I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp.
I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).
It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.
That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.
Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US.
Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.
It's less prominent if you were already 20-30 when the first iPhone came out. In slightly-affluent primary schools, owning an iPhone was your inroad to a cult of iMessage games and insular group chats. If you didn't beg mommy and daddy to fork over $600 and tax to Verizon then you didn't join the cool group chats.
It sounds petty, but not very abnormal for growing up in America.
Respectfully, you can't extrapolate a single experience to _every_ "slightly-affluent primary school". Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes such as "did you just judge me for a green bubble? what sort of asshole thinks that's worth judging someone over?" (group proceeds to make fun of the iPhone user)
> Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes
I certainly didn't say it was the only outcome. I switched schools three times in my youth, and each place I went had different kids but the same materialist obsessions. Some people did mock the Apple users, for what little it did to get them into the iMessage chats. Every school I went to had an 'iPhone in group' though, and if you didn't have the right phone you didn't get to chat, period.
My larger point, which you really don't need to extrapolate for, is that Apple knew they were making a FOMO-based service that would predate on kids and adults with maligned priorities. They understood the social clusterfuck that they engineered, and marketed the hell out of it; because it worked, bragging about iMessage does sell iPhones.
Fair enough. I went to public school and (I believe) more people do in general. In my particular public school it was frowned upon to brag about your privilege as many had less fortunate upbringings. Mind you, this was still in a (relatively) affluent area - so general amenities were okay but many people still didn't come from extravagant or even mild wealth.
Excessive privilege really fucks with people's worldview.
Your comment is snide and unnecessary. Do Chinese walk around thinking they want to be more American? No they don't. Americans certainly dont believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them - typically go about their own business. Chinese may be influenced by western shows and movies but everybody is influenced by the shows that they watch. Why do Americans need to think about the rest of the world? Do Chinese think about the rest of the world? Your hatred really shows in your comment.
This has led to all sorts of opinions on the thread, which are all very interesting!
I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach.
I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work.
I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HOA, groups for birthday party invites (where you're asked to confirm attendance), a painter, etc. In many restaurants, if you want a reservation, WhatsApp is the only way. For people who work in Brazil (I work remotely for a company abroad), a lot of work communication happens on WhatsApp.
Again, this is not to say that not dong anything is the way to go! But I think abroad some people don't understand the extent to which WhatsApp is used here. Someone mentioned iMessage for instance and I don't think I know a single person who uses it. Most Brazilians have Android phones too.
I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should).
But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-).
I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".
For 1:1 conversations I think you're right. Having multiple channels for communication is fine.
Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.
In my experience, people who use Signal usually also have WhatsApp. It's really mostly that many people absolutely refuse to install Signal on their phone. Like they have all sorts of apps (including social networks that are sometimes downright malware), but they will fight against Signal for some reason I don't understand.
> (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should)
FWIW, as far as I ever could tell, Facebook did this correctly: the only real thing is letting a business have an account without a phone number; they then provide the software you can run on your server to be a WhatsApp client, so all of your user's messages are then end-to-end encrypted to your business. Yes: later on they decided they'd get in the business of offering a "hosted client"--which meant that, technically, if you used that service, they could see the messages, which caused a change to their terms of service, as a blanket statement that Facebook can't ever see messages isn't technically true anymore, which Signal threw a ton of FUD at :/--but anyone could have offered that service before (and could right now also for Signal).
> I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp)
Comments like these make me think it's probably more a problem of inertia. Of course they can still talk to family (visit/call/email/sms/fax/mail,...), and of course they can still do their taxes, they might just have to get a different accountant that does business outside of WhatsApp. This all would take more energy than living in this beautifully convenient platform that Meta set up for them.
you should still slowly push for more ppl in family to use signal. In moldova as example most ppl used viber, but moved gradually to telegram and whatsapp.
I've convinced my family/friends to use telegram in the past, but I'll slowly help them use Signal more. Changes rarely happen fast
Is there functionality whatsapp provides (even if it’s really unrelated to software features, just by happenstance due to its widespread usage) that signal doesn’t currently provide for? If so, it’s a losing battle. No one would go backwards in functionality unless the ads got egregious.
What you consider important may not be what others consider important. Seems like you know of other features that others find important you’re just not wanting to mention those because it undermines your point.
Non-profit and actually quite economically efficient per user.
Once WhatsApp was bought by Meta the writing was on the wall. I moved out of it immediately and I'm surprised people are caught off-guard by this news.
I suppose there's little guarantee Signal won't be sold, but an ultra popular app with no profit, owned by a single bloke (WhatsApp) was the last thing I expected to be a sustainable platform for my communications. Same reason I've never looked at Telegram.
Signal is open source, for one, so if Signal started pushing for ads, then someone could fork it into a new service.
In my opinion, the goal is not to find "the perfect monopoly". The goal is to be versatile. Right now, Signal is better than WhatsApp (be it just because it does not belong to Meta), and using Signal is absolutely trivial (it can even be used in parallel to WhatsApp).
I use Signal today, if in 2 years Signal goes into surveillance capitalism and ads, well I'll move to the next one. And then the next one. It's not like it requires a PhD to use a clone of a messaging app.
I had this problem some years ago. Eventually I just told everyone I would be uninstalling whatsapp on date XX/YY, which I then did. Some people installed signal and stayed in touch, others didn't. Life didn't change much.
Now I'd like to move to my own matrix server but I think appx 0.0% of my social group would follow me down that rabbit hole. :-(
More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.
I left whatsapp long ago when it was bought by meta, due to my privacy beliefs. I quit facebook in 2007 when i caught negative behaviour patterns. Im staunchly anti social media, however it would be dishonest not to note that it is lonely, organising anything is tedious, you have no access to the used goods marketplace (fees on sales platforms are too high). I dont really know if privacy is worth it. But tbh the thought of going back makes my skin crawl.
Last night I just removed myself from every friend groupchat and blocked everyone there, while leaving a status message about how they can reach me on Signal or call me. If they are actually your friends they'll come around, and families survived before Whatsapp existed. I'm also brazilian, I just won't stand with people dismissing what matters to me as if I'm a nutjob for not using their fascist app
I admire the conviction, but I think you're underestimating the social inertia that platforms like WhatsApp benefit from.
The unfortunate reality is that most people won’t follow you. Not because they don’t respect you or your concerns, but because the cost—in effort, friction, or just breaking habitual patterns—is too high. Social coordination is fragile, and it leans heavily on lowest-common-denominator tools. WhatsApp has become that denominator.
What’s likely to happen is this: group chats will move on without you. Events will get planned. Conversations will unfold. People aren’t going to message you separately to accommodate your principled stand—not out of malice, but out of convenience and momentum. You’ll be increasingly left out, not because anyone wants to isolate you, but because ecosystems don't fracture easily.
After a few months of being disconnected and missing out, there’s a strong chance you’ll reinstall WhatsApp—not because you’ve changed your mind, but because opting out of a near-universal platform means opting out of modern social participation.
This isn’t a defeat of principle—it’s a reflection of how network effects work. The only way to realistically challenge something like WhatsApp is if a critical mass moves at once. Individual protest, while noble, often just leads to isolation unless it becomes collective action.
Your predictions assume I live in a contemporary, "atomic", social organization where people aren't integrated in tight-knit communities apart from the internet. My core friend group meets a few times a week because of church-related activities at a fixed weekly schedule, to the point where if someone is missing with no explanation they get a phone call. Football night is also at a fixed, weekly schedule with no need for Whatsapp, and I run game night, so...
I was also reading some of the comments in this thread with incredulity. You switch messaging apps and your friends.. just aren't your friends anymore? Not being on a particular platform means you'll be "left out"?
I've seen a number of group chats move platforms because "we need to add X but he's not on imessage, let's use snap instead" etc. I have all sorts of group chats and contacts on various platforms and they move around all the time. A group being beholden to a single messaging platform sounds.. inflexible, and probably not the kind of people I'd want to associate with in the first place.
Yes, like ggp explained its not something people do intentionally to spite you but just how social interaction works.
But you could also turn your argument around if you wanted to - what kind of friend refuses to talk to you unless you sign up for whatever new app they found.
> This isn’t a defeat of principle—it’s a reflection of how network effects work. The only way to realistically challenge something like WhatsApp is if a critical mass moves at once.
This isn't the only way. The other option is a legally enforced (with real teeth) requirement for interoperability. That we can require device makers to support USB-C charging but can't require social media companies to play nice with others is absurd.
Because then they have the option of readding you to group chats and sending you messages
ETA: there is no way to really uninstall Whatsapp around here because so much of society runs on it, the most I can do is move all of my private existence elsewhere and hope that decreased traffic will do something
Please allow me to be devil's advocate here (and FYI, this comes from someone living in a country where government officials use [official state institution]@gmail.com to ask you to send passports and other info, and tell you they'll whatsapp you your papers when they're ready).
I have not yet been in a situation where you CANNOT skip WhatsApp - since having someone be your one-time intermediary is almost always possible. Can it be an incovenience ? Yes.
How much would this inconvenience compare to what my grandfather's grandfather would consider an inconvenience? Probably not much. (You mean, I had to twiddle my thumbs for twice as many minutes!? How difficult)
So in the end, you're asking people to experience what they consider to be a major hassle (having 2 apps) just for you, when you're not willing to go through the pain of having just one app. It feels unbalanced.
So please consider that people might be complaining that you're being too much of a Don Quixote, but actually, the reason it's not working is because you're not playing the Don Quixote card hard enough
We also did this, using change data capture and kafka to stream data to clickhouse as it gets written to postgres.
Clickhouse is incredible tech. We’ve been very pleased with it for OLAP queries, and it’s taken a lot of load off the postgres instance, so it can more easily handle the very high write load it gets subjected to.
I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade.
Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it, shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything, they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the experience of using those features has become significantly worse as new verticals sprouted up.
That’s because WeChat has really taken off in China. So there are companies in different markets trying to replicate that. And, well, from business perspective it does make sense. If you manage to pull it off, the reward is massive.
Yeah definitely. I'm not oblivious to the potential gain to the business. I'm just frustrated with the user experience of the core banking products. And it seems like this is the direction other banks might like to follow.
I have the same with my banking app here in The Netherlands. I don't know if they try to be a super app, but since a year or two they put all kinds of annoying ads inside their app and unnecessary notifications on top of my account overview. Just show me the numbers, I pay for your service.
It's the same with mobile payment. AFAIK there isn't a single bank left in The Netherlands which has its own mobile tap-to-pay app, everyone has switched to Google Wallet.
Good for them that they want to save a few bucks on developers, but why do I have to give my payment info to the devil? It's a third party which has nothing to do with the payment itself, and the fact that some banks used to have their own tap-to-pay apps shows that it clearly isn't a technical requirement.
Did a quick stalk based on your Brazilian name... I am talking about your competitor ofc!
I have an account with you guys too but haven't kept up with the developments at all. I do wonder what direction you're going in - particularly given the tech company valuation the US market has given ya.
Extracting this from my comment on a subthread to add color to the discussion here.
They announced in a blog post that they went from $1m ARR to $100m ARR in 18 months (Feb 2021 -> July 2022). [1]
Reuters in the article posted here reports they were at $500m ARR when they last raised in mid-2024, meaning they went from $100m to $500m in around 2 years.
One would thus speculate they are likely a few hundred million above the half-a-billion figure today.
The multiple still appears a little high to me (particularly given it's all-cash, which Google doesn't even have) but what do I know.
Sorry. I pulled my figure from the article in the post which claims "Google had $23.47 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of Dec. 31, implying it might have to seek financing for the deal."
Well 500m/year when they last raised in mid-2024. There are hints as to their growth rate from their post about their 100m ARR milestone [1] and thus one knows they went from 100m to 500m in two years (mid 2022 to mid 2024).
They're thus probably higher than 500m now although the multiple still seems really high to me. But what do I know.
Usually we keep the mainstream news out of here but felt I had to post this one because I've never seen anything like it and was curious to hear other people's perspective here.
To me it feels like a setup to look good in front of their audience without any proper desire to engage in true diplomacy.
Some of the stuff I've had to deal with building business to $100MM++++++ revenue give me stress and anxiety. I've been through so much shit at this point I think it's hard to stress me out. Watching that interaction between the 3 of them invoked a feeling I've not felt in a very long time, it was incredibly stressful. That was neither politics nor business, personally I'd have accepted either, but that was not those.
How many millions of workers endure endless shit and disrespect from their boss, but they get the job done anyway for the benefit of their families?
How many business leaders, like you, let slide so much shit and instead focused on what was important for their business?
Even if Trump and Vance were disrespected, suck it up like the rest of us and do the thing that benefits the entire country. They met to make a deal to benefit the country; Trump failed to make the deal.
That assumes that any amount of capitulation would have persuaded Trump to support Ukraine, and that any reasonable deal could have been reached. I obviously can't say what could have been, but every sign Trump (and those in his administration!) has given up to this point indicate that there's only one outcome they support, and that's Ukraine surrendering all or some of its land to Russia, along with a deal barring Ukraine from NATO.
I'm very curious to see how this comment ends up ageing. saved for follow up ;)
My prediction is ukraines got three options;
-Show europe that the US is an unreliable trading partner, and get them to commit atleast $500B, with SF troops coming to ukraine to train their troops.
- Make a deal with trump.
- lose their country.
Yes, and that's also the only outcome Russia would accept, unless Putin is replaced by a US puppet, which seems unlikely; such a puppet would be deeply unpopular in Russia and have great difficulty remaining in power.
The people in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk would also reject any deal that doesn't involve Ukraine surrendering some of its land, either to Russia or to some sort of Republic of Texas limbo-state. So, even if Russia were taken over by a CIA asset, fighting there would continue unless extremely repressive measures were taken.
So that sort of deal is the only way to end the fighting with anything resembling humanity, even though Trump supports it. Stopped clocks, etc.
I can understand, but honestly it was a mistake. I just scrolled down to get here, and there are no curious perspectives being shared or interesting questions being asked, just the entirely understandable and expected mass anger and frustration.
In an ideal world we could have a threat or two like this that would serve as outlets, but what I've actually seen is that having these discussions leads to them bleeding out into other threads that should have been unrelated. HN is going to need to more aggressively enforce its rules about political news if it's going to stay a haven for curiosity and not descend into just another place for angry politics.
Whether we like it or not, politics pervades everything. Attempting to keep certain forums sanitized and "apolitical" while a regime shift is occurring and people's civil liberties face very real threats is to live in an amoral and ahistorical fashion.
I have found myself lately to feel indifferent to many threads on HN that would otherwise have exicted me because of the insane world politics events which were occuring simulatenously but without mention. There is an intelligent crowd here, and important topics ought to be discussed, not just the latest hacker news.
I think a lot of people in tech unintentionally blind themselves to reality by obsessing over technology, and then thinking that is all that matters. It’s a behavior that is incentivized because it helps those with power utilize the tech-blind’s skills for their bidding.
spot on. I am continually shocked by the number of people I work with who will actively contribute to ends that are ultimately against their own best interests just because they are intrigued by the technical aspects of a problem
I disagree. There are lots of interesting things happening in the world, and the HN crowd does a good job talking about them. Those topics—the ones where HN has high quality conversation—are why I come to HN.
Since the inauguration the HN crowd has not done a good job talking about politics. Where we used to be able to have some of the best discussions and comments on political issues I've seen on the internet, the last month or two has consisted primarily of hot takes and aggression, and I can get my dose of that anywhere else, I don't need it here.
The crowd isn't some invariant. The people here and quality of their responses is a function of the kind of topics that get discussed here, the repetition these topics receive, and the grace others have in receiving those comments. You can't just neatly swap in the HN community and say "okay you used to discuss Elixr tooling now it's time to discuss US politics."
What happens instead is, people start getting heated at each other and vitriol across the site increases. Folks who don't find that grace anymore exit the site and folks who are heated stay. This attracts other people who want to be heated. This creates a downward spiral across the community. This isn't HN specific, it's the same thing that happened to pretty much every other public internet community once they started featuring lots of discussion on polarizing politics.
The entire reason HN used to be high quality open internet forum is because politics wasn't a huge part of its contents. But the site has been under quality pressure for some time now and ever since the start of Trump 2024 it's started going downhill faster than it was before. That's fine of course, if folks just want to battle out politics and shout at each other or cry out in anger they can go ahead. But it won't be the "intelligent crowd here" doing it. Those folks will go elsewhere.
As an example, this thread is ridiculously large (2818 comments as of this writing.) There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms. The only sense I can make of it is throwing the thread into Gemini and asking it to summarize it for me. The summary tells me nothing that my own thoughts and some social media comments I've read don't already tell me. So what has the "intelligent crowd here" really given us? I'm waiting for op-eds from the MSM and blog authors I follow to give me literally anything more rigorous than the slop in this thread.
> There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms...
Or you could, you know, jump from parent to parent and actually read the threads that interest you. I wholly disagree with your broad assessment. I have seen plenty of substantive, interesting comments in threads like this. Of course there will be duds, but that's equally true in threads about the latest front end web framework.
Intelligence and outrage are not mutually exclusive. Again, the world is not an apolitical place. If you do not represent and speak up for your own values, someone else will decide your fate for you. This forum, like all others is a chance to signal boost and stand for the values you care about.
The moderators have also done a good job of keeping the volume of these threads reasonable. Sure, on the new page they are rampant, for good reason, but only one or two max make it to the top thirty on a given day.
Agree to disagree. Speaking up for your own values has nothing to do with winning elections. For that, voters in R districts need to call their reps and tell them their mind. Internet comments don't win win votes.
One problem, which I fear you might be falling into, is that people who find themselves in a minority position tend to get frustrated and then lash out at others in ways that break the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Then they get downvoted and flagged, quite correctly (because, by hypothesis, they're breaking the rules), and often get sucked into a positive feedback loop*, in which they get even more frustrated and start breaking the rules even worse. Eventually they decide that the entire community is against them and that they can never get a fair hearing.
The conundrum is this: on the one hand, we want commenters with minority views on HN (because it's better for the mandate of the site) and we try (in our limited way) to protect them from abuse by majorities. On the other hand, we can't make it ok for them to break the rules just because they're in a minority. If they keep it up, we have to ban them the same way we would ban others who do that—it's not as if the rules can change depending on demographics, opinions, and so on.
The only approach I know of that has a chance of working is (1) to describe this dynamic to the commenter in your position, (2) acknowledge that there's a greater burden on people who are arguing for minority views, (3) acknowledge that this is unfair but also inevitable, and then (4) try to persuade them (i.e. you in this case) that it's in your interest to scrupulously follow the rules, even when other commenters aren't doing that.
There are at least two reasons why this is in your interest, even though it's hard to do under pressure, and unfair that minority commenters are under extra pressure to begin with.
The first reason is that it will make your comments more persuasive to open-minded readers. There may not be many open-minded commenters on hot/divisive topics, but commenters are a small minority of readers. The more you fall into the trap of venting at other people's wrongness, the more you're going to lose the larger, silent audience who may be persuadable. Worse, in cases when your argument happens to be correct, you're going to end up discrediting the truth that you're arguing for—which is bad for everyone.
The second reason is that if you scrupulously follow the rules, such as by editing out all snark, name-calling, flamebait, and so on from your comments, then if other commenters respond to you by breaking the rules, moderators are in a much different position: we can reply and ask them not to do that without getting a "but what about what they did?" finger-pointing response. Or if we do get such a response, there's a lot more we can say.
I highly respect your contributions to HN and your moderation work. Your post is thoughtful and well written.
It has been incredibly frustrating to witness multiple social networks fall victim to cult-like political ideologies over the years. Seeing that happen once again on HN is especially disheartening. Consider what has happened to Reddit over time—it used to be full of diverse perspectives, but now it has become a toxic, radical-left cult. The same dynamic appears to be unfolding here, and from what I can tell, it is worsening.
I realize I need to do better and avoid resorting to low-effort posts. I agree with what you've said, and I'm glad you're fighting the good fight.
It may be best for me to move on and find somewhere else to lurk—a place that has not yet fallen victim to this scourge.
How would you distinguish between what you csll TDS and sharing of opinions that are group of intelligent between collectively strongly agree on ...like the fact that Trump ran has run many scams throughout his life including Trump University.
Like how can some piece of negative information can be collectively held by a crowd without it being tds?
I assure you your allies see it. What’s funny is what did the US give up its leadership of the free world for exactly? The price of eggs? It took the British Empire fighting two world wars to lose its place! The US is collapsing and the experiment has clearly failed.
disagree. I’m here and not Reddit because I’m interested in the perspectives of people on this site and the information that is shared including on events as unprecedented and impactful as this one.
Can you point me to a comment on this thread that you found to be more substantive than what you'd find on a typical subreddit? I sure couldn't find one in the deluge of low quality hot takes, so if you have one I'd love to see it.
I don't disagree (in that I can't think of one either), but that makes this a terrible subject for an HN thread. We have other forums for collectively bemoaning the state of the world, we don't need that to spread to here. It's poisoning other threads in a really toxic way.
Curiosity and interesting questions won't have any future in the trump world. So yes, this is very relevant to the HN community. Doing nothing is also a choice which has consequences.
Everything is like that with this guy. He looks at the world through the prism of old-fashioned network TV ratings. You saw that during the infamous COVID press briefings (the bleach and light ones), holding the bible after the paramilitary cleared the streets in Washington, D.C., when he stood on the balcony after he had COVID, etc., etc.
It's the same thing here — he literally said as much today[1].
As a worldview, that is incomprehensible to me (and I suspect most people), but it really does help understand the choices Donald Trump makes. The spectacle — the attention paid — is what matters to him. How it looks on TV is what matters. How it actually is, is secondary at best, but often irrelevant.
He does a lot of things that "don't make sense" until you think of it that way. That the executive of a country as powerful as the USA perceives the world this way, and makes instinctual decisions on this basis without any credible effort to reason through the possible consequences, is of course very alarming.
As a US citizen, I'll admit that the "gravitas" of the USA as the "leader of the free world" was always carefully stage-managed. Still, it's depressing to watch momentous and crucial international wartime negotiations degraded to this reality-TV/pro-wrestling level, and so swiftly, for the whole world to watch.
> To me it feels like a setup to look good in front of their audience without any proper desire to engage in true diplomacy.
If that's what it was, I don't think it worked. I think rather that Trump and Vance manufactured a conflict to use as pretense to do what they wanted to do in the first place, which was to cut off Ukraine from U.S. aid. Whether it flies with the American public generally is largely irrelevant to Trump at this point, as he's not constitutionally eligible to run for another term. (He might simply refuse to leave in 2028, but he doesn't need an election to do that.)
That's an interesting perspective, do you have some links to better video? My wife saw it live, but I watched a 4min video from the BBC and it certainly seemed as though a lot of the aggression was on the US side.
The Kafka engine gets a little bit of hate (well, I haven't worked with ClickHouse for like 2 years now) but honestly it will go a long way.
At PostHog we were inserting something around 50M rows a day into CH with it and it was quite nice to be able to pause ingestion to a table by just detaching the table via SQL :D
I think they're still using the Kafka engine today but not sure. In our case (at least back then) we had to live with suboptimal batch sizes because we were providing near realtime analytics so Kafka was a solid fit.
The Chinese investment into strategic spots around the South China Sea & Gulf of Thailand is really interesting to witness.
I was at Sihanoukville (Cambodia) around 5 years ago and was surprised to find what was seemingly a Chinese city. There was a lot of dust, construction, and the city seemed like it was being raised out of the ground really quickly. Massive Chinese casinos and hotels were around and locals reported some casinos didn't even let them in. There were some whispers about shady stuff too.
I suppose if I were to go there today I'd find there are no more dirt roads and that the city is "fully built" given the rate at which these things happen. Would be cool to see.
I tried them out and found the same thing as the author. The fact that someone dared to take a different approach gathered them a large amount of attention at CES but the 2min demo had me a bit dizzy for a good 10 minutes.
You inevitably have to look up to see the display and it's also a constant struggle to aim as best as you can to be able to see what's on the display effectively.
It's important that people in the industry try and test different approaches though!
I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp).
It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard.
That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.