Hacker News: gcthomas

New comment by gcthomas in "Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)"

gcthomas — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:44:07 +0000

It's more centralised now after several decades because monopolistic companies saw commercial value in squeezing out the competition. Plenty of technical folk have given up their own servers because the dominant providers ruined the system by blocking their emails.

New comment by gcthomas in "Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)"

gcthomas — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:31:09 +0000

Fediverse isn't VC funded and isn't a 'product' in the sense that Twitter is. Obsession with eternal growth is a function of the funding model. Those putting money or time into this are not looking for a financial return - they are trying to sustain a public service.

New comment by gcthomas in "Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)"

gcthomas — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:27:31 +0000

If a poster wants their posts searchable then they hash tag key words. Those who don't want randos searching for vulnerable people they can dogpile onto can have that relative anonymity by avoiding contentious hash tags. It's a feature, although some exTwitterati disagree.

New comment by gcthomas in "Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)"

gcthomas — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:23:34 +0000

If that's their take, needing a news feed, then they wouldn't benefit from a social media service. One way comms isn't very social.

New comment by gcthomas in "Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)"

gcthomas — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:19:14 +0000

It's trivially easy to move your profile and followers list to another instance, if you want to. But you aren't restricted to following users from your instance anyway. Follow one person you see boosted into your feed, look at who they follow and follow them. Rince and repeat.

New comment by gcthomas in "Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)"

gcthomas — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 10:10:32 +0000

Want to join Email? First you have to choose a server ...

No wonder email failed to thrive as an open protocol, distributed communication system. It's just too darned hard and unfamiliar to figure out how to join.

New comment by gcthomas in "On the Shortcomings of Gemini Protocol"

gcthomas — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 11:53:41 +0000

You can put images links in fine, between lines. Stick your svgs in and publish.

New comment by gcthomas in "Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?"

gcthomas — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 19:33:49 +0000

O365 works cross platform in the browser well enough for most windows-centric corps. I've got by happily for years with Vivaldi and Libreoffice, without Windows installed.

New comment by gcthomas in "Insider Trading at Coinbase"

gcthomas — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 17:38:09 +0000

Thanks, it seems that I have been interpreting the term pro-choice incorrectly.

New comment by gcthomas in "Insider Trading at Coinbase"

gcthomas — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:11:39 +0000

Your link shows 81% in favour of abortion, with or without some restrictions, with 19% against abortion. Wanting abortion rights is not synonymous with being pro-choice, which carries implications of no restrictions at all.

New comment by gcthomas in "People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?"

gcthomas — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 19:14:02 +0000

> If you go to your uBlock origin plugin settings > filter lists > annoyances > checkmark "fanboy's annoyances", "adguard annoyances", and "uBlock annoyances"

This ^^ hits the spot. No need to accept the dark UI patterns (illegal but everywhere) without the pain of going through the options. Works brilliantly.

New comment by gcthomas in "Netflix Should Sell Ads"

gcthomas — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 14:55:45 +0000

Google has grown by using ad revenue to buy comoetitors or companies that do something interesting, then squeeze them for every penny of profit or dump them.

Google has a dominant search engine, a browser and massively intrusive ad placement system threaded through everything they offer. Gmail was a Hotmail clone. Android, Fitbit, Maps, Nest, and Google Earth were acquired. YouTube was bought after it out competed Google's offering. Even the advertising tech was acquired, with AdMob, DoubleClick invented outside Google.

They are dominant mostly because they have not been bothered by antitrust actions. That, at least, looks like it might happen sometime relatively soon.

New comment by gcthomas in "Meta suspends Netherlands data center due to political pushback"

gcthomas — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 09:47:11 +0000

Austria is a simple train-ride away for the Dutch - it doesn't cost a long haul flight's worth of CO₂ to go skiing.

New comment by gcthomas in "EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants"

gcthomas — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 18:21:16 +0000

It seems that I get hit with the negative first order effects, and VCs benefit from the putative positive second order ones. No, I'm happy to have the legal eagles stop this without-consent data sharing, and if the corporations lose a bit of money, then that's fine by me.

New comment by gcthomas in "EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants"

gcthomas — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 09:41:41 +0000

It is the most powerful tools that I want restricted. the milli-second bidding auctions for ad placements and the tracking that goes on to enable that is unethical and illegal. There are perfectly good alternatives that don't abuse my personal data — companies should use those.

New comment by gcthomas in "Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests"

gcthomas — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 21:16:32 +0000

I'd be wary of taking a pilot's subjective impressions as superior to a technical analysis of the optical system.

Pilots may be competent users of these systems, but they are not experts at anything beyond flying their missions, in general. Experience as users is not the same as expertise under unusual conditions.

New comment by gcthomas in "Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored"

gcthomas — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 16:22:01 +0000

Is economic 'high achievement' the key sign of success, or a sign that wider indicators of a successful upbringing have been ignored?

New comment by gcthomas in "Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored"

gcthomas — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 16:19:15 +0000

Capitalist tech investor with piles of cash and political influence, yes. But is Musk a genius? That case really hasn't been made yet.

New comment by gcthomas in "Launch HN: Living Carbon (YC W20) – Trees that capture and store more carbon"

gcthomas — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 16:34:19 +0000

Trees don't absorb any more sunlight than an equivalent area of grassland, so I'd be surprised if mature woods sequestered any more CO₂ than grasslands did.

New comment by gcthomas in "Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019)"

gcthomas — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 20:44:25 +0000

Just be glad that the EU managed to unify the dates across the (then) 28 countries.