Love your username if only because it reminded me of that grad algo class and Prof, some hilariously awkward dude who invented some quantum alkhwarizmi, started ... "There was this guy ... Named Al Khwarizmi. Al..Khwarizmi Alkhwarizmi Hehe. Get it?" he also once started the class with a lecture for a different class and everyone was confused till the TA intervened. convinced it was all precalculated comedy of errors.

You may have convinced me that this phone tapping thing may, and I am being super serious here, lead to something much much bigger than mere social networks.

I am convinced that this weird Phone Tapping thing may be the next evolutionary step from both social networks and the dead Internet theory (evolution not meant jokingly i.e. both naturally selected and the baby only got the recessive regressions).

The real solution hinges on maybe a future Turing award or Fields medal on physical cryptography for auth/integrity/privacy... but even without that. This is how Facebook got its "grassroots" userbase, from elite students verified via .edu email.

If a Friendster 2.0 actually doubles down on this physicality, and actually concentrate its efforts on making the very act of having to RE-TAP the physicality of a social connection, for example your friends may have an option to fund your trips to meet together if about to get disconnected.

Or of course it might end up being Facebook 2.0 and sell your Physical data to Cambridge Analytica 2.0 to make Grok beta emperor of Great North America CoProsperity Sphere

Is your name based on Pale Fire by chance?

Love it, also love how Datenschatten can also imply that it disappears when someone shines light on it

If only our past 20 year old self data could be so ephemeral…

Who doesn’t want that old post going extinct forever when they were shit faced outside of a bar in Nashville but now they are in their mid-life and are “respectable” members of society.

Heya. At first I wanted to pile on the negativity due to really. Really bad red flags from the title alone signaling slop, sociopathy (calculated sensationalism), sociopathy (guiltless artificial scarcity peddler), and some really big "Gretchen stop trying to make Friendster 2 happen" energy. But as a longtime HN lurker who lost my first account and now have to carry the "account created after 2022" stigma when I had been training GPTs in my own slop in 2018, I value a storied post history pre-dead internet and it may be your best investment yet. (also you have shared positive posts about some things I like).

So just wanted to say I am rooting for you and I may be able to provide some acutely specific but embarrassing input(s) about how a Friendster 2 can happen, based on my Friendster 0 experience (it is definitely not about breaking up in high school where deleting profiles sends the news rippling to the whole universe) (it may involve learning that Indonesian black hats were scary and many and also how the social graph was uncached and always computed server side per profile visit). Now that you own the "Friendster" trademark, I hereby greenlight your soci-emdash-ability to manipulatively hint at the "possibility" of restoring profiles via the Friendster archive project, but keep it as a possibility until you big enough the patent trolls be phone tapping (this is really weird)

It's not a search problem it's a grammar problem: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html

JG Ballard's Crash led to Baudrillard's brand of Postmodernism (Hyperreality/Simulacra entering pop culture especially with The Matrix) and iirc Ballard was weirded out by Baudrillard's analysis of Crash (which, you know, is saying something when Crash is car crash erotica). Wikipedia claims Nabokov's The Eye+Despair to be the proto/first "postmodern" novel that led to Pale Fire that led to works like Pynchon's V and Wallace's Infinite Jest and Danielewski's House of Leaves etc. though those mainly apply Postmodernism to form, whereas Crash questions the nature (i.e. natural/"original"/"correct") of biological arousal when the object is a literal car crash.

Amazing recommendation! I was hooked by that most powerful New York Times Bestseller endorsement but in 1600s. "Many say: I wanted to learn, but only found madness. But those who seek wisdom will not find it elsewhere."

Just joined the "family member battling neurodegenerative disease" club and plunged into resigned frustration when I could not find even some vibecoded assistant that does the simplest critical dementia caregiving tasks proactively, and ChatGPT and Gemini voice subscriptions dont have that capability yet. My mom thankfully still has at least perhaps a 1 hour attention window. It's enough for her to read an old, long letter I wrote about her life for mother's day reminding her about how she lived her life sacrificing for her family and how she always worried for everyone else but herself (to a fault). She lives with my sister but she is closest to me and I still have a lot to learn on how to deal with this illness from her psychiatrist especially the acceptance part. I have been spending most of my free time face timing her. Grateful for anyone who could share existing solutions that are already available.

I don't have any useful advice, but I do have a hug from an internet stranger.

Was hoping to find that good end in your story and found it, happy for you. I'm thankfully healthy but found myself in an adjacent circumstance as the child of a newly diagnosed dementia patient who forgot who I am. I was able to reintroduce myself and she has not forgotten again so far but she is at the point where she will believe anything without ground truth as basis. I find myself clamoring for time with her, pioritizing FaceTime calls with her over anything else, as each time I talk to her I can sense her drifting away. I don't mind her forgetting about me, which finally convinced the psychiatrist who said she didn't have a problem the previous year that yes she is in stage 5-6 dementia after all. She woke up once not knowing who she is, and that is something I can't have her forget. This is the closest I've experienced something like what you've survived through and what op is going through, something that puts Everything in perspective. So I'm thankful for threads like this on HN especially given this point in history where everything is happening all at once, which makes this Total Perspective Vortex (HHGG) thing all the more epiphanic (the TPV in HITCHHIKER'S was meant to destroy you by showing you the evident infinitude of your insignificance, but the reality of mortality just shows an indifferent universe being equally, coldly, largely ignored)