chimeracoder

> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide

The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.

The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.

Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.

> Also profiles can be configured and used with CLI, no need for UI (old or new).

AFAIK, they can only be created at the command line, not configured. If you want to do things like change default settings or install extensions from the Firefox Add-On store, you can't really do that at the command line.

You can do that by mucking around in the user.js file and manually adding .xpi files to the extensions/ subfolder, but that's probably stretching the definition of "done at the command-line" since most people aren't creating Puppet modules to manage Firefox profiles.

Perhaps someone knows an easier way to do this, though.

LLMs have serious problems with accuracy, so this story is entirety believable - we've all seen LLMs fabricate far more outlandish stuff.

Unfortunately, it's also worth pointing out that neither Marsha Blackburn nor Robby Starbuck are reliable narrators historically; nor are they even impartial actors in this particular story.

Blackburn has a long history of fighting to regulate Internet speech in order to force them to push ideological content (her words, not mine), so it's not surprising to see that this story originated as part of an unrelated lawsuit over First Amendment rights on the Internet and that Blackburn's response to it is to call for it all to be shut down until it can be regulated according to her partisan agenda (again, her words, not mine) - something which she has already pushed for via legislation that she has coauthored.

> Being found not guilty supports my contention.

Not necessarily. Being found not guilty just means that the facts of that specific case, as determined by the jury, did not fit a guilty verdict. It doesn't mean that someone who did a similar or analogous thing couldn't be prosecuted under the same law and found guilty.

> a businessman who was modestly famous in his lifetime and now is pretty much unknown.

This is quite an understament about who John MacArthur was and what is impact and legacy has been. You're talking about a guy whose name appears in multiple US history textbooks.

I haven't read that biography, so I can't speak to it, but I wouldn't call him "pretty much unknown".

> I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.

I've been a member of this site for fifteen years. I know that nearly any material - not abstract - defense of transgender rights will get downvoted into invisibility, as will any attempt to name transphobia, no matter how civilly presented or exhaustively-cited.

For that same reason, I also know that it's not a worthwhile use of time to delve into substantive "debate" on these topics in this thread, or any place where transphobia is being trafficked openly, for that matter (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508592).

> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.

Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of journalistic ethics.

Nobody has cast false aspersions on him, least of all the person that you are responding to. On the contrary, your comments on this post suggest to me that your defense of Signal and your description of him as "grounded and reasonable" has more to do with your approval of his beliefs rather than an honest assessment of his work.

> They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.

Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.

Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.

> Do you mean "misandry?"

No, OP is being transphobic and referring to trans women as men:

> Note that the "banning controversy" is that they're not banning enough people for having entirely mainstream political opinions, and mostly targets journalists. Or let's be more specific: mostly targets people who don't think that men can identify into being victims of misogyny.

> The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS.

Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.

> Right, but it's not the serum levels that matter: it's the agonistic effect on various receptors. (Most) hormones don't have direct chemical effects on the body. According to Wikipedia:

>> Relative to testosterone, DHT is considerably more potent as an agonist of the androgen receptor (AR).

Judging from this and your other comments in the thread, I'm assuming you're not an endocrinologist.

You're pulling quotes from tertiary sources that at first glance seem to support the argument you're making, but you're missing the broader context, which is that pharmacokinetics and our endocrine systems are way more complicated than you're giving them credit for. It's not as simple as "drug A makes X go down, and X does Y, so A decreases Y".

It would make a lot of people's jobs much easier if that were the case, but the clinical reality is actually much more complicated.

> I take dutasteride (even stronger form of finasteride) and have been personally fortunate to not have any side effects in ~8 years.

Dutasteride is not a stronger version of finasteride. It's a more effective DHT blocker, but it works differently.

The side effects are also different and not easy to predict. Some people have terrible side effects from finasteride and none from dutasteride. Some people have the opposite. And some people can tolerate either one. We don't have a way at the moment to reliably predict which one will work better or be better tolerated for a given individual.

Anyway, I'm glad it has worked for you, and I also would not want to prosecute people who've created a medication that's one of the most effective and well-tolerated around.

> Many trans men who go on testosterone report reductions in suicidality. If the theory is that gender dysphoria related to hormonal incongruence causes depression, then the data from trans women taking the medication supports the theory that cis men might really struggle with it.

This is a really weird argument because it gets so many basic facts wrong. The most fundamental of which is the idea that taking finasteride means lower testosterone levels - it doesn't!

And I'm not even going into the issues with all the other confounding variables at play here, such as the motivations and dosing schedules for HRT being substantially different from other uses of finasteride.

I really don't know why you're bringing up data about HRT for transgender people that's nearly a century old in an article that's not about HRT, when we have plenty of data that's not only far more recent but far more germane to the topic at hand.

> You might expect trans women to react differently to lower T levels than cis men for various reasons

Sure but that's besides the point. I was responding to - and refuting - the claom:

> Reports from trans people, way back in the 1940s, show clear links between sex hormones and depression: a priori, one would assume such a relationship would exist here.

There's no reason to believe that the effects of hormones on depression in trans people are predictive of hormones taken by cis people in completely different doses for different reasons, but it's especially fallacious to assume that it's not only predictive, but predictive of the the exact opposite effect.

> Yeah - it's a selective testosterone blocker, kind of, and tries to target the part that causes male pattern baldness without lowering overall T Levels.

> I assume it still blocks enough hormones to cause mood shifts or other effects?

Endocrinology is a lot more complicated than you're giving it credit for. DHT blockers don't necessarily lower testosterone levels; they can actually increase it (although even then, the mechanism isn't as direct as you might think).

It's neither established nor a given that any side effects of finasteride have anything to do with effects on testosterone or hormone levels at all. A lot of people make that assumption, and there's reason to suspect there's truth to that hypothesis, but it's completely possible it's an unknown side effect of the drug, and there hasn't been enough study into the mechanism to understand it (in part because the side effects are relatively rare and weakly established).

> Reports from trans people, way back in the 1940s, show clear links between sex hormones and depression: a priori, one would assume such a relationship.

We have a lot of data about trans women taking finasteride as part of HRT and depression, and the clear correlation runs in the exact opposite direction from what this article is talking about.

> Bigger the city, more expensive housing becomes.

That's not universally true; it depends on what housing policies exist.

> That is the real reason for low fertility rates in big cities. People who want children have to be either rich, or move further away.

This is not universally true either.

> Find me anti-car advocates with 3 or more children.

I easily could, but I have no interest in chasing ever-moving goalposts.

> Nope. It's universal. The denser the city, the more child-hostile it is.

> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.

This is a glaring example of hunting for data that supports a preexisting belief, rather than basing beliefs on empirical data.

To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.

> There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.

To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.

But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.

> This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state. This is free babysitting.

It's not quite free in every state, although it's closer to that than many people here probably realize.

At least until 2025 (unsure how the July budget cuts will affect this longer-term), Medicaid provides free or low-cost insurance to eligible children/families, which in theory should apply to everyone who isn't eligible for health insurance through other means. Emphasis on in theory, though - in practice, there are plenty of people who aren't covered.

It's probably more accurate to say that almost all children are eligible for healthcare coverage, and that coverage is free or low-cost for millions of people who meet various income thresholds. (People who are covered on private insurance almost always have copays or deductibles, so it's not truly free for them because there is some out-of-pocket cost).

> It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.

This post is about childcare - ie daycare/preschool/babysitting - not child health care.

> That also means that, unfortunately, it will take years to repair the damage.

If you're old enough to be reading this comment today, it's unlikely that the full damage will be repaired in your lifetime.

> Encrypted backups can't be deduplicated unless the encryption is flawed

This isn't an encryption problem; each device can only have one instance of Signal installed, and the latest backup (assuming it has terminated successfully) is a superset of the previous ones (aside from any messages that have dropped from retention, which you presumably don't want to be preserving, by definition).

"Deduplicate" in this context means ensuring that you only have N backups in your remote storage, rather than cumulatively storing every day.

> On the contrary

Well, no, that doesn't contradict what I said at all. That link isn't about treating the recipient of your messages as an adversarial actor. The recipient can still choose to enable it, if they want to provide Microsoft access to the messages they receive.

> I do that and then sync that folder with another computer using SyncThing.

AFAIK SyncThing only monitors for changes between files with matching names, and Signal stores each backup with a separate (timestamped) filename. Are you storing every day's backup individually, or do you have some tool for deduplicating?

> I'm confused, I've restored Signal from encrypted backups before. I did it like 4 months ago. What's this feature?

Those backups are stored locally, are platform-specific (Android-only), and there is no feasible way to automate their transfer to any other device, which means that either you have to manually manage them regularly, or you risk losing your entire message history if your phone suddenly dies (or is stolen, or broken beyond repair, etc.).

This is a true automated, off-site backup feature.

> It would be really useful to have more client-side control over media storage. That way, I could better manage storage growth without wiping entire threads.

> For example, being able to see all media across chats, sort by file size, and optionally group by conversation would make it much easier to clean things up.

I have good news for you: this already exists.

On Android:

Settings >> Data and Storage >> Manage Storage >> Review Storage

This allows you to view all of your media, files, and audio across all chats, sorted by the amount of storage used. You can also delete those files individually without affecting the rest of the chat.

You can also do the same thing within a conversation.

I know plenty of people who have inadvertently lost their entire messaging history because their phone broke or was lots and they couldn't transfer messages directly from the old phone to the new one. Signal allows you to export backups of messages to a file, but only on Android - the iOS version does not. This is a great feature not only for users who are less technically inclined than the average HN reader, but for any user who doesn't want to go through the tedious process of manually backing up their messages periodically but doesn't want to risk losing their message history if their phone has one unfortunate encounter with gravity.

My only concern reading this is that I hope they don't remove the manual export feature once this is rolled out. I know that that feature has been technically complicated to support, but it's important for users to preserve the option to maintain control over their backups, if they want to manage backups themselves, alongside the option of having a more convenient, automated approach.