If can dismiss what he said because it's one data point then we can dismiss the original argument altogether.

I was under the impression that, like chicken, cows became less edible as time passed?

I don't think his comment meant "edibility rises linearly with age." I think it meant "it reaches a peak" and implicitly "and then declines from there."

There's only one way to get to the bottom of this... we're going to have to have eat a lot of crows.

No arguments now, this is science damn it!

He said "cows" not "crows."

Although you can open up a new branch of Science.

Exactly.

I disagree that this is a social media, I don't even look at the names of those who leave comments or those I reply to. It's like I'm reading and talking to the hivemind.

You don't get it. It's social media. You interact get upvotes(dopamine hits). argue and feel entertained through the screen of your device.

These things are all possible in iMessage. Is iMessage social media?

For me what puts Hacker News in the same bucket as Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook is that it’s a constantly refreshing feed of content that requires very little choice or initiative on my end to access. It’s always here, always novel, and I don’t have to think from a blank slate to figure out what I want to read, I just come and pick from the menu that’s been put in front of me.

I can contribute and participate actively by doing critical thinking and leaving comments but I can also read passively and barely even think my own thoughts. For me that passive version is the default.

I agree that social media is not the most accurate term. I wonder what a good alternative would be. “Mindless feed reading” could refer to the act of consuming it.

You are being pedantic. Yes, if you're in a group and exchange discussions which are low-effort(memes) and high-dopamine(outrageous views) you are in the cycle.

I don't look at the names of commenters on Twitter or Instagram, so those aren't social media either?

HN still serves as a source of distraction for time periods of arbitrary length. TikTok may also not be a social network, but it's distracting and addicting. The content on HN is just a bit more geared towards the intellectual (and The Algorithm is less powerful).

If I had to guess, I would say that the designers who have been in charge of Windows for years are twenty-something year olds who have never used Windows in their lives.

Since the Win11 taskbar "redesign" I'm also 100% convinced of that. They also don't use mouse and keyboard it seems (touchpad/touchscreen only).

That was also my guess given the massive flaws they never bothered to fix. Like search is unusable in windows. Clearly they are not consuming their own product.

Given that practically every family has at least one car, I don't see how this is useful.

I don't know if things have changed but the last time I tried SL the client was so rough and awkward it seemed like an alpha. Even moving was laggy and annoying.

The biggest contributor of lag is not having things cached or being in a laggy region.

On first connect, it used to be practice to go to a busy scene (a mall) and then go do something in real life for an hour or so while the viewer grabbed everything and cached it.

Regions can be very low lag or amazingly laggy, depending on a bunch of things (particulary misbehaving scripts).

The causes of lag in Second Life are complicated, and are, at last, getting a lot of attention right now.

I've been working on that with a multi-threaded viewer in Rust.[1] After I started posting videos like that, there was a lot less "can't do" attitude from the Linden Lab devs. Now there's a "performance viewer" project out of Linden Lab, using many of the same techniques. Key concept: the backlog of assets to be loaded needs to be on a priority queue which gets reordered as the viewpoint moves. Otherwise you bottleneck loading stuff that you were previously near, not stuff near where you are now. There's a nice B-tree solution to this. Once you have that, everything in close-up is present and at high resolution.

Hardware helps. 100mb/s networking and putting the viewer cache on an SSD will help a lot.

There's still a big problem server side with the transient load when a new user enters a region. A mall or event with a lot of traffic can slow way down. The server devs are trying for more concurrency, but it's hard in an old single-thread 32-bit C++ program.

It's striking that, despite all the "metaverse" hype, there are very few people, even among game devs, talking about the nuts and bolts of making this stuff work. The metaverse conferences are mostly about branding, NFTs, and moderation/censorship.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/sFPkECUxRUSxbKXRkCmjJK

They don't mean someone should put a fence to stop people from leaving obviously.

"Relax," said the night man "We are programmed to receive, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave"

We had this same thing before and Seattle residents used to call the people moving in from down south Californicators.