harpersealtako

Not at all, actually. In fact that's the opposite of what I'm arguing. There are countless things left to invent. It's just not worth doing most of the time.

As a trivial example, Unicode is not a 100% perfect text encoding scheme. Why don't we have something better than unicode? Why is there no interest in making a unicode-but-better format which solves all the problems with unicode? The reason is, unicode is sufficiently good that the cost of switching would outweigh any marginal benefits.

Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.

"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"

Well, I imagine they aren't fans of Francis either, and the Gospel of John does say "many antichrists have come", so it's entirely possible Pope Francis is also the antichrist.

That said: while he was conservative in many ways, Pope John Paul II was well-known for his ecumenicism, especially mending relations with Jews and Muslims, which might ruffle the feathers of the sort of sedevacantist whose problem with post-Vatican-2 Catholicism is that they got rid of the antisemitism.

In the same way that all conspiracy theories are all slightly different in their own unique interpretations, making them fun to learn about, I am fascinated by the fractal nature of religious heresies and schisms. I had to look up this one because it's pretty damn obscure and I ended up spending all afternoon trying to figure out exactly what flavor of crazy the "Most Holy Family Monastery" are.

TLDR: they are a fringe group of sedevacantists who think all other sedevacantists and catholics are heretics and promote lots of insane infowars-tier conspiracy theories, run by two brothers living in an isolated compound in upstate New York. SPLC lists them as a hate group for being holocaust deniers.

So, the background context: in the 1960s the Roman Catholic Church held a big reform council (Vatican II) where, among other things, they decided to switch from the old Latin Mass to the modern one which celebrates mass in the vernacular, which is what nearly all of the world's 1.4 billion Catholic attend today.

A small fringe, called "sedevacantists", hated Vatican II so much they declared it was heresy, and that every pope since then is fake and there hasn't been a real pope since the 1950s. Hence the name: sede (chair) vacante (empty). Wordlwide, sedevacantists probably number around 30,000 (maybe as many as 200,000) and include all sorts of groups with various wacky beliefs.

Another small fringe is "Feeneyism", the belief that only baptized Catholics can go to heaven, with no exceptions for e.g. good people who never heard of the Church or who died before they could be officially baptized. The Catholic Church rejected this view in 1949 and the founder was excommunicated for disobedience. There are a few thousand of them left, mostly in rural New England. Some of them are still in communion with the mainstream Church, which quietly tolerates them.

This brings us to Most Holy Family Monastery (MHFM), currently run by brothers Michael and Peter Dimond in New York (which the above poster linked extensively). Neither of them is ordained, and no bishop recognizes them. The MHFM was founded by a guy named Joseph Natale in the 60s. He was a benedictine drop-out who broke away from the Catholic Church. Natale started an unofficial traditional latin catholic monastery in New Jersey which preached that Vatican II was a secret plot by the freemasons and the communists to destroy the Church, and predicted the world would end in 1999.

Weirdly, despite believing that Vatican II was a Communist Freemason conspiracy, the MHFM weren't sedevacantists under Natale; Natale just believed the pope was real, just a puppet controlled by the conspiracy. when Natale died in 1995, Michael Dimond took over with his brother Peter. They moved the operation to a rural hamlet in western New York and promptly declared that actually, the Pope wasn't just a puppet, he was a fake pope. Under them, MHFM became sedevacantist (which by their own logic makes their founder a heretic). But they also decided to become Feeneyites! So, being sedevacantists puts them outside the Catholic Church. Being Feeneyites means they consider every other sedevacantist group heretical, and vice versa. And being Sedevacantist makes them heretical to other Feeneyites, who mostly still accept the pope.

Some of their actual beliefs, as far as I can tell:

- Most everybody is going to hell except for them and and maybe some of their youtube followers

- Stage magicians use real magic, not illusions, which they get from demons

- UFOs are real and actually they're demons

- The covid vaccine was a cover-up

- John Paul II was the antichrist

- Holocaust denial. (if I had a nickel for every time I look up a sedevacantist group and find out they are holocaust deniers...)

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists them as a hate group due to that last point.

Thanks for the links btw, I have no idea if your comment was a joke or not but I had never heard of them before and I had a fun time going down this rabbit hole

well, no, the WFP's current yearly budget is 13B, which is nowhere near enough to solve world hunger, considering world hunger still exists. They actually say they need 93B/yr until at least 2030 to solve it.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397

No, I kill innocent animals because that's my hobby and I enjoy it immensely. I just usually stick to deer because they taste better, are overpopulated in my area, and give a greater meat yield. The seasons are very generous and the tags are very cheap, making it quite economical as a source of protein.

In addition I also shoot nuisance animals, such as groundhogs (which damage fields), rabbits (which eat plants in the garden), and crows (which occasionally get aggressive). This is a very common thing people do in the countryside. The only uncommon thing I do is eat them; most people wouldn't bother with plucking or even breasting out a crow because there's so little meat on it and they have a reputation for not tasting good. But I eat everything I shoot on the principle of it.

Crows are clever enough to be dangerous (they can remember a face, connect it to a past incident, carry a grudge over that incident, communicate this grudge to their friends, and actively plan violent revenge) but also dumb enough that this intelligence is often self-defeating and counterproductive (randomly attacking people unprovoked). They are a great example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Thankfully, they are intelligent enough to understand credible deterrence: a surefire way of resolving an ongoing dispute with crows is, of course, by using a gun. Thankfully crow hunting season is quite generous in my state and they taste pretty good.

The Sheetz disparate impact case was in 2024, post Ricci. Griggs is still the law of the land even though some justices have signaled they might want to revisit it.

You're free to make whatever mistaken assumptions you like about the kind of places I go and the kind of travel I do. You're wrong, obviously, but it's not like I can prove that any more than you can.

Some unlikely places where I've found Tabasco, though:

- at a cockfighting ring in rural Mindanao, Philippines.

- in a yurt camp in rural central Kyrgyzstan only accessible by horse

- at the galley on a Taiwanese container ship transiting the Panama canal

- seemingly everywhere in Japan, from cafes to fancy restaurants to izakayas to convenience stores on remote islands to random old peoples' houses in the countryside. "Tabasuko" is literally the Japanese word for hot sauce.

You are perhaps directionally correct if you say that many places have a non-tabasco table condiment which is their first choice for spice, and if that's the point you are trying to make then I will agree and let that be that. But in the "hot sauce" category, if they have "hot sauce", it's more likely than not that "tabasco" will be an option, if not the first choice, if not the only choice, and that is the point I am making here. There are of course certain places where it is more or less common, but that's hardly surprising. However I reiterate: in my (probably 99th percentile well-traveled, mostly in out of the way places, especially in asia) experience you can find tabasco basically anywhere on the planet, including some somewhat surprising places, to the extent that I think that, if there is such a thing as "the world's hot sauce", it is without doubt which hot sauce it would be.

part of the issue is that there are multiple laws and legal frameworks even at the federal level in the US that are kind of contradictory here. See "disparate impact" law, where using a neutral standard (such as a background check, or an ability test) that affects different protected groups differently can be considered illegal discrimination. 2 might be illegal, but 1 might be illegal too in the other direction! It kind of seems like the only solution is to basically maintain plausible deniability and try your hardest not to leave an auditable paper trail about any of the reasoning you use to hire a candidate or not.

I've traveled to about 50 countries, on every continent except Antarctica and I've found Tabasco in every country I've been to, from Tajikistan to Tunisia to Turkey to Taiwan. At a minimum, it can be found at 99% of hotels that serve an "international" style breakfast with scrambled or fried eggs, and I have found it in enough convenience stores in some of the most remote places that it is highly unlikely that western visitors at hotel buffets are the entirety of the domestic market. It may not be the first option for adding heat to food, or even the second, but it's basically always an option, basically everywhere I've seen.

Seems like there is obviously a spectrum of positions here and various people have found themselves calling certain positions "DEI" or "anti-DEI" or "affirmative action" or "racist" depending on which positions they hold and where a particular institution lies on it. For example:

1. A company that hires mainly based on on-paper qualifications (which, due to existing disparities in experience and education, means in practice that they hire fewer historically disadvantaged minorities)

2. A company that, believing that talent or merit is more equitably distributed among groups than on-paper qualifications may suggest, goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions (to discover those as-of-yet-unrecognized talents), and tries to hire based on actual merit and ability rather than on-paper qualifications.

3. A company that has the goal of creating a more equitable and diverse workforce with groups that more closely matches their proportions of the population. They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage

4. A company which, accounting for the disparities in distribution of measurable abilities of groups, tries to hire based on within-group ability rather than between-group ability; for example trying to hire the top 10th percentile of black, or top 10th percentile asian, or top 10th percentile male, rather than top 10th percentile of all applicants in aggregate (which would likely be overrepresented by over-performing groups). This in practice means using a different standard for different groups, but using the within group distribution of talent; they may say they are "considering race/sex/disability as one of many factors they take into account"

5. A company that in practice has an explicit hiring quota based on the race/sex/etc. of applicants, in order to create a more equitable or diverse workforce that matches the relative sizes of those groups in the local population.

6. A company that, in order to reverse historical and current disparities in achievement within society, actively discriminates in the opposite direction as historical trend, with the goal of evening the playing field more quickly.

7. A company that, in order to address historical grievances and grant some amount of justice to victims of discrimination and oppression, actively and purposefully discriminates against privileged majority and overachieving groups, favoring underprivileged and underachieving groups, up to and including reparations for past injustices to remedy current disparities.

I'm pretty sure 1-3 are legal and 4-7 are illegal, but I'm not a lawyer so that's just my guess. Some hardliners might attack 2 as going too far, but somewhere between 3 and 4 is probably the more common point at which anti-DEI people draw their line.

The history is more than a little complicated. I model it as a set of separate overton windows in different institutions that have shifted, widened, and contracted over the last 60 or so years. So in this picture, courts arguably expanded it to 4-6 in the 80s, but have retreated back to around 2-3 since then. Legislature has mostly stayed around 2-3 with a handful of radicals pushing higher or lower with low-to-moderate success. Academia has been around 5-7 since the 70s. Executive has mostly hovered around 3-5 until Trump. Media/popular culture, big shift up to 6-7 in 2014-2021, retreating back to 3-4 now. Also, motte-and-baileys are common here; pro-DEI activists sometimes frame it as something like 2, but often advocate up to 6 or 7 (e.g. "antiracism" in the 2020s peak). anti-DEI activists often say they simply oppose quotas and illegal discrimination (4-7), but in practice sometimes attack even 2-3 as being too much.

I feel like "don't agree" is a weird framing, because it assumes that all technological innovations must have the explicit and affirmative consent of all parties they could directly or indirectly affect. Not to mention that "artists" are not a monolith any more than "AI bros" are.

I could sort of get behind something like this in theory (weighing each new technology based on whether it furthers the values of the community, and rejecting it if it doesn't, kinda like what the Amish do), but I'm not sure it's being applied neutrally or consistently here, nor do I think it works in practice especially for something as decentralized as a diffusion model, which are surprisingly simple to build and train and can run on a home GPU.

Then they presumably are fine with open weights models made by hobbyists by scraping publicly available art on boorus and such, yes? because they are neither made by corporations nor are they selling any product.

(to be clear, I don't think this is an accurate description of how artists feel about e.g. publicly released diffusion models. The core is not that it's made by "corporations" or the for-profit aspect or even the copyright infringement part, it's simply the understandable and not-at-all-unique-to-artists resentment at having your job or passion automated or displaced)

I mean, the obvious way it's better than the Chinese open-weight models is literally the fact that it's not Chinese and is therefore less likely to be banned or restricted. Chinese models cannot be used on certain government systems already in the US, and regulators are actively considering expanding these restrictions more generally (such as adding it to the Entity List).

I have found that in order to reduce laundry times to something like this, you have to very deliberately make very specific tradeoffs in the types of clothes you wear and purchase. It is perfectly possible to have a wardrobe that is very low-maintenance (such as by opting for synthetics or synthetic blends for all your clothing), but more likely you have some special cases such as wool, linen, and cotton (which may require air drying and/or ironing or steaming), clothing with small stains that require spot cleaning with stain remover, delicates that need to be hand-washed, whites that need to go in their own load with bleach, or other specific cases.

An example I can think of off the top of my head is Luis Alvarez, the nobel physicist who came up with the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The geology and paleontology community shunned him until the 90s when the Chicxulub crater was discovered (though geology is historically infamous for this, to the extent that nearly every important paradigm shift in geology was made by non-geologist outsiders who faced ridicule for their theories)

I like coding for the sake of it, like solving a puzzle. for example I love Advent of Code challenges each year. I don't use AI for it (except for documentation look up) even though it could solve it trivially.

I also like using AI to make things

I am happy

Nowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".

I've always wondered if you could solve most of the negatives by imposing a "money in per year" limit on online gambling. Let's say, you can only transfer in 1000 dollars per year or something; maybe it's a federal limit tracked to your SSN or required to be declared on your tax forms or something. You can of course transfer OUT as much money as you win, and carry over any earnings to next year without affecting the limit. But aside from people for whom 1000 dollars a year is a huge deal, you avoid the worst harms. The people who benefit the most and eventually become disproportionately represented in the pool are superforcasters who can consistently turn a profit by being smarter and better at predicting stuff than everybody else.

I wonder if it's all just downstream from class. It used to be that rich people would regularly host feasts for their dependents as a form of patronage. This was then imitated by the gentry and bourgeois: proving that you have a house with a bunch of servants who can serve multi course meals, showing off your etiquette and conspicuous consumption so everybody can see how wealthy and classy you are, just like the real rich people who are generous to their friends and get to flex how cool and rich they are.

Then at some point middle class Americans began copying these sorts of upper-middle class styled parties (again, as a form of class signalling; maybe partially because all the rich people in the movies and on TV and in magazines are doing it, and you want to seem like them), but Americans also fancied themselves as classless egalitarians, so it didn't really keep because the whole "conspicuous consumption" clashes with modern suburban ideals.

I think "convenience" is correlated to the actual thing you're gesturing towards, but isn't the actual variable that matters most. "grocery stores being open until midnight" is certainly very convenient, but doesn't seem to remove anything important (except perhaps for late shift grocery store workers). On the other hand, buying your food from a grocery store (versus having to hunt it down and kill it) is certainly more "convenient", but "convenience" isn't the most important dimension where hunting differs from grocery store shopping.

Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.

Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.

But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.

Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.

alternatively:

pipe tapping: $5

knowing where to tap: $95

taking on the legal liability and accountability in case the water heater explodes: $400

ChatGPT is more than capable of telling you where to tap, but you can't sue openAI if it gets it wrong and your water heater explodes.

I haven't played with claude code with 5.5, but I tried using claude cowork for a bunch of tasks and was surprised how much hand-holding it required. I gave it full access to my desktop and email but I kept running into cases where it had some arbitrary rule or restriction that prevented it from doing what I wanted.

Three examples that stood out: first, I wanted it to clean up my desktop by deleting some outdated files. It spent a few minutes looking through all the files, only to tell me it didn't have the ability to press buttons, only click, so it couldn't click and delete the old files. And it didn't have the ability to click and drag, so it couldn't move them to recycle bin. So it was stuck and suggested I do it myself. Of course, there was another solution it could have tried that would have worked: asking for read/write permissions on the desktop folder, and then deleting them using terminal...but that never occurred to it because I had asked it to test its remote computer usage tools, not its terminal tools.

Another case was asking it to print some files from a share drive I was given by a colleague on my email. It found the email, but it stopped and told me it couldn't proceed because there was a password window, but that I could enter the password myself, which was ***, because my colleague had sent it in the email. Like literally, it pasted the password into the output window and said "sorry I can't use this you gotta put it in yourself". It has some strong prohibitions on handling passwords, but in this case, it literally had it in its context window and could tell me it, just not type it into the password prompt in the browser. Of course, if you're at work and using claude on your phone to try to do something like that remotely, you're out of luck; even though it could* do it itself, it chose not to. The same issue happened for a 6 digit verification code for a website I was using that was sent to my email; it considered it a "password" and decided that it couldn't touch it. I couldn't even just...paste it into claude's context and ask it to enter it, it insisted that I must type it in myself.

A third case: for some reason it always forgets it can read pdfs. so many times it stopped what it was doing and said "well, I found it, but it's in a .pdf so I can't read it." and I'm like "bro you literally have a tool for this what are you even talking about".

A less important observation: it seems overeager to solve things by sending emails. Opus 5.5 LOVES sending emails. Can't find the information I'm looking for on the website? Here, I've drafted an email to the webmaster to ask it to add it. Have some ambiguous question about Virginia's hunting regulations? Opus 5.5 won't even try looking more closely at the regs its first thought is "I know, I can just email this question to the local game warden."

the "minimum requirements" aren't even the actual minimum, the game can definitely play on worse machines than that (just inconsistently). I know from personal experience that you can play factorio (at least the base game) on a crappy old 2009 toshiba laptop. Pretty sure it doesn't even have a GPU, just integrated graphics. It doesn't run well but it's not an action game, a little stutter isn't the end of the world and anybody playing on a system like that should not be surprised by it.

The issue is, I don't think that university humanities courses generally contribute much to a person's moral development, and if they do, it's not always necessarily in a positive way (as anybody who has taken enough university humanities courses can tell you). Interest in the humanities is something that should be cultivated much earlier in life to really have an effect; if your first serious encounter with philosophy is in senior-year philosophy gen ed classes, it's probably not going to do much good, and might actually do harm (e.g. the person who takes psychology 101 and starts over-confidently diagnosing all their friends and family with obscure mental illnesses, the person who takes ethics 101 and decides that 20th century utilitarianism is a perfect system with no downsides, not to even mention the culture war stuff which is the not-so-subtle elephant in the room).

I loved probably 2/3rds of my gen ed courses back during my college years, but this was entirely due to an existing appreciation for the topics (history, literature, physical sciences), and around 1/3rd of them were worse than useless (I cannot remember a single positive lesson I took from them other than a sense of nihilism about the university's faculty hiring standards).

If the goal is moral development, few things will develop a person's morals than actually living and struggling in the real world, and college is NOT the real world. I have some half baked opinions about the degree to which university education produces a lot of adult children with arrested development due to an extended adolescence. If on the other hand, the goal is a classical liberal arts education, which I am quite sympathetic towards (at least in theory), I am skeptical that taking a handful of university humanities courses is the ideal way to accomplish this.

The Philippines is great for streetview, wikipedia, random internet rabbit holes. You can just zoom in until you find some island somewhere and there's probably something interesting you can learn about it. If you're lucky there's a road with streetview on it, maybe a village, a church, etc. You can spend hours trying to figure out what's going on there.

Many of the islands don't even have wikipedia pages. You can spend hours just scouring the internet for information on what the heck is going on on some island. Sometimes you find the amateur website for a local school, or some account of a tourist or traveler going there and reporting what they found.

Sometimes you learn that there is an old Spanish graveyard that has since sunken underwater, the statues and tombstones and crosses now covered in coral and barnacles, with a single lone cross still visible above the sea.

Sometimes you learn that the village is a sprawling shantytown of fishing huts and thatched-roof shacks on precarious stilts 15 feet above the ocean.

Sometimes you learn that it's the site of a WWII battle or famous explorer visited the island or a plane crashed there in the 60s or some other interesting tidbit.

Sometimes you learn that it's been occupied by jihadist terrorists for the past 40 years and that in order to encourage foreign visitors (who might not want to go there due to numerous past kidnappings of foreigners for ransom), tourists are assigned a free, mandatory vanguard of heavily armed marine commandos as human shields to defend them whenever they go to the beach.

Sometimes you find a remote archipelago where every island seems to have a different christian denomination on it, like you have the island with the Mormon church, the one with the Catholic church, the one with the Iglesia ni Cristo church, the one with the Seventh Day Adventists, etc. etc. and you start to wonder how exactly that happened, and what the locals think about the weirdos on the island next door who got a very different story from the missionaries that came there than they did.

Sometimes it's just so obscure nobody has ever written anything about it in any language you know, you can see some blurry houses and rice paddies and outrigger canoes on the beach on satellite view but the village is otherwise unmarked, and you start to wonder, exactly what goes on there? Who are these people in this strange little fishing village with their canoes and rice paddies and corrugated-iron roof huts, what are they hiding, and how do I get there? And pretty soon you start looking at plane tickets and schedules and trying to imagine the complicated and uncertain logistics of traveling to such a remote place, because surely it's not that hard, there is an island only 30 miles away with an airstrip, beach villas and a handful of restaurants, and surely you could just fly there and charter a boat or something...

I'm more curious personally about the legal side here. Setting aside the actual object level issue (I personally support A/C for prisons), it seems to open up a lot of interesting questions to me:

* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before the invention of A/C (obviously not)

* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before A/C became widespread and affordable for regular people? (probably not)

* what is the main reason why this wasn't an issue 50 years ago and is now? Climate change? People being on average more sensitive to heat than they used to be? Better legal recognition of prisoner suffering? Broadening of 8th amendment protections in the court system? Changing public morals, i.e. "evolving standards of decency"? Ubiquity of A/C in ordinary Texans' day to day life? The random chance of this particular case getting sent to this particular judge?

* Is it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C now, when not all non-imprisoned Texans have A/C (and if so, does that imply that A/C is being codified here as basic human right, and is that really constitutionally tenable? How is it possible for a judge to order that something is a constitutional right for prisoners, but an optional private luxury for non prisoners?)

* Is A/C the only option, or might other, cheaper cooling methods be allowed, if the core of the complaint is reducing preventable heat-related injuries and deaths? Hypothetically (not a real proposal obviously), if instead the prison put hotel-style ice machines in every cell, would this solve the issue or is the judge's decision very specifically about A/C?

Facebook is the only social media I've ever had this kind of problem with. Every few years I find some group or community that only exists on Facebook that I want to join (in the most recent case it was a local DnD meetups group; in a previous case, it was a gardening group that was my only reputable lead on seeds for an uncommon variety of heirloom tomato I was searching for). It always ends in my new account getting banned within a few days for suspected fraud with no real reason or opportunity for appeal. No other social media has that problem as far as I can tell, it seems like it's primarily a Facebook problem, and clearly I'm not some unique case considering how common a story it seems.

Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.

>Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?

Is this actually the case? I've heard Whatsapp is popular outside the states (something about differences in phone plans, in the US unlimited SMS texting is basically universal) but it's definitely still in the minority here. Anecdotally I feel like each friend group here has a different, idiosyncratic method of text communication in the US. Some people communicate through SMS, others through instagram/snapchat, others through discord, or whatsapp, or facebook messenger, etc. There are some interesting trends in the distribution along age and gender lines too.