4,515 karma · joined September 14, 2014
The difference here is that China is positioning itself as a political rival to the United States. America is under no obligation to help its rivals develop.
Prior to Xi Jinping's belligerent foreign poljcy America was considerably more welcoming to Chinese companies. You reap what you sow.
It's not necessarily a function of how much time you spend with the counterparties, or exactly how many relationships you have.
If you have strong, healthy relationships with your kid, ex, and a friend or two you're probably already in the "good" column.
It's a weird accident of information capitalism that we all signed up on platforms to talk with our friends and then those platforms gradually morphed into hyper-engaged outrage factories where you're getting sucked into political arguments with strangers.
What's striking to me about HN discussions of ActivityPub being the future is that the future is already here. The resistance already exists. Do you not know anyone who participates in a semi-private Telegram group or Discord instance?
Especially when you talk to younger folk they're acutely aware of how the behemoth, wide-open networks like Twitter and FB are dangerous places to be yourself. They don't participate heavily in these networks. They are already moving to loosely moderated, semi-closed communities on other platforms. These platforms have millions of users.
Now in light of that fact, Mastodon's role in the discussion seems to me to simply be "here is a similar solution which some techies are really into, it has federation which some of them think could be a killer feature, though it isn't yet."
If an individual is concerned about the effect of Twitter on society the best thing to do is quit using it, move to semi-open, semi-moderated platforms, and encourage everyone else to do the same.
I participate in Discord and Mastodon instances, I've cut back my FB usage and I wouldn't touch Twitter for a million bucks. This digital town square bullshit needs to do a lot better to earn my engagement. I'll just keep going to the local pub for that because at least I get to drink a beer when I'm there and people are usually more civil when they have to say things to my face.
On top of all that the forum is skittish about embracing controversial political topics in general, because many people would prefer to just talk about tech.
Why wouldn't HN users flag some Michael Moore content to oblivion?
What is wrong with this? I'm a far cry from a Silicon Valley liberal, and nothing's wrong with it that I can see. There is no One Forum To Rule Them All, and there shouldn't be. Let a thousand forums bloom their own way.
The one thing I'd like to see is a franchise model based on HN - this place pays just enough attention to civility and topicality to promote good discussion without feeling Orwellian. If only that magic could somehow be replicated.
The title is "Seeking Truth" but the author doesn't appear to be doing that. A more accurate title would be "Declaring Truth Without Supporting My Claims!"
- Author makes an extraordinary, vague, unfalsifiable claim that "America is Broken," but does not provide extraordinary or rigorous evidence
- Author makes the further claim that it's all the fault of Republicans, again providing little in the way of evidence
- Author appeals to the authority of science, but doesn't apply the rigor of good science to his own arguments; we are ironically expected to take his own claims on faith
For the most part this article is just another piece of incendiary rhetoric with little compelling evidence of anything, all it adds to the debate is emotion.
The author should narrow the scope of his claims and address opposing viewpoints in good faith if he wishes to construct a credible argument.
If this shit passes for academic nowadays, no wonder a growing number of Americans feel we no longer need academia.
Teach your students a dialectical method instead, where opposing and specific viewpoints are presented with the requirement to make a rational, evidence-based defense of their positions:
"Pay money to support the creator" can work - Patreon is doing around $50M in revenue annually. Bundling can obviously also work with many big and established examples. But it strikes me that the two models attract a very different customer, so those who subscribe to a specific Substack newsletter may or may not be enthusiastic about buying a big bundle of them down the line.
Early on the WHO's biggest concern was that panic buying would lead to mask shortages for health care workers. If you have to choose between an unmasked public and unmasked health care workers, having the public go without is definitely the better option.
So IIRC around March they issued the guideline - if you feel sick, wear a mask, otherwise don't. And it made sense in context, because after masks worn by health care workers, the infected are the next most effective place to deploy masks in terms of protecting public health.
Eventually mask supply increased because everybody started producing them. The WHO then changed its recommendation to "everyone should wear."
So I don't really think the WHO did anything wrong here. But because of the one-sided way it was portrayed in the media, the negatives got amplified and we ended up with "WHO NWO EXPOSED MILLIONS DEAD!! BILL GATES EUTHANIZES AFRICA CONTINENT GLOBAL ELITES KILLING VACCINE PEDOPHILIA" all over YouTube. Again.
The best sources are public health authorities like the WHO and CDC. They have consistently made careful and measured statements, been fairly accurate, minimized scaremongering and speculation without understating the seriousness of the situation, and issued useful recommendations. Most people would be better off following these authorities directly and ignoring other coverage.
I definitely appreciate the idea of there being a community interest in both the creation and archive of the work. The salient question in these times I think is whether it will continue to be possible to safely create public works of this type. This is a social issue beyond the scope of HN, but the drift of users away from public social networks and toward private messaging apps is evidence of a change that's already underway.
We live in a very different world than the one that existed when HN first launched. Self-censorship and careful pruning of old posts is now a necessity for participating in public online discussions. Society is growing less tolerant of diverse opinions every year and comments that are within the Overton window today could get you fired from your job a few years from now.
I don't think we can even predict what opinions will inspire a Twitter mob in 2022. But inevitably one will come here and try to get someone fired for something, which will have a chilling effect on HN unless we can prune our own posts/comments as future situations require.
There's an alt right author called Vox Day (and I'm a little afraid to be referencing him here) who makes the following argument: if mainstream thought becomes increasingly constricted, and disagreeing with it becomes increasingly dangerous, people will do one of two things. Either they'll self-censor, or they'll "flip the switch" and just go totally anti-mainstream, because it's safer to associate and identify with people who won't get them fired for their opinions. The greater the censorship and fear, the more people will "flip" in a search for safety.
Now he is alt right and he has a vested interest in portraying the ascendancy of the alt right as inevitable, but the point is nonetheless logical, and quite disturbing. It may be that punishing moderately "wrong" speech will ultimately drive moderates into the waiting arms of the extreme right, where they won't be judged so harshly for their errors. Moreover if the purity spiral [1] theory is correct, this phenomenon may be hard to stop, because punishing people for their dissenting speech is an effective way to gain status in many communities!
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
There has never been as much empty virtue signalling by privileged people as there is today. They declare the deck chairs on the Titanic to be offensive, remove a few of them, congratulate themselves and call it a day like their responsibility is absolved. Maybe they go the extra mile and try to get somebody fired for not speaking the same doublespeak as them.
But fixating on their theater achieves nothing. It just gives them more of the attention they crave. So I decided instead to donate my time and my money to good causes and actually help make things better, because this is in short supply.
The virtue signallers may or may not take note, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that if they're going to absolve themselves of doing the real work, someone else has to step up.
If Apple decides to raise the price of all the apps on its store tomorrow, what can you do? Those apps have no other way to get to you, all you can do is take the pain. That smells like market power. I guess you have the option of switching to Android, but that comes with a high cost. So figuring out whether that matters is the type of thing that would be examined in an investigation.
DuckDuckGo gets about 75% of my searches nowadays with the rest going to Google. Still using Maps, GSuite and Android... Baby steps!
The irony here is that while Hacker News is not growth-driven and that's surely part of what makes it great, the bills are paid by a firm that couldn't be more focused on growth.
Here's a thought, which is probably far too political for its own good but oh well. The characteristics of the software industry (both the ones we love and hate) boil in great part down to IP and business law... why not get behind legal reforms that would mitigate the growth at all cost environment. For instance if America had a better antitrust framework then some of the more predatory business plans out there might never have been written. And Stallman, the FSF etc. have been out there for many years pushing us to think about IP in a way that has had enormous societal benefits.
The WHO actually has a definition for this, when the droplets carrying the disease are <5μm they spread further and drift around for longer and that's when they start calling it airborne instead of droplets, COVID-19 is not in this category.
It's still good to wear a mask, I've lost count of the number of times over the years that some excited extrovert straight up spit in my face because they were worked up about something. lol.
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/modes-of-t...
You can go back a few months and the WHO went on record plenty of times regarding a couple of points
- Health workers really need good PPE and there is a shortage
- When infected people wear a mask, it reduces transmission
- The benefits of a non-infected person wearing a mask are not super well understood/studied and this topic doesn't really come up much because our main audience is healthcare professionals
So they said at one point, focus on getting the masks to health care workers, and then as mask supply increased they said the infected should wear them too, and now that cloth/paper masks are easy to obtain they say everyone should wear them.
It was always a question of supply and availability, there was no conspiracy.
If you looked beyond the headlines and looked at the context it was pretty clear.
The exact same article is available without demands here (at least when I accessed it through Google): https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavi...
Any amount of immunity or resistance within the population will reduce the effective reproduction rate of the virus. This effect becomes more significant as the immunity rate increases.
Herd immunity is a colloquial term which refers to the point where there's so much immunity that the effective reproduction rate <1 and new infection clusters die out. The percentage of the population which needs to be immune to get R<0 depends on many factors, consider that many countries have managed to achieve this with near zero population immunity.
For example - if we imagine a hypothetical society which could indefinitely maintain measures like social distancing and mask wearing, the effective reproduction number will be low to begin with; the population immunity required to get to R<0 will therefore be lower.
Please start here before spreading additional misinformation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
I haven't seen a free market in America in decades.
Free markets can be destroyed by governments or by megacorps, but most often they're destroyed by a collaboration between the two.
Put two and two together and resist.
Twitter censoring conservatives wouldn't be a big deal if Twitter had more competitors. America keeps on saying it's committed to free and open markets. Why doesn't it make one here?
Break up Twitter. Or make them open up their protocols. Or whatever. I don't care. Just promote competition. Enough of these quasi-fascist state regulated oligopolies run and reaped by 1-3 companies while the rest of us stand in the bread lines. It's not the American way, not the democratic way, not the capitalist way, and I'm sick of it.
1. Because the virus is spread mainly through droplets, the risk goes down if you keep your distance from other people.
2. Because the virus is spread mainly through droplets, the risk goes down even more if everyone (especially those with symptoms) wears a mask.
Since day one, since before the disease had even left China, the WHO was clear on all these points, the CDC followed shortly after, with one partial exception, which was the mask recommendation. (On masks, the WHO said from day one that anyone who was potentially infected should wear a mask; they initially advised against population-wide mask wearing due to supply.)
Masks and distancing could have and should have been rolled out the day the first COVID-19 case washed up on American shores. Both could have been enforced through stiff penalties on noncompliant businesses (no masks, no distancing, you get shut down for 30 days). They were already in use in South Korea which did a great job of getting the disease under control.
The Korean strategy worked better than the American strategy. Less death, less economic damage. Why did America screw up so badly? Pure hubris and incompetence on the part of Americans, starting with American leaders on both sides of the aisle. The war on COVID-19 was being waged and it was being beaten on the other side of the world, but myopic Americans were too preoccupied with themselves to watch and learn. It's as simple as that. Poor leadership, panic and nationwide myopia.
Why isn't this solved fairly easily via a digest metaphor? One can imagine many different implementations, but something as simple as "your recent updates appear in a group and that group can't be bumped to the top of people's feeds more than twice a day" already seems better than the barrage of puke hiccups that is Twitter today.
You're not alone, the existentialist/nihilist position is that there is no good answer to this question, and life is intrinsically meaningless. This strain of thought has been around for more than 100 years and no one's come up with a really solid counter-argument.
A couple things to consider;
- A meaningless life is normally assumed to be a negative and depressing thing. But why is that? Some people have argued for "positive nihilism," the view that a lack of meaning is freeing. From reading about both sides I eventually came to the conclusion that assigning a positive or negative value to the intrinsic meaninglessness of life is artificial. Both sides are just coming from their own head space with a bunch of stuff they've made up, and projecting. Life's fundamental properties simply exist. The human condition is neither positive nor negative, it just is.
- Even if there's no "good" or intrinsic reason to live, some people manage to cope anyway and enjoy happy, interesting lives. The list of strategies humanity has developed for coping with the abyss is as long as history. Existentialism, absurdism and religion are all radically different philosophies for coping. More practically, everyday tactics for coping range from things as simple as getting more sunlight and exercise, to meditation and (some) social relationships, to many many types of drugs and therapies. There is a long list of coping mechanisms to explore for the sake of curiosity if for no other reason.
- Finally if you choose death, there's no undo button. I think there are too many taboos around suicide (unless you're already dying, at which point some elements of society seem to grant you permission to make a decision which was none of their business anyway). However it can certainly be said that once you cross this line, you lose access to all the other things you might have wanted to do. If it turns out you were wrong, too bad, you'll never know. In this sense suicide is the greatest act of hubris possible, it is the belief that you've arrived at a final conclusion, and in our vast and unknowable universe, this type of belief is almost always incorrect. The only certainty is uncertainty, and with suicide you have eliminated it.