I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network.
I have the same nostalgia and even some more:
It is noteworthy that "The Facebook" startet as the hip place for students and required a university email address for signup. Imagine being a young adult moving for the first time away from home and to the big new city and starting your new exciting student life, only that you know no one, everyone is a stranger, and university life is complicated in all kind of ways. If I recall correctly TheFacebook had group chats, like mini message boards, which were made by students for every course (and of course used for organizing partying). You could stay organized. You could connect. This was a very useful and fun service. I wonder if it was lightning in a bottle or could it be replicated today? The students I know today organize with group chats on WhatsApp (I think this is less a thing in the States?). And Family networks also moved to group chats. But this is not discoverable (which to be true is a big feature as it provides intimacy/privacy, but it also loses something).
What changed? You say it was monetization which drove more and more antisocial features, but there was also a big vibe change when everyone could join and your grandma first time commented disapprovingly your binge drinking party pics. And does one want your colleagues and work aquaintances see your children pictures or "its complicated" relationship status? Anyone remember Google Circles? They tried to out-facebook Facebook, but couldn't make the separation of friend circles stick as managing "circles" was too cumbersome. (Was it though? We do it fine in group messengers.)
The other explanation is that Facebook was always doomed to doom-scroll, as every new generation tries to find their own new cool thing but like all non-crab crustaceans evolve into crabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) all "social" networks seem to evolve into anti-social doom scroll time sinks: Twitter -> SnapChat -> Instagram -> TikTok
Blueberry
7d ago
it's about Musk's affirmative reply to this tweet.
Btw, I can’t read that tweet in Europe:
“This Post from @breakingbaht has been withheld in Germany, France, Ireland based on local law(s). Learn more”
What does it say?
Blueberry
11d ago
To be fair, if the next President elect from the Democrats would sell baseball cards of herself the day before inauguration (and that money is not 100% going to charity), I would doom and gloom about the republic.
The claim here rings true:
because we all know Trump is corrupt and depraved, and the way in which he is so is incredibly funny, people don't hold him to the same standards they'd hold their political enemies, or anyone else.
See the laconic comment about that in the FT link:
Trump has sold sneakers, watches, jewellery and a $60 Bible in the months leading up to the election, as MainFT ably reported. He also promoted a platform called “World Liberty Financial” and its token.
Please ignore the context of this tweet (Elon reXt it, so it is CW fire): https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1879273049075458217
What I instead found curious was the usage of "GM (Global Majority) formerly known as BAME (Black, Asian, Middle East)" which I had never read before. But I am not British. Wiki has a short article about the term, maybe it will be longer in future:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_majority&oldid=1257733067
The term was used as early as 2003 as a way to challenge the normativity of a white majority or Eurocentric perspective […]
In 2020, the Church of England created an Archbishops' Anti-Racism Taskforce … "United Kingdom Minority Ethnic/Global Majority Heritage" (UKME/GMH) as more appropriate than BAME.[16] The language of "Global Majority Heritage" is seen as a reminder that minorities often come from a majority culture before migrating to the UK.
In November 2022, the Labour-run Westminster City Council committed to replace BAME with "global majority."
It seems to still be fringe/local use, but I wonder if it will be the new preferred term. Being part of a minority sounds small/miserable, you are an outsider. But being part of the global majority, now that sounds grand and legitimate, you are the demos.
There are so many headscratchers. The conclusion after the bath tub experience was that she … didn’t phone his wife? Made a police report? Fled to her home screaming? But instead googled him (to check his “me too” creds, yeah right…) and stayed the full weekend. And during the bath tub she tries to deflect him by saying that she is gay and never had sex, but after Gaiman’s horrible egotistic male powertrip abuse she forgot she was a lesbian? After the weekend she texted him:
Pavlovich texted Gaiman: “I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me. I’m so hungry. What a terrible creature you’ve turned me into.”
Conversion therapy works, it just needs more Dark Triad Stockholm Syndrome.
Blueberry
15d ago
the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse.
I had to laugh, that is a good genre description!
Blueberry
16d ago
The accusation was “You’re saying the average man wants …” to which orthoxerox clarifies now to you, that he never tried to speak for the average man, but only for himself.
Blueberry
16d ago
Least shocking MeToo reveal.
I read once a short story collection by Gaimann but I don’t remember anything. Did his work alude to his private life?
As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. […] Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”
Amazing the passive language. Like she willingly presenting herself as a sex toy, but also had no agency in this decision. Which could well be, there are also comments on Reddit how Palmer used egoistically other people, so it could be she & Gaimann preyed on vulnerable and weak characters.
Blueberry
16d ago
What baffles me is that she is all hating that, and the article all points out the defiant disapproval of our heroine, and then Gaimann just has to snap his fingers and she is on her knees again.
The only explanation given is that sex is confusing “for the brain”. And that she hated herself, so the degradation made him her soulmate?
I am not sure it is possible to condemn him for “rape”, that is sort of difficult if he gets enthusiastic consent love messages per text, but I condemn him morally for abusing a sort of mentally ill woman. Like, you wouldn’t think someone with Down syndrome being able to give consent, because they don’t understand things and make good decisions and a predator is running intellectually circles around them, and this is true for her too.
Blueberry
16d ago
(1) Which makes sense, considering "consent" was manufactured by non-gender-conforming men and women in the late '80s as a reaction to the free '70s, so it's only natural those [in a purely descriptive sense] trans-gender individuals would come up with a system that doesn't match how normal human beings actually function, then get all defensive when it doesn't work.
Can you explain that more?
Blueberry
17d ago
It is noteworthy that many hn comments are not amused:
Blueberry
19d ago
Apple:
https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/10/apple-opposes-investor-calls-to-end-its-dei-efforts/
Investors will vote on four outside proposals at next month’s annual shareholders meeting. Apple is urging shareholders to vote against those proposals, including one that calls on the company to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The shareholder proposal, submitted by the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, claims that DEI “poses litigation, reputational and financial risks to companies, and therefore financial risks to their shareholders, and therefore further risks to companies for not abiding by their fiduciary duties.”
Though the company doesn't like such external proposals as a matter of principle, and may have adviced shareholders to vote against it regardless how they feel about DEI internally..
Blueberry
19d ago
No, he regularly streams Diablo 4 for hours. This captured video is 3 hours long:
Barack Obama and Donald Trump chatting away before Jimmy Carter's funeral is quite something to see:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5cnfNgvKsoo
Does Barack humor him diplomatically like a crazy MAGA uncle at the Thanksgiving table? Maybe, but Obama coolness breaking into a chuckle is genuine, Donalds joke must have hit. At the same time Obama has literally the ear of the next President, Trump is listening intensely what he has to say. You know deep down Trump thinks Obama is cool.
Blueberry
21d ago
The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer.
More interesting for me is Zelenskyys language skill:
https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1876014982527434842
https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1876016285550813559
Tweaking Zelensky is a mess. He struggles to speak Ukrainian, stumbles, switches between languages and swears profusely in Russian. Wonder what happened to the lil guy. Lex Fridman fucking DUBBED it in English, so people wouldn't notice how stupid it all sounds.
Imagine Trump sounding like this: "Hola amigos... fuuuuck.. i'm gonna whoop the cholo pendejo ass. mierda motherfucker..." Not exaggerating, not even a little bit. Crazy world we live in!
RWAPodcast are Russian shills, but they have interesting take and provide a window into Russian thinking. If their diss here is accurate (or not!) I could judge how fair they are.
Blueberry
23d ago
I think it is similar to why Napoleon invaded Russia. He had everything, he had won (well, almost but he could have ignored Britain), but he was so driven being Emperor in Paris was boring and he needed the next challenge. So he did go to war until he got into a war he lost.
Leading a car company is a full time job. Building rockets is a full time job. But he finds normal day business boring and delegates so he can solve the next challenge. But you can’t “solve” politics, and sooner or later he will fly like Icarus to close to the sun and fall down.
Blueberry
28d ago
So the Cybertruck explosion before the Trump hotel was done by an active duty green beret and big Trump supporter:
The man suspected of being behind Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas was a “big” supporter of Donald Trump and voted for him in November, a senior law enforcement official tells the Daily Beast. The revelation tracks with old Facebook comments and what Livelsberger’s uncle, Dean, told The Independent about his nephew’s politics on Thursday. “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” Dean said. “It’s one of the reasons he was in Special Forces for so many years.”
I guess he killed himself, and willingly tried to harm others, to show his disapproval of Elon Musk? [In the surveillance video the car before opens the car door moments before the explosion and on the right side you see a man fleeing. They were really lucky the CT with its steel frame is the worst car for a car bomb.]
I wouldn't have expected active duty special forces soldiers being mentally unstable enough to do suicide bombings. I guess it is futile to search for a rational explanation and meaning here, a rational soldier would simply plan to assassinate Elon Musk, but then a rational person wouldn't to something that violent and drastic in the first place.
Blueberry
1mo ago
100+ mile weeks
Woot? That is something like 22 km per day or every day a half marathon. :-o
Blueberry
1mo ago
Venkataraman also wrote this on his page:
http://www.vivekvenkataraman.com/blog/2023/7/5/debunking-a-debunking
we found that reports of women’s hunting were genuinely rare.
Most reported prey sizes are small- or medium-sized. Of the cases that do involve large-game hunting by women, some pertain to whale hunting; some involve firearms and/or dogs; some occur in the context of husband-wife pairs in which women contribute to hunting success indirectly; some involve cases of women hunting large game alone out after the death of their husbands; other instances of large-game hunting are explicitly stated by the ethnographer to be very rare. This is not to say that these are not cases of large-game hunting, but the broader context of their occurrence casts suspicion on them as cultural regularities. This provides a starkly different picture of women’s hunting in these societies compared to the analysis of Anderson et al (2023).
Blueberry
1mo ago
Are you sure the women are doing the nursing? This graphic in the article clearly shows that men have more muscle mass because they habe to carry infants around:
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2023/saw1123Ocob32_m.jpg
There are photos were he has models as arm candy, so maybe he over compensated in settling down with someone serious?
I just remember now how uncomfortable the Weiner documentary was and how angry I was on Abedins behalf, who was oddly calm.
Wiki:
You can google the story, but it is rather meh. After dinner a senator invited her into his home for “coffee” (who drinks coffee before night? Some people just are oblivious), she was shocked when he kissed her, he was shocked that she was shocked and apologized for misreading the signs. Subsequent meetings with the senator were low key awkward but then she forgot the incident, until it was time to write a book.
I want to edit my statement: I am not baffled by a billionaires choice to marry her, but instead in her taste in men. Nothing against Cooper, but at some point an adult woman must know that narcissistic politicians, sonnyboy actors and boyish billionaires are maybe not the best partners for long term relationships. Jesus Christ, marry a dentist and provide some boring normalcy to your poor teenage son!
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