Well, call it "Monetization" then. Most platforms start optimistically, free to use, lots of features, burn VC money. Users love them.
Then you want to make $$, and inevitably this causes the platform to be less good. Even my favourite non-ensh*ttified (so far) social platform, let's just say it has the same orange colour scheme as the HN titlebar, is getting ever more aggressive at promoting its paid plan to the detriment of usability for a free user. But so far hasn't started putting formerly free features behind a paywall (premium features are, of course).
And CD's argument that first you stiff your users to favour your advertisers/vendors, then you start stiffing them to favour yourself. Well, what about Amazon then? Isn't that exactly what they have been doing?*
Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so far, and I can actually find things in it.
And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort of gathering which were usually held for that reason so X was involved... and then finally look at the old pictures and there's no sign of X. It is literally the brain invoking "lossy compression" to make it all fit, just like certain web services that let you upload pictures without limit might reduce old ones, that hardly anyone ever looks at any more, to lower quality to limit storage bloat.
Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men. Women's memories are flawless. If they claim that they remember a conversation exactly, word for word, 20 years later, who's to prove them wrong?
I think that's because memories really are highly compressed, with the average complex memory (of a grand day out, for example) being compressed into at most a paragraph of text's worth of information. Everything else is made up of context.
For example, having no photographic memory, I can remember the general "feel" of the innards of an antique shortwave receiver I used to have as a kid. But almost all of that is context. I know what canned octal base vacuum tubes and big tuning capacitors look like, what sort of components were in the big band selector "sled" (for geeks: This was an NC2-40D) and so on. So I can "zoom in" on the coarse memory by just filling in details that are generic, not specific. And these details may be from different sources than the original memory too.
And so the brain needs to remember - if one is not faceblind, which in fact I am - just the overall geometry of someone's face, and all the other stuff can be filled in as needed (how they look when they smile or are anxious etc.) Compression, compression. We have a lot to learn from nature. Note that a faceblind person does this too, of course - just not with a geometrically exact visualization of that person's face, just one with the correct "feel".
And that's also why synthetic memories can be formed so easily. You really don't have to insert much. The brain infers the rest as needed.
Given the number of neurons, hash collisions are inevitable? /s
Our model of the world, and this includes "memories" is very highly compressed, and extremely lossy. We reconstruct everything from what neurons activate when we recall something, so it can also be like a corrupted zip, where we don't access everything required in the moment. This can be affected by sleep, stress, hormones, etc.
What is quite interesting is when we try and recall something and can't, but the subconscious processing continues and you recall it later.
This of course applies to my (sarcastic) description of women's memory too. A given conversation is compressed to a small amount of memory, a significant part of which is the "feel" of the conversation rather than the actual words. So of course the memory is not word-for-word exact. But, let's just say, a subset of persons, a majority of which may or may not be female, does not acknowledge this and insists that the (reconstructed) sequence of words is exactly what was said 20 years ago.
I went under for 2 different surgeries. One of them I had post surgery complications. Years later, we needed to know the year I had the complications. I remembered the surgery, simply look it up and ta-da I got the date.
Except, my wife thought it was the other surgery. And insisted. I was incredulous and angry. I literally nearly died during the complications. I think I would remember the surgery it was from. And it definitely wasn’t from my vasectomy. I decided to make a stand.
I found the oxygen sensor we purchased for the event. Found to manufacture date. It was after her event. So it was physically impossible have the o2 sensor before her event. Wasn’t good enough. Maybe the date was wrong.
I finally went to the hospital and got the records. I was right. My wife simply could not or would not acknowledge it.
I spent the majority of my marriage being “the forgetful one”. And here was a single case where I was right and she had memory issues. And she could not simply say “oops, I got it wrong”. I began to doubt her memory and thought maybe I was being gaslit sometimes.
It was a very influential event in the course of our marriage. I lost a lot of respect for her and began to wonder what our future would be like.
We were divorced within a year.
Not only this, but other things too. But this was a big part of it.
At the risk of sounding rude, ignorant, and insensitive... did you all get married young? That all sounds a bit narcissistic.
Life is too short to be miserable, and we don't celebrate divorce enough. I'm happy for you both, and hope you are too. It's just as much of a milestone as any other big life event.
I've never been married, but I have noticed some couples get sort of locked into the level of emotional maturity they were at when they got married. I've always assumed it was a lack of new experiences stunting personal growth.
Obviously, similar could be said about me since I've never been married. That too is a lack of experience. Though it is worth pointing out that it's stories like this and my own past relationships that have scared me away. Being emotionally stable and reasonably humble is underrated.
Perhaps the rate of occurrence changes, but everybody does this at every age. When even our experience is an interpretation of the real world, our memories are even less accurate.
Just throwing out an idea: I recently stumbled upon an old-school website where someone is uploading a photo of their day (almost) every single day since 1998.
Came across screen captures of the original Everquest (SO COOL) and other games, photos of anime/cosplay events, city shots, family, friends, etc. Really fun for them, and fun for people who like me who still enjoy surfing the web.
When my mom was still alive and relatively new to a smartphone (at age 80) I decided to send her some sort of relevant picture every day via Whatsapp, to get her used to communicating that way. Sometimes it was a real stretch to come up with something. But yes, this forces you to evaluate your life from that viewpoint "surely something was interesting today? Let's keep a picture of it". Even if it's just what I'm having for lunch that day.
I'm not sure if you are in this demographic, but a lot of people I know born in 1999-2003 or so in the US used snapchat as a primary method of communication for many years, and a large part of it was keeping up "snap streaks" of sharing one photo a day with many different friends.
This is one thing for all of the pairs of genuine friends doing this, but I also have two friends who I introduced to each other exactly once, and who have never spoken since, who have a 6 year snap streak together, and both of whom have streaks like that with dozens of other people, many of whom are virtually strangers.
That is interesting. For a streak to count, do you have to both send out your own, and open incoming images? I wonder how much you could tell about someone if you had a 6 year snap streak with them. Would they be more like a friend, or an awkward relative with whom you seldom meet and have little in common?
Both of you have to send them to the other person as a specific recipient (so not just putting it on your story). I'm not sure about opening them.
For the two friends I'm thinking of, my impression is that they don't know each other any better through snapchat than they do from me knowing both of them and mentioning them to each other (they live 1000 miles apart and only met once). I guess the best I can say is that I would be comfortable seating them at the same table at my hypothetical wedding. Same vibe as my cousin I have on Facebook but have only really met twice in the last decade.
Well I knew someone who did this ritual and they would send black photos of their leg so close to the camera. So I'd imagine nothing and its classic number go up social media.
Everquest looked sooooo good back then. Man! No more Meridian 59!
Why did you have to destroy my memories? :)
It's like looking at the first DivX encoded movie that was soooooo good vs. VideoCD/LaserDisc. And then you look at it today and it's so damn blocky and also in that tiny resolution. Ugh!
> Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men.
My first read of this headline was to observe that people seem to get more comfortable stereotyping people different from them as they age. Thanks for the datum.
On average, obviously. Any given day ranges from zero, to a couple hundred for especially interesting days. Also a huge blip when the kids were young. Runs of "zero" days end up being dark ages in long term memory. Sure, went to work, ate, slept etc. but nothing interesting. That's where the "at least one interesting picture for Mom" thing provided a baseline.
>I don’t think the sexist comment at the end is appropriate for HN
I don't think the ageist comment in the headline is appropriate anywhere.
It is well known that memories and perceptions at every age are largely constructed more as "what makes sense" ("no, a gorilla did not run across the basketball court") than "as recorded" recordings.
I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use.
Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.
Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.
Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
I have moved out of the U.S. into South America and one of the nice side-effects of this is that apps from local companies are well optimized here. It's not that there's an extreme level of competency or an optimizing culture. It's simpler.
People have cheaper phones here, so devs are naturally more exposed to low end hardware.
It's been awesome for me! I have a fairphone 4 which isn't top of the line at all anymore but the apps work MUCH better here on average than when I was in the US. Websites also load quicker too for similar reasons.
The article mentions several times that early sugar exposure affects sugar craving for a lifetime. Did they correct for that? I.e. people born during sugar rationing who later developed normal sugar consumption patterns compared to people not born during rationing who consume similar amounts?
I was born into a traditional food culture without excessive sugar, but I sure as heck developed a sugar craving later, to the detriment of my diet. I'm guessing this cancels out the early healthy effect.
I grew up in a house with little to no sugar and never really developed a "craving" for sugar. I'll absolutely eat it if it's there, but really only consume it if it's zero effort, and generally in small amounts since many sweet things taste overly sweet to me.
There is a genetic component to disinterest in sweet food. It quite evidently runs in some families. These are people who never eat any sugary food or often even fruit regardless of availability because they actively dislike things that taste sweet. It isn't a matter of environment or self-control. To them, a donut is about as enticing as a bowl of plain oatmeal.
Anecdotally, people that don't eat any sweet food always seem to gravitate toward salty/bitter flavors instead.
> Importantly, these differences only began to appear decades after sugar rationing had ended.
> What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It’s how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people’s diets even 50 years later.
That's because the body can become desensitized by sugar the more it gets. Poeple often turn to processed food more and more as their tastebuds become more accustomed to tastier foods while natural foods start tasting more bland. It's the same way dopamine works.
Adaption is just how the body works though. From the perspective of someone living in the mountains, descending to sea level is "addictive" in that they will get air withdrawals (altitude sickness) when coming back.
As with most research, these findings represent a distribution of outcomes. Intuitively, early sugar rationing is likely, but not 100% effective, to discourage future diets which prominently feature sugary foods. And vice versa.
Yep. Precisely because of our efficient manufacturing, throw-away culture a lot of gadgets that used to be serious luxuries are now nearly free. For example basic espresso machines. In my area you can get one for $25 off FBM any day. Or (adjusted for inflation) affordable sandwiches with tasty ingredients nobody had heard of when I was a kid (I'm old). Or pretty decent bicycles if you're willing to learn a little how to fix them. Or low-end smartphones for about the price of a landline phone back in the day (adjusted for inflation) and cellular service plans that are actually much cheaper than a landline used to cost.
Or synthetic clothing. Sure, natural fiber stuff is in retreat but some synthetic stuff is actually really comfortable.
How do you actually do that? I ran mine for years with a single, borderless full screen CLI window but that hardly disabled the windowing system, you could still run GUI apps.
You can edit the boot script (s:startup-sequence, I think... it's been a while.) so it doesn't start Workbench. However, you can't really disable the windowing system.
Yes, that's all you could do. Sounds like just a slight memory fault exaggerating it, something I'm sure we're all guilty of. Booting "exclusively to amigaDOS, without the ...windowing system available" was not possible, as the CLI ran in a window.
You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.
You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.
You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.
You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.
Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
I did it the right way. I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM. I shopped around for a dedicated box with a v4 address that had a clean reputation. I ensured the provider's ASN was also clean. I used a well known TLD. I sent absolutely zero spam. No newsletters no nothing, just regular correspondence.
But I don't send enough emails to keep my IP reputation warm, I think, because deliverability into the big providers like Microslop and Google was very hit and miss. The end result is I would never know if someone just didn't want to reply, or if my message has been silently dropped. It stopped being fun and started becoming a chore and a headache.
Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit. I have more important things to do with my time.
Wonderful but it irritates me that so many descriptions of internal combustion engines refer to "explosions" of the fuel. You don't want that. It causes knocking and pinging and engine damage. You want a controlled burn that generates heat smoothly.
Not exactly. You do want a deflagration and not a detonation, but "explosion" is more loosely defined and, depending on who you're talking to, a self-sustaining subsonic flame front and a sharp pressure spike are a perfectly valid explosion.
explosion/detonation causes engine knocking or pre-ignition which is both very bad. a properly working combustion engine is driven by controlled burning.
But it is strictly correct. Deflagration is the definition of low (i.e. subsonic) explosive.
Combustion is a broader term — combustion just refers to burning. And the reason it is called an internal combustion engine is to contrast it from its predecessor combustion engine designs - the external combustion engine.
More precisely, the type of combustion happening in an ICE engine is (low) explosive.
Even more confusing to anyone who doesn't know the lingo, detonation in the context of an internal combustion engine means something specific. It is a synonym for pinging and knocking, and happens when unburnt fuel/air mixture explodes after the spark plug has already fired. It can damage the engine, but typically takes some time. Preignition is when the mixture ignites before the spark plug fires, and is typically much more damaging, often destroying the engine in just a few revolutions. It can pound through the boundary layer between the mixture and the face of the aluminum piston and melt it, or break something else in the engine like a rod.
It's been a minute, but at one point GM had some pretty interesting videos up on YT where they talked about preignition testing on Cadillac Northstar V8s and how quickly it would grenade the engine. Fascinating stuff.
I don't think it's any slower than the dust explosions that occasionally happen in factories or grain silos. Although those do appear more violent due to the scale & damage.
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
I used to have a bathroom scale with a single strain gauge that was accurate. Accurate, as in weigh yourself, pick up a 1lb object, weigh yourself again and see an extra pound. That scale had a "lifetime" nonreplaceable battery in it and after 20 years or so, gave up the ghost.
Every scale I've tried since is wildly inaccurate, and they do have brains and they fake it. Step on, get a random weight within a 5lb range of the true weight. Step on repeatedly, even after the scale has timed out and had to be rezeroed, and get that exact weight again. Fake. Everysingle 4-sensor scale (one in each corner post) that I've tried does this.
I've since found another relatively vintage single strain gauge scale whose battery still works. And I have a mechanical scale in reserve for when it no longer does.
> Fake. Every single 4-sensor scale (one in each corner post) that I've tried does this.
Huh. I have never experienced this and didn't even know this was a thing. My cheapo Chinesium scale that I bought from Amazon years ago occasionally jumps by a pound or so. I measure myself a couple of times to be sure. But it definitely doesn't "freeze" measurements, as I see a different measurements shoes on in back-to-back measurements.
Then you want to make $$, and inevitably this causes the platform to be less good. Even my favourite non-ensh*ttified (so far) social platform, let's just say it has the same orange colour scheme as the HN titlebar, is getting ever more aggressive at promoting its paid plan to the detriment of usability for a free user. But so far hasn't started putting formerly free features behind a paywall (premium features are, of course).
And CD's argument that first you stiff your users to favour your advertisers/vendors, then you start stiffing them to favour yourself. Well, what about Amazon then? Isn't that exactly what they have been doing?*