TFNA

7 ms·

91.
by TFNA 1mo ago
How do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but e
92.
by TFNA 1mo ago
Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a l
93.
by TFNA 1mo ago
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fa
94.
by TFNA 1mo ago
Sure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopol
95.
by TFNA 1mo ago
What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led
96.
by TFNA 1mo ago
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums
97.
by TFNA 2mo ago
Wifi passwords at cafes are often now given as QR codes, precisely because customers find that easier than typing the string in.
98.
by TFNA 2mo ago
CoMaps has been around for about just as long, as it is ultimately a fork of Maps.me. OSMAnd is great for nerds but scares normies. I'm active in a travel subculture highly reliant on OpenStreetMap data, and I have only pissed my peer
99.
by TFNA 2mo ago
As a fellow keen bikepacker (about six months a year), I prefer OSMAnd. More features relevant to our community, and you can install Brouter as a routing engine.
100.
by TFNA 2mo ago
I have seen so much talk of Bay Area "peptide parties", so at least there is some social benefit?
101.
by TFNA 2mo ago
People pining for the small web are a narrow elite in modern society. They are generally people who frequently use a desktop computer and enjoy reading (and writing) longform text. Most internet users today use a phone for accessing the int
102.
by TFNA 2mo ago
That is all well and good for individuals chatting with family, friends or small groups. But alot of small businesses all over the world are using WhatsApp for Business with features and data storage that cannot be immediately moved to anot
103.
by TFNA 2mo ago
Small businesses have complained about being buried in search results for long years. In some industries like restaurants, scammers create a higher-ranking website that looks like the real thing, in order to skim revenue. Not everyone has S
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by TFNA 2mo ago
"The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology." Meta owns WhatsApp, which is core infrastructure in many countries now where it has basically replaced the PSTN. If WhatsApp went down without
105.
by TFNA 2mo ago
> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere ar
106.
by TFNA 2mo ago
> he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberia
107.
by TFNA 2mo ago
I don't know if you have noticed, but piracy has declined greatly since the introduction of streaming. The scene is a shadow of its former self. The communities today that are keeping high-quality releases of canonical music and films
108.
by TFNA 2mo ago
Even if not all art, once something becomes canonical, it then becomes something that people should be able to easily familiarize themselves with for the sake of an educated and edified citizenry. And indeed, many countries subsidize public
109.
by TFNA 2mo ago
Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of m
110.
by TFNA 2mo ago
Within the former USSR, there is very, very little demand today for the socialist-realist works produced during the Stalin era. No one goes to see museum exhibitions of the visual art except as a historical oddity, and the doctrinaire liter
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by TFNA 2mo ago
In many countries, all major local banks require their phone app as the second factor to log in to the browser version of their online banking. Sometimes functionality is removed from the browser version and made available only in the phone
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by TFNA 2mo ago
Again, we are not talking about banks or banking. In my country one's bank app functions as the strong authentication used to log in to all the other services where one has to prove one's identity. And yes, pretty much every day w
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by TFNA 2mo ago
In some countries, authentication to a wide variety of non-bank services and payments is done through bank apps. The bank has done the work to verify who you are, so they conveniently serve as the proof of your identity to everyone else. &q
114.
by TFNA 2mo ago
I am an academic and do the same reading of books for hours each day without phone distractions. The problem is precisely the less formal environments where, instead of a serious book, I'm going to be reading news or other light conten
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by TFNA 2mo ago
This doesn't work for me in spite of over 10 years of trying. I am currently eating lunch and wasting time on HN on my phone, but my ebook reader full of edifying material is sitting there ignored on the table, right in front of me. I
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by TFNA 2mo ago
Students of Tocharian A and B have never learned them from the native script. The native script is only for a handful of experts working directly with manuscripts; even many linguists working with Tocharian data cannot read it. Instead, one
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by TFNA 2mo ago
I don't recommend any books written for the general public. Too full of compromises, oversimplifications, and obsolete ideas. I can only recommend learning the field through the same course materials used in training the next generatio
118.
by TFNA 2mo ago
I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being cal
119.
by TFNA 2mo ago
Reconstructing a PIE religion (as opposed to a few rather vague lexemes like "sky god") is regarded as less tenable today than in the past. The well-described features of Indo-Iranian religion are largely innovations and not found
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by TFNA 2mo ago
Historians today tend to emphasize that, even if the Western Empire ended in the fifth century, ultimately everything goes back to the Crisis of the Third Century. That took place with a short enough space that it must qualify as a within-o

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