They have a PR department, don’t give your time bro bono to spin it for them. With as many customers as they have, they’re in no danger of not being able to pay developers.
I’m with you on 1P. I bought every version starting in 2009, until the constant push to subscribe made me stop. The part their VCs should be afraid of is that switching took about 5 minutes (export + import) and the only change I noticed is that everything is faster. That moat is a trickle of water (I hope it’s water) and they’ve annoyed a lot of the people who used to be telling their friends and family to buy it.
> There is talk that Google's got some kind of extension that adds E2EE to RCS but others will be well informed on it and can add to my message.
It’s not just talk, but it’s locked down. Google’s huge PR campaign backing RCS has been very impressive at getting people to conflate the two but basically they have an RCS extension implementing the Signal protocol which theoretically could be implemented by anyone but it depends on Google’s key exchange servers which are restricted to their own proprietary app – even third-party Android developers are blocked.
It’s a PR masterwork, really. They’re honest on the technical white paper:
> E2EE is implemented in the Messages client, so both clients in a conversation must use Messages, otherwise the conversation becomes unencrypted RCS. In rare situations where the conversation starts as E2EE, then one of the clients migrates to a different RCS client or an older Messages client that does not support E2EE, Messages might be unable to detect the change immediately. If the Messages user sends a new message, it’s still E2EE, however the recipient client may render the encrypted base64 payload directly as message content.
They even had one of the most popular messaging apps 15 years ago - I remember when iMessage launched and people were predicting it’ll fail because GTalk was so popular. The mismanagement is just epic - so many botches trying to build something new (or make Google+ happen) because apparently nobody gets promoted for good stewardship of a product they didn’t start.
$2k/year is nowhere near even the direct costs of raising a child. Think about how much an extra bedroom and food would cost even before you get to things like childcare, education, increased travel costs, etc.
I’m pretty sure the basics were covered in AP Physics when I took it but have no idea what the curriculum was like when he was in high school. That said, I agree that it’s generally a smart ass answer but a) teenage boy and b) I would be incredibly unsurprised to learn that a child of academic economists who goes on to get a PhD might be the kind of insufferable high school student who reads ahead and makes sure everyone knows about it.
> Oh, so it might not be practical, without much math into whether or not it's an easy "only" or an "actually this would be far harder than other approaches" idea?
That part was eye-opening: had he simply gone to Princeton’s library, he would have learned that people have been studying this concept and had a far more precise understanding for how effective it would be than simply guessing. This is especially disappointing given the stakes: if he was right, the outcome is that we do it quickly and put the issue to rest; if he was wrong, billions of peoples’ lives are upended.
I also find it interesting how he correctly recognized that the problem is not simple fluid dynamics but then made two major mistakes assuming that he correctly identified all of the complicating factors and concluding that he had a more accurate understanding than the thousands of people who’d been working in the field for decades. This is practically insulting when he just asserts that climate scientists are staying in comfortable offices without verifying their assumptions, as if there are a number of fields where people are doing fieldwork to collect things like ice core samples, measuring ocean conditions, surveying plant and animal communities, etc.
This is, of course, a notorious intellectual pitfall for both physicists and elder scientists but I think in this case it’s more a question of insufficiently vetting information. He wasn’t just wrong in some novel manner but in exactly the ways that the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists were saying in the 90s and early 2000s, down to the decoy concerns about public health and disaster relief (both of which are becoming much harder due to climate inaction). This essay seems like a good example for how susceptible smart people can be to the message that they’re savvy enough to see something most people missed.
100%, it reads like 'I found a clever flaw and followed it up with an unrigorous conclusion because I was blinded by my cleverness'.
His conclusion that oh the soil can recapture carbon also reminded me of generally smart & accomplished but non-expert people online these days that lean on unrealistic tech solutions they just heard about as being an adequate mitigation for climate change. 'Oh just have ships burn bunker fuel again to put sulfur in the air', 'we can seed the clouds', 'we'll surely build technologies like carbon capture that will solve this'.
Rather than fall into the nerd snipe trap of trying to analyze these technologies and their deployment and effect, it's far easier to see it for what it really is: cope. People don't want to face up to how existentially scary and out of control things are in our climate, so they rationalize their fears away. It's understandable, but it's also not sound analysis, and can be safely dismissed as such.
I think your last point is really important. Once you accept that climate scientists are right, you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions and the things you’ll be doing less, not to mention all of the fun ecosystem and disease implications. It’s sooooooo much easier just to hope that the multi-billion dollar campaign saying business as usual will be fine is right, because otherwise you’re pretty much saying your children won’t have a world as good as you did.
> you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions
Been there
Done that.
Driving my car. That is it. I do need to get an electric car for taking the dog (and me) to the beech, then I am done.
* The vast majority of my food is local
* My clothes are natural fibres
* My electricity is > 80% from renewables.
The real problem is not lifestyle, it is systemic. I think it is bad form to blame people, who unlike me, have no way out of burning fossils. If we stop burning fossils, for most of us, our lives will get better, not worse.
Some very rich people will be less rich. That is the real problem
I wasn’t blaming people – it’s systemic (c.f. needing to buy a car) – but rather thinking about the inevitability of change. People like getting imported fruit in the middle of winter. We like taking airplane flights for weekend excursions. Tons of people want to retire to cheap houses next to the beach in Florida, coastal or barrier islands, etc.
Entire generations were sold on those being middle class ambitions, and we don’t have a viable path where that’s sustainable. That doesn’t mean we live in abject misery, but most of it is something which most adults were told was a sign of how much better we have it than our predecessors so it feels like failure.
Yeah, she was talking accurately about the benefits until very recently. The complete reversal using transparently-untrue claims should cost her the governorship since it also means nobody can trust her on anything.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think it will: NY's Democratic governors have historically received a "default" vote from the city's voters (especially when the governor themselves is from the city), and this will challenge that default.
Hochul also hasn't helped herself by spending a bunch of state money (i.e. city money, since the city contributes disproportionately to the state budget) on her own local, i.e. Buffalo, pork-barrel topics[1].
I live in NYC, vote reliably for the Democrats, and will certainly consider voting for the Republican if Hochul succeeds in killing congestion pricing.
Ah yes, good strategy, vote for the people who would never even entertain such a policy idea if not just move in the exact opposite direction. There's a reason we have primaries.
I think it shouldn't though. I feel at this point it's rational for liberal NYC voters to vote Republican, regardless of the candidate. The dynamic here is that state-level Democrats consider NYC totally safe, and because of this they consistently prioritize the swing suburbs over the city. The way to break this dynamic is to make the city less reliable for Democrat politicians.
I don't think city voters will swing for a Republican in the gubernatorial race, unless the Republicans field a Bloomberg Independent-type (which they can't, because their own base has rejected that kind of politician).
What's more likely, IMO is that overall city turnout will be severely depressed in 2026, and Hochul may find herself counting on an uncomfortably slim, demographically homogeneous, and purple suburban voter base. That's what she's used to as a Buffalo politico, and I don't think she's fully come to terms with the reality that that doesn't "play" at the statewide level.
The problem is that NY's governors are chosen in an off-cycle closed primary in which almost nobody votes. By the time November comes around the choice is between whatever apparatchik survived the Democratic primary and the mouth-breathing psycho that emerged from the Republican one.
The right-wing spent a couple of years demonizing mask policies, and the major talking point was that masks didn’t work. You don’t need that many people to flag-kill a story and there’s far more than that number who will go to the grave not admitting they were wrong.
In that case HN has finally strayed from its "hacker ethos" and objectively wanting to find out about any system over time at least; truth. Eventually right (even) in online discussions? No more. OK.
Maybe I've been thinking about this forum too highly for too long already? Probably.
Could this be another potential signal for the trend of the attention economy's created culture taking over in this turbulent and in many ways regressive global state?
If so, this is starting to feel "on rails". Scary.
I think of it as a consequence of the field expanding and becoming a high-income profession: with more people in total, regression to the mean is going to inevitably show up and the hyper-focus on capitalism bleeds through in many places. Mask mandates were proclaimed to be bad for business so a certain level of opposition is largely baked in.
> Evolving the methodology to suit the team, product, and company in an additive way seems the best outcome I’ve seen.
This to me is the core of agile: the people doing the work have the flexibility to adjust to match their goals and needs. So much of the consultant-industrial complex comes down to finding ways to helping business people who aren’t willing to give flexibility or clear requirements ways to not do that which don’t sound like saying no.
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