Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch to Cingular and pay thirty dollars for a data plan!" (Keep in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!)
I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to admit by 2008 that I wanted a smartphone instead of this second device with a stylus.
In those days though, browsing the web as though you were on a desktop was thought to be the goal to aspire to. Even the iPhone launched with the default behavior in Safari being showing whole desktop webpages, and you zoomed in to the parts you wanted to use. It took a year or two for people to figure out 'responsive' and within 4 years most sites were starting to be designed for small portrait screens. At that point the landscape N800 style was at a disadvantage since the mobile sites being designed to be a little leaner, were the wrong layout, but the desktop sites were pretty heavy for a mobile device to handle. And as "apps" ate the world that probably put the final nail on our little N-series.
Indeed. The success of even one such prosecution means that the second someone in government wants someone out of the way, they can efficiently be imprisoned for anything rising to the level of... "offensive."
Okay, so I see we've arrived at fantasyland now. Just because someone probably posted an idiotic idea like that on Twitter one time does not mean it has any path to becoming law. Do you know how difficult it is to get a constitutional amendment passed?
I agree that it's not currently reality and the person you replied to could have made their point by using actual examples of appalling ICE actions rather than a scenario that's currently just fantasy.
That said, it's not just "someone posted an idiotic idea on Twitter". The idea of stripping people of their citizenship has literally been suggested by the current president to a press gaggle, and that's not a one off random statement it follows years of things like prominent political voices suggesting that certain Muslim members of congress should be deported despite their having been born in the US...
As to the technical difficulties of passing a constitutional amendment, I agree it's hard to imagine that happening. Depressingly though it's less hard to imagine the president signing an executive order telling ICE to go against that part of the constitution, followed by one or both of ICE actions outpacing judicial ability to enforce the constitution, and/or judges ruling in favour of ICE being allowed to ignore the constitution.
These are possibilities that, if suggested 30 years ago would sound like crazy conspiracy theory territory, but in 2025 they're actual plausible scenarios looking at the coming months, yet alone years. I wish this was just scare mongering, but the truth is if you don't think this is possible then you haven't been following US politics closely enough - from the words of Trump and his team, such as Stephen Miller, to the actions of agencies such as ICE and the FBI, to rulings of the Supreme Court such as the one giving Trump unqualified immunity that anything he does as a work act rather than a personal one can't be treated as illegal, even if it goes against the constitution.
You're totally right that it would be easy from a tech perspective to do that. it's a shame that:
(A) most people cannot grasp how it could be that "GovSSO" can attest "This person you just sent our way just logged into GovSSO [with biometric 2FA], and they are at least 16 years old" without the receiving system having any way of knowing who that citizen is or even whether they're 16 or 99.
(B) very real terrible government policies the UK has (like jailing people for speech, and like demanding encryption backdoors that compromise the security, at minimum, of the whole of every British citizen's devices, and at worst every device in the world) incline anyone who's paying attention to assume that the government will somehow use anything related to "ID" and "internet" to do idiotic things like figuring out who owns a Twitter account that committed some wrongspeak so the bobbies can come round them up.
Nobody’s vilifying the homeless. Tons of homeless people are perfectly fine human beings who don’t bother anybody. Unhinged and dirty drug addicts on the other hand, are pretty categorically unpleasant. If you enjoy being around them, you can let them move in with you and then they won’t be homeless anymore.
Thirding this observation. Inner city fast food has been - nearly universally - a horror show since at least 25 years ago when I first experienced it. I expect it will continue to be like that forever. I also suspect with them being allowed to take EBT (since maybe 10-15 years ago?), that provides enough revenue that they won’t pull out of those places completely.
That last part does sound like a bad deal based on recent anti-owner-control habits like sealed immutable system volumes, but I definitely want to be constrained to a single system cert store controlled by the owner of a computer. Which works for the corporate case as well as the personal one.
> Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
I highly agree with you - and that’s coming from someone who can’t stand the Democrats[1]. Things like announcing all of a sudden that he opposes a merger when everybody knows Kushner is involved with a rival bid… it’s too obvious how much corruption is his very operating system.
[1] (I didn’t vote for either candidate for President, but I’m not in a swing state so I’m not sorry)
The lesson from Mamdani is that the only way forwards for actual policy based and anticorruption politics is within the Democrat primaries. These are even run by the state in many states, I believe.
Eradicate the Republican party as an organization, split the Democrats into "normal right" and "maybe a bit left" factions, and see if you can get preference voting in there as well while asking for a pony.
> It is the year 2035. The average "Hello World" application now requires 400MB of JavaScript, compiles to a 12GB WebAssembly binary, and runs on a distributed blockchain-verified neural mesh. To change the color of a button, we must query the Global State Singularity via a thought-interface, wait for the React 45 concurrent mode to reconcile with the multiverse, and pay a micro-transaction of 0.004 DogeCoin to update the Virtual DOM (which now exists in actual Virtual Reality).
This is all too realistic... If anything, 400MB of JS is laughably small for 2035. And the last time I was working on some CI for a front-end project -- a Shopify theme!! -- I found that it needed over 12GB of RAM for the container where the build happened, or it would just crash with an out-of-memory error.
Picture me in 2007. "The iPhone. Psh. Like I'm going to switch to Cingular and pay thirty dollars for a data plan!" (Keep in mind that's $47 in today's dollars!)
I would use my N800 and Bluetooth-tether to my Verizon flip phone when on the go. It was mildly useful for things like LiveJournal and I'm sure the Twitter of that time would have worked on whatever browser Maemo had. But I had to admit by 2008 that I wanted a smartphone instead of this second device with a stylus.
In those days though, browsing the web as though you were on a desktop was thought to be the goal to aspire to. Even the iPhone launched with the default behavior in Safari being showing whole desktop webpages, and you zoomed in to the parts you wanted to use. It took a year or two for people to figure out 'responsive' and within 4 years most sites were starting to be designed for small portrait screens. At that point the landscape N800 style was at a disadvantage since the mobile sites being designed to be a little leaner, were the wrong layout, but the desktop sites were pretty heavy for a mobile device to handle. And as "apps" ate the world that probably put the final nail on our little N-series.
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