5,397 karma · joined April 6, 2009
8½
return -ENOCOMPREHEND;
It's an opinion paper. Specifically, (UK's) Labor-style socialism + 4th wave feminism. If you have emotional attachment to those positions, you'll feel satisfaction and validation from reading it. Otherwise it feels like advanced clickbait, geared to give emotional validation to a particular segment of society.
>Journalism and activism can’t be separated.
They should and they can. Either have a separate publication, or at the very least have a separate, clearly delineated "Opinion" section. Otherwise you run the risk of media trust becoming very low, and thus media losing its ability to guard the republic (or the democracy).
Consider a similar assertion - "journalism and advertising can't be separated" - it's obviously false. Granted, there is some undue influence from advertisers to be expected. However this is considered a negative that should be avoided. And indeed the good practice is to have a "firewall" between the advertising department, and the news desk, in any publication.
Any example you could name would be highly contested as to validity of the claim.
Specifically, "elected by the people" doesn't grant any immunity by and of itself; you would need a huge public protest or other such expression of public will. You may still be ignored by the media, which prevents you from getting anything done[0]. On the other hand, "strong legal immunity from demands of the executive branch" would take a constitutional amendment; anything less can be rescinded with a simple majority vote or a judicial decision.
>But this doesn't mean that private, feudal and corporate power is the only other option.
You would need to create a very strong legal shield around such institution. Right now the government (particularly the judiciary branch) considers every private contract to be in its purview, with ability & willingness to void, add, or rewrite any and all clauses it considers wrong. Even institutions like marriage are subject to retroactive change of the original terms&conditions. Even the media, with its oversized influence through gatekeeping the political parties & candidates, is still bound by various regulations regarding falsehoods, besmirchment, etc., while at the same time tied intimately to their insider sources. About the only exceptions I can think of is the internal dealings of the churches, and the diplomatic matters [1].
On the other hand, any NGO is subject to the wishes of whoever finances it. Whether it is public donations or corporate sponsorship (or outright corporate structure); whoever holds the spigot of the money gets a say. Another important say is held by the media; with ability to either prop up or sink any NGO or public figure.
As of recent, the social media mobs seem to be gaining the gatekeeping ability just as well.
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[0] quick examples of media keeping mostly quiet: weekly Yellow Vests protests, Paris, France, 45+ weeks; annual March for Life, Washington DC, US, 45 years.
[1] bit of a stretch, but also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
No, that would lead to even worse abuses.
Cf the present day Hong Kong protests, and Yellow Vests protests - in both cases, the government would use snooping power to spy on the communications, dragnet style. Anybody seriously suspected of partaking would have the account shut down. Since the account would be "the official one", that would most probably render them unable to access other major services, like banking, judiciary, or healthcare records.
Having a corporate steward of email is one more level of indirection. While imperfect, the corporations do put up at least a bit of resistance against governmental over-reach. Even just the fact of having to create, send & monitor official correspondence to demand snooping & take-downs is slowing down the snooping a bit.
Moreover, it would be highly probable the government would mandate a "real name" policy, or otherwise tie the email service to your offline identity. Cue the abusers by online platforms like Facebook & other advertisers.
Lastly, it's more feasible to compete with corporate services than with tax-paid services. And it's competition that drives innovation, quality increase, and cost reduction.
This strikes way too close to throwing the 1A out the window, in all the ways that touch the everyday activities.
That sci-fi book you wrote, with Lord Admiral character? It was a manifesto for a new governance system. That meme you shared online a month ago? It's now associated with a particular candidate. Your proposal voiced in parent's meeting at school? It's a political position favoring a particular social group.
Not to say everything is political, no. However any single aspect of life can, and many ultimately will, be talked about and negotiated on by a politician or a political movement at some point.
I often wonder how we would vote if we were blind to the opinions of the media, celebs and friends.
The biggest difference would be among candidates and the policies they propose. Presently the celebs & the media gate-keep which opinions & political programs are acceptable.
We effectively have two Overton Windows, and the candidates are constrained to the overlap of the two. The first Window is the usual voters' preference, expressed freely in the privacy of the voting booth. The second Window is maintained by the media - only the candidates that espouse certain views & policies get to be listed on the ballot, endorsed by mainstream parties, etc. All other ones get to be "crazy crystal lady"[1] at best, and maybe even "celebrated & defended by Russia's propaganda machine"[2].
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[1] https://news.yahoo.com/marriane-williamson-190502156.html
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/russia-s-prop...
The countries in question are authoritarian specifically because of the single dominant source of income (the oil exports). A specialized economy that relies on foreign sales is pretty easy to put under governmental control - and the arrangement is also convenient for the buyer. For non-authoritarian setup, you want diversified economy that's largely self-sufficient and trade-balanced; in such economy the government is mostly just an arbiter between roughly equal businesses and consumers.
>outsourcing manufacturing to China and them using the money to buy Western companies and real estate
The single biggest failure of the several recent US administrations: allowing the Chinese supply chain to become dominant; even "too big to fail". So big that there's a persistent narrative "we can't tariff chinese imports because it would hit the US consumers hard.". It is indeed similar to how the problem of oil imports used to be[1].
There's no fixing it other than slowly but surely shifting the bulk of imports away from China and towards multiple alternative sources[2]. Once there are several major sources of import competing[3], putting a tariff or two on China won't move the prices all that much, thus making the tariffs a practical tool of trade negotiations again.
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[1] big props up to both Obama and Trump for helping domestic US oil extraction expand & provide a counterbalance to the foreign exports
[2] India is a particularly good candidate for a major trading partner, with compatible culture, existing economic ties, and already growing industry
[3] diversity
Not to imply those were from unnatural processes, more to indicate that basic spacefaring technology implies ability to detect such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)
Why even post this, when it has nothing to do the with the case GP & OP described? It's misleading at best.
The failure here is in the way Google has set its Android development process. They keep a separate "stable" kernel, and manually select certain patches to backport to. In process they skip all kinds of patches - performance, features, and yes, security ones. Given that only selected patches are backported, the process is best described as insecure by default. It was Google's decision to favor stable API over security here.
This is compounded by the fact other Android phone vendors are pretty slow at releasing OS upgrade - and tend to stop releasing them altogether shortly after the phone's no longer manufactured.
The mainline kernel, as released by the Linux core team is up to date with security. Hold to account people that decided to skip patches as a matter of course, resulting in the insecure by default process.
In the drive to close up security holes, Apple created a new one that can't be conceivably fixed by the user.
The user is ostensibly prevented from installing apps outside of the Apple Store to protect the data from malicious access, theft or destruction. The thorough app vetting process gives high assurances of that.
However there's a 4th aspect of security: security against service denial. Apple, by being the sole guardian and steward of the iPhone app ecosystem, made all their users vulnerable to service denial (in form of app removal). If there were alternative mechanisms available - ex competing iPhone app stores - the vulnerability would be negligible.
However presently the vulnerability is glaring: all it takes is single legal action - or even just enough of pressure from government on a key market - and the users are denied use of certain apps.
Presumably it would work just fine in the "Unreal mode"[1] - one which is very similar to real, with the added benefit of being 32bit address space, and 32bit instructions by default
Quite a paradoxical situation: the organizations in question are no longer fitting - neither the community, nor the leaders.
Stallman co-created and led a community. There were various organizations established to help the community and to benefit from it. Somehow the organizations became detached from both the community and one of the most prominent leaders, to the point of taking a stand against both.
Here's to hoping one day the free software community's voice can reach Free Software Foundation better than the Twitter outrage mob.
The article is well worth reading as it's reasonably comprehensive, including a small foray into COW filesystem.
>so apparently most unmanaged switches have a 8051 connected to the switch fabric inside. would it occur to you that pretty much any switch on your network could be monitoring or injecting traffic? sure would not to me
https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692567150653440
>i wasn't previously aware that it's possible (it does makes sense i guess? doing switching entirely in gateware is more risky), and it's an absolutely incredible placement for a near-undetectable implant
Hopefully we won't go back to the Win95/98 era of everything running as single user!
Having services run isolated as their own users is not merely a good security mechanics, it provides for a clear and simple mental model of what is what. A clear permissions barrier that's enforced pretty strictly by the OS.
Moreover we see separate user accounts more and more; even on small devices like phones it makes sense to have, for example, separate "private" and "business" accounts.
>does that mean processes have failed?
Nah, that's too general of a take. There are two more specific failures. First up, people fail to realize the present-day crop of containers are re-inventing processes. "Those who do not learn history, etc, etc."
Secondly, there's a significant failure of certain key features (like IP stack, FS handlers, etc. - in general, NAMESPACES) having been provided almost exclusively in kernel, and thusly requiring either superuser access or complex work-arounds (like FUSE) to manage. Plan 9 did it the right way; on P9, processes == containers.
Very much so; the pop-ups interrupt and obstruct, breaking immersion. I sincerely hope a browser gets brave enough to start blocking those obstructions by default.
It irks me how every "Cookies" banner is an unpaid advertising billboard saying, "Your privacy is valuable to us. Yours faithful, EU".
>This too shall pass.
For now, uBlock Origin[1] + the ruleset from I Don't Care About Cookies[2].
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[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
>This has nothing to do with 'SJWs'
>I think it's much more likely you're clinging to buzzwords.
The ESR's article[1] you are referencing is so much more than just headline. I encourage you to read it, and try to re-construct the events, the thoughts, and the emotions that led ESR to post a piece that explosive. The comment section alone spans some 760 responses over four years, with people chipping in with their observations from the trenches and with their shattered dreams. While writing, ESR was in communication with several victims of then-recent social media mobs, and conveyed their woes.
The two bits of article that stood out to me:
>The hacker culture’s norm about inclusion is clear:
>anybody who can pull the freight is welcome
>We must (...)
>learn to recognize their thought-stopping jargon and kafkatraps
[1] "Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
>I think it's much more likely you're clinging to buzzwords.
The ESR's article[1] you are referencing is so much more than just headline. I encourage you to read it, and try to re-construct the events, the thoughts, and the emotions that led ESR to post a piece that explosive. The comment section alone spans some 760 responses over four years, with people chipping in with their observations from the trenches and with their shattered dreams. While writing, ESR was in communication with several victims of then-recent social media mobs, and conveyed their woes.
The two bits of article that stood out to me:
>The hacker culture’s norm about inclusion is clear:
>anybody who can pull the freight is welcome
>We must (...)
>learn to recognize their thought-stopping jargon and kafkatraps
[1] "Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
Good point. I intended it merely as emphasis to the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish point, but apparently it ended up being more of a red herring...? I'll take extra care the next time.
>Also, this outrage culture is exactly what everyone here including you
Don't worry, this forum isn't entirely a single-minded and single-channel tribe. Albeit let's not detract further with risky subjects, shall we? :-)
I've seen the accusations against RMS. I've seen the RMS emails in the thread[1].
RMS' emails bemoan wishy-washy reporting, and are centered around calls for clarity and precision. With some insensitive words.
In response we got even more wishy-washy reporting - weasel words were used, misleading summaries instead of quotations[2], and focus was placed on how people felt outraged. People who weren't part of the discussion.
This isn't the way to build great software. This is tribes warring on social media.
>They're a negative contribution, and they contribute to driving away other contributors
Riddle me this: which drives away contributors - private email threads, or social media wars of attrition?
Is my judgement right? Maybe I am missing something big, that happens. Nonetheless I decide to side with somebody I've seen reliably exhibit the same character over decades, rather than with out-of-character accusations. I decide to side with somebody who delivered great projects[3] over decades - rather than with a social media conflict.
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[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d5a4dz/richard_stall...
[3] notably RMS delivered not only software projects, but also organizational/legal projects, and social/cultural projects
It's time for us to defend each other, and to hold contributions above outraged crowd's size.
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[1] "Stallman was right", countless comments here on HN, on LWN, and all over the internet
[2] "Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
My data isn't valuable. Your data isn't valuable[1]. The data of all HN users is of some value. The data of all Facebook users is highly valuable. But no single FB user has any claim to having valuable data; not even in proportion.
The value is in having a collected, curated, normalized, and cross-tabulated dataset. One that can be queried at scale and with good certainty to accuracy. The value is emergent, a property of the whole graph; it's not merely sum of all the parts nodes[2]. This is one of the reasons "databases" are a separate protected category under IP laws. Come to think of it, the value was created by Facebook, by collecting, managing, and processing the dataset, rather than by users collecting the individual datasets.
We may need a whole separate branch of jurisprudence and legislation, dealing with situations where value (or harm) is an emergent phenomenon in a dense network, not only not attributable directly to any singular node, but also much greater than straightforward sum of nodes' values.
There's a similar (if of destructive value) case for vulnerable "internet of things" / "smart devices". Any singular such device being vulnerable to remote exploit is barely notable. Together, a vast army of vulnerable small "smart devices" easily become a botnet in hands of criminals, with power vastly larger than mere sum of parts. Question arises how to handle responsibility & culpability of vendors (or owners).
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[1] aside of being directly useful to you.
[2] possible edges = n(n-1)/2, thus value = O(n* *2)
There are two decision spaces here. One is the selection of search ranking algorithm (whether to use PageRank or any other), and that decision was taken by Google[1].
The second decision space is the decision whether to link (or not) to any given document, and what content to put around it. That is a long lasting iterative process rather than any singular decision. Arguably it's geared towards approximating the distributed consensus - which is a global mutable state; expressed with edges the graph rather than any singular node.
Can the process be gamed, perverted, or corrupted randomly or maliciously? Sure. Do we know any better one? Not yet, at least not in the public.
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[1] practically speaking we all selected PageRank, by preferring Google's over multiple competing engines.
No, quite the opposite.
The original PageRank was defined by what other internet publishers considered to be a relevant and informative webpage. Specifically, the original PageRank was weighting content by the links (and content around the links) it was getting. The trust was placed on the internet publishers linking to it. The trust was distributed and also transitive to a degree.
Which, if you think about it, is pretty close to what journalists do - they prop up the good ones in various ways. And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences - equal peers judging relevant materials and marking / linking the ones they approve.
All in all, the original algorithm was effectively a "wall" between Google engineering and the actual content, as ranked & searched. It was clear delineation that "we don't editorialize search results".
Granted, the later incarnations of Google Search take into account much more than just the original PageRank, and thus stray away from the idealized original formulation - and also get much closer to editorial decisions.
The essential Multics vs Unix mindset clash. One application to rule them all vs. a versatile toolbox of interchangeable modules. Telco heads vs hacker heads.
In the end, the hackers always win - but the telcos grow to be fat cats.
That has became a bit of a meme ever since Bill Maher pointed out recession would both prevent Trump's reelection and also judged it as preferable over Trump.
"Well, you should wish for a recession,” Maher said, interrupting Nichols. “'Cause that will definitely get him [Trump] unelected." [1]
He followed it up with more of the same in a later episode [2].
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[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/hbos-maher-prefers-r...
1. monetization. How do you ensure your platform can at least cover its costs? The users want to know your platform wont go dark one fine day because of an overdue server bill. Better yet, that it won't get yanked like many of Google's cool projects due to insufficient profitability.
2. incentives alignment. How do you ensure the incentives for your platform are to get the users paired up permanently, which usually would mean they stop perusing your platform? Unlike typical services, a dating platform is one such that most people want to be able to ultimately do away with.
3. fulfillment. How do you make users feel they are putting in reasonably hard effort? How do you let them increase the effort if they so desire? People do feel fulfillment from putting in effort; cf. a lot of computer games that grant satisfaction through daily grind.
[edit]
A throw-away thought:
current dating platforms operate in "push" model: the singles make themselves available.
How about you make a "pull" platform - let already established couples find & match up great candidates to join their social circles - as new couples.
Making the already established couples your main users would solve the obstacles 1, 2, and 3. You would take money from the already established couples for finding & matching up new great, interesting, friendly couples for them. You would have the already established couples "grind" (put in the effort) for finding & setting up new ones.
Talk about misaligned incentives!
The dearth of effective dating platforms is the expected end state of the current "pay per use" model. The popular sites earn more from repeat customers than from single-time customers. That is fine for general goods & services. However it goes against the usual idea for dating: to find a partner & establish a good, lasting relationship in as few "attempts" as possible. Users successfully coupling up are effectively "lost" for the platform that facilitated it.
What would it take to build a sustainable dating platform? First up, it would need to benefit the most from a successful & permanent match, rather from repeated use.
As much as I dislike Facebook for their abysmal handling of privacy, I figure FB Dating suffers less form misaligned incentives than standalone dating platforms. Presumably users will remain on FB proper anyway, whether their dates are successful or not.
Come to think of it, the "traditional" (for lack of better word) society built on nuclear families just might have been geared that way - to benefit the most from people finding partners & becoming long term couples.
>rusty
The "rusty" parts look like crevices between protective tiles being sealed with kapton tape[1] - general protective material that handles well extreme environment, and is often used in consumer electronics, especially in places where high temperatures are expected.
>duct tape looking stuff on the wing leading edge
Looks like temporary protective coating of foam, for safe on the ground handling, to prevent damage to the wing leading edge. If the leading edge is anything similar to Space Shuttle's, it's hollow inside, surprisingly thin, and somewhat brittle. Any cracks or damage would cause risk of overheating during re-entry, thus need for extra protection. --
Any moving or flexing part is subject to wear and tear, and the risk of eventual breakdown, necessitating replacement surgery every few years. Open heart surgery is involved, somewhat risky, and puts the organism under significant stress by its very nature.
To the best of my (layman's) knowledge, pulse is not really needed by the body, and using smooth flow pumps causes no health risk. Of course there's the inability to check for the pulse or its tempo, as well as the mental impact of not having the expected sign of being alive.