.

Before making blanket statements like that, please always remember HN is an international community, and countries are different.

I wasn't talking about textbooks, which were only a sideshow of the pre-AA academic pirate circles I was active in, but rather published research.

Yet not without its detractors. I still remember this brutal roast of its C API from over a decade ago.[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150308153847/http://what.theda...

Prices for scholarly books are not set by the author but by the publisher. The author will often send you a PDF for free if you email and ask nicely.

I don't think this a youth thing that "people outgrow", lol. For over a decade now adult (and now middle-aged) peers who are heavy readers were asking me to put books on their ebook readers, since they knew I had the hookup, but now since Anna's Archive is so convenient, they are just getting the books themselves. A surprisingly large number of normie bibliophiles knows AA now.

For the majority of literature, buying the book won't contribute to the author because the author is deceased. For that minority where the author is alive, many people won't see a need to make an exception to their policy of not paying. Indeed, your second paragraph gets to the heart of it.

That doesn't accord with my experience (considerable as both uploader and downloader). I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the typical 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.

Before the smartphone era, non-tech-savvy young people were still pretty tech-savvy compared to modern computer (= phone) users, who rarely step outside a few corporate phone apps and have even lost the concept of the file and the directory. You can't expect the same curiosity and willingness to make an effort from normies today as back in the XMPP era.

I spend about half of every year traveling the mountains and deserts of the world, often ones with poor infrastructure. I use Signal more than any other messenger app, and I have never had the deliverability issues you complain about; messages do all get through eventually.

I have run Signal on LineageOS or GrapheneOS for nearly a decade, no Google services, and I have always had satisfactory battery life, i.e. ~2 days of normal use.

I bought a PinePhone, so I definitely know what truly unoptimized battery life looks like, lol.

As an OP here, I'd like to mention that I don't agree with this characterization at all. When I said academics are divorced from the real world, I was speaking of them largely conforming to particular demographics that make them a bit blind to broader trends in electoral politics and culture.

Academics do just fine picking up "adult life skills". Only a small minority of academics find academic employment from their mid-thirties or so on, so everyone moves to other sectors for the rest of their lives. It is not as if they are just hapless misfits or on the dole for the rest of their lives.

Until I gave up on Reddit this year, I was solely on small hobby subs. I hadn't even seen the big general subs since sometime before Covid. And yet all of those small subs I was on had degenerated into insubstantial comments and image posts. Posting substantial comments, the kind that used to be normal, started making one look like an autistic-infobombing weirdo.

Substantial discussion of some hobbies has moved from Reddit to invite-only WhatsApp groups, precisely because Reddit went downhill. (This is true for long-haul bicycle travel, for example.) Unfortunately, on WA, too, everyone is on their phone, so messages are on average too short for comfort, and also there is no FAQ culture so people just ask the same questions again and again.

When people use the term, it is obviously not a reference to just "knowing things" but rather 1) the distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world (and I say that as an academic), and 2) hyperspecialization to the point one loses the big picture, a problem in education today.

Very insightful. However, weren't the Ferengi in that episode the first, abandoned version of that race, before they were changed to a hyper-capitalist people for DS9?

Even if the platform weren't originally a microblogging one, longform text is basically over at a societal level because the majority of internet users now are on phones, and that medium discourages longform text. You can see this from Reddit, where comments a decade ago where often much longer, a couple of solid paragraphs, and now they tend to be microblogging-length inane quips.

The Xavier character in Logan was literally written as decrepit, senescent and dying. It was the job of makeup among the crew to make Stewart look that way. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about Stewart's actual health at the time from that film.