I'm Canadian and when I see these stats, and see that they are rising, I get the sense that there is a greater number of people able to experience a good death.
I'm old enough to have experienced a reasonable amount of death and suffering caused by aging.
A grandmother I wasn't particularly close to, but who when I asked "How are you" on the phone, would reply "I wish I was dead". Great Aunts and Uncles who experienced Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and dementia.
And a cousin who just recently chose MAID after given a terminal cancer diagnosis. I applaud her courage and bravery. My nine year old nephew was able to pass along a message to her. "Have a good death".
Far too many people don't have a good death. More people should have the option available to them.
It's possible to balance both the value and importance of MAID with the need to ensure the system is not being abused and is working well.
This has always been the case, particularly for Facebook. Even when they acquired Instagram, the vast majority of the comments were negative (the top comment called it well though).
I do think that HN has gone from indie entrepreneur/ real startups to Big Tech and then back again over the time I've been hanging out here.
> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts
This isn't necessarily true.
It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3].
I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5].
With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license.
Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age.
And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app.
Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be.
EDIT:
I see now from the article the following:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be.
Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it
Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school
every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?
This seems like a different and fraudulent category of problem.
The point is that it's possible to create third-party authentication systems that require proving your age and the only extra thing the third-party learns is a verifiable age and the government does not get any information at all.
All this being said, I took a look at the article in question and saw this:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
So what could have been achieved with no invasion or privacy now seems like it must be achieved with an invasion of privacy.
aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name.
There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.
Yeah I think that's somehow cooler than the species. There are a lot of obscure species that get named for someone, but being the guy who named something that every kid is familiar with... that's pretty cool! (And I came here to post about that too).
I ported my primary phone number into Twilio years ago. Most apps/websites have no problem with a `voip` number type. But some systems, including Twitter, have refused to accept it.
Quite a few people asking about my experience porting my number to Twilio.
A few years ago I was frustrated about paying CA$100/month for my phone plan in Canada for unlimited talk/text and a few gigs of data a month. I realized I only needed the data.
I wrote an app that directs phone calls straight to voicemail and then emails the missed calls and voicemail transcription and mp3s. SMS messages are sent to email and email replies get sent back as SMS. I made this a product at https://ringer.io.
I also picked up two CA$15/month data only SIMs (3GB each) from Fido.
So now I could only receive voicemail and I would use Google Hangouts Dialer to make traditional phone calls, which was very rare. I have to admit it was awesome not having the ability to receive a phone call.
I used WhatsApp day-to-day for texting and video calls.
Eventually the need to receive calls kicked up a notch so I switched my number over to https://openphone.co for US$10/month. They are on Twilio as well so it was a painless port (ie: one API call).
The OpenPhone app is "good enough" for me. If I had to talk a lot using traditional phone calls I would pay for a dedicated talk/text plan.
But I'm happy paying CA$30/month for 6GB of data and US$10/month for the phone/text line.
Can you tell us more about your experience using Twilio as your personal phone number? I was looking at alternatives to Google Voice and Twilio seemed like an interesting possibility but I have been looking for someone that has tried it to let me know if it's worth it.
Not OP but I think I've participated in a group SMS maybe twice in 10 years and initiated none. I don't feel like I'd be missing out by not having group messaging support.
The problem is, you have no idea if you're missing out because you aren't getting them.
I use Google Voice and my family uses group text to coordinate things like dinner. I only knew about dinner because my wife gets the group texts.
GVoice eventually fixed the group text problem, but I don't get all the messages and I get them out of order. I also get other group texts with important info that I wasn't getting before.
I have no idea how many other group texts I'm missing out on that I might actually want to be a part of or was missing out on. Everyone assumes that group text works with all recipients all the time, and since it has no way of telling the sender it failed to deliver, no one ever follows up.
Depends on geography. In Canada it’s WhatsApp and Messenger groups. Never had a group text. Not saying it’s the same across the country but don’t assume that other are missing on group text, I could get group text and I don’t.
Does group SMS even exist? I know that you can send the same message to multiple recipients, but does it support "revealing" the recipients to each other? Or am I just out of date? I haven't sent a proper SMS in probably 5+ years.
It's extremely common in the USA since most people in the usa have phone plans that include unlimited MMS and SMS, third-party chat apps like WhatsApp never became ubiquitous here as a result of that basic functionality being available through the phone.
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
Although not strictly technical, this is a great talk. Bryan effectively communicates both the history and the mindset of Sun Microsystems and its open-source software heroes, and the bitter disappointment of being taken over by Oracle.
I love this quote (about 33:15) summarizing Sun Microsystems:
"It makes me very proud to have worked for a company for whom that is completely accurate. We should all be so lucky as to have that be our epitaph. That is all I want out of my life. That and my family. [...] That is Sun. But that's not Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill. (A very excellent Oracle rant follows immediately after.)
Oh Bryan Cantrill... (don't worry, not criticizing him below)
This is someone whose mind seems to be going at 500mph all the time. I used to love his (and counterparts') early talks on ZFS, but yeah, I've found that pretty much any talk by him is packed with interesting info, but you may have to watch it at .5x speed (even if you're a native english speaker).
His talks on dtrace, ZFS, containers, are all very interesting (most on YouTube).
How did I know that I'd find this talk at the top when I poked my head in here :). I must rewatch that segment at least once every 6 months even when not prompted by people linking to Brian's other, often more technically rewarding talks.
If that's the best technical talk you've ever seen, I have to feel sorry for you. Cantrill may rant all he wants about Oracle but he's not exactly doing better, with all the peddling of node.js to the masses. It is rare for me to see someone come up with so much bullshit in one talk:
https://vimeo.com/230142234
Since I don't want to end with a negative note, here is a personal favorite as far as best technical talks go:
Would you mind be slightly more specific about the "bullshit" in the talk you linked to? In particular, that talk is emphatically not "peddling node.js to the masses", but rather explaining why we are moving away from node.js (and attempting to do so in a way that is thoughtful and reflective rather than reactionary and dismissive).
Here is the expanded URL of the tinyurl link to halve the changes of getting a 404 or similar in the far future, and maybe allow finding the content via the Wayback Machine in case infoq also disappears.
I'm Canadian and when I see these stats, and see that they are rising, I get the sense that there is a greater number of people able to experience a good death.
I'm old enough to have experienced a reasonable amount of death and suffering caused by aging.
A grandmother I wasn't particularly close to, but who when I asked "How are you" on the phone, would reply "I wish I was dead". Great Aunts and Uncles who experienced Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and dementia.
And a cousin who just recently chose MAID after given a terminal cancer diagnosis. I applaud her courage and bravery. My nine year old nephew was able to pass along a message to her. "Have a good death".
Far too many people don't have a good death. More people should have the option available to them.
It's possible to balance both the value and importance of MAID with the need to ensure the system is not being abused and is working well.