lsiebert

Those of us who work in tech operate with a lot of privileges compared to many many other workers.

All of these options technically exist, but make a lot of assumptions that aren't true for my non techie friends who are looking for work. It's not unusual in a lot of industries for companies to not continue to interview someone who doesn't let them decide everything about the process.

It's good to see this is still around, I was using it in the early 2010s while working in a county health department.

I really appreciate Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance concepts, that things we group together may not be in fact grouped by a shared trait, but instead my consist of a bunch of different sets of overlapping traits, such that no one trait is common to all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance

One of the ways racial hierarchies persist in the US in the culture are taught they are normal, natural, deserved when they are instead being perpetuated by culture and institutions and those who benefit from them. The effects of discrimination serve to justify and/or perpetuate the discrimination.

My take away from this is that there is nothing natural about one caste having an advantage in business, that success in any field has much more to do with who has financial and social capital than with what caste someone is.

Yeah, my understanding was that apple cracking down was merely the excuse Verizon, which owned tumblr at the time, used to justify banning porn, but it was about ad revenue.

Twitter certainly has plenty of porn.

Yes, sorry for the lack of clarity. Users shouldn't blame the machine when they control every aspect of it and how it's used. It's on you as a user to understand your tools and data.

the AI is just a product of it's inputs, how it's used, and whether it violates discrimination laws, are totally up to the users.

With a warrant, probably?

That's not why the postal service is federal though. Establishing a postal system is a power given to congress in the U.S. Constitution. "To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" Actually having a postal system run by the government was something that predates the U.S. constitution.

I think I'd rather some people be vaccinated without their consent with a safe vaccine than have some people be infected without their consent with a deadly illness.

We know mask mandates, vaccines, and other medical interventions save lives, reduce transmission, reduce hospitalizations, reduce long term symptoms and long covid rates, and reduce deaths, and they may even reduce mutation rates. So the choice to vaccinate, that you paint as one of conscience and consent don't just affect the individual making the choice, but all the people around them.

It's about secure messaging

With no written privacy policy or TOS, I'd be reluctant to use this.

So if someone created a document consisting of just these search terms (and nothing else) in the search order, that's always going to be the highest ranked item, right, despite a lack of any added information, right?

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, Clojure isn't a language I know at all so it was a little hard to parse the code, I couldn't figure out if there was something that indicated a minimum levenshtein distance threshold for documents, but I feel like only looking at documents which are longer than the search query would also be a reasonable optimization.

Wheat and corn and a number of other plants are wind pollinated, so we won't lose everything. And we'll probably keep some plants that need bees alive in conservatories through manual pollination.

Still scary, in that a single disruption, like a new illness infecting crops, would have a much bigger impact.

The loss of pollinators is scary. blueberries, cherries, every brassica (broccoli, cabbage etc), carrots, squash, melons, and many more are insect polliated.

A few other plants can also self pollinate, but with reduced yields.

A large number of homeless in San Francisco were previous SF residents.

When folks live paycheck to paycheck almost anything can lead to them becoming homeless.

That said, there are more then enough homes for everyone, in the form of vacant homes. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-a...

Also studies of universal pre K suggests it more than pays for itself.

https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre...

Wonderful.

One of the things I'm most concerned about is how credit card payment processors and banks basically define what you can easily buy online. Something can be perfectly legal, but if there's no way to pay for it, it won't be available.

Yes, tech companies always fire people for the publicly stated reasons.

Don't worry, they thought of that.

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/after-alabama-enforces-vot...

As bad as that is, some folks never got a birth certificate

https://sclegal.org/living-without-a-birth-certificate/

Yeah individual voter fraud, per all the vote security experts, basically isn't a thing, IE the rare instances never change election outcomes. Voting ID laws are at best security theater for non existent threats.

At worst it's a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise minority voters, for example the NC voting law, where the legislature requested info on racial differences in how people vote before creating their bill.

https://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-court-rejects-republic...

Of course this suggests that efforts to GOTV helped mitigate the voter ID requirements, which is part of why GOTV efforts and other support for people voting is being targeted now in many states.

I'm not sure I'd call it a loophole, it's still illegal to hurt people or damage property, but certainly there is evidence to suggest bugaloo boys and white nationalists are doing exactly that, by infiltrating peaceful protests.

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/17/far-right-boogaloo-boy-kill... https://heavy.com/news/2020/07/mitchell-carlson-umbrella-man... https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/boogaloo-b... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/boogaloo-bois-member-charged... https://www.complex.com/life/2020/07/white-supremacists-infi...

all 50 states prohibit private militia groups. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/30/907720068/are-citizen-militia...

"...But one thing is consistent - all 50 states have some provision in their state law, whether it's their state constitution or their state statutes, that prohibits private militia, private paramilitary activity. And that's also the case in Wisconsin. In addition, many states, including Wisconsin, prohibit private individuals, untrained, unaccountable to civilian authority from taking on official functions - functions of an official public officer like a police officer without any authority."

I mean there is and has been wide diversity in thought within the hacker community, so there's certainly people who view things only through asthetics.

But I don't think that erases the presence of explicitly moral/ethical thoughts within the hacker community. The philosophical and political manifest in the hacker community in many forms: anarchic, communal, utopian, anti authority, anti centralization, pro equality and merit, etc.

For example: From The Hacker Manifesto

"... You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals...."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Manifesto

also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

Just a note, most but not all bumblebees are eusocial or social, but a majority of bee species aren't. That makes finding nests way more difficult, for those species.

Hackers have long been interested in politics/culture/public policy.

There has always been a strong anti-authoritarian ethos to hacker culture, one where personal privacy and bodily autonomy and the right to encryption were intrinsically at odds with corporate and government attempts to control and surveil, and I hope that doesn't go away.

If facebook merely showed the most recent posts in a timeline instead of letting an algorithm pick them, that might be a better argument.

Facebook isn't a public discourse, more of an algorithmically curated news feed. How it curates it's news feed is a business practice, and unethical business practices should be curtailed by regulation.

I suspect there may be some bias in your data gathering, because that's not what's reflected in the statistical surveys I've seen.

"Americans are concerned about how much data is being collected about them, and many feel their information is less secure than it used to be. The majority of Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned about how much data is collected about them by both companies (79%) and the government (64%). Additionally, seven-in-ten Americans say they feel their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago. This compares with just 6% who say they feel their information is more secure, and about one-quarter (24%) who feel it’s about the same."

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...

I've read Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and while I didn't agree with everything they said, a lot of it was thoughtful, made me think, and ultimately made sense. I do have a lot of privileges that others don't, and I feel obliged to make things better if I can, using the imperfect guides that exist.

I expect in 20 years some of what Kendi and DiAngelo will have held up, and some of it won't have. That's how doing anything new usually works.

I don't expect corporations to solve racism and sexism, or politicians or even people who run seminars.

I've actually given up any hope that my lifetime will see meaningful end of racism or sexism or even childhood hunger in America. Maybe some low hanging fruit or common cases will be better addressed.

When there is a real attempt to do something that actually makes a difference in the world, I expect it to be a bit clumsy, because they are so often trying to solve for the common case or the most costly case, not for every case. That's not illogical, I do the same thing when I code.

Sometimes they will certainly screw up or go to far; nobody said changing the status quo was easy.

Perhaps that's why conservatism has as much support as it does even when it's based on unscientific BS, or even outright lies.It's very easy to treat the status quo as the best of all possible worlds and try to defend it from the imagined horrors of change.

To me that seems such an empty hopeless way to live, and I hope more people in the world strive for something better, even if it's difficult and imperfect.

I assume the Evergreen State College doc is about Bret Weinstein, which I'm familiar with, but I'll watch the documentary. Have you heard or read about Harvard and Lorgia García Peña? https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/why-lorgi...