csydas

This is a story about social media technology and a fairly deep and documented look at how a specific group is using this technology to spread their version of propaganda and harassment.

The use of the technology may be political, but I would not call this a political article. I was surprised this made it to the front page too at first but as I read on, it ended up being a really interesting article detailing fairly specifically how social media tech is used to engage in harassment, attack people for voicing an opposing political opinion, alter public narratives on important divisive events, etc. It's probably the most plain explanation of how this process works and how social media tech accelerates it I've read to date.

I completely get your fear as I also don't really want non-chat features from Telegram, but I can pretty confidently say I don't think any of the new features have at all changed how I use the app. my chats work exactly like I expect them to with my friends and that's perfect. I don't see any of the more social media stuff unless I want to.

I think it's a pretty good sign that all these social media features continue to be added and I still don't see any impact on how I use Telegram.

I'm not sure what the parent post meant exactly, but I do agree there is tons of grunt work -- I've seen big name SV companies where large parts of their work flow include parts like "and then just every hour you need to do something in a slow UI that can't be automated" to keep vital systems working. I would say that's really grunt work, and there are even persons in such companies where their only task is doing such grunt work. Truly I've been told by clients I work with they have entire double-digit sized teams where the members only responsibility is to reboot VMs that breach specific resource thresholds -- easily automated and even built into most hypervisors, but for whatever reason these tech giants opted for a human to do it -- the only semi-reasonable explanation I got from one client was that their infrastructure team got outsourced and they laid off the only people who knew how to use the automation tooling. It's a dumb reason for sure, but at least I can understand why they opted for the manual grunt work.

Similarly, keep in mind a lot of this grunt work is just to satisfy some reporting requirement from somewhere -- some person(s) in the company want to see at least X% of uptime or Y LOC every day, so you get people trying to write a lot of yak shaving code that basically does nothing except satisfy the metrics or ensure that uptime % always looks good (i.e., they don't fix the cause of the downtime entirely, they just get the endpoint that is checked to determine update working well enough so it reports to the monitoring system and they leave it at that)

This is a real issue I've seen at my past jobs in Support -- in theory, the better the support team got at closing issues without needing RND, the better the case load should have gotten and the better overall time for everyone involved (support, rnd, C-levels, customers). We had many huge enterprise customers using the product (usual big names across the globe), and everything was working pretty damn well and people were happy.

Then the acquisition came, hordes of new C-Levels and directors added, and suddenly, the system everyone wanted was no longer enough; we needed more out of the Support/RND team for some reason, more sales, more renewals, more special contracts with ENT clients with exhausting demands from the company. And the expectation was just "be more efficient". All of this came over slow time with small changes (back porting features for ENT clients who refused to upgrade, forbidden solutions for the Support team because "it upset the major clients", allowing sales/renewals to force RND engagement if they demanded it, new CRM because it was too hard to do marketing campaigns in the old one, even though people were calling _us_ and asking to just send them a quote they liked the product so much)

I honestly think trying to commodify and extract even more from what was a very successful system financially and just overall ended up ruining pretty much everything. Sales are slumping as are renewals, we're churning RND and Support folk, and because of slump in sales, there's belt-tightening everywhere.

We've implemented so many new systems needlessly with huge implementation/consultant fees that absolutely no one knows how to use -- workday is a prime example of this as out of the box it doesn't do _anything_ we needed, but we had to use it anyways, and absolutely no way to pay for the features we really needed. Same with ServiceNow implementation, it was supposed to be a near 0-code experience we were sold, but naturally that was not the case. Why did we get it? No idea except that it came down from on-high from persons that don't use the CRM and now we're stuck with it.

For me what it comes down to is too many people having to be like the CEO and Bill from the article -- for some reason such Clevels need to show they're doing "something", but I didn't think that something should include implementing wild changes to workflows in the company the C's know nothing about, or even worse, responding to customer complaints and demanding we "fix the issue" without knowing what the issue is.

The conference experience from the article resonates with me heavily, cause we have all these systems that do "everything but nothing", all these workflow changes without listening to the people having to use the work, it's really awful.

Out of curiosity, do you interpret the list as a list of accomplishments or a goal list?

My interpretation of the author's intent is that it was more to show how much we limit ourselves needlessly due to our own perceptions (however we got them) that such things are "not normal and shouldn't be done."

If I had read this article 10 years ago, it would not have resonated with me as it does today, but I was in a much different mental state 10 years ago. As I got to a better mental state I also started to eschew a lot of the limitations I placed on myself on what I can or cannot do -- don't interpret this too drastically, as many of the limitations I would put on myself were quite strict about absolutely benign and minor things, for example (and also from the article), "ask obvious questions". I was so afraid of looking stupid for not knowing something and also did not handle when I got dismissive responses to my questions at work, which meant I would stress myself out trying to research something I didn't understand well and conceptually had difficulties even starting to grasp, so even though I'd usually get it _eventually_, it was only after a lot of mental and emotional stress and lots of really dumb or bad mistakes (which garnered further dismissive statements/comments). What changed was I stopped being embarrassed that I don't know something completely unfamiliar to me, and instead practiced how to express:

- Here's what I understand so far

- Here's what I'm not certain about and would like clarification on

- Here are the questions I have that I don't even know how to start finding the answer to

- Here's why the questions/clarifications are important for my thought process

When I started framing it like this, I began to realize that the dismissive response _typically_ (not always naturally) came from one of two reasons:

1. The responder themselves didn't get why I was so lost on the subject before and thought I was dumb/lazy, but now they could see my train of logic and understand how I got to these questions/concerns

2. The responders were dismissive because they themselves did not know how to answer these questions and did not want to admit this, and instead decided to be dismissive.

It really opens up your own world and is great for your mental and emotional well-being when you stop limiting yourself needlessly on very basic things in life. Even physically and financially you can improve just by not limiting yourself needlessly, for example, talking about salaries with your coworkers, making counter-offers to unsatisfactory salary offers, asking for counter offers from your current employer if you get a job offer with a better salary.

This isn't to say that you will always be successful in these items, but my experience is the successes tend to outnumber the failures, and even when there are failures, often there's a silver lining from them. (e.g., using salary discussions again, a vitriolic reaction from a current employer I was considering leaving due to low salary/high stress job was scary and hurtful at first, but it made the decision to leave much easier as I saw plainly that not only was it possible for me to have a better paying/less stressful job, my request for counter-offer showed that my current employer really did not care how unhappy I was with my job -- the decision to leave became way easier)

Even just think of a few "out of the box" things you've done in life that worked well for you, I bet you could make a pretty decent list also.

It's the reality of many families all over the world, so, yes, you can if you want to I think is what the article is suggesting.

I don't think the list is meant to be a "you must do these things" list, it's more to say "yes, you can absolutely do this if you want to, there is no cosmic force that stops you if _this is what you want_. I get your comment was incredulous towards an idea which isn't want you would want for yourself and your family, but my understanding is that the author's intent was to share their own realization that just because the things on their list are sometimes considered unusual or not normal doesn't mean you're forbidden from doing them. I think the author's point is more "you should not needlessly exclude valid options" as you're finding out what you really want to do in any element of life.

So your statement of incredulity is understood, sure -- you wouldn't want this right for yourself and your family at this time. The point is that if it is something you and your family wanted to do and could do, then the fact that it's not common for families to be nomadic shouldn't be a reason why you don't do it.

it’s contextual as most things. need to actually use and work on the machine? use whatever shell you want to make your life easier.

need a script to run on many different systems and/or need to write a script to be managed automatically by a service account? probably you want a shell with syntax that is guaranteed to be the same on all your systems.

it does but i cannot tell why the azure performance is so different than on premises hyperv. i simply don’t know but the issues i’m describing here afaik did not affect azure instances. i do not know why but i thjnk it means there is a difference between on premises hyperv and azure hyperv or they do something to ensure the same issues don’t affect azure instances

but i simply don’t know why there is a difference

edit: if you search “hyperv rct bug” you will find forum posts fasts showing the timeline of this issue lasting years and many clients complaining that microsoft would not even acknowledge the issue publicly (or even in ms support cases) until very very recently

HyperV has been overlooked by Microsoft for awhile in favor of Azure. You can get a basic HyperV host up and running pretty easily (even for free with the Core edition), but I would not call it great. My experience with HyperV is not a pleasant one as it struggles a lot and the error messages are often extremely cryptic. Similarly, there are some pretty outstanding bugs that existed for years that Microsoft didn't bother to fix -- for example, since HyperV 2019, there has been an impactful RCT bug† that can be triggered if you upgraded your HyperV hosts in a specific path (2016-2019) and any backup solution used HyperV's RCT. The result of the bug is extremely poor performance on any VM using RCT. Supposedly there was a patch last or this month that addressed it, but I've not heard any positive news from clients about this patch. Nevermind that Windows updates have frequently broken core HyperV functionality (as recent as December 2022 there were bugs where you couldn't start Virtual Machines or even create new ones due to bad Windows updates)

From my perspective, Microsoft doesn't want to deal with HyperV anymore, they want your machines up on Azure. I'd actively advise against HyperV simply because I don't see that Microsoft cares about on-premises.

† RCT == Changed Block Tracking for HyperV, basically faster backups by allowing the backup application to know exactly which blocks of the virtual disks have changed since the last backup and the backup application can do fast incrementals via this means.

it’s not my thing but there are certainly tech enthusiasts and even brand specific enthusiasts that like details like this as they do try to get “the best” from their tech.

so probably it’s not for everyone but i guess there is value in knowing how big of a bump the newest model gives.

Yes, mostly because the other actors are notoriously vengeful and petty; ransomware gangs, dark markets, etc, they don't just register complaints with each other, they typically look to ensure the bad actors are removed from the space entirely.

regarding drug dealers, I wouldn't consider it a good comparison. the actions of one dealer typically doesn't affect others, they're just not that connected beyond professional recognition/courtesy. If dealer A is shorting their customers, dealer B absolutely wouldn't care as why would they? they have no relationship, and it'd probably mean the customers go to dealer B instead. business will continue as usual even if one bad actor is doing shitty stuff to their customers.

with ransomware that is not the case -- if public opinion overwhelmingly tells there's no sense in paying because the ransomware gangs never follow their word, that affects all the gangs, not just the bad actor. the gangs already have a hard enough argument to make as to why the targets should pay so anything that frustrates that further is frowned upon.

SilkRoad was a dark web market, so the comparison from the parent is a bit strange for me, but regarding your comment on reviews, yes they're very important and for the sites I've used, the reviews have been very reliable and useful.

My understand is that since it's a much more limited market, access is very difficult even under normal circumstances (not because of security but just because dark web markets usually have awful performance for various reasons), so it's a far different review landscape than say shopping on Amazon, at least the ones I have used. The markets themselves were fantastic about refunds/conflict resolution, better than most normal online shops. Reputation is key for basically everything dark web, and the main actors in this space are notoriously petty and bold towards anyone that makes it harder to conduct business.

I imagine it's very similar with Ransomware as there has to be some reason for the targets of the attack to believe paying the ransom is worth it, and anyone who upsets that balance for the ransomware gangs unexpectedly becomes rapidly unpopular, and usually a target for the other gangs. It very much so is heavily relying on the honor system, but it seems the groups are committed to such a system.

Is there maybe some road map or purpose statement on this? it’s not that i don’t believe that this is absolutely true (i’m sure it’s the wet dream of all SV companies…) but google’s offerings are so inconsistent that if that’s really their goal i just can’t see how they mean to get there. every answer to competition is a half baked answer in my experience and i truly just can’t see how google means to do this. google plus i thought was supposed to be this but that did not pan out well at all.

and i also don’t see how they can really do this at least in EU, at least not for long until the regulators catch wind.

yes but what i’m saying is the knife analogy weakens this position imo )) if it’s bullshit (which we agree)i personally find such analogies serve to support the nullshit narrative instead of calling bs on it ). that’s all). i do agree you and i agree though penultimately

I think there are elements we agree on (liability), but I don't think it's about any real safety concern or anything beyond just "we are not sure we cannot break the law on privacy and data collection/advertising with our AI...so we are going to pretend we are trying", and this just seems like it's Meta just stopping the pretending, but naturally just my opinion which is open to change.

that's more my point, but yes, I can see that maybe I came off as too disagreeable

edit: In other words, my contention with Meta's statements and your analysis is mostly that I don't really think "safety" is Meta's concern -- the knife analogy I think isn't even necessary (the models are already neutered in this regard as I see it), I think instead it's that they likely know the models will violate many regulations and also privacy laws, and they're trying to seed the idea that they built their AI implementation responsibly and any violation is just a "hallucination".

It would be great if a reporter truly took meta to task on what they mean by safety and what specifically they are trying to protect people from; I have little hope this will happen.

i would not call myself a writer though my education was literature, and whether by intent of my instructors or just by how the writing process works, this is more or less how i write more formal or “professional” items.

it’s not nearly as conscious of a process as what the article describes but this really is the self-check process in my head as i write. each section i just try to understand what do i want to say, have i said it anywhere else, have i effectively made the point with supporting context for it, and have i expressed the source/type of information i am presenting (it’s my opinion, my thought, as best i understand a fact, etc).

it’s a discipline for sure and as such i don’t always do it well, but for any piece i want to write for work or blogs or creatively, this process helps me and after some practice it’s very easy to fire off unconsciously.

the best thjng for me was having very good instructors who did constructive criticism well; they tried to understand my intent and purpose of the writing and noted places where i didn’t quite meet my intent or there were better ways to express it.

i got into programming later on in life and i would equate the process to a good code review. it can be strict and intimidating given it’s a critique of how you express yourself in the medium, but the strictest code reviews are immensely important for my growth as a programmer, and even more so as a writer as writing with human written languages is a lot more “open” in many ways with less strictly defined methods of accomplishing a task.

i would disagree. i thjnk the safety concerns and conversations from the companies serving AI services are misguided simply because the companies know what they want to do with it (advertising based on user data and input) but they have no idea how to accurately predict all the unexpected or undesired responses from the AIs. they know there is likely some potential revenue there but they aren’t sure how to make the AI comply with regulations.

they already have processes for manipulating results and have a trained and likely tagged data set of “bad” things the AI shouldn’t return. if they don’t want the ai telling how to do illegal stuff they will just not include that in its dataset. if the ai “learns” this, that’s responsibility of the user likely in the clause. they will simply document how it was trained and true expected results, add clause on “if you don’t wanna see disturbing responses don’t ask disturbing questions for it to find he answer to”, and probably it will be enough unless the ai gets really combative and destructive.

i really don’t thjnk this about safety at all, it’s trying to seed the idea that the ai companies are at all concerned about violating existing privacy regulations that Meta et. al. already are bumping against.

obviously it’s supposition but i thjnk this is far likelier what they’re worried on and what all this “safety” talk is about. they just want plausible deniability to be seeded before the first lawsuits come.

Spellchecks are fine usually but I have not yet found one I like when it comes to auto-correcting, as I cannot seem to get the rhythm when I'm trying to type and seeing my words and writing change without my interaction is very distracting. I also don't really like the way of "teaching" new words to most auto-corrects (macOS gets it right I think, just right-click the word the OS doesn't recognise and select "Learn"), but I remember it being far more annoying on other OSes.

Similarly my frustration with Office is that depending on how you access it (web version, office 365, within Teams, etc), it's been my experience that the configuration/preferences are not carried over so it's just very annoying to know that despite Office365 being so connected, depending on how I use Office365 my preferences aren't carried over.

I would vastly prefer if spellchecks and auto-corrects were more restrained in what they tried to fix. A lot of the grammar changes are inane typically or treating stylistic choices as grammar mistakes. Probably Office just isn't for me but I think it changes the writing enough in many cases that the meaning is lost.

I would largely agree with this viewpoint having grown up in the US in a medium sized city. Everything was a few miles away, public transit was present but not reliable (missing a bus meant waiting 40+ minutes for the next one), no bike lanes or paths except for one outside of the city, etc. as a child bikes were our only option to meet friends but this meant biking in traffic or on sidewalks, neither pleasant or convenient.

While i survived fine, it was in spite of the childhood, not because of it. I still don’t want to bike in a city unless they have well defined and protected bike lanes; too many close calls, not so close calls that ended up in disaster, bike theft, etc.

After moving to Europe and seeing how mobile kids are without cars even, i wish i had that growing up, as just seems so much nicer to be able to meet friends and do things without needing a car or having to survive biking in traffic.

I’m glad i had internet very early to make hanging out with friends easier and keeping up with what’s going on way easier. instead of having to do a bunch of phone calls or go visit and make plans, we could just do IRC or AIM or Skype chats and it’s much like it is nowadays for planning and joining/declining meetups. I do wonder what my teens years would have looked like if we had the same public transport options as most EU cities do.

will take advantage of your knowledge for a question and also a comment to your post.

No writer should be trusted blindly but i don’t thjnk you meant that literally ;) just for others to see. all information should have some verification even from trusted sources.

on the author though, can you share a bit about the subject and the author’s participation in android dev? i’ve never touched android anything dev wise so i’m not even sure if the topic being discussed is a new and unexplored territory, explored but still evolving, or if it’s something the community has settled on with plenty of data to back their conclusion. similarly im not sure if the author is really skilled enough to have controversial opinions or if it’s more they’re alright but excitable.

how would you position the two points just from your point of view?

i get the impression the author of the article is controversial and also opinionated i. “unusual” ways — for me, such persons are interesting to hear from even if a lot of their ideas are non-sense or fanciful. “out-there” ideas often are just out there for no reason, but sometimes there’s gold in such ideas, or good thoughts and starting points for actual golden ones.

wiuod you personally at least listen to this author just in case there’s some gold or are they very much so just in their own world?

this is why car analogies are dangerous :)

I would argue a dealer telling you about a major defect directly before you buy the car is a bit different than a post on some forums that the product they're selling is not well made.

I would suggest it's not reasonable to expect that someone buying a game has to do research on a forum to know the game is unfinished -- if it's being sold as a finished game it's reasonable to expect it's in a playable state. the original post was meaning to say it would be unheard of for other products to allow companies to sell known unfinished products as finished products, even with the promise of completing the product. and consumers would similarly balk at such a proposal for virtually any other object.

it was more the absurdity of the different way games are treated which is anti-consumer.

asking why the sky is blue when you don’t know is perfectly fine and even admirable when everyone else seems to know and you don’t. i would expect such a person to at least try some research first and then share what they learned and what questions they still have, but if someone is asking earnestly and i have time, then why shouldn’t i help?

i don’t thjnk the logical extreme you position here is correct; if it’s an interest for the person why shouldn’t they pursue it? questioning everything for me is just getting to the point that it’s not magic anymore.

i probably don’t need to know the entire kernel code base to figure out why my eth0 won’t stay up. it might help a bit to know some of it if i’m getting weird kernel-ey messages in the logs.

I don’t think it’s about fearing the truth I think it’s a right for fear that there is a new system which everyone treats as authoritative and very often the system is wrong. I think it’s worth the question. What are we going to do with this new system that produces fast accurate, looking answers when the answers that AI produces are very often wrong or flawed in someway or present inaccurate answers or misrepresent certain facts or data. I think it’s reasonable to be suspicious of any supposedly authoritative source and to question how we’re using such tools, and what the effect of such tools might be.

I don’t think that follows at all I think what they would prefer is that both AI developers and users of AI systems are aware that this is what is being fed to them and that without purposefully going to avoid stereotypes you’re going to get stereotypes.

I don’t think that’s the article was trying to say that AI is inherently racist or inherently is causing people to be racist, it’s that AI is still seeing as authoritative. If you just ask AI show me a picture of someone from a specific culture ask and it shows very stereotypical result, I wouldn’t call the AI result. Racist what I would say is the problem is that the person viewing this might except that this is an authoritative answer this is what progrsmmers and maths have shown is undoubtably, a true accurate representation of a person from such a culture, and the end-user is no more aware how this picture was formed, or whether or not the AI considers to be a stereotypical representation

I think the focus on the Barbies around the world from AI generation was a good example as it does. Kind of show some very strange interpretations of different cultures. Now granted we need to take this with a grain of salt because we don’t know the queries we don’t know the exact models and stuff like that but that’s not really the point the point is more that AI in person to use AI frequently treat the AI output as authoritative. There is no indication if the AI maybe it wasn’t able to get a good idea of what your request was if they maybe had a lack of confidence in what they are responding, you just get a results and it seems with all the white papers and with the buzz around AI that it’s an authoritative result

I am not a stranger to using AI to assist with tasks, something like a quickly converting from one syntax to another, is something I do on a fairly regular basis the difference, however, between using AI like that, and using it as an authoritative source is that I would check the queries or the code that’s produced by the AI. I would not accept it blindly. I will double check and make sure since at some point I need to run this code in real environments. I think that is what the article was trying to say is that AI is very cool and I can do some very cool things but if you’re not understanding how it’s doing what it’s doing and not checking it output and trusting the AI blindly that is where it has a problem. And I would agree with the article if this is what I’m trying to say,

I don’t think it’s so much about moderating speech or anything like that, not that it must not produce certain outputs; It’s more long lines of there is simply too much implicit trust in how AI works in the output that AI produces. And I would agree with the article if this is what I’m trying to say, I don’t think it’s so much about curtailing speech or anything like that or that so must must not produce certain outputs. It’s more along the lines of people’s Trust in how AI works and in the output that it gives and s stereotypes users are probably giving it bad inputs to produce these outputs, which are quite stereotypical and very often incorrect.

I think, showing more about how the AI understood the prompt and how the output was produced, such as sources, or may be certain key words and examples of images, that the AI associate with his key words would help the users to understand why they are getting this out put and also it would help them understand may be watch the words they use in their props are associated with, and maybe understand a bit more about why their innocent understanding of their problems or questions may be is not as innocent as they thought originally. It doesn’t have to lecture them. It simply needs a show “X is associated with Y in this model and that’s produced Z” and let the users draw their own conclusions.

I can somewhat do this, but I think that the idea is overstated in many people's perceptions -- that is, it's not that I can always clearly see anything in my mind or hear or smell things in my mind, it's only in specific situations and specific moods.

I enjoy cooking for example, and if I really like a meal somewhere, I can slowly start to break down the components that provide the taste, the smell, even the texture (i.e., cooking techniques) for the meal.

Music is a bit easier for me even without a ton of familiarity, but I can hear the notes quite easily in my mind, scale them and find their "friends" (not sure what the real musical term is), I just lack the physical ability to hit some of the notes in my mind.

The point of this is that it's not an omnipresent feature for everyone, and I'm willing to bet it's much more isolated as I'm describing, but I don't insist that I'm accurate in this bet. I don't think that I really trained for this directly, at least not in all subjects -- I did play an instrument as a child, and while I couldn't recite the different scales or tell you which notes to play by name, I could just show you with my instrument because it "sounded" right in my head, and if my teacher corrected me and showed me, it was easy enough after awhile to "hear" the right note in advance.

With visualizing items, again it's nothing that I would train on and it's not something I do all the time, but it does happen; remembering directions to some place in my city I might just give the basic directions without thinking of what it looks like, but if someone is unfamiliar with my city, I can "see" the various places they'll spot on the way, almost to the point it's like going on a walk in my mind through this place.

The visualizations typically start out very amorphous for me unless I'm _very_ familiar with the subject; usually only a few vague aspects of the image appear, and as I remember other details, the picture becomes more clear. It's maybe a bad example, but imagine watching a painting come together one layer at a time, or a Timelapse of an artist doing a painting. Or maybe some game where only part of the image is shown at first with some blurring or distortion, and over time (as I think of more details), it becomes more clear.

would agree. i don’t have kids myself but often get asked to watch people’s kids for extended times; half the time building trust is just being interested in what they are interested in. not even participating just asking questions and encouraging them to go get excited and share their excitement with you. pay attention, try to learn why they are into something and just share in their excitement.

i won’t try to claim it always works but at least for my experience just being someone who is safe for younger people to share their ideas and thoughts with (starting with the “lighter” thoughts) seems to make the foundation for the kids being more willing to ask the tough questions about life on their own or to listen when you do want to share your own thoughts.

i mean you can explain)) i explained why i cannot reach that and my points are there)) so please explain

A late reply you'll probably never see, but while in theory that works, keep in mind that (at least for US Court systems), there is an evidentiary process that must be satisfied before any of that will be considered. The police have repeatedly been documented outright beating and murdering people with dozens of witnesses and even their own body camera footage -- very few have been punished in a meaningful way.

None of what you mentioned really changes anything about my statement -- if the court date for my arrest where I was brutally beaten by officers for no reason is 30 days out, it doesn't matter that I got a video on my iPhone and uploaded it to whatever social media -- I'm still in jail, I still got the crap beat out of me, it's unclear if the video will even be accepted as evidence, the police video footage will also be considered as will their testimony.

Again, it's not about the actual video files, its about the concept of what surveillance can do, who actually is empowered by it, and who is surveilling who; the fact that there are continued policy brutality/abuse incidents despite the ever-present surveillance from all things is pretty supportive of what I'm intending to convey; they are surveilled for sure, but because they have the power/are protected by those who control the surveillance, they act with impunity because they _know that the surveillance works for them_; that is the point, not that you _can_ surveil someone if you want.

Late reply I'm sure you'll never see, but I do not agree with the idea that such a system is a betterment for society given our approaches to prison and arrests.

The law should be consistent for all persons; any punishments should be consistent and equal for the same crimes, while being reasonable punishment. If a rich kid can continue doing something destructive that we all agree is bad, the fact that they pay us $65 each time they do it is not relevant, and it more or less proves my original point; the law was made to prevent the senseless destruction, and just because someone is rich they can do what they want.

One of the big problems of this is that it treats criminal acts as a revenue stream; the point of the law isn't to fill the coffers, it's to keep everyone from just doing whatever they want without consideration for the consequences of their actions. An eye for an eye is great in theory, but is anyone really better off with two half-blind persons? Not to speak of recidivism; in your example, the intended behavior is we don't want people parking anywhere except designated parking spaces; if the penalty is just a fine, then really all it does is commoditize the activity the law is meaning to address. "You can't do this, unless you pay of course"

It's a similar idea to bail and to justice; consider two persons caught with coke, one who is wealthy and one who is not. We have the laws on cocaine because supposedly it's so vile towards society that it must be controlled (this is debatable, but not relevant). But, if someone can afford bail and the fines and walk free within a few hours and another will likely sit in jail for long time and be deprived of their freedom, the punishments aren't really the same in practice, even though on paper they are the same.

These are edge-cases yes, but they're edge-cases that are incredibly common and very impactful and harmful if you can't afford them. Having wealth negatively influences the justice system, and not in a way that is a betterment for society; society might get a booster of 20k as you proposed, but now the school or anyone who Richie Rich wants to bother by parking their car anywhere has no recourse against the action; Richie Rich already "paid" their debt to society quite literally with money, while still doing the stuff that society specifically said "hey stop that"; yes, in real life Richie Rich _might_ get enough instances where someone takes action or maybe the school will get a restraining order, but again, why should they have to? If the laws were agreed upon to generally be best for society, why is it alright to "just pay a fine" and allow the person to continue doing whatever they want? What about the law which is meant to prevent this action? Just because someone has money they should be allowed to violate it?

> It's not that powerful people don't suffer the same penalty as everyone else, it's that they excuse themselves from that penalty because the recording is "lost" whenever it's to their advantage.

I'm not sure how your two sentences can both ring true for you frankly speaking. The penalty of surveillance as I described it is that most people have 0 control over who records what about their lives, who is recording and where and when, etc. And worse, the actors implementing the surveillance are trying to make it _the law that they must have access_, even though there is 0 reason to believe that it will be used for the good of society based on the clearly recorded and documented abuses of this surveillance power by those in authority. If surveillance that you do not control can only harm you, not help you, and if those in power control the surveillance, then no, they do not have the same penalty; they are the adjudicators as to who the surveillance will help because they control it; if they don't want a penalty due to the surveillance of themselves, then there isn't a penalty -- how could there be? Credibility in technical matters only goes so far; let us not forget that footage of a person accused of murder shooting people was thrown out of court because the video was enlarged for viewing purposes, and thus considered "altered", as argued by the Defense;† the courts have very little patience for technological quibbles is the point, as while the statement is technically true, it's not like enlargement algorithms for video are some mystery, and it wasn't even argued that the content's expression and message changed, just that the video had been altered.

It's very scary stuff for me about surveillance and talks of justice, as it's far too easy to get into really spooky and bad situations as they are so many real life edge cases that absolutely are ripe for abuse (and frequently abused), especially by those in positions of authority and especially by the rich. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have frequently called out other for defamation, but openly will espouse any statements factually about just about anyone; Elon called the cave diver a pedophile, the mere accusation of which is enough to cause a ton of trouble for just about anyone. Somehow Elon won that law suit, and I'm not confident that a less rich person would have.

>It works as long as the fine is at least as much as is necessary to compensate society for the nuisance. And if it isn't, you've set the amount of the fine wrong.

I will end the rant that no one will read with this comment, which is the one that triggered me to respond to this: I don't think it's a good idea to commoditize punishments like this. It focuses purely on an if>then understanding of justice and law that only tries to satisfy a code-like logic. I wrote before the law should be applied equally, and I do maintain this; the total punishment as a result of the crime should be equal; if being able to pay to get less punishment overall is possible, then the fine is just a fee that rich people can pay to do what they want. This is not an argument for minimum sentencing guidelines, it is about appropriate responses to the infraction that are consistent and equally impactful; if being poor means that parking on a lawn (regardless of intent) deprives you of freedom because you couldn't pay a fine or bail right away, then the impact of the law for the person without money is greater than that of someone with money.

It similarly ignores intent -- if the person with money intends to continue breaking the law because they can pay it, then society is not made whole by the fines they pay; the behavior the law is intended to prevent and discourage is still happening, and increasing the fine equally for everyone just makes the impact for those without wealth even worse, and the gap between the punishments received only grows bigger.

Wealth should not allow you to skirt the law or punishment -- I understand that's quite idealistic and I have no doubts that we will not see this as a reality in some time; but let's not pretend that such a system is really a benefit. To use a classic scare tactic, is it really fair that a particularly bad person in bad circles can do some egregiously horrible, but avoids serious punishment because they happen to know a lot of bad people and can plea bargain while anyone else who does the same action would get the full force of the justice system bearing down on them? We would agree the two crimes are equally egregious I think, but we'd differ on whether the information given as part of the plea bargain is equal to the punishment the other person received, and I would not call the plea bargain in support of justice so much as just a quick way to get out of jail that actually encourages more bad behavior from the individual -- after all, the only reason they got a plea bargain is because they did enough illegal/bad stuff with other people that they have a treasure trove of knowledge. I sincerely question if the justice applied in such a situation will prevent the person from doing such activities again, or if they'll be emboldened to realize how much power they have to barter, and want to get more so they can get out even faster next time.

I strongly urge you to revisit your thoughts on justice, as the edge case failures are a matter of life and death sometimes, of having a normal life or being in prison for the rest of your days because you could't afford the same fines/fees/lawyers as someone else guilty of the same crime. And the edge cases are very common to the point that depending on who you are, it's almost expected that you will be targeted by police.

Justice cannot exist in such a system via fines; that's not justice, that's a class system enforced by the state, who will use violence to enforce it if required. I cannot find a favorable interpretation of such a system, even if it at first blush appears to be beneficial.

I cannot see how you reach the conclusion of discrimination; the question is simply "why is this article from a person with no relation to the tech sphere on front page of HN?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Even for the broadest understanding of "interesting", nothing on the article or site really inspires curiosity or meets the intended standard.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

Since we know the algorithm for how something gets to front page, I just have a very hard time believing that so many people felt strongly about a completely contentless article that doesn't inspire genuine curiosity in the article's subject matter (it completely lacks citations, so I guess it's curiosity just to see if the article is BSing us or not...), is definitely off-topic, so I really question how this got to the front page for any amount of reasonable time. Especially since the article is from 2015...and a July 4th poem apparently now that I re-read it.

So again, maybe the context is more clear, but why is it on HN? How did it ever get to front page if it's very much so off-topic and just a love letter written, and not a very good one.

I will be honest, just like I was suspicious of the article, I'm suspicious on your insistence that it's discrimination; just reading the article, I had no idea the author was christian; knowing that now, the article makes a bit more sense, as based on my experience growing up christian, the focus on the suffering and how it's actually beautiful in a way is very much so in line with many sects of Christianity; someone must suffer for our freedom from sin is inherent to Christianity, and even as a kid, everything was oriented in how much you struggled to do something. I wouldn't tell any Christian they're wrong for their belief but having done that and tried other options, I think I could convince you the other options are pretty good, and even christian compliant depending on your reaching of the Bible RFC known as New Testament. Edit: forgot a section below:

But there is nothing in the article that indicates anything about the author or the purpose really of the article; to find that it's not even like a tech person or a philosopher or someone who does have something interesting to discuss as per HN rules is very confusing. The Christian musician part is confusing not because they are christian, but more to the fact "knowing that the person is not really of interest to on-topic items, why is this article here?"

The article was just really random, it's quite surprising to me and I'm presuming the parent at least that it made the front page, the focus on the article is a bit strange for me, there is no content that is interesting or curious. If it was a breakdown of how some of the early US government members handled their religious beliefs with their understanding of freedom with some discourse examples, would have loved to read this! It would be interesting, could test their logics and discourse myself and see if I find fault with the logic or conclusions, would be great to see which philosophies or areas of the Bible guided their philosophical design, etc.

But an old 4th of July love letter? Doesn't matter who wrote it, not interesting, just a repeat of what I already learned was non-sense long ago.