19eightyfour

It seems like there is a lot to process in what you are saying. It will probably take me a while to digest it and respond, if I respond. Thanks!

I certainly agree with the notion that the current iteration of "tech kings" and their minions are not so ideally adapted to the role of "social guardians" that has been thrust upon them. But...maybe it's like having kids -- you're never ready. You just have to make it work somehow.

But I disagree with the invocation of "this is a complex topic" to sort of muddy the waters of what is or is not terrorism. That ambiguity gives wriggle room for terrorists to slip in and justify their acts which can't be allowed.

It's pretty clear to me when I switch on the news and see Manchester, or Bataclan, or the south of France or Charlie Hebdo, or Al Shabbab, or basically anyone doing this brutal medieval stuff is terrorism.

I don't really want to wade into the Israeli Palestinian thing except to say that, as in Northern Ireland, sometimes there is this financial incentive, to both sides, for conflicts to simmer for a long time at low-temperature -- if peace is declared, the money stops flowing. And in such a situation, it pays to muddy the waters, since both sides want to seem justified to keep the money flowing. I am certainly no expert on this ME issue, this is, IMHO, a factor.

But this sort of incentivized conflict is, IMHO, entirely different to the non-state terrorism we are all aware of today.

Agree with that too. Maybe IQ is out of date? Also, the huge effect that all these new technologies must be having is surely not going to be factored into that.

I agree. People are also arrogant. We like to look back and think "how quaint" and we are better than them. It's humbling to think that we actually weren't. But it's probably not very adaptive to think that way. Since, believing we are better now, by falsely diminishing the whatever metric of the past, probably helps us keep going forward to create the bright future.

Hopefully without repeating the mistakes of the past tho!

Even that phrase "mistakes of the past" is telling, right? I mean it's not like, IMHO, you hear a similar amount of talk about, "the brilliance of the past", except it a sort of quaint, dismissive way: "oh, look, plumbing in ancient Rome, weren't they sort-of clever!"

I haven't thought much about this....But my first reaction is -- can we at least test it to see what happens?

I have something that might not be that relevant. Consider China's control of conversations on Weibo as a microcosm of "all 1-1 conversations". Assume they are using some sort of AI there ( there's a good argument for any sufficiently large bureaucracy being AI-like ). Is it really so bad? They've tracked huge GDP growth for 70 years and very low civil conflict, and much harmony, I think, from some points of view, definitely.

Okay, but that's unfairly ( to police States ) correlating lack of economic development with with increased State power. A more realistic comparison is: would you rather live in London, or Hong Kong ( or even better, Singapore )? ( terrorism is rare in HK, which is basically a police state protectorate of China, and SG is almost certainly a police state ).

You could just as easily say Paris v Warsaw, or Berlin v Shanghai.

TL;DR - comparison with NK is unfair since NK is very hostile to all foreigners and has few attractive economic reasons to live there, it doesn't offer much to potential expats / migrants. But Warsaw or China or HK, or SG have strong policies that seem to have stifled terrorism ( for now ). The fear of "police state == (NK or Burma)" is overblown. You can have strong policies and still have many attractive qualities.

Sorry, I feel the above isn't very clear, but it's the best I could do right now. Thanks

Oh, so you're saying the speaker was saying

" some terrorism as opposed to the curtailing of freedoms that would come from eliminating" [1]

is preferable ?

I completely took it to mean: "I would prefer to live in the Islamic State, than in the USA with mass surveillance."

Okay, well I'm undecided as to whether [1] would be preferable or not in the way it's phrased. What I have thought about tho is:

- Yes we could eliminate terrorism, and it would take a lot of extreme measures ( that the West would be unlikely to get away with )

- But why should we eliminate terrorism, since from a purely political standpoint, it is quite useful. From any sufficiently emotive or divisive issue political motivation and utility can be extracted. For instance, the fear of terrorism helps the State advance legislation that it probably would not be talking about if we did not have terrorism. So the funny paradox I see is that, at this stage of human development, our States can actually benefit from using the spectre of terrorism to develop and advance themselves. Please take this in no way to mean justifying terrorism in any way...just to say that, IMHO, real politik dictates that terrorism has political benefits for the very State it is supposed to politically disadvantage.

The idea is to reinforce the fact that:

- only the State has a monopoly on violence, so State violence is legal

- terrorist violence is illegal

Perhaps it would be clearer to say, the always-illegal terrorist violence...but that seems like too many words. I'm happy with it as it is.

I probably added one too many negations. I confused myself when writing it! let me see if I can work it out.

One criticism I have of this policy doc is this quote from the "Counterspeech" section.

> But counterspeech is only effective if it comes from credible speakers.

No it isn't. It's also effective if the background noise of conversation in your life is countering the "terrorism supporting narratives". Credible people are important. But not the only pillar. If you have a lot of voices countering the terrorists' narratives then you can get somewhere too.

Overall tho I'm a fan of this post as a step in the right direction, not just for FB realizing it can do something to counter t, but also awakening to its wider role in the world.

Do you believe the propagation of narratives that try to justify illegal terrorist violence help support terrorists? I agree with that idea. And following from that basis, suppressing and/or countering such narratives is correct.

How can you even promote that? Even taken at face value...on the one hand, you have illegal violence carried out by non-state actors. On the other hand legal violence carried out by the state. Unless I totally misunderstood you, you are saying being subject to illegal violence carried out by non-state actors is better than police violence? No. Way. Societies worldwide would also disagree with you. The State has a monopoly on violence. And this form of social organization is the majority in the world today, not your "terrorism is better" alternative. Deal with it.

Don't panic. This is unlikely. IF FB goes in China, yes it will partner with censors. But why would FB permit flagrant abuse of its anti-terror policies for censorship? Doesn't make sense. It already has other mechanisms to censor. Anyway, China takes terrorism as seriously as the US and has the same things to lose. China would likely not misues "terrorism" to censor. Unlike the West, China doesn't have to pretend something is "terrorism" to censor it. It's bolder on suppressing ideas it doesn't like across the board to design harmony in its society. Maybe its bolder stance is why it doesn't have such issues with terrorism as the US, despite being active in parts of the world that have large disadvantage Islamic populations and having its own large disadvantaged Islamic population in the NW.

That is weird, right? Where did the precise use of broken and unbroken lines, in all the combinations necessary to represent binary 0 to 63 originate? It's a compact representation to label 64 different things using 6 "sticks"...but why did they do it like this? Were they aware of binary numbers?

Maybe because by the time hands were closed into fists, people had forgotten about the negotiating and gotten down to fighting.

In other words, the "fist" symbol was a reserved word for a very different purpose than counting.

Or possibly more realistically: if the way you communicated numbers didn't rely on position to indicate magnitude, you didn't need zeros as place holders. You could just "sign", 3 * 100 + 5 * 10 (whatever the symbols for those were ). Hell, maybe the symbol for 10 was 1 x "fist" and 100 was "pump your first twice."

It's not that there's anything wrong with the technology. It's just that people can be exploited. And they get exploited. So the hierarchical power structures remain in place.

Seriously, what better dream to plant in the slaves' minds but the idea that "a simple little computer program" can set you free? And what better way to control them and stifle their rising-up than by the constant deception that they have more power than they do? Fools. They're all god-damned fools.

People talk about VR being 10 years away. We've already been living in it for ages. The Matrix. Democratic Theatre. We've all been living in a dream world. I think we like it here. Because, IMHO, most people would rather blame a higher power for their sh*t than take responsibility to control their own lives.

And whether that higher power's the state or some religion, doesn't matter. It still sets up the same power dynamic that makes most people, IMHO, slaves.

But wouldn't it be in the interests of mass surveillance to herd people toward a chat option that isn't secure, or that the surveillants have a backdoor to? You get two benefits: 1) chat people think is secret you can read, 2) people self-identify as selectors / targets by choosing to try to hide their communications, which you can actually read

And if such PR herding worked, wouldn't the surveillants be prepared to pay for such efforts to make their job easier?

So, what seems readily apparent is: Telegram takes state money, to offer an insecure option, while dissimulating to the world that it's: a) secure and b) turning down state money all the time.

I know why this perspective isn't discussed in MSM. But I don't get why it's not discussed more here. It seems obvious to me. And personally IMHO, I think that's a good thing. Catch more criminals / terrorists.

I could have the code wrong or overly complex.

Thank you for posting your code. I'll see what it works to include.

That certainly looks tight / good, what you've got there!

A reason I wrote it the way i did was I wanted to get rid of the conditional testing if value is zero or not.

Also `wordSizeShift` is just the number of bits to right shift by to divide by the word size, to save a division.

Thanks alot for the feedback and info on your implementation! I'll do some perf tests and see if there are ideas from you it works to include.

Is your code online?

Also, I didn't know that getters add more overhead than just a property slot. I'll research this.

I don't understand your criticism of `toArray()` because to me it's the best it can be. To explain: `toArray()` returns a cached array of the unpacked bits, unless a bit has been changed, then it lazily recomputes it. So that's pretty much as good as it can get. All the methods that use `toArray()` require an iteration over the bits, so the alternative to a call to `toArray()` would be to inline its code into every caller. Two reasons I didn't do that were DRY and because 1 more call in the stack won't have a huge overhead, IMHO. Still, more testing is required to know more perf details.

A possible optimization is factoring out the cache check from `toArray` and inlining that check into each method calling `toArray`, but that really only saves on a method call, so to me, it's negligible.

The design reason I've done things the way I did was because the aim of this class was convenience, simple code and good performance. I didn't factor it to be about absolute best performance. I think, if we're going for absolute best performance, an implementation in wasm or asm.js would work better, and I'm not interested in doing that right now.

So that's my point of view and I don't understand your criticism of `toArray()`. What am I missing in this perspective and what ideas do you have to create improvements?

Truly a great answer.

Just to encourage you, and everyone else who feels this way sometimes, including myself, is the following. It's also true.

Sometimes the best performers start out as the ones who naturally are weak at the skill.

Take swimmers. How many top medalists came up from being kids with bad asthma?

So you do have some amount of control over your performance long term. Some amount of that is determined by the reaction you choose to hardship.

Another divergent point is, sometimes top performers don't get recognition in all arenas... So if an interview fails you, by all means see it as an opportunity to improve yourself ( one of many such opportunities, for sure ), but don't go imagining interviews are perfect.

Thanks!

That's like what they said right after it happened: that I deserved to be treated like that. That it was my fault. And for along time I believed them. And I considered deeply how I could have done things that worked better.

In any situation, I am okay to take the blame and responsibility. So as long as as it's fair I'll own what's mine.

In this situations it took me a long time to see it wasn't fair. These people had exploited my willingness to own responsibility, and blamed their own actions on me, to disguise what they had done and avoid consequences for it. They also exploited their closeness to me, knowing that I would trust what they said, and likely shoulder blame they wanted to put on me. One reason I did that was because I just expected they would do the same for me in return, and we would each take responsibility and work out a win-win.

The hardest part for me was letting go of the idea that I could rely on these people. That took me a long time, one reason is because they were so close to me.

Now I've realized I need to be a lot more responsible with how I take responsibility for things, and not try to own stuff that's not my fault. And that I need to more quickly and robustly stand up for myself when people try to hurt me, and not let them dominate the narrative with lies. I used to think such things didn't matter, then I faced the consequences of being silent in the face of other people's bad behaviour and fake stories, and of trusting them to feel about me the same way I felt about them.

Anyway, it's good to take this opportunity to say this. It took me a long time to get to this point.

I didn't come here to out anyone, just to get some advice on how I recover from this emotionally and on strategies for protecting myself in future.

I've paraphrased the descriptions of the other people involved to protect their exact identities and relationships with me. The exact details reveal the worser extent of the betrayals.

I'm not going to out them here because it's not considerate of me to make the choice on their behalf, to expose who they are on HN.

Battle is not over. FB lost in China. Mark will move into policy politics later and when he makes the break FB will decline more.

Also predict that changing market for surveillance and censorship respecting developing economies will result in newcomers getting foothold.

Expect FB share price to peak in 2028 decline thereafter.

Thanks

Thanks, useful

Thanks

Thanks, this is useful

Thanks, it's useful

Thanks, this is useful