MikeGale

The architecture of the system is important here too.

1. Do the regimes buy the software and set it up themselves, or does NSO set it up and they use the service provided?

2. If the former is there a route to go for Saudi, Mexican, UAE, Bahraini... governments?

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I'm not familiar with a survey of how many know these things (and the good suggestions made here).

My suspicion is that few know, and fewer are doing it.

An important goal? Help those who care enough become aware enough to take action.

Very interesting.

Read a 2012 study a few days ago on what kills coral. Have not found a more recent follow up yet. (I was snorkelling on the reef a few days ago, the parts I saw looked pretty good, so wanted to find out more.)

They studied a fair number of reefs, on the Great Barrier / Coral Sea area. My quick summary, from memory, about half of reef coral "cover" damaged at that time. Only 10% from bleaching, the rest split between cyclone damage and crown of thorns. Their conclusion, if crown of thorns are eliminated the reefs will recover naturally.

Fortunately in my 3 days of snorkelling I didn't see a single crown of thorns. The crown killing operation is hopefully that effective on most of the reef.

I've observed that Stack Exchange is worse now than when it started and that the points award system moulds and warps respondents.

Now that it has gone overtly commercial they face issues which may not be solved.

What will programmers do to fix this, will they come up with an alternate architecture?

I guess programmers could take the questions they've answered. Reformulate their answers (and hopefully update them in many cases) and publish them in a distributed way, under their own control.

It might be better to allow people to make their own choices instead of forcing something on them. Your reasoning is going to be wrong or irrelevant for many.

I feel sympathy for those who feel this envy but don't share it.

When I realised what this thing is, I realised it's a nothingburger for me.

Pity I can't control the monster instead of having some decisions, made in a remote conference room, that are no use to me, rammed down my throat.

An important area on which a lot of nonsense is published. By some analyses over 80% nonsense. (When I look at the other material you often can't take any action based on it anyway.)

Some interesting observations in these comments, much better than you usually see.

Could even kick off an HN diet study? Detailed recording of everything that can be sensibly noted, you pick the dietary changes and do it for a long, long time. Something like that might cut through the clutter?

In that regard Facebook has improved recently. Their export now has a JSON format which is useful. They still exclude so much that it may be better to scrape from the UI though.

People who want to take control of their own lives, and curate the mix of knowledge / fact / falsity / opinion / propaganda / disinformation / useful-idiocy in their own heads can technically head in this direction today.

I think a key ingredient is translators that move content out of the platform-bubbles into the world you control. You can move material between RSS, email, blog channel easily, if you choose. Harder but doable is to crack the walled gardens of social media.

These can fuel development of better forms of expression than the primitive nonsense so often used today.

Many people have major barriers; not interested in taking control, not going to build anything myself, fear of leaving the mob, will accept advertising, want somebody to tell me what to do, too rushed...

That's fine, they will continue. Those who want can, and are, going down the other road.

I have no idea whether this is relevant.

I noticed that the site has reviews of anti-tracking products like Ghostery and Privacy Badger. (The reviews are a bit thin in my opinion.) Google may view those as existential threats and work to remove that material from the web.

I find the obvious propaganda (like this) both amusing and useful (well in this case not very useful).

It exercises the immune system against the ever flowing rubbish that is so much of the Internet, Press, Politician bit dribble...

In this case it was so very obvious that it wasn't that useful. I'd be happy to see it still there to give me a laugh.

Also a bit insulting, these guys seem to assume that I'm a weak minded fool who will get taken in by this obvious nonsense.

I don't really see the issue.

These appear to be real humans.

I see so many fake accounts, sock puppets etc. just about any place I look, that I just accept that to not be an idiot myself I need to spend time thinking through everything.

I don't understand writing that seems to assume that anybody, or their analysis, can be automatically believed.

As a user I want the option of choosing for myself. (Whatever I want.)

From that potential designs should be obvious.

Logical error here.

Some people avoid Google Search, Chrome etc. They are still subject to this.

There's some talk of regulation, and people who never knew individuals getting in on the act.

For those who so choose, I'd prefer to see options: 1. Person can set who gets to see their content after they pass, before they pass away. A part of their will. 2. People having access to the content of the person who has passed have ways to handle that as they wish. (Never see it, only see it when I ask etc.)

For those who choose not to prepare in advance, they might get the default, which they can change.

Needs a study of different kinds of people. The difference being how they respond to surveillance.

I'd guess there's a very high performing group that hates surveillance, and when it's noticed finds something else to do. Might be those people whose results are 20 or more times better than the others.

Then there's those who get into flow. Would be interesting to see what impact surveillance has on them.

As a corollary, study the managers who chose to do and not do this. Figure out how good they are.

My attitude, if there's monitoring, it should be done by the individual and used by them for self improvement, no oversight.

There are different audiences out there and the "metrics" reflect some of them but not others.

Simplified version.

Type 1: Think that metrics (followers, friends, likes, reposts...) have meaning. Pursue that meaning. Have no effective moral structure. Maybe are dumb.

Type 2: Don't care about metrics. Find a way to get something that they actually like out of the systems. Have some moral structure.

Much discussion assumes that all users are dominated by their Type 1 side. Type 2's are invisible to the analyst.

Me I say. If everybody is genuinely Type 1 it's time to can "Project Mankind" and start again. Fortunately I know that there are Type 2's out there.

If you can list them we can consider what to do about them.

I can imagine an improvement in many UI's if I had a way to tailor it for what I want, not some corporate one size fits all.

Like: 1. See no likes. 2. Filter out comments that are deeply nested quotes. 3. Filter out specific people on a specific subject that I don't need to read again. 4. Switch off all adverts. 5. Never see a public post. 6...

It seems tied to having a single bucket for everybody.

I'd probably participate in some discussions if I couldn't see and wasn't involved in the likes, up/downvotes, brownie point scramble. If I just saw similarly inclined people there would be a different kind of discussion.

For years I've essentially not consumed sugar except for that in vegetables etc.

I still suffer from this rubbish though: 1. I often can't find any meat in the supermarket that has not been denatured by having the fat removed. 2. I reject a lot of products which I suspect I'd like because they have added sugar. 3. I have to tamp down on my anger when I hear somebody rabbiting on about the dangers of fat.

Humans truly are a stupid species.

Best to ignore "Public Health" advice, too much of it is demonstrably idiocy.

If the stores are hurting and channel that into destroying the communities that support them, something is going to change.

Communities vanish, big stores are destroyed, the old smaller outfits come back, Amazon takes over, whatever???

Good luck with filtering algorithmically. There was a recent stupidity that Sony was claiming all to rights, to all performances of the work of long dead, famous composers. Now if they got hit with a few billion bucks for such blatant nonsense this thing might work... or just have little guys publish their own, decent laws about fair use and no Internet behemoths getting in the way.

The legislators in the EU are an example of what happens when the clueless, make law. Their GDPR has apparently only benefitted Google, with Facebook taking the smallest hit of the rest.

Many want these behemoths to get less power but these EU guys give them more.

Now this.

One answer it to ghettoise Europe and block them from receiving your content. For one thing that would get rid of those stupid "we use cookies things".

My question. How does it go when Linus does get out of it?

I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us.

The title is misleading.

People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising.

RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in and drowned so much in their ignorance and lack of vision.

I always thought this was pretty simple. Google wants surveillance of everybody. AMP is a way to advance that.

You can generally revise an AMP URL to make it normal.

There is nothing to stop you encrypting your comms, except to convince those you talk to.

I wish the venture good luck and hope its users gain.

I decided not to use it for various reasons including: 1. The situations I deal with cannot be reasoned through the skein of a boolean network. 2. The core of a useful discussion, in my mind, is talking with a few people who, in general, are each smarter / more knowledgeable in part of the discussion space, than I.

I didn't see provision for such things in Kialo.

This is what happens when you don't have many staff and your algorithms aren't nearly as good as a decent person. Facebook has no way out of this, as currently set up.

Would you believe it: If you want to have others vouch for you after losing credentials, you can't pick a single person, you're forced to pick 5. If you don't want to pick 5 you can't use the facility. What kind of mind comes up with a system like that?

The thing that may be bothering them is that this will reveal that they don't actually delete an account.

If they got out of the way as gatekeepers, let you use your own data, and that which you're permitted to see, on your own terms it would be better.

If they remain as gatekeepers they will suffer pain, potentially lethal pain.