Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.

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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • That’s because a social app that quickly solves the need of making a connection and then perpetually the need of maintaining it was called ICQ. Or AIM. Or other such. They were focused on the part after that hope.

    The reason that’s no longer the normal model is simple - weak people are easier to exploit. The “after hope” model doesn’t keep people weak.

    Even with XMPP - the classic instant messenger model of adding someone to friends, remember it? You send one invite message, and after it the other side won’t see anything you want to send until it accepts you into contacts. It might never do that. Or it might add you, see you’re sending unsolicited dick pics, remove you.

    With dating apps all you need is a search by tags and tags corresponding with truth, and of course ability to choose who can contact you. The former is not hard. The latter is hard when people are interested in putting false tags, but not when the tag social metric, so to say, is commutative. The model where conversations are started by mutual “like” is good, I think. And the anonymized way (like with Pure, have tried using it when decided to become more social, got some insights but no dates, or more specifically one failed date) is good, when those who liked you are shown as anonymous invitations to accept or deny, but also when mutual “like” means accepting that invitation. I think one’s visibility and one’s point of view are something that should both be customizable with logical conditions. One should be able to set they want to only be seen by people without “no less than 20 inches” wish to not be frustrated when those people ghost them, or that they don’t want to see people without photos on their page, or that they only want to see people and be seen by people who like hiking or who like animals, but not both at the same time, or any other set of logical rules, everyone is different. Perhaps a limit on searches is good, though.

    And then there is crime. Or mental illnesses. Or bad hygiene. Or conflict. That is, there are situations where outside observers should be able to evaluate who of the two sides is telling the truth about the other side being an abuser or whatever. I suppose some kind of escrow for contacts can be devised. This should be a social thing, a moderator can’t be trusted with correspondence and also with judgement. So - escrow by people trusted by both sides, something like that. To have a rating, it should be possible to tell who’s really spilling tea and who’s doing libel.

    And if you were reading attentively, you might have noticed this doesn’t just apply to dating, this applies to everything about establishing contact over social media. Because that’s absolutely correct, dating doesn’t differ in anything from any other social connectivity. In other social events you too want to quickly find and communicate for long with someone. Romance being involved doesn’t change much or anything.

    The reason these two purposes have been separated by businesses is pretty transparent - trying to apply general social media to dating shows that they don’t work, and trying to apply dating social media to normal long-term communication shows that they too don’t work. The issue is that what’s invisible still exists. That separation is just hiding what doesn’t work, but it still doesn’t work. A functional social media would function for both dating and daily buddy talk. Like ICQ did.



  • As the poster above, I should clarify that the reason I mentioned Telegram is that there a channel (like a blog) has a representation as a group chat where channel posts, comments to them and simple group chat messages appear.

    And about communities and issues - the problem with comments is that they are local to post. Separation by posts first, then separation by threads, separation by score ranks, separation by depth. That may seem like a nice idea to not see everything. That’s the very problem.

    OK, so the data model wouldn’t have to be changed to make it in good sense like Telegram.

    What you need is ability to have a linear representation, where every message is additionally marked as a comment to some post or as a reply or as a post itself, and might have scores.

    Like old forums usually were, tree representation wasn’t very popular.


  • Comments: that thing where you upvote what you like and downvote what you dislike, and if you feel strongly, say the same thing 10 other people said in different words. Very important. Very necessary.

    Honestly a sidebar with a chat like IRC, but every message being tagged by which specific article its author is viewing right now, would help the social part more.

    I mean, Telegram’s convenience is a weapon. If you want a good UI for article feeds with comments, it should just copy Telegram. Except for the Russian intelligence services part.




  • A minimum wage job, 1 minimum wage job, paid for a family in 1950. Bought a house, a cheap car, doctors, dentists, optometrists, other professional services people can’t do themselves, even able to go out to eat for a burger.

    Yes, in 1950, damn right. Now do 1930.

    by the 1980’s it was undeniably true that wages no longer paid for what they did

    Still better than 1930.

    but there is no future going further up, come straight back and join us in the sunshine brother!

    I dunno, there might not be any sunshine stored for me, but it’s still not 1930.


  • There are some very old contracts still not terminated around. From Netherlands before William of Orange, or from England before Cromwell. Those of nation-states (WWII lend-lease of the famous ones).

    working people don’t have the money to live a dignified life for the first time since the great depression in the US,

    The US is not even close to that. Your comment be proof of that, you don’t even understand how life was there and then, despite that being history of your country portrayed well enough in many movies and books.

    That said, there are, of course, complications to be expected.






  • the fact that russia can’t design and build a tank that doesn’t play turret toss when it gets hit with a shell or break down in the middle of a parade DOES have a lot in common with this - it’s called brain drain.

    Older Soviet tanks play turret toss, you know why? Their automatic loading system is optimized for fire rates, but not safety. You know why that and what that achieves? That achieves a whole lot of tanks built during Soviet times for mass ground warfare in the WWIII as it was imagined then. When it’s one safer NATO tank against 5 worse but comparable (and fast-firing) Soviet tanks for the same expense, the choice (with Soviet doctrine) is obvious.

    There was no brain drain then, these were all conscious design decisions making a difference of the scale of hundreds of tanks built.

    Literally all of the smartest young people left Russia because the pay was bad and the prospects for living were better I’m the west.

    Unfortunately no.

    You say thag everyone of consequence involved in designing military equipment in russia has better knowledge than Germany? Due to what experience, getting their World War 2 era tanks pulled out of the mud by Ukrainian tractors?

    You are a few years late even in talking about tanks.

    That’s also something most Russians have passively understood by now about modern warfare, it’s all about information, planning, coordination done by many small drones, with humans reduced to techs and operators and, of course, small assault groups. Tanks have no place in that.

    You’re wanting to claim a country that experienced that amount of brain drain is can do cutting edge brain surgery??

    Brain drain is something that was happening when plenty of Soviet-educated engineers and scientists simply had no place in ex-Soviet countries, or by any measure the offers they could get were far better in the West. Right now there’s no coordinated incentive for said brain drain from the western governments. Which was a thing then.

    Right now - yes, I think oil money that buys western components for weapons can buy expertise in areas of interest.



  • Cowardice in general has become way too socially acceptable. Actually the norm. If you G-d forbid act so that you can be unambiguously determined as not a coward, then G-d help you.

    And cowards understand each other very well. You can even expose them all as cowards, they’ll accept the shame and admit you’re right and all such, and then they’ll still feel victorious, because in a society of cowards cowardice always wins in all ways but one.

    Living like “Hagakure” for real is perhaps the only way to preserve your humanity in some life situations, but that won’t lead to happiness. And the author of “Hagakure” refused to commit seppuku when his suzerain died, because “times have changed”.

    And meeting people who live by those principles, you damn hard wish they hid or cowered or stepped back that one time that led them to pain for their remaining lives from those not worth their breath.

    I’m thinking of a woman, by the way. Men of that quality are far more rare.