Defletter

Yeaaaah, the Communications Act 2003 is not fit for purpose in the modern information age where [seemingly] the vast majority of conversation is taking place in digital spaces. Sidenote, I do think it's amusing how, prior to the Online Safety Act 2023, it was an offence to Cunningham's Law someone (posting a knowingly-false statement online to annoy someone into correcting you). That said, I'm more or less ambivalent about "grossly offensive" speech: most of the examples I find people moaning about are people being gratuitously abhorrent and should have known better. But again, there are examples of police and prosecutors getting it wrong.

But I think the leap from acknowledging that to "speech should never be infringed", as many freeze peachers would advocate, to be infinitely more destructive: just see what it's doing to America. Just look at what the infiltration of American-style freedom of speech principles is doing to this country: we have people defending Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocated for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers, calling her a "political prisoner", that the government is "silencing the right".

One part where I agree with you is "From the river to the sea": there are two versions of this (more than two, but they are variations of the same thing), the first being "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", and the other "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty". Guess which one our government finds objectionable. And guess which one is being used to justify a genocide. It does bother me that the government can chill and punish speech that objects to its foreign policy. But I feel as if (this is just vibes, feel free to correct me) the most harm being done is through anti-protest laws, not grossly offensive digital communications: I personally know of multiple people who regularly post abrasive, if not downright virulent "silence is violence" type content online, but do not go to protests because they fear arrest, detention, and being fired.

What a shining example of freedom of speech, right here. Bravo.

> The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is

It can be, but free speech types like to pretend it's nigh impossible. The UK has had modern hate-speech laws (for want of a better term) since the Public Order Act 1986, which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred. Amendments in 2006 and 2008 expanded that to religious and homophobic hatred respectively. This exists in stark contrast to the common strawman touted by freeze peach types of "are you just going to compile a list of 'bad words'?!" Hate speech is not magic: you're not casting the self-incriminatus spell by saying the bad word.

That said, I wont pretend like that aren't misuses of police powers in regard to speech, and expression more generally. We've seen a crackdown on protests over the past few years which is more than a little frightening. That said, it's become a pattern that anytime I encounter a discussion online about the UK trampling on freedom of speech or whatever, it always comes back to hate speech. It's almost never about protest or expression. I think that's interesting.

EDIT: Correction, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 did not make stirring up or inciting "homophobic" hatred an offence, but rather hatred on the basis of sexual orientation. So one could get prosecuted for being inciting anti-straight hatred.

Scope guards are neat, particularly since D has had them since 2006! (https://forum.dlang.org/thread/dtr2fg$2vqr$4@digitaldaemon.c...) But they are syntactically confusing since they look like a function invocations with some kind of aliased magic-value passed in.

I think OP is directing their ire towards projects with multiple maintainers, thus is more likely to be hamstrung by consensus building and is thus less productive. It does seem like we've been swamped with drama posts about large open-source projects and their governance, notably with Rust itself, linux incorporating Rust, Pebble, etc. It's not hard to imagine this firehose of dev-drama (that's not even about actual code) overshadowing the fact that the overwhelming majority of code ever written has a benevolent dictator model.

It depends on governance, for want of a better word: if a project has a benevolent dictator then that project will likely be more productive than one that requires consensus building.

Okay, seriously, can we just get one, just ONE document/image spec that doesn't let you embed scripts or remote content? What is with this constant need to put the same exactly vulnerability into EVERYTHING?! Just let me have a spec for completely static documents, jfc!

Figured I'd add that the BBC has had to apologise recently for Question Time posing a question to the panellists about a stat of 1 in 3 children in Glasgow having English as a second language, but the text prompt they showed on screen lied, saying that 1 in 3 children in Glasgow are not fluent in English. That's a pretty substantial change.

It's not very centre-left of the BBC to aid Farage in his racism, and of course there's a Reform politician there to have the first and last words about it. Keep in mind that this is a Scottish episode, with the leader of the Scottish National Party at Westminster, the leader of Scottish Labour, the leader of Scottish Conservatives, a Scottish journalist (there's usually one or two non-politicians on the panel) who did a lot of indyref coverage. And despite Reform not winning a single seat for Scotland in the 2024 General Election, or in the last Scottish Parliament election in 2021, they apparently always need to give Reform a voice on everything so they shoehorned him onto this panel.

This all just screams centre-left.

> Second-wave feminism explicitly challenged and rejected biological essentialism

Exactly, hence why JKR's depraved dogma is anti-feminist: the idea that women can be disqualified from their womanhood for not being biologically pure enough is aggressively bio-essentialist. See JKR's disgusting reaction to Imane Khelif where mere rumour was enough for JKR to disqualify her womanhood entirely and call her a "a man beating a women in public for entertainment". And as konmok as said in their comment: you were all too willing to do the same in another comment thread. This is exceedingly cruel, hateful, anti-feminist, and not worthy of respect within a civil and democratic society. I will no longer be responding to this level of inhumanity.

EDIT: Sidenote, you claiming to have been rate-limited despite having a pretty sparse profile is very funny and implies that you're either running multiple accounts (probably to defend JKR and her cronies) or because you're thrumming the API like nobody's business trying to find any criticism of JKR. Or both. It could be both.

Partially correct but you are conflating the movement fighting for biological rights (eg: reproductive rights) as it being bio-essentialist. And there certainly was infighting about trans people within second-wave feminism (eg: feminist sex wars), but then there's also intersex people. Second-wave feminists more generally did not have the kind of one-drop rule towards womanhood as you do, where someone could have lived their entire life as a woman, be perceived as a woman, experienced misogyny as a woman, experience patriarchy as a woman, suffered domestic abuse as a woman, have breasts and a vulva, etc, but once some test determines them to be intersex, you disqualify them from womanhood entirely and cast them as male. Second-wave feminists would not have done this. In fact, I believe even Greer deplored surgeries being performed on infants to make them comply with society's perception of the binary.

Have you never encountered a generalisation in your entire life?

EDIT: Fun tidbits:

- Sheila Jeffreys thinks that "any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger".

- Janice Raymond thinks that "all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves".

- Germaine Greer published a book of some 200 pictures of young boys "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure".

Truly the height of second-wave feminism right here.

It's shows that JKR, a billionaire, has an army of sleeper accounts willing to jump at any mention of her nakedly virulent transphobia. Second-wave feminists would deplore her bio-essentialism. She is an anti-feminist.

Oh hello, welcome to this 18-comment deep thread. This is the second time now that I've mentioned JK Rowling's transphobia and had a randomer show up and comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058027). You, like them, also only speak about JKR on your profile. How curious.

> which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left

Could you elaborate on that? I'm aware of the Lib Dems championing changes to the law to remove restrictions on "insulting" speech, but even so, they're not left/centre left. There's a joke that they're just yellow tories.

> now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech”

That's untrue. Stirring up or inciting racial hatred was made an offence by the Public Order Act 1986. And while it's true that stirring up religious hatred and homophobic hatred were added to that in 2006 and 2008 respectively, this did not invent the notion of hate speech. Lord Sumption, who was on our Supreme Court, said that the traditional line in English law was between words that merely outrage and words that would cause a breach of the peace amongst reasonable people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=END98dJwpCg&t=1306s). Stirring up racial, religious, or homophobic hatred would seem to conform to that.

> BBC having a center-left slant

That's also untrue. The BBC participated in the pillorying of Corbyn; the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55350905); the whole debacle with the "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4buJMMiwcg); the BBC downplaying Gaza (eg: killed vs died, not allowing the term "genocide", demanding anyone critical of Israel to ritualistically condemn Hamas, etc); the BBC preventing pro-Palestinian audience members for Question Time (https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/10/03/bb...). And speaking of Question Time, how many times has Farage (or other Reformer) been a panellist now? And this is just the stuff I've personally witnessed and noted down. The BBC is establishment media through and through: the BBC is not suddenly centre left because there's gay people in Eastenders.

> You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement.

You should tell the right wingers that. Here's some of the right-wing sources I found when searching Ground News for some articles about Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocating for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers:

- "British Mother Jailed for Tweet: ‘I Was Starmer’s Political Prisoner’" (The European Conservative) (https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/british-mothe...)

- "Lucy Connolly considers legal action against police after being jailed for race hate tweet" (LBC) (https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/lucy-connolly-first-interview-...)

- "‘Silencing the right!’ Free speech boss rages over Lucy Connolly’s ‘absolutely heartbreaking’ admission" (GB News) (https://www.gbnews.com/news/free-speech-lucy-connolly-admiss...)

You may notice a theme amongst these articles about how "it was just a tweet" and "she's a political prisoner" and "calculated move to suppress conservative viewpoints on immigration". This is what the right does. I'm not conflating legitimate criticism with incitement, they are, and they're using their massive media empires to spread this conflation.

This is just going to fix itself with more speech, right?

> It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't.

Y'all really don't make a convincing case for freedom of speech when you cannot even read. Let me repeat: "You have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right."

Again, you are stripping all context and content. You are pretending that protest organising and calling for the burning down of a building populated with asylum seekers are the same thing. I vehemently reject this facetious framing.

Protests are pressure valves, not tweets.

The continual conflation of speech that harms society as "speech I dislike" is absurd. And yes, it's not American-style freedom of speech... we've never had that nor should we. Just look at what American-style freedom of speech has done to America.

> For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.

When you remove all content and context from what is actually being said and done, then yes, this is fairly accurate, but it's also an entirely meaningless framing. But you have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right. But what you're doing here is (to use a hyperbolic comparison) accusing me of hypocrisy because I'm okay with interpretive dance but not murder, even though they're both just actions. It reminds me of 2016 Reddit where slurs were "just soundwaves, bro".

We don't have American-style freedom of speech, nor should we. We have freedom of expression instead because we have very personal experience within our very recent history what unfettered hatred does to a continent. Attempting to import American-style freedom of speech will genuinely destroy this country, we are already seeing it happen.

For me at least (different person), the term "speech offences" has been so captured by the far-right who think publicly advocating for the burning down of buildings populated with minorities is totally fine, but calling someone racist is beyond the pale. Whereas, at least from my own experience, progressives tend to use phrases related to expression, eg, protests.

And so when I hear "speech offences", my immediate thought is to question the premise: Are we talking about people publicly advocating for mass violence? Are we talking about bullying or harassment? Are we talking about a private conversation? Are we talking about a group chat? Are we talking about hate speech? Are we talking about defamation? Are we talking about "fighting words"? Etc. Context matters.

For all the talk I see online advocating for social media to be considered a public space, I've yet to see anyone really grasp the consequences of that: have any of them tried yelling out in a public space that they should burn down a populated building? That won't go down well, and rightly so. It has never been okay to do that.

People facing consequences for broadcasting their depraved bloodlust online doesn't concern me. What concerns me is the extent to which protests against genocide are being suppressed, with police looking for any minor infraction to pounce upon, but we have video of people saying to police "I support the genocide" to make a point, which the police don't bat an eye at. That scares me.

I think it's because unwrap() seems to unassuming at a glance. If it were or_panic() instead I think people would intuit it more as extremely dangerous. I understand that we're not dealing with newbies here, but everyone is still human and everything we do to reduce mistakes is a good thing.

Probably for the same reason that most new language these days cannot bring themselves to just use "function" and instead have "fn", "fun", "func", etc. It's a headlong pursuit of conciseness for the sake of conciseness.

I think they're referring to bundling Bun into another program to use Bun as a JS runtime: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/12017

And here is Exhibit A of those responsible for our current state of affairs

Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).

Isn't that not necessarily out of the ordinary though? What if there's a cosmic ray that change's the value to something not expected by the exhaustive switch? Or more likely, what if an update to a dynamic library adds another value to that enum (or whatever)? What some languages do is add an implicit default case. It's what Java does, at least: https://openjdk.org/jeps/361

That's because you have incorrectly inferred from our statements saying that Core should get the data, or rather that the data should be publicly archived, as us saying that Core has a right to the data. You are again constructing a strawman to argue against.

EDIT: Also, if Rebble scraping it from Pebble isn't theft, then neither would Core scraping it from Rebble. Problem solved.

You keep repeating that Core has no rights to that data, which is true, but it's a refutation to an argument no-one in this thread has made. What we're saying is that Rebble has no rights to that data either.

Rebble's theft of that data was 'allowed' in the same way that Nickelback allow those "look at this graph" memes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7aqZyRuP1Q): it's copyright infringement but they don't care so they don't enforce their rights. It's not like trademarks with its use-it-or-lose-it clause. What I'm claiming here is that people who made apps and watch faces for Pebble didn't care (assuming they knew at all) because it was for preservation purposes.

But now that Rebble is hoarding it to themselves, to the exclusion of Core, a revived Pebble company, those copyright holders may become less willing to tolerate the copyright infringement. And let's be clear: their rights do not begin and end with just getting it taken down.

This is a bit of a what-if, but I had a Pebble watch back then and was considering trying to make an app for it. The idea that, if I had succeeded and published the app, that Rebble would be claiming ownership over my binary and threatening legal action against the original Pebble creator, to be really quite ridiculous and affronting.