apostacy

It makes almost no difference at all, all that matters is the outcome. People with power are exerting pressure to deny people access to information.

Honestly I'd rather have the weak and ineffective Indian government "ban" something, than have the full force of corporate America collude to punish me for trying to serve "problematic" content.

No it isn't. Freedom of speech is an essential American principle. The First Amendment is an instantiation of that. Congress should force big tech monopolies to reflect our core values.

Essentially, the first amendment is the floor, not the ceiling. People who want to minimize freedom of speech will point to the first amendment and say that restricting congress from restricting our speech is all we should have.

Big tech companies should be forced to enshrine freedom of speech into their platforms, or face still government sanctions.

What if you get called the fascist then? Anything you say to defend yourself is just fascist mind tricks. Denials are just more evidence of guilt. I would still defend your right to call for us to be silenced.

Telegraph companies, electric companies, bus companies, and airlines had far less of a monopoly than these tech platforms. Forcing them to respect 1st amendment values is the only reasonable thing to do.

So called "private platforms" don't exist on the internet. If YouTube really wants to be completely private, than the government should physically sever any backbone connections over public land. Let Google pay for every inch of fiber, and negotiate with every single property owner, every step of the way.

Then and only then will they actually have a private platform where they can ban anyone for any reason. Until then, they are imposing on the public, and the public has every right to require them to respect our most foundational values of freedom of speech.

Unlike XUL, extensions are just passengers, with no power to override core browser engine features. I don't think that web extensions have reached a similar level of usefulness today. And even if they did, why should we have waited so many years to gain that functionality back?

Google's decision to have crippled extensions was made in a corporate board room to maximize Google's leverage at the expense of utility for users. So it is tragic and baffling to see Mozilla pantomiming what Google did, since throwing away a far more mature and powerful extension framework benefits nobody but Google.

Google could troll Mozilla by just announcing that they are deprecating local bookmarks (and they may very well do that), and watch as Firefox obsequiously removes bookmarks from Firefox, "to stay modern", and then Google could pull the rug out from under then by not deprecating it.

It was really disappointing that Firefox removed RSS support. I could understand Chrome was abandoning an essential open standard, as they are a for-profit company. But Mozilla doing it was senseless.

The only thing that seems to reliably motivate Mozilla to change their browser is when Google adds a new feature, so I am confident that Firefox will get RSS support again.

> Don't be obtuse. Had members of Congress not evacuated their chambers just the fact a mob was outside the doors would be holding them hostage. Several rioters had flexi-cuffs and other bindings. It's not terribly difficult to hold someone hostage. It's downright easy for a large group of people to imprison a smaller group, especially one composed of unarmed geriatrics.

Yes it is quite difficult for a group of unarmed and unorganized rioters to subdue a highly trained and well armed security force, much less perform a coup.

What would have been a worse case scenario here? They burst into the capital chamber, subdue dozens of armed guards in unarmed combat, and then seize control of the federal government by threatening to beat members of congress with flagpoles?

There is no evidence of this being anything other than a riot. And for the year 2020, it was a relatively tame one.

What specific acts did the Jan 6th rioters commit that would count as terrorism or insurrection? Is it insurrection to damage public property and disobey government orders? How were they planning on taking hostages without guns? Were they going to beat people with flagpoles?

I wasn't even talking specifically about vaccinations at all. There are so many examples of injustices caused by our leaders during the pandemic. An example of a group that was harmed was the Canadian first nation communities. They had their community centers and churches closed indefinitely, while Walmart got the keep all of their stores open.

Not just were people's lives ruined by sloppy and corrupt government pandemic policies, but communities were shattered. The rich got way richer, and working class people were thrown into poverty. And it was so avoidable. Our decision makers at different layers were either corrupt and using the pandemic a cover to profiteer and consolidate power, or they were just incompetent and didn't enact effective policy.

They should be held accountable. They should have to face some kind of justice. Again, look to how corporations that were found to be engaging in illegal pollution were dealt with as a good starting point. Assets should be seized, arrests made. Ideally trusts can be set up to try to repair the damage done to people and communities. People that concealed information about the pandemic should be arrested and tried.

> Specifically, what ‘shattered’ that trust?

Doubling down on failed lockdown policy long after it was known to be ineffective and hurt more people than it helped. Profiteering off of the pandemic crisis. Rampant censorship of people who turned out be correct and were trying to warn us.

If they knew that there was something wrong with the vaccine, I expect them to lie about it, and censor and coerce whistle blowers into silence. They have demonstrated their eagerness to do so over the last two years.

So what good is the word of "the science" about how effective vaccines are? These are the same people that told us that we should trust the Chinese government.

> What did you need to see from those in power that would have maintained or built that trust?

Absolute transparency. Admitting that they made mistakes and committing to avoiding those mistakes in the future with meaningful policy changes. Reparations paid to those who were needlessly harmed by their mistakes.

At the very least, something like the settlements from toxic waste dumping coverups would be a good start.

Because the deaths prevented are debatable, that is why. Should we be forced to get every vaccine? Even vaccines that are not effective? Who decides that?

What if the institutions mandating vaccines have a conflict of interest?

Very few people are actually so selfish or ignorant that they would not get an effective vaccine.

So much of the handling of this pandemic has completely shattered my trust in our medical and scientific institutions.

The debate about the actual medical benefits of the vaccine are almost irrelevant at this point.

Except that created a narrative that the pandemic was above politics, and was only about public health and "the science". But that is clearly not the case.

You don't engage in Steelmanning to be nice. It is for your benefit.

Demonstrating that you fully understand an argument better than your opponent, and being able to charitably represent them, just makes it all the more devastating when you knock them down.

If you really disagree with an argument vehemently, then you should steelman it. Strawmanning makes you look dishonest and fragile, only capable of attacking a weakened form of your opposition.

If someone who has really abhorrent opinions tries making their argument, then you are letting them win if you strawman them.

I agree that the language about personality disorders is absolutist and pessimistic, which I think obscures discussion about treatment.

So it is possible to cure narcissism, if only the narcissist wants to be cured?

That is a very far cry from being described as 'incurable', which I have seen used a lot.

Again, I am not saying that narcissism doesn't exist, but the language that is being used to describe it is unhelpful.

A lot of people go through phases in their teens or 20s that could be described as narcissistic, and then they develop out of it.

I am really confused about this. It does not make sense to me.

Do you mean that it is difficult to cure? Because that is not the same thing as incurable.

If people can be socialized into it, why can't they be socialized out of it?

15% of the population is incurably emotionally broken? And most of them were made, not born, because they spent too much time on Instagram, and now they are part of the 15% of the population that is cursed to a life of narcissism, no matter how much effort is put into curing them?

Isn't it possible that you can just mature and become less solipsistic? Aren't these behaviors situational? What if you were put in an environment where someone got negative feedback for narcissistic behavior?

There must be something I am missing, because those claims do not seem realistic.

Should customers who have had a bad experience just not give any feedback then?

Github should be grateful for this feedback. I know that it takes effort to make your product or service better, but that doesn't mean that customers shouldn't ever say anything. Customers are telling Github how it can improve its service. Github can choose to listen to them, or not.

With some simple frontend changes, they can probably reduce accidental destructive changes to customer's accounts.

I think Github cut some corners here. I would much rather that repo stars were treated similar to how resources on other platforms are. If someone makes it private, then return 403 "repos is private"

This is like seeing Obama do a charity event with Halliburton and Dick Cheney.

Disney is probably the company most directly aligned against the values that Mozilla purportedly holds. They spent decades funding projects to kill the modern web.

Has Disney indicated that they have stopped being the bad guys? As far as I can tell, Disney is still pushing their dystopian nightmare world. The least that Mozilla can do is not normalize them.

> _Who_ has been "spending the last few years..."? Is it the same people who are now "outraged over a single schoolboard..."? Can you show that?

Of course it is the same people, that was implied by my sentence, obviously.

Just being willfully dense and refusing to comprehend what someone says does not refute them.

If you had spent any time reading HN, you would see the plethora of commenters who would defend actions far more egregious than what is alleged to have been done by this schoolboard.

In threads discussing California's changes to their curriculum, there was a sea of commenters defending things far more absurd than the scopes monkey trial.

It would take me less than five minutes to use the hackernews search tool to find these threads, must I do that for you?

Are you really going to make me spoon feed you?

California recently decided that long division should not be taught until middle school, in order to fight "white supremacy"

Some Tennessee backwater is not the joke here.

What if the author said something slightly problematic on Twitter 14 years ago, would that be a good justification for banning their book?

Rednecks stopped being the biggest laughing stock in this country years ago.

A small school district removed a book because it contained some profanity that made some parents uncomfortable.

Is this supposed to be more important than the massive changes that states like California have quietly pushed through over the last year? How am I supposed to take this incident seriously?

After spending the last few years gleefully cheering for Republicans to be banned from every online platform, it feels pretty fake to be outraged over a single schoolboard somewhere editing their suggested reading list.

I used to see stories like this all the time in my social media feed 10 years ago, during the peak of the new atheist phenomenon. But it feels really out of place now. Especially because of people's warming to censorship.

This is because of the toxic effect of economics and marketing. Everything has to be centered on making the platform more money. Even in cases where it makes no sense to do so!

I've seen open source projects embrace market driven design methodologies, because they mistakenly think it matters.

There are so many designers and developers who have only worked at startups, and dark patterns have become baked into our development culture.

Mostly this attitude that you need to manipulate the experience of the user, and disregard any feedback from them, because you are the expert, and they don't know what they really want. That's what Steve Jobs said, and he was a success, right? So you should do that also.

The only thing that function does is create a directory, and you could just as well have done an mkdir output && youtube-dl -o output/ I would also advise against using the mkv container, and use mp4 instead.

I have no idea what videos you were watching.

The thing that is so compelling about JCS is that he keeps his distance from the subject, and lets the facts speak for themselves most of the time. The only time he really talks about psychology at any length it is pretty textbook criminology that you could find on the wikipedia entry about criminal psychology.

JCS has actually spawned an entire new genre of YouTube videos. Just search for "JCS inspired" to find more. I find it really compelling, because it is much more grounded and less sensational than documentaries that would be shown on cable television.

It makes me sad that so many people have a knee-jerk reaction that anything amateurish must be fake news.

I am not remotely excited for any reboots. I don't want Stargate: Discovery