5,397 karma · joined April 6, 2009
8½
return -ENOCOMPREHEND;
Long-term causality is pro-bitcoin. Just like with network bandwidth usage, "whales" (heavy users) drive and finance the build-out and the R&D.
This might prove right eventually - or might very well end up just like Java, for which similar claims were made. The smugness around Java was moderated a bit by the more corportey image of it, but the gist was quite similar nonetheless. Let's just say openly: the smugness is using up a lot of natural goodwill, and generating its own pushback. As there's no widely acknowledged "equal competitor" to Rust (why?), something feels "off" about the whole situation.
As an european who have worked for european and for american companies[1]... no, very much it's the reverse: european companies pay a lot of attention to university, nationality (home culture, really), and social class for matters of promotion; american companies are more results-oriented and much more cosmopolitan.
You might be judging it by what's being broadcasted in popular media - the european "we're enlightened all the way through" versus the american "we still have ways to go".
>All european countries have equal opportunity laws.
Only really useful for bilking the big multinational companies for moderately stingy fines. Nobody gets ahead because of a lawsuit.
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[1] selection bias caveat applies, obviously
No, we can't solve the problem that way: the very same problem wound remain: EU and 5/9 Eyes want e2ee backdoored or gone. If you start legislating which apps are allowed, you're putting yourself even more at mercy of gov regulation.
And the regulation would be blanket, with little to no way of sorting things out through unofficial channels as it can be done with Google. It'd be "backdoor or jail", not even sideloading apps to help you.
Some people are calling excessive data "toxic asset", due to the future risks of it causing unexpected breaches of privacy, damage to reputation, or other losses.
We'll certainly develop standard technical means of handling that in due time, quite possibly ones based on cryptography. A common scenario at present: instead of trawling all backups & distributed stores to laboriously expunge every bit of deleted data, you could delete the relevant encryption keys - a small piece of data, a known quantity - rendering the encrypted data inert. This is particularly suited for systems that use WORM approach to backing up & distributing data.
Even better, restarting the browser clears the cookies & other stored data, making tracking across session highly unlikely.
YouTube videos take fractionally longer to load, but it's manageable.
EMACS dates back to 1976 (David Moon & Guy Steele); vi also dates back to 1976 (Bill Joy).
GNU Project dates back "only" to 1983, with GNU Emacs soon after: 1984.
There's clear and strong undercurrent of Twitter employees and middle management expressing opposition to Trump, and also expressing sympathy to various left wing causes. Similar to other tech firms, like Google or Facebook.
That's why I point out conflict of interest inside Twitter. Might be partly ownership stake matter, partly cultural matter - employees tend to be a generation younger than management, and tend to have gone through a different path through life.
A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally.
People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally.
A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways.
While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.
The middle management & line workers of Twitter can monetize their small Twitter stock portfolios pretty quick without shifting the market all that much. Jack, on the other hand, would take a major hit if he tried to sell off his.
=edit=
Clarification on content_sesh's good point: I don't assume whether Jack agrees or disagrees with Trump's points. They are billionaires, might be "frenemies" for all we know. I do assume Jack likes a cash-cow for his major property, Twitter - and tries to balance the upsides & downsides of hosting Trump's contentious content.
Depending on the project at hand - and perhaps also depending on the day - I am any one of the three?
My one extra nuance would be the "less is more" attitude rooted in UNIX tradition.
Yes indeed. Right now news & opinion are largely limited to what is considered "advertiser friendly" - think short news cycle, and other problems.
The perspective of paying pennies for everything introduces a lot of friction. Luckily an alternative model is making roadway, mostly in Youtube circles: pay a couple of your favorite creators, and watch the rest for free.
The extension of the old "freemium" model, but this time based around stochastic balance between viewers who pay this or that creator. The paying subscribers often get access to additional material - one that's more geared towards fans or deeply interested viewers - while the regulars, free-to-watch, viewers get the general content just fine.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
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In case of Discord, there are three key causes for preferring the desktop version - and I don't see any easy workaround to them without adding explicit support to web standards:
1) custom audio codecs & filters; Discord is primarily a gaming VC app and the codecs available on the desktop version are superior for purpose of cancelling echo, noise etc. at low latency,
2) ability to capture any keyboard & mouse shortcuts for VC activation
3) ability to use voice & keyboard shortcut while the browser window is not focused (in particular while in game)
Incidentally adding general support for those to general browsers would lead to subtle security bugs & gotchas.
A facade of politeness & shaming, a reality of censorious rules. The encroach was slow, almost imperceptible, but here we are at last. The current state of the Twitter rules is impacting investigative journalism. Internationally recognized journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept explains:
Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned. [1]
Ceding the full power to the platforms has failed us.
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[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1316720230450724864
Moderation on the client side is a thing. It already is practiced on networks like Twitter and Mastodon. It was the historical model on Usenet too.
At this point you're just posting excuses for prolonging the monopoly of centralized moderation. The bogeyman of "the right wing of American culture" doesn't help, given how international the discourse of the subject is.
No different from the present day centrally moderated platforms - whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN. There's significant amount of objectionable and even illegal content on Twitter. The central moderation is a figleaf over it.
>w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?
To re-emphasize: >>Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; (participation in those was optional), and content was explicitly submitted to moderation.
Easily the key distinction is that the moderators weren't part of the platform. It was not the platform doing the moderating. It was pre-arranged users that were designated by the community to have a say who selects the best posts to then forward. It wasn't "this post breaks our ever-shifting rules"; it was "this post is good enough for me to to forward it to the list". The proverbial firewall separating the platform from the users doing the selection is the key distinction.
The closest modern analogy of how the moderated Usenet groups were is "a public-read, private-commit Git repo, with project heads accepting pull requests at their discretion".
Provably, definitively wrong.
1. HN relies on the "platform" choice to avoid responsibility for 3rd party posts. HN also relies on operators like dang moderating at the server side.
2. The proposed model would prevent operators moderating at the server side, when the "platform" model was selected.
3. Historically, Usenet had workflow, content, and userbase similar to HN - multiuser, near-realtime threaded discussions with text and links, on technical & related subjects.
4. Usenet didn't rely on centralized moderation by the operators; instead the moderation was performed at the client side, by end users. This was entirely sufficient for the purpose. This was done partly in collaborative ways, with sharing of moderation tools & datafiles.
5. Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; participation in those was optional, and content was explicitly submitted to moderation. Those were generally ran in parallel to similar unmoderated groups.
HN, and other fora, would do just fine as "platforms whose operators abstain from interfering in the flow of content", as informed by the historical precedent.
It irks me how quickly we forget the hard wrought lessons from the early internet.
Your pick - The Daily Beast: a 12 years old opinion website in USA, directly interested in the ongoing US election.
Compare and contrast the opening - your choice focused on "character assassination" via conspiracy theory; my source focused on giving a broad background & overview as facts. The difference in quality of reporting is palpable.
Literally the opposite of the case. Due to the power of Section 230, the online platforms are shielded from the normal liability, which gives them an inherent advantage. Section 230 distorts the market, making it non-free.
See also: the excellent "Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly"[1] story from earlier on today.
Moreover, the Section 230 was specifically created to distort the market, to help kickstart the online communications and commerce, by giving it an edge over the other businesses. Now that it has done its job, we can revoke the Section 230, and return to actual free market. Where a tortious interference would be sorted out by a lawsuit.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8841255/Man-Hunter-...
By falsely claiming the records were hacked, rather than the legal property of the repair shop following payment default by Hunter Biden, Twitter is itself deliberately spreading false information to justify its illegal election interference. [1]
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Yes, a well designed PRNG algorithm and implementation can be quite simple, but it is quite hard to design them well. It takes either non-trivial math, or non-trivial amount of iterative improvements.