I applaud the work and thoughts the author put in this system, but for me it just demonstrates why all these complex digital controls fail. I have a older mercedes, my seat heating has one knob, 3 settings, high, low, off. Those buttons, i can find them blindfolded.
I don't. Phones have a huge amount of downsides, attention spans, doom scrolling, etc. The upsides though, of this magic sci-fi supercomputer in your pocket, good damn.
I don't think the Twitter choice of 140 was anything to do with this though and is just a coincidence. Back during dumbphones the only way to receive tweets while mobile was via the texting interface, and it would want to prepend the username. I don't think reserving 20 for the username has anything to do with how many bits are used to represent the alphabet.
That's coincidence, though. I used Twitter to keep in touch with friends via SMS in 02008, and the messages had space for a prelude to say who they were from. In the opposite direction, you could use that space to tell Twitter to send the message privately to someone.
The username length restriction might come partly from that. They could surely relax it by now, though. I saw it at play this week when @SecondGentleman (15 characters) changed to @SecondGent46.
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