I thought everyone learned the Mercator use case in school? It is for marine navigation. A line of constant bearing will always appear straight on it. If you want to see the relative size of continents that's a different use case and you need a different projection.
Apps with maps use a specific and different Mercator projection which produces a nice quadtree for dynamically loading data. This is possible with other projections too, but reprojection and training users to expect a different looking map is expensive.
Almost nobody plots courses of constant bearing on a map. Almost nobody uses a map to measure area either.
99% of the use cases for maps these days are for local navigation where artifacts are minor. The differences in map projection are basically irrelevant to users in these cases.
A line of constant bearing will always be a great circle. A straight line on a mercator projection of the earth does not constitute a great circle (in fact only the equator line is a great circle and each vertical line is half of a great circle).
> A line of constant bearing will always be a great circle.
That's not right. Imagine heading due West, and keeping your compass pointing West every step anywhere not on the equator. That traces out a longitude line, not a great circle.
If you follow a constant compass heading you will spiral toward the poles in a helix, not travel in a circle around the globe. To travel along a great circle, your compass bearing must constantly change as you move.
I mean even for marine navigation, you use digital solutions now. But paper charts people would use before aren’t exactly zoomed out to show the whole world. So I feel like this whole world Mercator projection hasn’t been very relevant for a long time, even for navigation
I've begun and abandoned a "modern take on finger" a couple of times. Sits in the pile (folder) of unfinished projects and at the back of my mind cluttering up the synapses. The reason I began thinking about this... my dissatisfaction/annoyance with all the dark patterns, mode of participation, and ensh*ttification in social networks. I began using UNIX in the early 90s when finger was still quite useful, and yes we did connect it to a named pipe for all sorts of fun (like a finger to SMS gateway).
Once had a lengthy battle with a marketing person. They attempted to change "uninterruptible" (as in Uninterruptible Power Supply) into non-interruptible, and then finally into interruptible. Took the best part of a week to get it fixed.
I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Well that's kind of understandable, isn't it? In the USENET era, internet users were a subculture.
In 2026, almost everyone is an internet user.
It's kind of like saying "As someone whose first car was a Model T, I don't really consider the bulk of mainstream drivers today to be in any way 'my people'".
Exactly. If you were on USENET way back, you were a fucking nerd (lovingly). People romanticize that because it was very likely with any given group of people, they could strike up some kind of conversation, and they likely shared at least a few central values. Now the Internet is just outside with better moderation tools and curation.
I will say though the GP's comment:
> The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
That's just everybody, including them even if they refuse to admit it. I have fond memories of many a circus on USENET, on ICQ, on AOL chat rooms, on 4chan, on Digg, everything. They all have circuses with different sorts of clowns putting on different sorts of shows. But they're all equally value-free. Pretending otherwise is just wanking yourself.
Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.
I'm not old enough to have experienced Usenet. For those who remember Usenet: Do you believe that Eternal September was a failure of cultural transmission? Or was it more of a human capital thing? (Early adopters/academics tend to be better-behaved users?)
Another way of thinking about it: Suppose the exact same userbase had joined Usenet, but they trickled in gradually instead of flooding in all at once. How much would that have changed the outcome?
FWIW I used to think it was human capital, but have updated more towards cultural explanations. For example, it seems fairly common for academics to make fools of themselves online nowadays.
I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an echo of it (not on USENET, but on forums and other places) with the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and another with the mass take-up of Internet services in 2016 on the Indian subcontinent by a huge population.
In fact, the people I see during my walk out are more my people than those I meet on the Internet. They speak my language, are immersed in my culture, and find local neighbourhood problems very relevant.
Then I go online, and there's a high likelihood I encounter people from other countries; worse is when you don't even enjoy a little bit of multiculturalism, but all you experience is a majority of people from one country which isn't even yours - like being on this site or Reddit or Twitter and being bombarded by the US perspective of US matters.
It's easy for terminally online people like me to forget who even are your people.
I don't see this happening, but I really wish that the Mastodon model centered on joining your city's local Mastodon server. Your server is centered on local people and local conversations. Maybe one would find this local community sort of annoying, but it would be at relevant, at least some of the time.
From there, you can connect with other individuals on other servers with similar interests or whatever. But your online identity would be rooted to where you actually live.
Time to move to a new city? You just migrate to a new Mastodon server. Makes sense.
As it stands now, Mastodon servers are primarily centered on some kind of shared interest, but I don't think that makes much sense. I am a person with many interests, so which do I pick? Over time, I might gradually lose interest in a subject, or simply prioritize something else. Do I leave that old server? It seems like a hassle to move, but it seems weird to stay. The result is that Mastodon servers seem so arbitrary, when they should be really important.
Other servers could still exist for the misfits or for people who otherwise find their city's server objectionable. But I think a city being the "default" option would make a lot of sense.
What makes sense about selecting instances based on one's own location?
Using local infrastructure leaks your location and simplifies law enforcement against the user. For example: Living in Saudi Arabia for work would absolutely not inspire me to seek out a hypothetical Saudi Social.
If local reddit communities are any tell, you would see competition real fast, e.g. Littletown Social, realLittleTown, LittleTown Online ...
Instead, one should probably use the server that aligns best with ones idea of moderation and appears somewhat trustworthy not to go down tomorrow.
While TCP/IP was open source and not controlled by any 1 vendor, quite a few companies made good money from selling TCP/IP stacks and won themselves billion dollar valuations in the process[1][2]. Of course this was during a time when Microsoft saw no point in including an IP stack with their OS, or indeed much point in connecting to the Internet at all! Some of the younger readers may find these things hard to believe.
Don't forget Trumpet Winsock [1]. I worked for an ISP at the time that provided it on a floppy disk (along with a newsreader, FTP client, telnet client, and web browser). Although I doubt many customers paid for it, Trumpet Winsock was shareware and very widely used on Windows 3.x.
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.
e.g.
The claim:
Planes are a very safe way to travel.
Followed by someone jumping up to say:
I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.
Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.
HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:
∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))
and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.
All the time? HN attracts some ... interesting ... characters so I accept it as something that has likely happened at some point, but something common? Anecdotes aren't shared in some kind of weird effort to falsify an imagined mathematical proof. They are shared because that is the natural progression of a discussion.
More commonly we see things like,
A: "I went to work today"
B: "One time I was on my way to work but I slipped on the ice in my driveway and ended up in the ER with a broken leg instead"
A: "Your broken leg does not disprove that I went to work today..."
Where A is trying to relive their glory days on Reddit where such a retort would have been considered funny, but thankfully most HN accounts know better than to think that is still funny, or that it was ever considered funny on HN. This thread being illustrative of one such exception, of course.
I understood your point. You did nothing wrong, the person replying to you read too much offense into what you wrote. They're looking for a fight. Ignore them.
Why would someone take time out of their day to contradict or narrow someone else's so-called argument? Nobody cares about your argument. Anecdotes are shared because someone found an anecdote, that came to mind based on previous discussion, to be interesting. Sometimes that interest isn't shared and the thread dies there, but other times others do find interest in it and discussion continues. That's the nature of discussion.
This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).
Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
The term I am familiar with prior to that was "immediate family" (as opposed to "extended family").
You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:
> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.
Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
There's extensive written evidence as far back as writing goes of recognizable family units. Here[1] we see a young man in 18th century B.C.E writing to his mother to ask for new clothing for school. It refers to household units with mothers and fathers having discrete roles. In 1250 B.C.E.[2] Egyptian workers took days off to take care of their wives, or sick members of their immediate household. Cross cultural examples abound. In Mexica (Aztec) culture adult life began upon marriage where a couple was given a small house and plot of land.
I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence that families weren't the major unit of society. A hunter-gatherer tribe is an extended family, so that only proves the point. If there's more than about 30 people in one then surely family based factions will form within it to some extent.
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
It was _especially_ like this further back. You literally could not survive without the tribe, and the tribe had norms-and-values you had to adhere to, some of which were to do with family units. This went for nomads and settlers alike.
How do you figure? It seems trivially relevant to asserting that family has only mattered for 200 years.
I suspect you're actually talking about the current western/american conception of family (fair!) but it doesn't make sense to ignore this obvious miscommunication.
To be fair (and I’m certainly not saying its not a good movie) Odyssey has very little to do with the original story or the worldviews and values described by Homer if anything at all. It’s a modern fantasy movie (i.e. the characters world views are mostly modern) loosely inspired by the Odyssey.
The nuclear family lived separate from the extended family. In separate cities. This is a new thing. You lived with your clan in history, not apart. The nuclear family is completely separated physically from their extended families, even across village lines.
Oh, I see. I agree with the other commenters, I think you may be focusing too much on the "nuclear" part of GP's comment. I interpreted that more as "immediate" family, and I think throughout history that people were most likely to rely on immediate family, then extended, then general kin.
In the 90s I visited a datacentre in an a central London location. The providers charged for both power and space (and bandwidth). I had cause to lift one of the floor tiles to reposition a power cable slightly for the rack I was working in. What I saw stayed with me.
Stuffed under the floor of the adjacent rack were perhaps a dozen-or-so small servers, switches, the odd modem or 2, and perhaps a kvm box. The tenant had obviously exceeded his physical space but not his power allocation. He had simply "gone underground". Like a little farm of blinking LED mushrooms in the dark.
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