No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

Mint uses an OAuth token (I think through Plaid). This is not the same thing as sharing a username/password, and is authorized by your bank, since they provide the OAuth flow; otherwise OAuth wouldn’t work in the first place.

Yeah, I think that’s probably more accurate than what I was thinking, and that leaving belongs to acceptance rather than depression.

I was actually aware of that, which is why I wrote depression/acceptance, meaning they probably moved from bargaining to either one of those, thinking either of those 2 stages could prompt people to leave. By fast-tracking, I meant that moved happened faster than they would have if the rebranding hadn’t happened. It’s still a fascinating bit, I have known about the stages of grief for a while, but only learned recently (like, this year) that they didn’t have to happen in order.

I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.

Yeah, to be clear, what the friend was saying that day is that they don’t even have access to file names. For them it’s 100% mangled data.

I would definitely consider file names to be personal information, that I would expect to be encrypted. If I store a file named “Letter to IRS for 2020 violation.doc”, then suddenly you know something about me that I probably don’t want you to know.

Oh that’s interesting!

Yeah, that conversation is much, much older, pretty close to the very start of iCloud file storage. I’m guessing either things changed since and they used to be end-to-end encrypted, or more likely, what the friend was complaining about is his iCloud infrastructure team didn’t have access to the keys stored by another team, and reverse. So basically, Apple could technically decrypt those files, but they don’t by policy, enforced by org-chart-driven security.

Now excuse me while I go change a setting in my iCloud account… 😳

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.

Summary: “oh no, startups are risky”.

I don’t hate it, but every time now that I get linked to a Reddit post, I look at the comments, and every time I get a little more shocked at the amount of low-value, hateful comments over there compared to here.

In other words, I don’t hate it, but I feel like it hates me.

Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169

The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.

Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.

No idea. I think they’re focused on being a newsletter, so my guess is probably not.

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HackerNews being a bit of a time-suck, I’m subscribed to HN Digest, the daily newsletter of only the top links of Hacker News.

Somebody posted another comment with the exact same idea, and I think y’all are under-estimating the amount of people who live under the poverty line (11%/~4M people in the US for instance), and the even larger amount of people who live below a living wage, and therefore all have zero buying power for consumer discretionary items, let alone having $100 to spend.

That’s an excellent point.

I’m not too surprised; but to take the example of one country, in the USA where I live, 11% of the people (that’s about 40M people) live below the poverty line, and that is even much less money than a livable wage where you can afford rent, food and nothing else. I’m speaking of the US as an example, but I’m sure it’s not an uncommon situation in other countries either.

My point is: a massive amount of people can’t afford to spend $100 on entertainment, ever. I spent some time with such families, and I can tell you it is not at all an uncommon thing. If they have a TV today, they probably got it for free from somewhere (possibly a dumpster), and it looks exactly like they did. That’s a massive amount of people who would desire this kind of upgrade.

Now is it the right population to serve ads to, that’s a different question.

That’s exactly it. When I was dirt poor, basically half of the people around me had a phone with a cracked screen, and a good amount of that also had batteries that didn’t last much at all. Not only was it a constant game of finding a public power outlet whenever you’d be out for a while, but even staying home, you couldn’t do much of anything that would drain your battery too hard. There was a thing at the time where some phones had batteries that kept turning off unless you hit them on the side until they worked again, but it was a while ago so maybe that was solved by manufacturers since.

It’s incredible now that I live in a middle class neighborhood, how literally every single phone is perfectly functional. It really does change everything.

Anyway, that kind of population would happily get a free TV with ads. Now whether it is the kind of population that those ads would be most effective on is another question, since they basically have zero spending power.

If you’re too broke to afford a TV, just watch on your phone or laptop.

Tell me you’ve never lived in poverty without telling me you’ve never lived in poverty.