It's not uncommon, but always disappointing to me, to see how out of touch most HN folks are when it comes to privacy and data. Usually privacy is dismissed as hyperbole, or tinfoil hat stuff, or only for people selling drugs on the darknet. It's not anymore. The minimum barrier to entry for simply not having your every thought and whim and search catalogued is high: Masking your IP address, masking your browser fingerprint, and simply not participating in a lot of parts of the internet.

These are your thoughts, your personal life, being dissected and catalogued and sold in an attempt to, at BEST, shape your behavior. At worst, see exactly when you cross the line into becoming "an agitator." It's the step you need before getting to "thoughtcrime." Why is this acceptable to anyone??? In exchange for free email?

We're all in the pot and the water is already starting to bubble. And I'm sure that the only replies I might get will be "Oh, but no, it's not anything like that." Sure.

This is simply the first time you're seeing it on US soil. https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...

Yet two years ago, look how many people were incredulous, doubtful, or simply didn't care. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540738

Maybe now is a good time to bring up KOSA? Or maybe we should discuss that two years from now when it's too late to change anything.

https://www.eff.org/document/kids-online-safety-act-kosa https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/kids-online-safety-act...

All DeleteMe does is save you the time of manually making takedown requests, which is not that onerous in the first place. I've done plenty of my own. But that doesn't prevent online advertising databases from profiling me or you. And it's been happening for years - this isn't new at all.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...

I've tried to explain this to people, that a digital ID done well is better than the fraud-enabling 1960's hodgepodge in use that has served fraudsters better than citizens for 30 years. They set their teeth and refuse based on use of the word "digital" in the title alone.

It will take generational change for the US to get something as banal as a digital ID already in use in dozens of countries, for no other reason than mindless panic over misunderstanding everything about digital ID systems, how IDs even work, and how governments work.

You can usually find maybe one variety of orange wine in the US at larger wine stores with a substantial international selection.

I've never been so invested in a puppet show as the puppet theater in Tblisi.

I took a few minutes a day to search for cat pictures and cooking videos, and sharing cat videos with my spouse (her reason for using IG). It was a fight, but after a few days the thirst trap suggestions immediately flipped to giving me stuff I can look at in public and not feel like a massive creep. There was a long tail, with occasional "....are you sure?" suggestions, but at this point a couple years of carefully reinforcing the same stuff seems to have overwhelmed the thirst trap suggestions.

I do, and the process is exactly the point. That human emotions affect the process far more often than we like to admit. Not always, but it's not completely removed from the process by any means.

In each of those cases, it's that no one says, "Oh, new theory, new evidence. Cool, let's test the hell out of it!"

People in positions of relative power sometimes say, "New theory? Nope. Not even going to look at it. No, in fact, you're crazy and you're wrong and get outta here!"

In each of those examples, to some degree the eventual more accurate theory met emotional resistance by people adhering to the status quo, not resistance because of questionable data or poor research methods or non-reproducibility.

>I mean that's how science works.

So you're saying it's a good thing to dismiss potential new discoveries because of feels? Not investigate further, not look for additional data to refute the theory or not. Just dismiss as crackpot BS? IIRC, that's not how science works.

Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.

This is not a new phenomenon by any means:

Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.

Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."

100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.

Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.

Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.

Helicentrism has a storied past.

Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.

And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?

This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.

So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.

Or maybe someone really is reaching out to urgently tell me all about "legal boner tea."

Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:

- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)

- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.

- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.

- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)

Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.

Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.

300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.

https://ian-albert.com/games/legend_of_zelda_maps/

Humans do a poor job estimating extreme odds. 0% chance or 100% of a high risk/reward event. How many people in rural areas are prepping for a Carrington Event-sized solar flare or nuclear war, but a car accident or cancer diagnosis and resulting medical bills would sooner and statistically more likely to ruin their lives? Many. They see the small chance of survival as being high reward, with low risk.

Likewise, the lure of a 100% chance of life-changing material wealth that takes the low risk of $2 fits the same mold.

The numerous layers of attempted monetization schemes since 2016ish hilariously touted as "features" are sort of band-aided on top of each other on new reddit in a way that makes it the worst possible way to display the information. It's like a terrible UI challenge.