BryantD

"No way" is an awfully strong statement. For example, people abandon personal material in storage units which are subsequently auctioned off fairly often.

But I appreciate you iterating on this -- I understand your position and while I disagree with you on the question of what "reasonable" would be in this case, I absolutely think that if I could read minds I would find that Project Veritas staffers at the very least knew the diary was stolen.

"particularly if you don't have knowledge of how the document was acquired."

I would not say that Project Veritas acted illegally in this case, although I have absolutely no love for them and I think they have acted illegally and immorally in other cases. In the end the Justice Department did not bring charges.

You absolutely can't offer someone money to steal documents. That's clear. Even providing advice on acquiring documents is probably going to be unlawful. And if possession of the document itself is otherwise illegal (i.e., CSAM) there's no protection there.

It isn't necessarily illegal to offer money for a document, particularly if you don't have knowledge of how the document was acquired. I'm not familiar enough with this case to have a strong opinion other than knowing the DoJ elected not to bring charges.

And, yes, it was Trump's DoJ. In this case I'm unaware of any evidence that the decision was politically motived and I still have some confidence that whistleblowers would speak out, particularly given the recent wave of resignations due to directives in Minneapolis. I think people of good will could disagree with me there for sure.

O'Keefe had already returned it, as I recall.

Sorry to be a pedant, but not exactly. They raided James O'Keefe's house to seize his cell phones as part of an investigation into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods (the diary) across state lines. Journalists (which is a very broad term, and in this context I think O'Keefe qualifies) are certainly allowed to receive stolen or classified material, which also applies to the raid on the WaPo reporter. They are not allowed to induce others to break the law on their behalf, and that's what was at question in the Biden diary case.

I don't think the O'Keefe raid was justified and it's certainly the first step on a slippery slope. I also think the current situation is a worse violation of norms.

Perhaps I'm missing something but I'm fairly sure that if I was a billionaire and I was motivated to figure out a way to donate to Renee Good's family, I would be able to figure something out without the help of GoFundMe.

I don't disagree with the underlying point, I just don't agree that the effects of this particular issue are all that minimal. Mockery only gets you so far when the moralizing fools are, say, serving as Speaker of the House.

Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.

Depends on how big the chilling effect is, no? For example, if a school librarian notices that a colleague in another district loses their job or worse, gets personal threats because of a specific book, they might well remove a book from shelves before it's challenged.

That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.

To be completely fair, Russia did decide to make an exception in this case, although it took a couple of months (during which Bushby was detained) to get there.

I am a little bit torn in this case. From our vantage point it's obvious that Bushby wasn't running an elaborate long scam to get into Russia. In the moment... I don't know, former UK special forces guy? Long history of espionage between UK and Russia? Two months seems too long; it's also not as easy as your case of a teenager in the sewer.

Oh, they absolutely are. As Leavitt promised at her first briefing, it’s been opened to: "independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators."

The repository is part of https://github.com/historicalsource, which has code for a bunch of Infocom games, although at a quick glance most of them aren't open sourced. Still, very cool resource.

I've been guessing that the problems existed prior to the Marriot deal; why would they give up their front door to a competitor otherwise? But I agree that it's got to be a wildly crazy story.

There's a nuance here: a lot of times, it's people hearing "male privilege is a problem" and immediately being told that this means "you personally are at fault!" So it's very understandable that people believe that they're being told "everything is their fault because they have male privilege" when they're not.

"We've observed and documented instances where judicial decisions seem to override the will of shareholders and boards of directors"

Annnnnd so? We should expect that will happen; a judge's job is not to follow the lead of the parties before the court, it's to adjudicate the law.

The Netherlands has also cut back on intelligence sharing with the US: https://intelnews.org/2025/10/20/01-3416/

I dug in a bit and did a little research. Criterion and Dropout, as mentioned, use Vimeo. So does Arrow's streaming service (cult films, mostly). From there on in it gets even more fringe: Taskmaster (the British game show) has a streaming service built on Vimeo, the Z-movie titans Troma and Full Moon Features use Vimeo, and so on. So not insanely crucial but I still think it's a better world in which those services can keep doing what they do.

Yes, yes it is. And there was some sort of bug that pushed the top quality down to 720p last month.

Yes, there are alternatives. Nonetheless, the niche streamers I'm thinking of would find it a moderate burden to move to a different provider and they're operating on slim margins as is.

Vimeo is the really interesting case for me, because they are the white label hosting providers for a large number of niche streaming services -- Criterion Channel comes to mind, for example. Evernote failing is sad but lower on indirect effects. Vimeo going down would leave a noticeable hole in the streaming world.

Save you a potential click: the article is dated September 8th, 2025. The House didn't surprise us all by coming back into session to pass this bill.

Oh, we’ve long since seen that revenge: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s... for many examples, including quite a few in the sciences.

I have come to think of the Sokal hoax as an early warning sign of our current information crisis. There was an era when high production values signaled information hygiene. The real Apple original sin wasn’t the walled garden, it was the LaserWriter.

Same here. I’ve been dedicating New Year’s Day to a long movie for a few years now —- Trenque Lauquen last year —- and the habit is working out quite well.

I have a different opinion of Twitter than you do, but that’s not actually the case I was making. I was pointing out that Twitter’s terms of service were modified to be less aggressive about calls for violence. If you’re correct and Twitter succeeds at not promoting hate and violence… why wouldn’t James Comer want to understand why?

My explicit hypothesis is that he’s not holding these hearings out of a desire to investigate, he’s holding them for other reasons.

Also you’re slipping down a slope here. Originally the question was about promoting violence yet you keep referring to hatred or even being glad someone’s dead. Promoting violence is not the same as being glad someone has passed away.

It is not easy to commit seven hours to a single movie; for me, Sátántangó was worth it. Warm up on Werckmeister Harmonies which is a short two hours since Bela Tarr isn't and doesn't need to be for everyone. That said, Sátántangó is in my top four movies of all time because of how well it reflects humanity and how much it says about how we interact with each other. (The cows are a metaphor for HN, obviously.)

Do you happen to have a link to Zendesk's denial?

I can’t help but notice that Twitter and TikTok didn’t get called for that session. In November 2023, Twitter went from a zero tolerance policy for violent speech to “we may remove or reduce the visibility of violent speech.” Seems really relevant for the topic of the hearings! And yet.

I’m thus unwilling to take Rep. Comey’s decision to call Reddit to testify as evidence of anything. Feels more like political theater to me. This doesn’t either condemn or absolve Reddit, it’s just not strong evidence.

I think maybe one other lesson, although I certainly agree with yours, and with the other commenters who talk about the unreliability of this particular method? This feels like an argument for using an editor that autosaves history. "Disk is cheap," as they say -- so what if your undo buffer for any given file goes back seven days, or a month? With a good interface to browse through the history?

I'm sure there's an emacs module for this.

Yeah, this is both true and tricky. My belief is that the original sin was politicizing the question soon after the beginning of the pandemic; both the Chinese and US governments are at fault here (destroying all the raccoon dogs seems like a very stupid action to me, for example).

I further believe that a lot of people overreacted to the rush to judgement. It is correct to say "we don't know yet" and in March/April 2020 it was wrong to say "this has to be a lab leak." But it's also wrong to overcorrect and say "it couldn't be a lab leak." That's both a political reaction and a human reaction.

Quite strong:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

I tend to agree with this, although I’ll note that I don’t equate revolution with violence. Often but not always, and Sensei sure has weapons at hand, for whatever that’s worth.