Viewing profile — TFNA

Talk to younger people (and not only) today about the way they use the internet. Many of them no longer visit third-party websites at all. They only use walled gardens through dedi…

MySpace was notorious for people with social problems who weren't getting out much. Bedroom musicians were able to share tunes and get buzz that they wouldn't have been able to ach…

Disagree. I think with modern tech China has built a surveillance panopticon that will continue to ensure social harmony through any economic downturn, and this is precisely the mo…

Almost every discussion here on HN about those "deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research" has been about how, when you actually dig into the data,…

I meant more generally: many countries are recognizing, just like China has, that the fundamental challenge of our modern era is ensuring social harmony. The OP's belief in individ…

"I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny." I don't think this kind of rhetoric about individual civil li…

Claiming that Sahrawis benefit from a great welfare state, when their businesses have so often been confiscated and handed over to Moroccan settlers, is appalling.

In spite of the craziness of the Berm, the funny thing is that the vast majority of foreign travelers passing through have never heard of it. It is out of sight of the Moroccan hig…

Dakhla and environs is also known for hundreds of elderly French, Italians, and Germans who spend winters down there in their camping cars. This was already a very developed scene …

Though I stay home for 4-6 months a year (I love cinema from my projector and physical books too much), I've spent the rest of my adult life traveling the world by bike, and I'm ne…

Universities in certain countries have strict ethical standards that require consent and crediting informants. These standards were often inspired by working with indigenous inform…

The language-learning publishing industry is something that I happen to know well: the number of bookstores in the world that one can walk into and find a Mongolian textbook, is ab…

In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and y…

This is Ceuta, an exclave. They didn't arrive on any shore. And often migrants who arrived by sea already paid all their money to smugglers and don't have lots of money to confisca…

In 2026, the way that friends who don't see each other at work/school arrange to meet and maintain that friendship, is via WhatsApp or the local equivalent.

Reddit hasn't really facilitated friendships (let alone the kind leading to real-life meetups) since the 2018 redesign at least; even before that the site was remarkably impersonal…

Real-life friends are ditching each other commonly these days, because the Block function on Whatsapp (or whatever app they use to communicate) seems so convenient and consequence-…

On the other hand, why care what the American founding fathers thought? There have been two centuries since then of developments in democratic countries that some Americans could c…

Me, I've embraced occupational pubgoing as a childless person in my forties because unlike other social activities, it is a way to avoid boring people with children. At least in my…

French filmmakers have been criticized within France for white-only casting going back to at least the 1980s. By the time that sub-Saharan African, Arab and Southeast Asian faces w…

"Which books are in copyright, not being published, and contain unique valuable knowledge?" Most works in a large number of academic domains from the twentieth century. In my own f…

Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium i…

The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of …

I used Old Reddit for a long time, but I could tell the vast majority of users were on the app now, just because the comment culture had changed completely. For example, posts now …

Today the vast majority of people I know rarely use the browser on their phones. They interact with the internet through apps from various walled gardens, and even for news on the …