allenbrunson

“body count” is not really offensive, more like irrelevant. it makes about as much sense to take that into account as how many people someone has ever talked to. i can’t attribute “body count” to anything but prudishness.

this is exactly the sort of thing i was talking about, with so many people having the wrong ideas about dating. which i am not going to discuss any further in this site’s comments, truly the worst possible venue for it.

personally, i would never use a dating site built by a guy who uses terms like “body count.” you cannot expect to have a decent relationship with someone if you are dehumanizing them from the start.

i can understand people’s frustrations with dating. the stakes could not be any higher. if you fail, it is way too easy to take the wrong lessons. i personally failed at this for decades before i figured it out.

a few years ago, i married the most wonderful woman in the world. and yes, i found her on a dating site. (one of dozens i tried over the years.) in my case at least, i made it a lot harder for myself than i had to. based on the comments i see here, i think that applies to a lot of you guys.

hacker news comments are not a great venue for this topic. if any of you find ypurself similarly frustrated, i am willing to try to help. you can find out how to contact me by following the links in my profile.

having one menu bar at the top of the screen made sense when macs had nine-inch screens. it saved some screen real estate, which was at a premium at the time. but the bigger the screens get, the less sense this makes.

apple should have switched to menu bars in each app when they introduced mac os x. we were all forced to make so many changes at the time, one more wouldn’t have been a big deal.

paul lutus himself is an occasional hacker news commenter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp

it is becoming irrelevant because the new regime is not prioritizing what was good about it. dismantling trust and safety is just one example of that.

"engagment records" ... yeah, i am pretty sure we have nobody's word for that except musk's, and he lies constantly. and even if that's true, so what? it is probably gawkers, just amazed, hardly believing what they're seeing. (in the few times i've paid attention to twitter lately, that was always my reason.)

likewise, people are pointing to the millions of sign-ups on threads.net as if that is proof that it will succeed. i don't think it proves any such thing. zuckerberg's long history of sucking the joy out of everything will ensure they will all get bored and leave.

yep, i agree with this. twitter is on a long slow slide to irrelevance, but threads will not be the thing that scoops up all the refugees.

twitter never worked for me, but i can see its appeal to those who did like it. it was engaging. it was the best opportunity ordinary people had to interact with celebrities. it had an irreverent quality that invited whimsy.

(all that stuff is either completely destroyed now, or almost so, but that's what it had in its heyday.)

my prediction is that there will be no "new twitter." it was the product of a particular time and place that will not be repeated. its users will disperse to a lot of other platforms, none of which will fill the exact same niche that twitter did.

they did not “fall for” anything. the article is very careful to never say that geller is capable of anything unexplainable. what they are doing here is a reframe: “hey, let’s just not call him a fraud anymore, okay? it’s more fun that way.”

as long as we are talking about security cameras, i have a related question.

i have a bunch of power-over-ethernet cameras installed in my home. all the ethernet cables route back to a server box, which has a hard drive for saving the video for about a week. it also has a mobile app that lets me view the feeds in realtime. so far, so good.

now, what can i do to also route the video footage to, say, AWS or some other cloud storage option, and have it deleted after a week or so, the same as my camera hub server currently does?

i figure this will require me to buy a new server hub box, and that is fine with me. the one i have now is adequate, at best. i'd rather have a better one.

i am a lifelong fan of electronic music. given that wendy carlos is one of the pioneers, i am in the process of buying up all her records.

as has been mentioned previously in these comments, her music is harder to acquire than some of us would like. pretty much all of it was released on CD at one point or another, but all of those labels are now out of business. further, she is absolutely rabid about having her music removed from youtube and other such sites, when it appears.

that said, it is not all that difficult to get ahold of this stuff. personally, i am going through sellers on discogs. say you wanted to buy a copy of her version of the clockwork orange soundtrack.

https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/193356?ev=rb

you can order a copy for as little as ten bucks. not exactly a princely amount.

i do hope she will re-issue this stuff one day, in a more readily available format. it will probably come too late for me, though! i will have bought up all her records second-hand by then.

from the article:

> For three consecutive years, the country has had the lowest fertility rate in the world, with an average of 0.78 children per woman. [...] The country is on alert, since an average of 2.1 children per woman is estimated to be necessary to keep the population stable. In 2020, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births in South Korea. Many cities are at risk of disappearing in the coming years.

you're going to have more of a problem writing that one off as "basically nothing."

i will start by saying i love dart. i learned it solely so i could make flutter apps. but now, three or four years later, i can say for certain that i love dart a lot more than i love flutter, which i have mixed feelings about.

i've learned at least a half a dozen languages over the years, and dart is now my favorite. so much so that i am converting existing projects to it. for example, i have a series of scripts i wrote, in python, to automate away the boring parts of my job, which i am now converting to dart. at this point, for me, trying to get anything done in python is like wading through molasses. (like, why does almost any change to a python implementation file cause you to also have to revisit the imports section? ugh, i hate that so much.)

my number one change would be to add configuration options to the formatting tool you wrote. i can see why consistency is a virtue for large projects, but for me, it is strictly a hindrance. programming is thinking, and i really don't like you dictating the way i ought to think. (yeah, i know you won't do it, but that's my big one.)

my second big change would be to allow me to implement a big dart class in two or more implementation files. the business logic in the flagship flutter app i maintain is getting unbelievably complicated, and large chunks of it cannot be moved out of the one object it is in, due to inheritance reasons.

> As far as I know, migrating servers is in fact very easy. I haven’t done it myself, but there’s a big button to click in the interface to do so.

i have, in fact, tried pressing that button. the experience is pretty terrible.

i made a backup of my original account's data, as suggested. went through all the steps. despite that, i lost all my posts, and all the accounts i was following that did not also follow me back. and that information did not exist in the backup i made.

(i am not arguing against mastodon, by the way! i am still a happy user. but it has a lot of warts.)

this is making me think that my contribution to the fediverse might be to write a tool that does a real migration, the way you would expect it to be done.

i kind of love the fact that posting fediverse links on hacker news is coming to be almost as common as posting twitter links. and i already read this, because one of the mastodon accounts i follow boosted this into my timeline.

all hail decentralized social media!

that sounds to me like a great excuse a billionaire could use to make himself believe that no, really, me keeping all this money is actually good.

sam bankman-fried is purported to have used a variation of this.

i'll take a crack at it: the act of accumulating a billion dollars is an anti-social act. billionaires should have been giving it away hand over fist long before that happened.

several hours later: yep, i did, in fact, just move my account! it wasn’t exactly easy. not something i would expect a novice to be able to do by themselves. but anyone who is reasonably technical can do it.

my mastodon link is on the front page of my site. i decided not to put it in the article because i want to emphasize the phenomenon rather than my own small place in it. and who knows, maybe i’ll move soon, just to demonstrate for myself that it is possible.

here's an example from in the wild:

https://mastodon.social/@willoremus/109552745423998782

it's a matter of degree. you are free to make your own choices, just as i am free to make mine.

> Wait! You do know you can see the users and posts of any server (even if it is not the server you are on) on the server you have account with, right?

yes. but that is not convenient, and definitely not how i have used a web browser, up to this point.

if you look at a user or post who is on your server, i.e., the domain displayed in the url bar is your server, then you're fine. if you're viewing a post or user on their own server, i.e., it is their domain in the url bar, instead of yours, that's where things get ugly.

are you using one of the apps? if so, then yes, it's as easy as that. but if you are using a web browser, then that's where all the rigmarole comes from.

i agree with that! i solved it the way you're supposed to deal with new technology, i think: i lurked for awhile. read accounts from other mastodon users, to get a feel for things.

argh, if only it were that easy. if you try to follow someone who is not on your instance, there is a whole rigamarole you have to go through. likewise, if you try to interact with a post, but you're viewing it on somebody else's server, rather than your own.

this is a price i am more than willing to pay, for the first-ever social media phenomenon i feel good about participating in.

my mastodon account is less than 48 hours old, so i am not the best person to answer this. i will say this much, though: anything i write that i feel has value will always go onto a site that i control. currently, that's my blog with my name on it. if i'm forced to move to a new mastodon instance, i won't lose much.

i think that's asking the wrong question. i think most or all of them started off pretty good. where we went wrong is creating a system where social media sites are paid for with ads, which gives warped incentives to the owners of those sites.

in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.

right, democracy instead of capitalism, i should have looked it up. and yes, i would support all of that. the big roadblock, it seems to me, is that our government in the usa is now so dysfunctional as to make that stuff all but impossible. not sure how we get out of that quagmire.

agreed. if either one takes off and leaves mastodon in the dust, i am happy to support the winner, whatever that turns out to be.

you seem to be advocating for absolutism: these things are bad, so abandon them completely. i don't think that's reasonable, or workable. there is basically no corporation in the world who has clean hands. i don't think it's possible to divest myself of all of them.

(i stole the title from mike masnick. if he's upset about that, i would be happy to credit him, or change it.)