ipython

Isn’t that what Facebook is supposed to provide? From anecdotal evidence, people are happy to engage in vitriol online that they would never do face to face, real name or not.

However forcing TikTok to divest of foreign ownership is not restricting the rights of Americans to express their opinions. Americans are free to widely exercise their first amendment rights- the TikTok order to divest foreign ownership doesn’t affect those users ability to speak. The first amendment does not guarantee you access to a specific platform- it means that the bar for the government to imprison you for speech is very high (you can be held in contempt for lying under oath, for example)

I would argue that in this case the platform itself is expressing speech by ranking, recommending and promoting certain content. A foreign entity has no such first amendment right- we have had restrictions on foreign ownership of news media for decades now.

I think it’s an interesting issue especially now that you have TikTok users who think they’re being treated unfairly moving to a pure Chinese platform RedNote and encountering actual censorship. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-redn....

And now unconfirmed reports that RedNote is considering segregating the new American users from the Chinese users, ironically so Americans couldn’t influence Chinese users - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...

You still pay the unsubsidized full menu price at the kiosk or drive through. I believe you can order at the kiosk and not use a card (pay cash at register)

Actually, in a way this is already true. If you consent to installing their mobile app (which includes god knows what kind of analytics), you are rewarded with at least 20% off all McDonald’s food list prices.

So you can pay for “McDonald’s without analytics” by paying list prices in cash at the register.

Now, if there was an option when booking a flight to pick a fare class not subjected to the stupid branded credit card offer walk of shame prior to landing, I would sign up in a heartbeat.

I guess I don't know what proof you require me to provide. I have several children. Only one has a visible correlation between artificial food dyes and abnormal behavior. The others do not. If I had confirmation bias because of food dyes alone, then wouldn't I have the same observation across all my children?

At some point, as the adage says, "Doctor, when I do this, it hurts! What do I do?" ... "Treatment is simple. Don't do that"

I assume that you would agree that allergies are real and afflict some people but not others -- if your son or daughter entered anaphylaxis shock after eating a PB&J sandwich, would you sit there and scold the child- "but double blind studies show, Chunky Skippy is a safe food! This is just confirmation bias!" Why is it so hard to believe that, in this case, artificial food dyes could cause adverse reactions in some people and not others?

It took £750k back in 2007 to administer a double blind study to explore the link between hyperactive behavior in children and artificial food dyes [0] - a study that included Red 40. I don't have an extra $1MM+ burning a hole in my pocket just to prove what I already know with my own kids. Believe what you want, but if consuming neon red food is that important to you, God speed. I will not be feeding it to my one child who has a reaction to it. I avoid it for the others, because.... even though I know they won't have an adverse reaction, what's the point? The dye doesn't make the food taste any different/better.

[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2007/09/hyperactivity-in-...

It is happening, albeit slowly, here in the USA as well. Trader Joe’s generally has no added artificial dyes, fruit by the foot now is naturally colored, Whole Foods of course, and Wegmans bakery products.

Its just that there still are so many products you don’t expect- marshmallows with blue dye to make them more “bright white”, candies/sprinkles, any children’s medicine in syrup form (although you can now get some in dye free form finally)

Ok - here’s one. https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2007/09/hyperactivity-in-...

But even if there were none that showed a link, I should just continue to feed my child something that would cause adverse reactions?

What’s crazy to me is … we are talking about a totally unnecessary food additive. It’s not like I’m arguing against some critical public health intervention to prevent a deadly virus. It’s a dye to make food turn a color.

What can the actual experts tell me about my child's reaction to the food dye? One of my children has an adverse reaction to the dyes, my other children do not. What is the expert going to tell me? How does one get access to one of these experts? What about the studies that do show a link between behavior issues and artificial dyes? Are those studies not to be trusted?

Edit: curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study? If so, can you name it or an expert opinion on the matter that you trust?

I'm not asking to be treated or trusted like an authority. I'm just asking not to treat people, when sharing a lived experience shared with others (making this n>1), is told that their experience is "half baked". My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.

Arguing with me that I could not possibly have experienced a cause and effect because some people didn't hold enough large enough placebo controlled double blind studies (I say this because double blind studies have studied this exact phenomenon, and triggered the retraction of some of these dyes in other countries) is just insulting after a while.

We know so little about nutrition and how different individuals process different nutrients that the scientific consensus on healthy food habits, weight loss, etc have shifted dramatically over the years. We are facing an obesity epidemic in the US. A little humility would be nice in the face of what clearly is not working for the majority of the population.

I mean, it's just food dye for God's sake, what's the "scientific" argument that foods must contain artificial colors?

Or, maybe some of us have lived experience where artificial food dyes have detrimental effects to our children. I don't need science to tell me what my own two eyes and lived experience says. Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?

My sibling comment goes into more detail, but claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.

Never been asked to participate in one. I am a huge proponent of the scientific method. This argument always interests me, though. (by the way, just a quick search on pubmed: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3441937/; https://www.cspinet.org/page/synthetic-food-dyes-health-risk...; the EU bans some of these synthetic dyes: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/food-colours). Also reference the famous "Southampton six" study in 2007 which triggered evaluation of food dyes across Europe: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

As a parent, if I notice a correlation between an action and subsequent behavior, are you saying that my lived experience is irrelevant because... nobody bothered to include me in a specific double blind study? How many things do you do every day that have not been studied through exhaustive scientific research?

From my own lived experience, when one of my my kids eats a red velvet cake or a bag of Skittles or M&Ms that he's violent and crazy for a week, but if he has a few Oreos he's fine. If one of my other kids does the same thing, she doesn't have the same reaction. If I knew the exact chemical pathway that made this happen, I'd be thrilled. I am just living my life trying to parent kids in this world, and you know what, stupid bright dyes that do nothing other than make food appear unnaturally incandescent are practically impossible to avoid. So it's just one more thing that's piled on as a parent that you have to deal with.

If you ask me, this aggressive "well, you're stupid and you shouldn't trust your own eyes because science" attitude that has triggered the strong anti-authority sentiments globally. It's why objectively crazy people like RFK Jr get huge followings- I vehemently disagree with 99% of his rhetoric, especially his anti-vax viewpoints, but I totally agree with his stance on food additives such as these synthetic dyes.

I see the effects with my own eyes. Telling me I'm stupid doesn't help science, it just serves to further diminish the trust in the very institutions we need more now than ever.

Great, now ban Red 40 and the other synthetic dyes. You can't avoid them in anything marketed toward children. I have children and I know others who also have children that are highly sensitive to these dyes, causing major behavioral issues that last for 5-7 days after ingesting food/medicine/drinks that contain these dyes.

Business idea: I can sell you a list of people who you can then pay to tell you how to make money on the internet!

Agreed. I’ve done this and I’d you have an existing fan base on those platforms, a final post that explains where you are and why you’re not active can help keep those folks engaged.

Plus I feel like I’m still costing the platform the fractions of fractions of a cent to keep my data stored, replicated and active somewhere

What could go wrong? Qualified immunity plus zero oversight and military style equipment- no way that the police officers wouldn’t feel emboldened to overstep.

https://www.tspd.us/swat

All campuses have student legal aid offices. I engaged one once myself when I was in university. Even though the complaint is against the University itself, in this case, attorneys are still subject to strict ethical rules and so you can at the very least get an honest read on the situation at a very low or no cost to you. (if they clearly demonstrate a conflict of interest, then you'll have an easy pro-bono case from a real lawyer against the University now for two things)

I would take a look at your Student Legal Aid office and get an appointment. Usually consultations are free.

I stopped using it about 12 years ago. So you can thank me for their number being 3,190,000 DAUs and not 3,190,001 DAUs. (point being, while individual action sounds like a nice solution, it certainly doesn't operate on "webscale")

this is super frustrating, as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter claim to be the digital equivalent of the "public town square" yet take on none of the responsibilities and transparency that come along with it, just all the profits.

I would suspect something a bit more sinister: the very organizations you are targeting probably started a mass campaign to "report" your content, which triggered automated systems that caused your posts to disappear. A more cynical me would add in the fact that any manual review by Facebook staff would trigger even more aggressive moves to silence you, given that you're directly accusing them of inadequate moderation of their platform, which at best doesn't make them look good, and at worst, means they lose advertising $$ that those groups may be spending with Facebook to target those very victims.

Tbh at least iPhone iMessage protects even the less knowledgeable from just blindly clicking through these links.

I’ve received at least a half dozen of these in the past week. Every time, the link is disabled so you actually have to copy and paste the url into safari. In fact the scammers even helpfully include instructions for someone to scam themselves in the text message. Here’s one of the most recent ones:

> (Please reply Y, then exit the text message, reopen the text message activation link, or copy the link to Safari browser to open it, and get the latest logistics status) Once your verification is completed, we will arrange delivery again within 24 hours. Have a great day from the USPS team!

Yes. Now tell me how I can determine the stir/shaken attestation level of a given incoming call to my iPhone before I answer it.

(The answer in my experience is: you can’t, and next, nobody knows what the different attestation levels mean, and many legit calls still come in without any attestation)

It’s like if browsers only told you that https was enabled after you POSTed your credit card number to the remote site.

I have a complicated history with this viewpoint. I remember back when Wikipedia was launched in 2001, I thought- there is no way this will work... it will just end up as a cesspool. Boy was I wrong. I think I was wrong because Wikipedia has a very well defined and enforced moderation model, for example: a focus on no original research and neutral point of view.

How can this be replicated with topics that are by definition controversial, and happening in real time? I don't know. But I don't think Meta/X have any sort of vested interest in seeing sober, fact-based conversations. In fact, their incentives work entirely in the opposite direction: the more anger/divisive the content drives additional traffic and engagement [1]. Whereas, with Wikipedia, I would argue the opposite is true: Wikipedia would never have gained the dominance it has if it was full of emotionally-charged content with dubious/no sourcing.

So I guess my conclusion from this is that I doubt any community-sourced "fact checking" efforts in-sourced from the social media platforms themselves will be successful, because the incentives are misaligned for the platform. Why invest any effort into something that will drive down engagement on your platform?

[1] Just one reference I found: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2024292118. From the abstract:

> ... we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. ...

I have to admit, at first read I thought the headline was referring to the e-cig Juul and I was scratching my head wondering how one could build an ipv6 mesh network out of vapes.

Possibly unpopular opinion: PowerPoint is just a tool, and most people not only suck at making slides but are poor storytellers to boot. If you are a good storyteller and can effectively use the medium (as in, not just dump a bunch of bullets on a slide), you can actually convey a lot of information in a combined slide + narrative format.

This would be an awesome build your own 8bit computer project - I would buy it to do together with my kids. Super cool

So when Elon fired a bunch of people, targeting (as you claim) “native born” Americans so as to overindex on cheaper H1B visa holders, again this is the lefts fault? IIRC Elon spent easily $25MM of his own money to … get Trump elected. So sounds like the “right” like immigrants too.

Heck his “cochair” of the DOGE, Vivek, got into an X fight with the MAGA contingent about how Indian workers kick the ass of Americans. Again, not exactly a raging liberal.

Even then, the priority for nukes is availability not “security” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link

> For a long time the U.S. military resisted the use of PALs. It feared the loss of its own independence, and it feared malfunction, which could put warheads out of action in a time of crisis.

Care to explain? A lot of the reasons posited here involve, for example, Elon firing 70+% of Twitter staff and still having a “functional” site. Elon doesn’t seem to have a particular leftward lean. Covid related stimulus (advocated by those in the left) in fact fueled a lot of the rapid growth in engineering roles in the past four years.

We are also locked in with at least the next four years of very right leaning US government, so if you’re a business basing your hiring on the expected “lean” of the government, how exactly is that the lefts fault? Heck the next two years the republicans have the trifecta plus a majority on the Supreme Court.

I’m not sure I’d use the Unix io interface as a shining example of reducing cognitive load. Sure, it’s a simple interface on the surface but…

Let’s just take write() as an example. Just calling write() does not guarantee that the full contents were written to the file. You could have the case where write() wrote nothing, or some data, but was interrupted because of a signal before it completed. Or you could have a short write because of a quota or disk limit.

And I’m sure I’ll be nerd sniped shortly with even more obscure examples of the sharp edges awaiting you in such a “simple” interface. (For a more snarky version of my comment, see the last essay “the rise of worse is better” of the Unix haters handbook: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)

Point is, this interface just shifts cognitive load on to the application developer - it’s got to go somewhere after all.

Agreed. That’s why I’m glad the new administration is prioritizing establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, for when the shit really hits the fan.

(/s if you couldn’t tell)

Many people have accounts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of non crypto assets but are relatively safe with the same level of security (or even less) than what crypto demands of its users.