weeblewobble

What you're describing is a mainstream political position. Our last president talked about it constantly. Googling "big tech censorship" brings up tons of articles from mainstream media. Just a random sample:

WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-googl...

EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-shou...

I don't think people like that are missing the point. AFAIK the concept of platforms vs. publishers with regard to liability comes from a misunderstanding of S230. Some people got attached to the idea and have backfilled a moral position, but I still think it's worth pointing out that it stems from a misunderstanding.

To me, the position that a platform cannot morally moderate some content without incurring liability for all other content is rather extreme and the precepts are non-obvious. Presumably you mean moral liability rather than legal liability? Can you elaborate on the precepts here?

* what does moral liability mean? is the platform equally morally liable as the poster, or is the liability split between them? * where does this liability attach? how big do you have to be, or how much of a hand to you have to play in dissemination of content to incur moral liability? * and finally, why does choosing to moderate some content but not others change the moral calculus? This is totally non-obvious to me and TBH doesn't make a lot of sense.

I would say more ethical, because there was no collateral damage

I don't think so. Most people are aware that autopilot exists for airplanes, and they are also aware that there are always human pilots on board the plane.

Amusing analogy. The postal service's unwillingness or inability to do just that has severely damaged their utility. If the USPS had a junk-filtering option I'd sign up tonight. Perversely, the postal system seems to embrace junk mail (e.g. if you sign up for address forwarding the USPS sends you a fat envelope full of junk mail as a "confirmation")

Just some random anecdotes...

Circa 2013 I was a tech conference attended by a contingent of RapGenius engineers. They were incredibly obnoxious. Loud, arrogant, boisterous, with no regard for anyone around them. This was when RG was getting a ton of hype and these engineers at least clearly let it get to their head. I distinctly remember one of them walking around in a t-shirt with "FUCK FUCK SWAG" printed on the front in huge letters.

Years later, through my wife, I became friendly with a high-level engineering manager at what had become Genius. Totally normal, down to earth guy. I liked him a lot. From talking to him, I got the impression that the company had "grown up" a lot. It was clear that they were very aware of the perception described above and were faintly embarrassed about it.

That part caught me too. I'm not obsessed with either one. People pay me to make computers do what they want them to do.

There's an interesting documentary on Netflix called Made You Look that deals with a lot of similar issues to this subthread.

Basically a scammer hired a master forger to create new/"original" paintings in the style of a few abstract expressionists (Rothko, Pollack, Motherwell). They came up with a fake provenance and sold them to a prestigious New York gallery for 25 years, making millions of dollars. The gallery then resold them to rich people for even more money.

They consulted the top experts in the world to authenticate them and no one raised any doubts.

Everyone was happy for a long time until the scam fell apart. They interviewed one of the people who purchased a fake painting and had hung it on her wall for years. She was furious.

As a nice little kicker, one of the attorneys on the case has a bunch of these paintings (which had been sold for millions a piece) hanging in his office.

There's a little blurb here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoedler#Art_fraud_scandal_and...

> Conversely, keeping clueless people around is demoralizing and insulting to the people actually doing the work.

I think this is only true in the most egregious of cases. A somewhat counter-intuitive thing I've learned is that highly productive programmers like working with less productive programmers. They've spent a lot of time with this person, maybe got to like them on a personal level. But beyond that, they don't have to butt heads all the time, it's one more person to stamp your diff without excessive nitpicking, someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to handle the more mundane coding work, someone to share blame with. Almost like an assistant programmer. A backfill will have to trained and knowledge-transferred again from zero.

This isn't to say the organization is best served by keeping low-performers around at full salary to keep their high performers happy. That depends on higher level organizational goals. My point is to support GP's quoted statement in your post, that firing is dangerous and can demoralize teams.

this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex

I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how stagnant discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring.

One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.

I'm not convinced. McDonalds isn't in the business of disappointing their customers.

It's in the abstract of the paper. They used fMRI

A lot of engineering time goes to building things that never ship. These companies do a ton of A-B testing of small changes in various combinations and only the best performing thing ships. When you have 100M DAUs a 1% bump in engagement (or whatever you're optimizing for) is huge

this is advice i give to a lot of people trying to get into the business or switch jobs. no matter how prepared or qualified you are, every interview is a roll of the dice. maybe the interviewer is in a bad mood. maybe you're in a bad mood. maybe there's a communications barrier. maybe there's some organizational issue (too many candidates in pipeline, re-org, etc.) that causes the bar to temporarily be set extremely high. It's ultimately a numbers game and it doesn't make sense to get too invested in one company or read too much into one result

Seems pretty obvious to me that if you mime shooting someone with whom you have an ongoing mutual animus, they might take it as a threat.

Seems like a wild overreaction to a single sentence in an article that you acknowledge is factually true

I happen to live within a few blocks of two elementary schools (one public, one private) in urban Seattle. Tons and tons of kids walk to and from school in groups without parents. Every day at 2:30 or whatever the streets around my house are filled with kids laughing and playing and doing kid stuff. Not a parent in sight.

Sometimes a narrative is just that.

what role do you play in this?

45% of American households have cable TV https://www.statista.com/statistics/612660/paid-services-bro...

Irony is when the nuances of reality conflict with facile binary stereotypes

volunteer fire brigades are also quite common in (very) small towns in the USA. it's a bit like a social club. the fire station serves as a sort of public gathering hall as well.

I think you're onto something here. I can't find the link but in the early 2000s blog-era there was a blog about how media criticism is a low form of argument. Media criticism is easy, it doesn't require any particular expertise or research, and it has broad appeal.

It's also rather thin gruel. It generally relies on a sort of sleight-of-hand where you imply the media (or the mainstream media) is a single entity and define away counterexamples.

LAPD budget is about 15% of the total LA city budget.

NYPD is about 11% of total NYC city budget

I'd be surprised if this was true. It certainly doesn't match my experience, and it also doesn't really make sense. The difference between machine code, assembly, and programming languages like C is first-week CS 101 stuff. What are you basing this on?

I never understood this complaint. There are dozens and dozens of recent, popular (good is subjective) movies on the front page of Amazon, Netflix and HBO Max right now.

I mean, it was 108 degrees in Seattle on Monday. The previous record was 103. Not sure what more information you need to determine significance-- it's literally never been hotter

I've done both, in my experience at a FAANG you choose your own WLB. If you want to go for a promotion, you're going to have to work a lot. If you want to just get by for a couple years and vest stock, that's an option too. I think people also put a lot of pressure on themselves because it's unclear where the bar is and they don't want to get fired for performance reasons.

At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)

A friend of mine had this happen at his condo building, I think the assessment was $150k. The HOA offered financing via an "association loan"

Personally, I just think specificity makes for more interesting discussion. It's easy to say "there oughta be a law" but it's kind of empty calories, intellectually. Responding with aggressive negativity to people asking you to be more concrete is a real conversation stopper.