heartbeats

It's more profitable to do it that way. And after all, who can be blamed for following the incentives? Really, it's the users' fault for creating the incentives.

Absolutely. Since the pandemic hit, I've been mostly alone since I don't have Facebook.

That's a thing people want. If you ask most people who have been pushed toward insane viewpoints how they feel about said insane viewpoints, I'm sure 99% of them would say it's great.

Who are we to deny the validity of their feelings?

Well, it is a cyber fraud startup. They didn't lie about that.

The real question is why nobody bothers. Why doesn't Facebook psychologically manipulate their users into being OK with tracking?

> Consumer don't buy black box devices because they trust the few big companies that manufacture the hardware and software: they buy them because there aren't any alternatives that provide the same level of convenience, and can solidly guarantee a due level of privacy as to what happens behind the screens.

They still consent to it, though. People do perceive it as acceptable, and use it to share their private information. If they don't want to use smartphones, they're free to move to another country.

Don't get high off your own supply.

That should be OK. If my friend wants to send it to me, why shouldn't he be allowed to?

Which?

> What part of this is untrue?

The characterization of pandemic conspiracies and political disinformation as harmful.

It's like kids and allergies. You never hear about kids who grew up on farms being allergic to animals - it's always those whose parents didn't have any when they were growing up.

If people aren't subject to misinformation, they'll never develop the sense of who's lying and who isn't.

It used to be that we gave common-sense advice - "don't believe everything you read on the Internet". Now, it's the other way around - "we must cleanse the Internet of harmful content".

Being exposed to misinformation is good for you, and it's good for democracy.

The opposite of modern is quaint. Modern means that it uses new technologies (Web/HTML5/React), quaint means that it uses old technologies (Win32 UI/HTML 4/command line)

> Identical files will always have the same hash and can more easily be moved from one torrent to another (when creating torrents) without having to re-hash anything. Files that are identical can also more easily be identified across different swarms, since their root hash only depends on the content of the file.

What if the hashes differ?

No, the system has not yet been perfected. CNN and Fox News both did things that were not perfectly politically expedient. We are seeing the beginning of that transformation, though.

I don't think there's any meaningful distinction between the two. You can take facts which are not wrong and use them to argue any point, no matter how ridiculous. If that's grotesque enough, it's misconduct already, even if you're not technically lying.

With the increasing polarization, there will have to be some point. For example, right now, Fox News at least mention negative news relating to the president, and the NY Times at least acknowledge Trump's existence.

In the future, I predict the newspapers will be naked propagandists. If they judge that some thing someone says or does is going to be bad for their party, they will just ignore it outright or lie about it.

In 2016, Fox News had people criticizing Trump, and CNN were (unintentionally) signal-boosting him by letting him dominate the news coverage. In say 2024, I think that Fox News will fire anyone who says anything bad about the Republican nominee, and CNN will not mention them by name on air.

I think it's unavoidable. With social media, the incentives simply aren't there to have a media that gives a balanced view of the story anymore. That doesn't sell.

Before, it used to be that you'd present side A and side B, without taking any stance. Now, people are starting to conflate neutrality with centrism. Even a 'neutral' news outlet is expected to take some sort of stance, and not to platform extremists.

If you want for something to spread, it's better for 100 people to really like it than for 1000 people to find it OK. That's the pattern we're seeing in the media right now.

Mr. Smith has a quaint notion of journalism, and one which is not shared by his publisher, who indeed see it as a reasonable endeavour to 'combat Donald Trump'.

I think that the future of media is to completely abandon the pretense of neutrality and to become blind cheerleaders for 'their side'; if you want the Republican coverage, you'll go to Fox or OAN, and hear the latest theories about how the President is morally infallible and how the libtards ought to be rounded up and shot. If you want the Democratic coverage, you'll go to CNN or the NY Times, and hear the latest theories about how the President is an evil man and how the fascists ought to be rounded up and thrown in prison.

I don't think this will be too bad. Before, you'd trust your neutral newspaper to give you both sides of the story. Now, you'll have to read two news outlets. But this isn't the end of the world, as long as people can adapt to the change.

If it's a targeted attack, they'll just make one clean account to check if they're shadowbanned. The rest of the suggestions are great.

You could whitelist the email providers, and require "strange" email providers to be approved by mods. The workflow would look like this:

1. Sign up with Gmail 2. Verify email 3. Account is instantly approved

1. Sign up with sharklasers 2. Verify email 3. "You're using a weird email provider. Mods will look at your account and see if it looks OK. If so, we'll approve it"

Try requiring new accounts' first few posts to be manually approved. Then he'll have to make enough quality posts to build up credibility first. This is very difficult, especially for a script kiddie.

Alternatively, you can take away the instant gratification by adding a cooldown of, say, three days for each created account. Then he'll have to register them in bulk and hope the humans don't spot the patterns.

You could also try using Bayesian filtering, but you'd have to block the ASCII art first.

Well, that's what terms of service are for. Facebook doesn't seem to have this problem.

Many tenants have problems with adverse selection; more robust monitoring systems would allow for them to take on more risky tenants, without seeing their property trashed.

Well, yes. The interviewee is supposed to impress the interviewer, not the other way around. The onus is on him to get hired. They're flooded with applicants. A smart applicant can thrive in any system, no matter how bad - otherwise, they're not very smart.

If you'd hire people based of how much they could lift, you'd see how the smart, driven, competent people coming in suddenly have much bigger muscles.

The system is never broken. You are broken for failing to adapt to it. If you fail to adapt to it, there are hundreds willing to take your place.

Why would you not do this? It decreases risk, and customers mostly care about price. As technology gets better, this is inevitable.

So how would this compare to the naïve approach of using a cursor in another fast, memory-mapped database, like LMDB?

But none of that is needed. They don't work for the company, and the company has no reason to waste thousands of dollars per employee on this.

We're now entering a recession with mass unemployment, so any company, no matter how shitty, will be able to pick up the cream of the crop for pennies on the dollar.

Customers never care about that. Case in point, my computer presumably contains all sorts of rare minerals mined by slave labour in the third world. Is it regrettable? Yes. Does it mean I stop using computers? No, it's a price I'm willing to pay.

Customers don't stop using Facebook over the clear and present erosion of their freedom it presents, so thinking they would be concerned with how a company treats its employees is absurd.

As for prospective employees, it's going to be a buyer's market from here on out. Universities have been pumping out CS grads en masse, and the startups have been hiring them. With the startups going bankrupt, there will be a glut of unemployed programmers.

If they'd be unsure for a week as to whether they would be fired or not, yes. If they are never uncertain, there is less time in flight.

"You're all still here for a reason. Eighty percent of this floor was just sent home. For ever. We have spent the last hour saying our goodbyes. They were good people, and they were good at their jobs, but you were better. Now they are gone. They are not to be thought of again. [...] I've been at this place for 34 years and I can tell you this is not be the last time you're going to go through this. But you all are survivors. And that is how this firm over 107 years has continued to grow stronger. So keep your heads high, get back to work."

Sam Rogers, Margin Call

But they're not their employees anymore. There's no point to doing any of this. The purpose of having a webinar was, presumably, that it should be atomic.

The rest of the things you're describing all cost money. Why spend money when you don't have to?

Yes, but why would they bother? They're not their employees anymore. Better for it to be a single, atomic operation.