Meta is reportedly developing an AI pendant

I think that might be common enough these days through sound horizontal scaling principals and especially services that scale for you, but Whatsapp launched in 2009, pretty much the turning point for the tech that enables "web scale".

At that time AWS was just rolling out ELB and RDS, people were still fulfilling their (and most) roles on EC2 servers or even more likely dedicated servers / VPS that took day(s) to commission and might have even been setup by hand, there was no Docker, GitHub was new and Actions, Jenkins etc were years away, and there were very few PaaS- or IaaS-type offerings IIRC just a very nascent Heroku and Google App Engine.

facebook itself is a myspace or nexopia clone

the targetting pixel and like button are the most obvious innovations?

facebook is a tool for building products on, rather than a product in and of itself.

Complete nonsense, as anyone who has worked on a service with scale would know. WhatsApp is not even close to the same architecture as it was at the time of acquisition.

Not to mention the load constraints did not grow 7x, it's orders of magnitude more load increase than that.

As the world's mobile data speeds have skyrocketed in speeds and plummeted in price, WhatsApp is now handling orders of magnitude more data per user than when they served merely 450. And it's all complicated rich media which was not handled at the time.

WhatsApp's file limit at the time of acquisition was 16 MB. Today, it's 2 GB. Per file. It didn't have voice or video calling at acquisition either, also highly complex and expensive to run.

WhatsApp grew 7x in user base, but the scale of data and technical complexity grew exponentially more.

If this were so easy, history would not be littered with high profile scaling failures from messaging apps. Most notably Signal, which couldn't handle a 1.5x influx of users from WhatsApp and was down for weeks.

Claiming a 7x scale is technically easy while your data-per-user growth grows probably 50% a year or more is patently ridiculous.

Sure, it's not original or unique, but that wasn't your question. Facebook itself wasn't particularly unique when it launched.

Threads is taking off in regions likely irrelevant to your interests (India, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, etc). The content on Threads covers national politics and local social issues, which would typically not be shared on a tech forum like this one.

Tech news is still dominated by X and bluesky, so naturally those content sources appear more here.

Why would you want zuck's minions to see everything that you see when you put on the ray bans?

Same with this pendant eavesdropping device.

The creep factor of AI glasses is high. That was a contributing factor to the failure of Google Glass, and I’ve seen various reports of places moving to ban the Meta glass. People, in general, are not comfortable with a camera pointed at them. People walking around with cameras on their face that may or may not be recording is not something the average person wants as a common thing.

Same, I hope there will be more alternatives in the future. Samsung is releasing Smart Glasses soon with Android for example.

Read you loud and clear. I enjoyed the crazy adventure that was the early internet. Really truly enjoyed it for over a decade, almost two. It's now gone, FUBAR and loaded with trackers. I usually can't even access an online newspaper anymore without logging in and being tracked. That's where I draw the line. It is nobody's business what I am reading. Got a stack of books to read now, instead. Not to say that legit sites without trackers don't exist anymore, but finding one of those randomly, for example as a result of search, is getting harder every day. Of course, the risk is real is that as the quality of journalism has diminished, thanks to trackers and putting the most popular dating advice and recipes on online newspapers' front pages in lieu of the reports of what's really happening in the world, we'll all soon be living in bubbles of filtered, sanatized information. So, it's not just privacy threats anymore.

I said Rewind, as that's what the company and product was called at that point before they rebranded to Limitless (and completely abandoned Rewind). The product called Limitless had no relation to Rewind and no plans to integrate Rewind's functionality. Rewind's website continued to exist and continued to accept payments, which is how I found and purchased the app, but there were no updates.

- Rewind uses Apple's on-device OCR (Live Text). That alone sets it apart from every other screen recorder, I've never seen another - you can search by any text that has ever been captured on-screen. I do not trust any OCR other than Live Text.

- The on-disk format is fairly compact. Over 7 months of recording is still under 250 GB on my machine.

- It records the URL in Safari so you can return to any web page you have ever visited without having to rely on OCR of the address bar, which isn't even displayed anymore most of the time.

I haven't used most of its other features.

Unfortunately, it's been breaking recently as macOS updates. For instance, notification banners no longer show up in the recordings. This actually removes a huge part of the utility for me, as I used to be able to use Rewind to catch notifications I didn't see in time, but that is no longer possible. So now when I see a notification slide away in the corner of my vision, I just have to accept that there's nothing I can do to ever see what it was (most notifications do not go to Notification Center on my machine; not sure why).

Also, Rewind crashes so often that I need to have a script in crontab to automatically restart it.

What kind of worse case scenario is running through your mind to be this upset? Not saying it doesn't exist I just would like to know.

> Some might argue that mobile phones can also be used to make secret recordings

Not to mention that doing so is a felony in a two-party consent state.