Lots of folks hit the nail on the head, it's a structural problem with a telco network that was never designed to be open. I wrote about it back in 2019 in case folks are interested [0]
This article is a little dated, since then we’ve released Fraud Guard. Our model can detect and block 98% of pumping traffic with only .1% false positive. It’s working really well to deter these fraudsters. If you’re interested, you can learn more here [1].
Were also rolling out a version for all Programmable SMS customers with a higher false positive rate due to the wider variety of use cases supported.
Taking a wild guess – but is there a chance that people using Twilio as their personal phone provider are not their target customer group?
Sounds a bit like opening a merchant account and using credit card payments as a way to split bills and rent with friends, and then being annoyed about being treated like a business (i.e. getting tax forms, having to declare a business model etc.)
Don't get me wrong, I also use a Twilio account for my home automation setup, but I can kind of see how that's pushing the boundaries of the product a bit.
"Taking a wild guess – but is there a chance that people using Twilio as their personal phone provider are not their target customer group?"
I attended Signal 2018 and was told that (Twilio) "couldn't wait to see" what I built. I was handed IoT SIM cards and carrier SIM development kits and attended workshops and seminars exploring exactly these sort of use-cases.
I was also told by many highly placed individuals in product development that the CEO was personally enthusiastic about exactly these sort of use-cases.
So yes, I did some homework and made an attempt to align my incentives (I pay actual money for every SMS I send) with those of the company.
Now all of that has changed - in large part due to their own (bad) behavior.
"... I can kind of see how that's pushing the boundaries of the product a bit."
Agreed - that is my point and the source of my frustration.
Server alerts and (literal) fire alarms should not be a "campaign". If they are, I'm using the wrong tool.
If I need to define an opt-out message to SMS my kids, I'm using the wrong tool.
Twilio is explicitly telling us - loudly and emphatically - that they are the wrong tool.
It looks like you still have this kind of capability. You might need to adjust settings and supply KYC info as requirements change. From the Fraud Guard docs, "You can mark known phone numbers using the Safe List feature so they are never blocked."
I'm actually in this exact same boat (I ported my US number to twilio when I had a long travel stint abroad to retain access, have since built a forwarding system to keep using it).
I registered with the IRS to get an EIN for my "sole proprietorship" (i.e. me), and that seemed to satisfy twilio for the brand registration requirements. Still waiting on a final A2P review for my use case (sending messages to family and friends) so not out of the woods yet, but hopefully that's the last step.
First, a utility number that I send myself programmatic alerts[1] and do general messaging management with has broken entirely and it is certainly the result of A2P 10DLC and my "failure" to create a business entity for sending reminders to myself.
Second, the messaging - both email alerts and direct from customer support - has been crystal clear:
ALL SMS is a campaign. It is all spam. You need to register and qualify and opt-out your spam or you can't send your spam.
So yes, actual problems.
[1] Again, Jeff, what kind of (required) opt-out message should I craft for myself ? What if the third party ad-industry working group doesn't approve of my unsubscribe methods that I give to myself ?
Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding!
For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective.
As a developer, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads together to make realtime personalization of every communication hard -- and Segment is so good at it.
So that's what we're focused on!
As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS customers as well. More to come like this.
And to others reading: Miguel didn't say anything bad about Twilio really, just that the alignments for them aren't there - and that's ok. Maybe it back fires and Twilio adjusts back to its dev-focused strategy. Businesses just evolve as they need to. If Twilio ends up being "bad" it just means there's now a spot for someone else to form "The Good Twilio" :) See: the many Google competitors, the many smartphone competitors, the many VPN competitors, etc...
Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors?
Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it.
I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.
It’s a good question because it goes to the incentives of a company to truly fight the problem vs saying the right things but looking the other way when convenient.
For us, we typically work with customers who are victims of fraud and the first time, we give them advice on how to better protect themselves and then refund them ~ the amount of profit we would have made. Ie we recoup costs but that’s it. For the financially aware, this is bad for our gross margin and profit but we do it to help customers the first time. After that though we expect them do implement some defenses otherwise our incentives aren’t aligned. Now however, we have Fraud Guard rolling out which should prevent much of the fraud in the first place.
There are other forms of bad actors but that’s the most prevalent these days.
You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely to engage with the community. You could frame the same question in a more constructive style.
Curious, what in GP's question rubbed you the wrong way? To me it seemed like a legitimate question. I'd actually like to know the answer myself because in the end it always comes down to incentives. But maybe I missed some nuance? (not a native english speaker, obviously)
Anyway, hoping for the answer to the question, and that it is taken in a positive way.
I actually don't have a strong issue with Twilio, and I think it's a good question that concerns me about other larger companies which also have problems with bad actors on their platform. It is potentially something that CEO could use as a huge differentiator if they want to as well. It definitely wasn't meant to be attacking in style, and I also wasn't aware this was the CEO. =)
That being said, I'm not a scary individual, I assume I am softballing compared to what a CEO faces day to day.
Jeff is the CEO of a public company, and hence works for shareholders.
It's in Jeff's interest to engage with the community, and we are glad he's here. We certainly don't need to tiptoe around delicate sensibilities though...
Only tangentially related—and I know the odds are low that you worked on this personally—but I want to give sincere thanks for the stuff you guys have shared via Twilio Labs. The netlify-okta-auth package in particular was exactly what I needed to complete a recent project, and the documentation it came with was nearly perfect.
if you feel inclined, would really love your comment on OP's observation:
> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio.
it does seem the recent messaging has de emphasized that in favor of "Customer Engagement Platform". as the originator of "Ask Your Developer" (I read your book!) that has to sting a little bit. would love to hear your thinking on how Twilio continues to also engage developers in its next phase.
At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.
We can have good APIs and make a compelling case to the business why they should pay for it.
I agree that sometimes our engagement messaging isn’t quite right for developers. As a developer, I prefer more technical and matter of fact marketing of products. But interestingly, as a CEO, sometimes I need companies to simplify the message especially in a domain I’m not an expert in and don’t want to become an expert in!
For the entrepreneurs in the HN community, it’s talking features vs benefits. Developers love what a product does in a literal sense because they’re close to the implementation. Business folks tend to look for the benefit statements more as they’re not as close to the implementation. It’s a like to walk when you’re talking to both!
"At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers."
How can I send my wife a grocery list, with a twiml bin, and not register a business use-case and provide a US EIN for A2P 10DLC (along with example messages and opt-out mechanisms) ?
Haha - just kidding.
I know I can't do that.
... and as long as we have you here, what, pray tell, will Twilio do with the pages and pages of use-cases and howtos for home automation, personal alerts, person to person messaging, self-reminders, email forwards - like this, for instance:
Yes, but the Twilio implementation of this has been very frustrating. The process is (needlessly?) complex and has changed several times since it's inception. The last time I had to adjust our 10DLC configuration I was forced to use the Twilio API instead of the web console.
An API is great if you have to do something hundreds of times or automate a process, but I had >10 sub-accounts to update and doing it through the API made it much more difficult. I feel like Twilio really dropped the ball here and could have done much more to make the 10DLC process more manageable.
I’ve always described this as “selling features vs selling solutions”. As a startup grows, the buying persona changes. Startups that sell to developers do best when they’re selling features, whereas a product manager/CEO is shopping for a solution (like increasing customer engagement). A neat thing I’ve noticed is that at one point, almost every B2B company will add a “Solutions” page to their website to highlight that.
> At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.
AWS does it well for both, may be learn from them. Twilio outbound communication has turned completely undecipherable (too much marketspeak) for both business and developers. The billboards in Miguel's blog post sums up the stark contrast very well. There need to be a balance.
Just an anecdotal data point, recently a company was interested in integrating internet voice calling systems, having used Twilio about 8 years ago, I suggested them to check out Twilio. The company mentioned they couldn't figure what Twilio does and doesn't and in the end went with the solution being pushed by local Telco.
I'd be interested to know how you think the business folks should judge the benefit statements without the detail that they could run by experienced developers? Surely they get a lot of vapourware pitches all the time.
definitely. my most quoted dev marketing tweet is about me constantly having to relearn “"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!” in the early stage devtool startup playpen i operate in, but at your stage you have multiple equally impt constituencies.
whenever i’m caught between a thesis and an antithesis i try to look for a synthesis to break through the apparent conflict. perhaps TWLO can find messaging that does the same. it feels like Msft is doing this well by essentially having a different group of brands that are keenly developer oriented, with Azure on the backend filling in all the enterprise messaging.
What better example of Twilio becoming a completely sales driven organisation than this opportunistic and self serving response, with a paragraph directly lifted from you sales 101 deck no doubt.
Good to see that y'all are still pushing in the right direction! I left between the layoffs to pursue some innovation in the semiconductor space, but I look back fondly on my time at Twilio (Sendgrid)!
Building APIs into businesses is no easy task, but I'm glad that there are those still fighting the good fight, even if the field changes. Best of luck to the Twilio of the future!
Hey there, this is tangential but you just launched limited MMS support in Australia, but no voice and not 2-way and from what I can gather only on the Optus network.
I offer a virtual mobile number that does voice, txt and mms in Australia which could be globalised, interested in chatting?
It's no cost to the user! Defaults are rolled out to everybody, but the users opts-into aggressive protection because of the risk of false positives. Note, this is Verify today. All Programmable SMS customers will get it soon as well.
Hi Chris - CEO of Twilio here. I'm sorry for the issue. Fighting bad actors sucks, but we can do better to communicate with good faith builders like yourself. Mind sending me a note with your account at jeff@twilio.com, and I'll escalate for you.
A request from a random HNer – could you also commit to observing what the user's interactions with your customer service have been so far; and improving each of those, instead of nebulously "escalating" (where people will unblock an account because the CEO mandated it from up on high)?
Otherwise, you are contributing to a pattern where HN becomes de facto Tier 1 Customer Service, similar to how Twitter was a few years ago. This is already the case for various Google services [1], but I would hope that we don't want to normalize it for every service.
----------------------------------------
[1] A familiar pattern to most of us – Ask HN: Google suspended my account without warning; Googler escalates internally; problem is solved
I'm going to have to cop to this. I was desperate and needed a way to get my phone calls up and running. I have many employees that rely on me to feed their families. We employ a lot of refugees with large families and if I don't run my business right, they can't feed their families. This isn't a game.
I posted to HackerNews because I suspected my issue would be seen and taken seriously if I did that. I could tell the ticketing system people were overlooked and only looking at my issue in a very shallow way.
If this had not worked, I would have started using my Stack-overflow account then Reddit. If that didn't work, I found an address of a lady how works for Twilio nearby, I was going to go knock on her door and see if she could put me in touch with someone.
Luckily I was able to get the problem resolved without those additional steps.
I would like to point out that Twilio's ticketing system works well for complex problems that are not time-sensitive. I had an issue a few months back that I think was probably quite complicated involving bureaucracy and multiple carriers and it was resolved in a few days via their ticketing system which was very cool.
I totally understand your point of view, and you are not at fault at all. Anyone with a small business who's faced with the faceless, understaffed customer service at modern web companies would have done the same thing. I hope your issue gets resolved quickly.
IMO now that Twilio is a public company, they should be investing in better customer service. I am simply encouraging them to solve the actual problem in addition to unblocking you; hence the "also commit to...", not "instead commit to..."
I hope my comment is not used as justification to not solve your problem. That would be the very last thing I want.
Oh no, I didn't take it that way. I just thought what you said was very interesting and wanted to provide more information and confirm that you were correct.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. The fact that you responded to this message at all resolves my initial concern, which had more to do with if I needed to change providers because of a cultural shift within your company. I understand that you are dealing with a very large and complex system that is changing quickly and will have problems, sometimes serious problems sometimes. Customer communication specifically is a very difficult and complex problem to solve at scale.
I actually spoke with one of the founders of Twilio when I first signed up. Evan maybe? He told me about how he studied cloud computing at MIT. This was a very long time ago.
Gregg was able to get the problem resolved within about 30 minutes once I reached out to him. He also provided me with a few solutions to prevent the problem in the future.
I understand the complicated problem that that led to this mistake and I think it is reasonable to make mistakes like this sometimes, especially if you're providers are threatening to suspend you.
The main problem that I would like you to solve is the lack of phone number. There needs to be a way for people to contact the company if there is an account administration emergency like this. Even chat would have been fine.
That being said, I did call sales and could not reach someone. If this is due to covid omicron and if normally I had called sales and would have been able to plead my case and gotten them to connect me with someone, I think that would have been fine and this truly is an edge case.
Because simultaneity itself is relative, in our frame it actually does happen in 2022. It doesn't make sense to say the stars already collided if it's not in our past light cone.
But in a classic Minkowski diagram like this one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minkowski_lightcone_loren...), don't you define the horizontal line (or at least a single line) as simultaneous in a given frame, instead of the entire white region? In all frames, the blue region are past or future, but in our particular frame, we can say more than that, like when the event happened.
As far as I can remember, the star blowing up and the light reaching us are only simultaneous in the light's frame.
That is a diagram of empty space, figuring out what that horizontal line represents in places with strong gravity is a bit tricky. In fact I'm not 100% sure there's a way to define it uniquely.
You could define the global time for a position to be the time at which light it sends reaches the earth, minus the time it took for the light to travel, but with things like gravitational lensing this can have some weird results, and may in fact not be well defined.
I get that it might be hard/impossible to uniquely define a single correct 3D subspace of the full 4D spacetime we're in as simultaneous to a given point in a given frame, but surely simultaneity is a 3D notion, right? This 3D spacelike subset of spacetime is simultaneous in some frame (or set of frames)?
I imagine that if you define everything on the boundary of your past light cone as simultaneous to you, it requires that everything on your future light cone to be simultaneous too, which would mean that everything between them is also simultaneous. That kind of definition defines a 4D subset of spacetime as simultaneous. In that set are points in each others future and past light cones, which we can unambiguously say are not simultaneous to each other. I think that's the heart of the argument everyone's having. I never took GR, so maybe you can shed some light on it (heh) from that perspective?
I'm not a physicist, but pretty sure you are conflating two different physical phenomena... One is the delayed observation due to the limited speed of light, the other is reference frame distortions due to special relativity.
I'm a physicist. OP is correct. OP is not conflating 2 different phenomena. The light cone is defined by the speed of light and hence they are one and the same phenomenon.
You're right that they're not conflating the phenomena, but to say that two events are only simultaneous if they're on the light cone is still incorrect - that's the boundary of the region of simultaneity, whereas the OP was suggesting that it's the entirety of it.
Since the light hasn't reached us yet, it's perfectly valid to state that in some frame of reference, the event is happening right now. 2022 is the last possible time at which we could make that claim because the events become causally separated, which is I think what OP was getting at, though the wording was a bit off.
I'm a physicist, too. And I don't understand what you and OP are talking about. In out frame, the collision happened ~2000 years ago. The light will arrive to Earth in a couple more years. That's it.
By the way, what's the need of talking about frames? Which other frame do you have in mind apart from ours?
Reference frames are local constructs, they cannot be used to (uniquely) define simultaneity over large distances. The time of any single event is just a "tag" in relativity. In fact there are infinitely many surfaces of simultaneity that contain the merger of those two stars and meet the Earth at a particular time "t" in the range ~[-2000, +5] from now, so that it is equally valid to state that the merger happened ~2000 years ago or ~20 years ago, or that it has not happened yet.
For this reason, to avoid confusion, it is much better and customary to "tag" astronomical events by the time we observe them. That is to say that they happen when we observe them.
Large and close is respect to the light-crossing time and the accuracy with which you want to timestamp an event. If you care about years, 1 light year is already a large distance.
IANAP, but doesn't speed of light actually define "at the same time"? I.e. for all intents and purposes, it's happening "now" for us, because there's no meaningful way of getting there faster than light.
In a way what I'm imagining is speed of light being a kind of "clock signal" of digital electronics, except continuous, not discrete.
If you wanted to say that when a light signal goes from A to B its emission and reception should be considered simultaneous, then you'd have to say the same about a signal sent back from B to A when the first one is received. ... And then, if you also wanted to believe that "x is simultaneous with y and y is simultaneous with z ==> x is simultaneous with z", you'd get the absurd conclusion that two events in the same place but separated in time are simultaneous.
So here's the actual situation (at least in special relativity):
Once you define a frame of reference, which is basically the same thing as a velocity of motion, you then have a notion of simultaneity in that frame. If you fix your frame of reference, simultaneity has the nice properties you might want it to have (like transitivity, which I appealed to above). But you can have "x simultaneous with y in frame F" and "y simultaneous with z in frame G" without x and z being simultaneous in any frame.
If a signal can get from x to y (here x and y are locations in spacetime, not just in space) then there is no frame in which x and y are simultaneous. If it's possible only for a signal propagating at the speed of light, then it is (just barely) impossible to find a frame in which they are simultaneous. If it's not possible even at the speed of light, then there is a frame in which they are simultaneous.
So, in particular, consider the collision between these stars and the arrival of the light from the collision here on earth. In an (impossible) reference frame moving at the speed of light in the direction from there to here, the events would be simultaneous. Actually, they can't quite be -- but by considering a frame that moves fast enough, you can make the time difference as short as you like.
In an (equally impossible) frame moving at the speed of light the other way, they would be 3600 years apart. With actually-admissible reference frames, the time can be anywhere strictly between zero and 3600 years.
So far as I know, we and these stars are not moving very rapidly (in comparison with the speed of light) relative to one another. It seems reasonable to use a frame corresponding roughly to their motion and ours. That gives you a time difference of about 1800 years, and any plausible adjustment for our actual relative motion will make no difference to speak of because we're moving so much slower than light relative to one another.
But: There is another related notion that you may have in mind. You can compute a numerical measure of separation between any two points in spacetime, called the "interval", which is positive when the separation is "space-like" and negative when it's "time-like". If light could go from one to the other, this separation is zero.
(How does this escape the scenario I described in the first paragraph above? Because knowing the interval, as it's called, between x and y, and the interval between y and z, isn't enough to determine the interval between x and z any more than knowing the distances x-y and y-z is enough to determine the distance x-z. In fact the situation is worse for intervals than for distances because there isn't anything corresponding to the triangle inequality. And the "interval=0" relation isn't transitive. So knowing that the intervals x-y and y-z are zero tells you nothing at all about the interval x-z.)
Thanks for the detailed explanation! I'll need to reread it several times more and think hard about it, but for now, your mention of transitivity clarified to me the problems of my current mental model.
Alright, so J'Kaziof [1] actually lives on a nearby planet in Cygnus. This was/is a tragic event that whiped out J'Kaziof's home planet. Luckily, they had super duper advanced technology with spaceships that could reach c * .99999...
J'Kaziof witnessed this event when s/he was n seconds [old] per their atomic clocks, and immediately set out in our direction.
What is the age of J'Kaziof in seconds when s/he arrives on Earth?
[p.s. assume their ships can instantanously accelerate to c and slow down to 0 from c.]
[p.s.s. In the year of our lord 222 here on Terra, Bardesanes of Edessa [2] went to meet his maker. Let's just say he passed away at the exact moment of J'Kaziof uttering 'make it so' to his 1st officer.]
No, it happened 1795 years ago. There is only one frame of reference involved here, one we can attach to the Milky Way neglecting the relatively small movements of earth and KIC 9832227 within it. And two events are simultaneous in a given frame of reference if light emitted from both events reaches a point midway between the locations of the two events at the same time.
So you position your space ship in the middle between were earth and KIC 9832227 were 1795 years ago, about 900 light years away from each and sometime about the year 1122 you will see the stars colliding and at the same time, with a good enough telescope, what was happing on earth in the year 222 which establishes that the the collision of KIC 9832227 and the year 222 on earth were simultaneous in the frame of reference attached to the Milky Way.
Please see my other reply below. Reference frames are local constructs. There is no such a thing as a (unique) reference frame of the entire galaxy that can be used to define simultaneity. In fact there are infinitely many of them.
I have seen that your profiles says theoretical astrophysicist so you certainly know a lot more than me about the topic. Nonetheless I can not see why we can not have a reference frame extending over 100,000 light years or at least over 1,800 light years. That seem relatively small distance, the relative velocities are relatively small, space is relatively flat, expansion of space is, I guess, not really relevant within galaxies.
So naively I would expect that you can attach a reference frame to almost all objects in the Milky Way and they would agree on simultaneity to within hours or maybe days. There are certainly some notable exceptions like the central black hole or particles traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and you can certainly just invent a reference frame with huge relative velocity changing simultaneity a lot.
But are there really places within the Milky Way so that simultaneity would be off by hundreds and thousands of years over a distance of just 1,800 light years? If yes, what is the cause of that, as far as I can tell it would have to be an effect of general relativity because, again as far as I can tell, there is no problem of defining simultaneity across extended distances in special relativity and the involved velocities are not large enough to have an appreciable effect to begin with.
EDIT: Just calculated an example Lorentz transformation, 500 km/s relative velocity and 1,800 light years distance, and the time difference comes out at almost exactly 3 years. That is certainly more than I expected and adds up to 166 years across the entire Milky Way, on the other hand 500 km/s is probably quite a bit above common relative velocities within the Milky Way.
So I am still not convinced that picking a reference frame for the entire Milky Way, say with the origin at the center of mass, one axis coinciding with the axis of rotation and rotating with the Milky Way so that the angular momentum vanishes, could not provide a good enough reference frame for the entire Milky Way for back of the napkin calculations.
I agree that you can make such a construction in theory. However, in practice there is no way we can synchronize our clocks with an observer at the location of that binary star system. There is also no reason to do it: the precise time of the star merger does not have any physical meaning, it is just a label. Saying that some astronomical event took place on the date we observe it, is equally valid and free from ambiguities.
That's just nonsense. We know the distance between us and the star, we know that light travels at c, and therefore we know that, in our reference frame, the event being observed happened 1795 years ago.
Simultaneity is only defined when you talk about two (or more) events. The discussion was about an event: the collision of two stars. What is the other event?
The generous interpretation of what he means is that considering that this event is outside of our past light cone, there exists an inertial reference frame such that the collision happens “after” our “present”.
Of course, relative to our own inertial reference frames as we experience them, i.e. where we are mostly not moving, the collision would be thousands of years in the “past”.
When he says “in our frame” he is clearly at least slightly confused.
But we do say we see the Sun as it were 8 minutes ago because of distance/c. Are you suggesting that this notion be removed as well, because I agree with you regarding the light cone, but the Sun being 8 minutes away makes too much sense for me to abolish the concept.
Is there any philosophical speak about this topic or is it basically resolved?
There exists a reference frame in which the distance between the Sun and earth is so compressed by Lorentz contraction that the light leaves the Sun and arrives at the earth in 1 second. In relativistic terms, the photon leaving the Sun and arriving at the earth can be considered to be simultaneous.
> In relativistic terms, the photon leaving the Sun and arriving at the earth can be considered to be simultaneous.
No they cannot, unless you boost to a reference frame that's moving at the speed of light, which is a useless frame. In all other frames, including the ones we are in, the photon left the Sun before arriving to Earth.
> In relativistic terms, the photon leaving the Sun and arriving at the earth can be considered to be simultaneous.
You just constructed an argument that can be readily used to argue that all events are simultaneous. That should flip your internal bozo bit and help you see that the argument is not sound.
> You just constructed an argument that can be readily used to argue that all events are simultaneous
No, I haven't. I have studied relativity in University, have you? Lol @bozobit
I will make the statement more rigorous.
"Let event A represent the emission of a photon. Let event B represent the arrival of a photon elsewhere. Event here refers to a unique location in space-time i.e (x,y,z,t). As per special relativity, you can always find a reference frame such that the time separation between A and B can be arbitrarily small. It can't be made exactly zero, but it can be made as close to zero as you wish to."
Use this formula to figure out the reference frame of interest.
If you feel like getting mystical about it, for a hypothetical Photonic Being all events are in fact simultaneous: It is always 'now' and per various mystic schools, that 'timelessness' is the actual meaning of 'Eternal'.
Well, maybe so, theoretically. But in fact, there may be multiple light paths between us and remote stuff. And the length of those light paths is in constant flux. Indeed, having data from multiple light paths has proved very useful. So it seems sensible to talk about stuff happening in its own frame, and distinctly about observation delays.
That's true in our reference frame, with some error bar, but astronomers rarely make the distinction when talking about observing events, so I always find it odd when laymen insist on making it.
I guess the distinction is rarely made by professionals because
- It requires defining a reference frame.
- It makes no difference to the causality.
- Time is a function of distance, which usually has large error bars on it, so it's better to discuss the distance instead.
- Time as a function of distance gets more complex on cosmological scales.
On the last point, you can get the exciting realisation that, due to the expansion of space, objects actually start getting larger the further away they get beyond a certain distance.
It's amazing how easy Twilio's APIs are to use. I've used them in C# several times, just add them to the project, add a line, and you are up and running. Nice work.
Jeff, we use twilio for short codes and sell primarily to non-profits. This is awesome for those that want their own short codes, but I'd really like to pass a discounted rate to non-profits through!
I am working on a front-end system for non-profits that will use there Twilio account information, runcampaigns.com. A discounted cost to support 501c(3) organizations will be very good.
Eventually but one step at a time. I ran a groupware platform for 9 years that was very reliable. This is my reboot of that but it needs to make money this time around so I am focusing on managing data and communication that leads to better fundraising results.
Thanks Jeff! It did cost us some sweat and blood to get right, but Twilio's API is a joy to work with. Connect looks awesome, not sure how we missed it, will investigate and probably migrate.
[0] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/insights/compliance/your-p...