Funnily enough, the country where I'm from is so touristic that if you're a local (with a typical local salary i.e. miserable) you get much more value for your money by going abroad.
I don't think that's a fair comparison since LLMs can't e.g. prescribe medical tests or medication. That's not something I'd be looking for anyway, but we should at least compare apples to apples.
Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.
Haha I love the super out of touch takes on here sometimes. Not using WhatsApp or Facebook where I live absolutely introduces major difficulty to communication and even every day interactions where almost 100% of communication in various social groups is happening on these platforms. Should I ask them to move?
I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.
As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.
I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.
I travel a lot within Europe and socialize, and Signal adoption is pretty limited continent-wide. You are lucky. Even when people do have Signal, a stock response if I ask “Do you have Signal?” is “Oh, sure, I use it to buy drugs”, which probably doesn’t help the app’s image in the eyes of the surrounding society.
WhatsApp as the only contact point is a pretty strong signal that the user is from a developing world country. I'm not from that part of the world, so I don't use WhatsApp.
If you count -all of europe- as a developing country, sure.
In europe we never had free unlimited texts. Internet was cheaper than calling/texting, especially with everyone having wifi at home and work. So a cross-platform messaging app appeared and has replaced text and calling.
Sure, it's not airtight. WhatsApp is popular in Europe. But as an American, when I see somebody say "You can only contact me on WhatsApp", it's not exactly a green text bubble signal.
I’m pretty sure it is extremely popular almost everywhere except the US (and maybe China? I think they have their own thing). We’re the odds ones out in this case.
As the other person mentions, WhatsApp adoption is vast in Europe, including the bulk of the continent where “developing world country” isn’t a reasonable label. I travel frequently across Europe, and when I book reception-less accommodation, WhatsApp is often the only way that self-check-in details are provided. Saying that “I don't use WhatsApp” might even lead to the reservation being immediately canceled on their part.
I am living in spain and I never used whatsapp professionally. I've had a few messages sent by medical clinics to confirm appointment, delivery workers to drop a package or some others pros but if you don't have whatsapp they just call you anyway so it is not necessary.
Most people in Spain still rely and prefer voice calls than messages anyway. I believe half the country must still be illiterate as they manage to send voice message but struggle to send written messages on whatsapp.
On a personal level you lose a bit of information when you don't have whatsapp. For example I didn't join the whatsapp group of my dance class and I am often unaware of stuff they mention on it but that doesn't prevent me to attend said classes.
Absolutely inaccurate. I am nationalized Spaniard living here 2+ decades. Almost no one over 50 calls on the phone and when they do they almost always send a message first. The large public institution I work in is removing landlines completely because they get too little use to justify the cost.
I am (mostly against my will) in multiple professional and personal Whatsapp groups. Use is constant and daily and unavoidable. It is the principal means of communication in both work and personal settings. Calls are always a second option.
I suspect your experience reflects only partial integration in local culture.
I think this is a Spanish/Portuguese language thing... I am in some clubs with many Spanish speakers and they love to send voice memos! I am in Europe though so maybe the Brazilians I know have adapted to their European counterparts.
Logs are stored on local devices and many people back them up in whatever cloud (majority not encrypted).
You or the other person could lose the device and someone could use your PIN/password (something as simple as shoulder surfing while you use it). There could also be a leak in whatever cloud service you're using, or the data could get subpoenaed because of some dumb law that gets passed, some rogue employee, etc. It's a huge liability no matter how you look at it.
The whole thread is about permanently storing every single conversation forever vs conversations that get deleted shortly after. If the latter is chosen, the blast radius is significantly smaller.
The blast radius of a single person conversations (shoulder surfing) which doesn't make any sense because if you are the kind of person targeted for their conversations you are going to take anyway other countermeasures in any case (in addition to probably disappearing messages).
But for normal people, the biggest risk is companies using their chats to train models / dispatch ads etc to which the only solution is E2EE.
There is the potential to use homomorphic encryption so that encrypted text can support operations like string search while encrypted, so unencrypted indexes would never need to be stored on user devices. It is a huge hassle though - it requires a ton of compute and is still very slow and limited, it's much more complex, and research is still ongoing regarding security. However if you want to truly minimize the amount of unencrypted data on your device this could one day be an option.
The internet isn't going to die out, but it feels like it's becoming a place where you go to do a specific task and then you check out again.
One interesting observation from myself: I don't "browse" the internet anymore. I go read specific sites, order something, or do some task. So my internet usage is way down, but I also don't watch a lot of TV or streaming content anymore, because I can't really deal with it. There's to much of it, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, everything is just a rehash (Cinematography is beautiful though). So now I just read, preferably books written before the year 2000.
It used to be like this, during the golden age of the internet. We didn't have it anywhere, we had it on a computer on our desk. We had to sit down at that desk to use it. Eventually we would get up again and be offline.
Bringing connectivity everywhere has many obvious advantages, but it's also sucked away the rest of life.
As someone who's traveled quite a bit, I love doing this but I should also warn everyone to make sure they're in a place where it's safe to do so. While most tourist destinations are mostly fine, you don't want to end up in a random shady neighborhood in certain cities - even touristy ones (Barcelona, Paris, etc). It doesn't matter that 20 years ago you did it and it was fine, things have changed.
The AC's temperature sensors won't feel your microclimate or body temperature. I'm all for 27°C in the general case, but yeah I'd prefer a few degrees lower in the gym or in a dense crowd.
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