wanderingstan (u/wanderingstan)

wanderingstan commented on Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows techcrunch.com/2026/01/18... · Posted by u/toomanyrichies

wongarsu · 21 days ago

WhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else

The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche

wanderingstan · 20 days ago

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

wanderingstan commented on Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows techcrunch.com/2026/01/18... · Posted by u/toomanyrichies

munk-a · 21 days ago

In Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies.

I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.

wanderingstan · 21 days ago

Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

wanderingstan commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

emp17344 · 25 days ago

How is this Simon’s area of expertise? I know he’s a programming legend, but I’ve never heard anything to indicate he’s a machine learning expert.

I’m not intending to be dismissive, just noticing a pattern and advocating a bit of skepticism.

wanderingstan · 25 days ago

This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and regenerative braking; what matters is he knows how to operate these machines in their use case at the limits.

Hearing a programming legend weigh in on the latest programming tool seems entirely completely reasonable.

wanderingstan commented on First impressions of Claude Cowork simonw.substack.com/p/fir... · Posted by u/stosssik

mrdependable · 25 days ago

My imagination may be lacking, but what would you realistically use a tool like this for?

wanderingstan · 25 days ago

For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out the no-motion portions of the videos and stitch them together.

This would have taken ages to do by hand in iMovie, and probably just as long to look up the needed parameters in ffmpeg, but Claude code got it right in the first try, and worked with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold.

wanderingstan commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates

ecshafer · 25 days ago

People need to purposefully and intentionally do things. Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. There is no fear or rejection, there is no work to get out of the house, there is no risk. But there is also no reward.

My thoughts on this are you need to have multiple roots into your community. This is something that you go to often and talk to people, become a regular, say hi. Think back to how your parents or grandparents did it: They went to church/temple/synagogue, they went to PTA meetings, they talked to their neighbors, they were in clubs, they went to the same bar.

So I think doing things that get you out of the house, consistently the most important part:

1. People need to make a point to talk to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner or bbqs, make small talk. How towns are constructed now is a hindrance to this (unwalkable towns where all of the houses are big garages in the front and no porches).

2. Join a religious organization. Go to church, but also join the mens/womens group, join a bible studies class. Attend every week.

3. Join social clubs / ethnic organization. The polish or ukrainian clubs, knights of columbus, elks, freemasons. Go every week.

4. Join a club / league. Chess club, bowling league, softball league, golf league. Tech meetups, DnD Night etc. But you have to talk with people and try to elevate things to friendships.

5. Have lunch, happy hour, etc with coworkers.

wanderingstan · 25 days ago

> Attend every week.

In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount of openness and friendliness, you will get community.

wanderingstan commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates

rootusrootus · 25 days ago

I think what makes this good advice especially difficult is that it cannot be one-sided. When everyone is letting doom-scrolling replace their social interaction, then one person won't easily solve their own problem by going out to socialize. We need a broader solution, probably a cultural shift away from using technology as a crutch to avoid other people. Maybe the current younger generations will evolve a balance.

wanderingstan · 25 days ago

Yes, for years now I’ve had this creeping feeling that it’s a social version of the prisoners dilemma: if you’re the only one that puts down the phone (or gets off social media, etc) then you’re just left behind. It’s a coordination problem.

wanderingstan commented on The price of fame? Mortality risk among famous singers jech.bmj.com/content/earl... · Posted by u/ingve

hackeraccount · a month ago

I don't have time to read the article but did they do a control? I would be interested - and this speaks to my prior beliefs - about the life expectancy of people who tried to become famous.

In other words something like compare the life expectancy of people who don't play the lottery vs. people who win and then add in people who play as much as the winners but never win.

wanderingstan · a month ago

It’s the 2nd paragraph:

> Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=648) based on the matching criteria of gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre and solo/band status. We compared mortality risk using a Kaplan-Meier curve and used a Cox regression to test the effect of fame.

wanderingstan commented on Spherical Snake kevinalbs.com/spherical_s... · Posted by u/subset

Ecco · a month ago

Really cool game, but please please fix the viewport to prevent accidentaly zooming on the page on a mobile device!

wanderingstan · a month ago

Yes. And it’s so easy:

`<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">`

wanderingstan commented on Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022) devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/montalbano

GaryBluto · a month ago

Why didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or audio stream causing problems?

wanderingstan · a month ago

This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker of an event over 20 years prior. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond the key parts of the story.

wanderingstan commented on AI will kill all the lawyers spectator.com/article/ai-... · Posted by u/015UUZn8aEvW

OutOfHere · 2 months ago

Allow me to explain a contrarian position. Judges favor individuals that use an expensive lawyer for representation, even if there isn't much of a legal argument to be made. Judges give such individuals a far better deal. The reason for this is that hiring an expensive lawyer shows that you've paid homage to the legal profession with your wallet, that you support the systemic judicial-attorney-penalty complex. It grants you favors.

If now you were to come forward with an AI lawyer, in practice it'll be almost as if you didn't use a lawyer at all, as if you were representing yourself, which will get you the worst possible deal, if any. Things shouldn't be this way at all, but the system is crooked, and so they are this way.

As such, I think some lawyers are going away, but not all. The ones who stand in court will have business.

wanderingstan · 2 months ago

It’s an interesting theory, but I had to downvote as you didn’t provide any references for your bold assertion. Is there data that bears this out? And even if there were, how could it be distinguished from more expensive lawyers simply doing better at representing their clients?