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You could add it to the bankruptcy laws; the trustee would hire someone to release the code.


Many hardware products are built with licensed code. It cannot be released because the company doesn’t own all of it.

There’s also more to a product than just some source code. You’d need the cloud domains, the private keys and certificates, and other bits. Releasing many of these to the public domain wouldn’t solve anything because you’d need someone to operate the cloud servers at the known address and trust with the private keys and certificates

All of this quickly begins to look a lot like requiring someone to operate the business again, which is obviously a silly thing to require in bankruptcy proceedings.

Forcing companies to release their IP if they go bankrupt is equally silly, because it renders the value of the company’s IP as $0 before anyone can be paid out.

The only thing this would incentivize is for companies to either relocate to countries with sane laws, or to shut off the servers and avoid bankruptcies by keeping the company technically alive but doing nothing other than staying as a registered business. It would act as a holding company to keep the IP in case someone wanted to buy it.


What order replies are shown in is a user profile option.


Google+ was wildly successful in certain circles. Tabletop RPG design still hasn’t entirely recovered from its loss.

Google+ was successful from any real metric but it didn’t replace Facebook so it was axed.


I definitely preferred it to Facebook, even before the feed became 100% inflammatory political stuff or ads and 0% my friends


The TTRPG community demonstrated how G+ circles solved how people segment different parts of their social lives by limiting the scope to a specific community and cause. Most people in that space were heavily invested in that community but also didn't want it being their primary public identity.

But the community is so minuscule that I'm not sure Google even knew it existed. If it had taken off to the same degree among something closer to critical mass, like today's parasocial celebrity communities or mainstream sports, it might've survived.

IMO most of that TTRPG community migrated to Discord, but the invite requirements make discovery horrible, search is terrible, real-time chat is miserable for discussion, and its "forum" features are just threaded chats. The vibe is way worse, it breeds and feeds drama, and the audience that survives it can correspondingly be either less appealing or require more moderation.

Bluesky doesn't solve the same problems as G+ circles, but between feeds and follow/moderation lists, it has a similar vibe of being able to focus the lens on a topic better than Twitter or Threads, and without the overhead and UX gaps of Fediverse.


By which metrics was Google+ successful? I don’t doubt you, I just never heard that before.


I can't say user metrics but Google Photos came out of Google+ and it is a massively successful product.

Hangouts (now Meet?) was also a product out of Google+ but considering GChat (the xmpp version) existed before, it was kind of a step backwards.

I think Google Local Guide also has some parts of Google+, not sure.


IMHO Google Photos was also just brand/infra-churn because it replaced Picasa Web Albums.


Your “following” is reverse chronological.


Knew what this was without clicking on it.


This underestimates the effect of Bluesky’s culture of “block and move on”. There are curated block lists you can subscribe to. Individual communities do a pretty good job of shutting down toxicity they don’t want to engage with.


It shares the same problem that Twitter had years ago back when it supported API blocklists.

Everybody you're blocking is at the whims of the blocklist owner, and it didn't take long for those people to go insane and use their lists as a tool for their own personal unrelated crusades.

Bluesky is already starting to experience this from a few I saw going around


Being 'at the whims' of whoever maintains the blocklist isn't unique to this style of moderation - when it's Twitter, you're at the whims of the company - but at least it means you can use other blocklists if/when the good ones go to shit, or can start a community-ran blocklist.


It'd be neat if you could create conditional blocklists. Like only whoever X person AND Y person block will be blocked from my feed. And so on...

I don't think that'd solve the problem, but it would marginally help (and should be better than the status quo)


Then unsubscribe from that blocklist.


Does that unblock whoever got blocked by the rogue blocklist?


Yes, your combined blocklist is point-in-time. If you unsubscribe from a blocklist, a user on that blocklist will be immediately unblocked, provided they're not also on another blocklist you subscribe to (and that you didn't block them directly).

(Outside of eventual consistency, of course.)


if they had a rule in the autoblock subscription that if a name appears in 3 or more (configurable) subscribed moderation lists it gets autoblocked, then users could stop following bad actors and change what moderation lists they use over time with less large impact to their experience. if you see messages from someone and they're on one of your block lists, you might reconsider the list. if they're on 2 you might consider personally blocking them, and if on 3+ you'd never see them. make blocks require a reason as well that the user will see alongside their block.


On Bluesky you have different algorithms/feeds which solves this problem. You subscribe to multiple feeds, which show you different content using different moderation and block lists. Sort of like you read different news sites and watch different news channels. Whatever feed you find that you enjoy the most is the one you spend the most time on.


People blocking jerks isn’t censorship. Do you have a source that there’s any kind of censorship going on stronger than other social media networks?


They removed a bunch of Palestinian journalists


Run, you pigeons, it’s Robert Frost!


The 17th largest city in the US is mid-sized?


San Jose has this problem where instead of acting like a top 20 city they act like Lubbock.


From my perspective living in Asia I’d place it on par with a small rural village


After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.


There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.

If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.


Well, there are more than 100 cities in China with over 1 million people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...

From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.

I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.

But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.


This is a very funny comment. Small rural villages in China do not have 61 story buildings.

Non-major cities do, but not “small rural villages”.


China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).

The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)

San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)

Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.

China: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...>

US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...>

Anquing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anqing>


Because the US is so car centric, the largest cities just feel like "mid-size" cities compared it other continents.

A town of 100k in Europe will feel livelier than a metro area of 3 million in the US.


It's not even a million population. Certainly would never call San Jose or San Francisco a metropolis.


The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.


The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the geometric complexity of their boundary.


yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.

Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.


I will wager a box of donuts the like-hiding was due to some combination of politics and Musk’s embarrassment for being called out every time he liked some cringe porn-adjacent tweet.


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