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

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

And India too I think.

I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)

This makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.

Orkut was launched in 2004 too

That's wild, thank you. I could have sworn it launched in 2000 and was very much earlier than Facebook.

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.

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.

I googled "edit out no motion in video ffmpeg" and found a snippet from StackOverflow which did this in about 10 seconds.

yeah but that doesn't requiring paying Anthropic $100/m

Good luck getting that StackOverflow snippet to "work with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold".

The answer described the relevant parameters for the threshold actually and gave a range of suggested parameters.

> 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.

Exactly. It can take a month or more but the secret for me is to “become a regular” at places I like.

I'm open and friendly to everyone I meet but get treated like a weirdo and ostracized (I am also a weirdo).

You don't only have to be "open and friendly", you have to say the correct things in the correct way in the correct order in order for people to accept you.

That doesn't work for everyone and everywhere.

But it works for most in most places

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.

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.

Yes. And it’s so easy:

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

It has something like that already[1]. I'm curious what's wrong with that.

1. https://github.com/kevinAlbs/SphericalSnake/blob/b907738476d...

Presumably it has to be “no” instead of “0”

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.

I won't repeat it here, but I posted What I saw as an insider. I think that not all of the facts were quite right. However, some of the overtones definitely are.

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?