There is also one of my favorite talks tangentially related by Lawrence Krauss. He explains that eventually a civilization exploring the universe around them will only see it's own galaxy and likely believe that's all there is.
We are living in an extraordinary time where we are still able to see other galaxies.
I can imagine scientists in a couple billion years debating whether the historic records of other galaxies existing should be believed or whether one should dismiss them as crazy religious texts someone faked a couple million years ago...
(obviously by then we'll probably uploaded ourselves to computers and turned into totally different beings from what we are now, but the problem of trusting historic data still exists)
I know you’re joking, but I’m genuinely wondering, would that actually resolve the problem of (then) ancient forgery?
Our proof-of-work difficulty is trivial compared to what’s possible a few thousand years from now. So for people a million years from now to trust our records, they’d also have to trust people a thousand years from now not to simply have forged our part of the blockchain, which might be trivial for them given their hash power.
What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent.
You see this all the time. As a kid I posted on a forum Opa-Ages that was just weirdos banned from Gaming-Ages (NeoGAF).
This isn’t so much about free speech and moderation. You also need to answer the question of how to compete with Reddit with these facts in mind.
The only people who ever had reason to use Voat were those with unsavory opinions. Ok, you’ve banned all of your users. Now what?
So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?
There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good.
As for the next step, it looks less like starting a reddit competitor and more like building individual, independent communities that can stand or (more likely) fall apart from any others.
Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream.
For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.
I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."
"Discourse" and "Discord" are two different products. One a slack like chat app for gaming, the other is a forum software produced by that guy from stack overflow
discord and twitter, everything is just a messy ocean of piss imo, discord is not an iteration on reddit, maybe some people prefer discord to reddit but it is far from a replacement. It's a big JS-heavy chatroom (almost like new reddit...).
> So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?
The solution is to attract small communities off reddit. There are countless decent communities on reddit that have issues with the vast majority of the website outside their niche interest. If each of these small communities will have their own little place to discuss and share ideas without having the Damocles sword of the larger reddit assholery and bad design over their heads, I feel like there's a chance they'll move to a different platform.
I am planning such an alternative to reddit that targets these small communities. I hope it will actually be useful to people.
> The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent.
Other groups might be people who feel harassed by people who aren't banned from the incumbent. For example, I think Mastodon saw early large influxes of LGBT users who were getting tired of Twitter's lack of moderation.
(Though of course, Mastodon has seen other influxes as well that might have helped it get over a specific niche - IIRC many Japanese who had different ideas about what is tolerable than Western platforms, and of course techies enthusiastic about federation.)
Not necessarily. Reddit was riding the coattails of Digg for a long time until Digg actively alienated it's user base with a redesign. Also, MySpace losing to Facebook.
not really sure why you were downvoted for it. You let nazis openly rant in your bar I'd bet you won't have any normal guests there pretty quickly, it's just a broken window dynamic. Unmoderated, a few bad users will scare most of the civil people off.
“Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he tweeted. “I'll happily provide video commentary.”[0] - Dick Costolo, former Twitter CEO
Context: he's not saying he'll start a revolution, he's saying one is coming regardless. And he doesn't want to be shot as a rich person. Maybe he also doesn't like how tech tends to ignore the consequences of the decisions they make.
And your knee-jerk response is to defend other parts of his statement? It’s a perfect example of leftism amok because it’s a common one I’ve increasingly heard over the past few years about the indifference or glee to rich people dying.
We can easily flip this into a right-wing statement and it will be highly disapproved of.
“Right wing nationalists will think your statements excuse leftist tendencies towards violence, and shoot your for this in an uprising. I’ll happily provide commentary.”
There are a tonne of tankies on the site. Some who claim Holodomor was fake, Tianmen square was an exaggeration and the DPRK/China are heroes, Fidel Castro was a benevolent dictator and that everyone who escaped his regime was a slave owner.
Here is the secret: most leftists don't like tankies. Ban them as well I say! I people want to defend Stalin's murderous regime then I don't want them there either. Appealing to some hypocrisy here isn't super useful since the large bulk of people who don't want fascists on their webforums also don't want tankies.
It's also so vague, it's useless. There's "tonnes of <literally any type of person>" on Twitter. No presented evidence/claims that the number of them (relative to anyone else you don't like/don't agree with) is causing an issue, or that Twitter has a structural problem that raises the voices of tankies.
Yeah. People do. They get a lot of RTs (not in the millions) but I have seen tweets with several thousand likes and shares. There are more psychos like anarchists and some other buzzwords that are popular nowadays etc... one of them even wrote a book saying rioting is good because all businesses are inherently promoting white supremacy. I am not even joking. This article on The Atlantic covered the sheer lunacy of the person.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/there-no-d...
It's even more perplexing when you consider that some countries that today are strongly associated with certain ingredients (Germany and potatoes, Italy and tomatoes), didn't know them until a few centuries ago.
Synology 918+, (and presumably the very similar 1019+ and 920+) is great for this - at a fairly steep price. It really does 'just work'. I added more ram to take it to 12gb so that the containers had plenty of headroom.
I’m sorry, but you have me confused with someone else who is fantasizing about “a California with population levels pre-Gold-Rush, pre-Dust-Bowl and pre-Silicon-Valley”.
Ok. Are you a Californio old enough to remember Silicon Valley when it was mostly farmland? You’d have to be around 70-80 years old right?
If we’re talking about the conquistadors, can’t we lump them in with “Just very greedy overly ambitious and pretentious people”? They weren’t kind to the indigenous people. Even slavery wasn’t out of the question.
“Prior to contact with Europeans, the California region contained the highest Native American population density north of what is now Mexico.“
Native Americans settled in California 19,000 years ago or earlier, at least 18,500 years before the arrival of the conquistadors.
Given your own ignorance of history, I really doubt you’re even old enough to remember Silicon Valley when it was just a bunch of orchards.
If you really want to live in a place similar to California before Silicon Valley, there are plenty of states within the US that can offer that experience right now. You don’t need patience, you just need courage to experience it; that is of course if you were pining for less development and population density. Reading what you’ve previously written again, if what you really wanted was ethnic purity (which I misread as wanting to live in less developed areas) then I have other words for you. That type of post is not welcome on HN
California indigenous who settled and mestizos who colonized share the same haplogroup d dna.
They are the same people.
And for what it's worth the massive anglo/white immigration into California has been tantamount to ethnic replacement - not just in California but all over this continent.
So excuse me if I don't cry a river over fewer transplants.
So we're playing the semantics game now? Let me guess, you didn't make a racist comment. Instead you made a comment about ethnic pride? If we're playing this game, let's be clear on the definitions:
settle - to establish in residence
colonize - come to settle among and establish political control over the indigenous people of an area.
> They are the same people.
According to the Californios article you referenced, they are not the same people as the Native Americans who first settled in CA.
"Californios included the descendants of agricultural settlers and retired escort soldiers deployed from what is modern-day Mexico. Most were of mixed ethnicities, usually Mestizo (Spanish and Native American) or mixed African and Amerindian backgrounds."
Otherwise, (using your own language), the Californios wouldn't have colonized California
> And for what it's worth the massive anglo/white immigration into California has been tantamount to ethnic replacement - not just in California but all over this continent.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions of your comments being racist and no, I am not white yet I do find it ironic for one descendant of colonizers to complain about the descendants of other colonizers. I wouldn't be surprised if you considered Asians and Pacific Islanders as "invaders" as well. Also you're proving your ignorance yet again. Since you've mentioned your imagined "ethnic replacement" of Hispanics in CA (which the majority of I'm pretty sure are not as prejudiced as you - and let's not confuse ethnic cleansing with population changes from immigration & migration), let's go over CA's current or near current ethnicity statistics ordered by the largest:
* Hispanic 39.29% (This has increased from 36.6%)
* White, non-Hispanic 36.64%
* Asian 14.525
* Black 5.51%
* Pacific Islander 0.36%
* Native American 0.35% (they are not Californios, and they are still here)
* Other
> So excuse me if I don't cry a river over fewer transplants.
I'm not going to excuse and condone what I feel are posts from a racist reminiscing about ethnic purity in California. You do NOT post this type of garbage on HN.
> Why do you think there are so many posts about people wanting to leave California? Do you think it's really all about taxes? It's not.
From your initial post, I just thought it was about over-development. I didn't expect to be about demographics and ethnicity, specifically maintaining your idea of CA's racial "purity". Consequently, I was very confused when you asked me to leave CA.
> The prevailing rhetoric of California being "bad" is mostly political and has racist anti-liberal roots. By shutting down counter views you're allowing those racist viewpoints to prosper
Let me get this straight, by calling you out on your racist viewpoints, I am allowing racist viewpoints to fester? That totally makes sense.
Who cares if other racist viewpoints have white, conservative roots? Racism is bad, period, regardless of its origins, the ideology of the people holding those ideas, and whether or not it's systemic. As shown by your own comments, conservatives do not have a monopoly on racism either.
> And by the way, none of your rhetoric counters what is historical fact.
That's great counter-argument with no details or facts, other than the slivers you've previously provided that I've quickly shut down. I guess your newest comment isn't rhetoric either?
> The plurality of California are not Hispanic by pure accident.
Yes, CA promotes diversity, yet you lament not having a more homogeneous population. The only difference between your views and "America First" proponents' view is the ethnicity being supported.
> Lastly, it should be possible to have a rational discussion about demographics on this site without people over reacting and name calling.
Forgive me for pointing out thinly veiled racist comments on HN. It's a natural conclusion to assume that racists comments are made by a racist. I am not over reacting. I initially assumed good faith and gave you the benefit of the doubt for too long. You're just downplaying your BS.
Let's revisit your BS before you delete it:
"_You_ go to Idaho and Wyoming.
California is our state."
So apparently according to your view point, California is only for "Californios", Hispanics who originated from Mexico?
"My qualms are more with the demographic changes these massive migrations brought.
Just very greedy overly ambitious and pretentious people.
To me they make terrible neighbors and have zero regard for the land, nature or the people here.
Some I assume are good people but I haven't met any."
I don't even have to comment on this one. It speaks for itself, especially the last line. Since you're really into semantics, let's define racist:
racist - a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group with the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance
What does this non-sequitur have to do with anything written so far? With you alluding to be a liberal, you've just proven that racism transcends American politics of left and right.
> I hate racists too which is why I prefer not having them in my state.
I am sorry that somewhere along the way you were hurt so much that it would push you to blame all of your misfortunes on another race or ethnic group, similar to poverty stricken members of neo-Nazis and the KKK; but you need to have a hard look in the mirror and do some serious self-introspection.
Let's re-read your comments.
"_You_ go to Idaho and Wyoming. California is our state."
I didn't understand it at the time, but you were telling me that CA only belonged to members of your own ethnic group.
"My qualms are more with the demographic changes these massive migrations brought. Just very greedy overly ambitious and pretentious people. To me they make terrible neighbors and have zero regard for the land, nature or the people here. Some I assume are good people but I haven't met any."
Your comments in just a single thread, really just this specific comment, already meet the textbook definition of a racist. In fact, I can attribute what you just wrote to a white supremacist, and it wouldn't seem out of place.
racist - a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group with the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance
If you can't reconcile this and change, then I agree with your statement. I also prefer not having racists in my state and I like diversity because life is richer with it, so it would be nice if racists like yourself left California or the United States entirely, regardless of whether they think they are conservative or liberal. In fact, please leave HN. People with your ideology need to either change or leave.
Liberal by definition is anti-racist. A major tenet of liberalism is egalitarianism and it's what allows free market capitalism.
Maybe you should go educate yourself about what Liberalism is before appointing yourself the racism police on Hackernews.
I'm a liberal and I've said I prefer not having more racists in California with illiberal sentiment. That is the opposite of racist.
There is a long history of America enforcing white racial integrity which you seem to be naive to. As a native Californian I think it's fair to be weary.
I stand by not wanting more transplants in my state and it's not just me.
Tit for tat flamewars like this are not welcome on HN. Worse, you've been using the site exclusively for political battle for a long time now. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do this, and you've been posting so much of it that I've banned the account. I hate to ban a 10-year-old account, but the pattern here is egregious.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
1. Just because you feel that you're liberal does not mean that you are actually a liberal.
2. You can identify as a liberal and still be a racist. e.g. your ideals of "egalitarianism" only seem to apply to you fellow "Californios" and no one else
> Maybe you should go educate yourself about what Liberalism is before appointing yourself the racism police on Hackernews.
I've already proven based on your comments alone that you hold racist views. Let me remind you the definition of a racist again, since you keep forgetting and ignoring it.
racist - a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group with the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance
How do you not fit the definition of a racist based on your previous comments? Let me remind you that your very first comment for me was essentially, "Leave my home, it only belongs to my people (who are racially / ethnically similar to me)". How is that much different from "Go back to your own country?"
Maybe we should have HN decide who is right and who is wrong? Your views do not belong here.
> There is a long history of America enforcing white racial integrity which you seem to be naive to. As a native Californian I think it's fair to be weary.
You're not wrong that America has a long history of racism in favor of white Anglos. I'm not disputing that. However, I think you're the one who needs a history lesson, instead of believing in your revisionist version. While the Calfornios were mixed, being multi-generational descendants of both conquistadors and indigenous people, they were by and large culturally still the same as their conquistador ancestors. They served European royalty to take and subvert land and native peoples for the Spanish crown by any means necessary. The first Calfornios were soldiers. All of this is well documented.
"Spanish and Mexican rule were devastating for native populations. 'As the missions grew, California’s native population of Indians began a catastrophic decline.' Gregory Orfalea estimates that pre-contact population was reduced by 33% during the Spanish and Mexican regimes. Most of the deaths stemmed from imported diseases and the disruption of traditional ways of life, but violence was common, and some historians have charged that life in the missions was close to slavery."
The Spanish conquistadors' descendants were no better than their English counterparts when it came to colonization and brutality. "Californios" are also not the same people as California's native population.
> I stand by not wanting more transplants in my state and it's not just me.
The popularity of a belief does not guarantee that it's actually moral or ethical. Your views are not acceptable on HN and they do not belong on HN.
Please do not get involved in tit-for-tat flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Arguments like this are against the site guidelines and, when people get stuck banging their heads against each other like this, it's extremely tedious for everybody else. The only thing that works is to let go and walk away. I know that can be hard (believe me I know) but adding more mass to the pile only makes it harder.
The place this thread really went off the rails is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482753. Your first comment was obviously in good faith, but when you got an obviously bad faith reply, you should not have fed it. This is in the site guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." When flames aren't fed, they quickly die out.
DeFi is being able to trade unregulated equities or lend on their collateral on decentralized exchanges with transactions guaranteed by code.
In other words, it's for degens that think avoiding taxes on shitcoin trading is peak crypto.
There are other interesting things on blockchains that can be done outside of decentralized finance. But trading shitcoins is what people are getting off on right now.
It reminds me of how porn is almost always first in new technology adoption.
A lot of people complain about California policies, but I don't ever see anyone stop to think that maybe those policies aren't there to serve them. That is, perhaps they aren't the constituency those policies were implemented for.
And maybe America and certainly California don't need half the country moving to just one state.
I think if someone really owns this credo - “I’m using the government to improve my life at the expense of someone else’s property rights” - I could maybe respect that? At least it’s consistent.
None of the people I’ve encountered who oppose housing construction seem to see things this way. Most of them seem to be economic conservatives who see themselves as having won a “fair game” and the fact that they’re using the government to strip others of their property rights - rights to build, rights to house - is lost to them. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and post-hoc rationalization in this group.
It's a mutual agreement to strip each other of troublesome property rights. These people aren't exempting themselves. They want to prevent tragedy-of-the-commons troubles, spite houses, and other anti-social troubles. They mutually agree (government) to prevent anybody from making the place miserable.
Thus there is no right to build: an 80-story apartment tower, a supervised injection place for IV drug users, an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant.
The demand is there for even more restriction. In many areas, new housing is exclusively in home owner associations or in condominiums.
To be fair, all of the Enron shorts lost their shirts until they didn't. I'm not saying that TSLA is an Enron, but using performance thus far as an indicator of likely performance into the future is a famously poor idea.
TSLA has famously bad QA issues, etc etc I don't need to go on. Few (including some of those who are holding TSLA stock right now) would say that there is meaningful justification for the current valuation.
The impression that other car manufacturers make right now is that they're playing catch-up while Tesla has been getting the electric part of the car right for years (while having issues with the rest of the car, as expected).
There's a good chance that "old" manufacturers with decades-old processes will have a harder time adjusting to an electric world than the hard time Tesla will have figuring out the rest.
Also, Tesla isn't just a car company, they're also a energy storage company. Which I suspect is a massive market too.
> I just don't see much more innovation outside battery tech happening.
This is where I feel the self driving part will come in.
1) First to market and length of lag for other manufactures there.
Imagine there 2 car companies with working self-driving 10+ years before others can catch-up. That will shift the market for domestic and commercial.
2) Self-driving safety stats - this is going to become huge when there are self driving choices.
If one company can say 'we are half as likely to have an accident' type marketing, this is going to become a new and significant factor in vehicle purchase, more so than safety rating are today (I believe anyway) as we are taking out the 'Im in control of my experience' factor.
3) Self driving will flow to other innovation. Cars will no-longer need to be 4 seats facing forward. Huge opportunity to re-think transport once you dont need a driver seat.
> There is a herculean effort by every car manufacturer in the world to compete for Tesla's electric car market share.
Can you link to some sources, please?
The only one that actually seems like it might be going into Volume production is the VW ID.3. There are plenty of articles from 2019 talking about how they'll be building TONS in 2020... but there are no articles in 2020 talking about how many they've built.
No other auto maker has any EV on the books they plan to actually mass produce, they're all just "limited volume".
Are there really no articles, or do HN news crowd simply don't read them? Doesn't fit the "Musk is taking us to Mars" narrative present on this site these past 5 years.
Volkswagen’s ID.3 Leapfrogs Tesla, Renault In October European EV Sales Charts
The Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf, and BMW i3 have been in heavy production for years for example. And in many countries (especially Europe) they outsold Tesla.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo