Hacker News Reader

100011on Dear GitHub 2.0: open letter to GitHub from maintainers of open source projects

So they do not have any complaint against Github, but want to engage in political virtue signaling over completely legal federal law enforcement procedures?

For some reason I doubt the group of people wrote similar letter when Obama had caged people. My bet is that they thought the pictures from Obama's cages were from Trump's cages.

100011on Intellectual Conformity Is Adaptive

"Let’s keep up the inaccessible, jargony works that no one reads. Higher education is not teaching much to students or anyone else. But at least it keeps intellectuals off the streets."

100011on Ask HN: How would you rapidly learn a foreign language?

Maybe Duolingo?

100011on Defending the rights of protesters using ProtonMail

Well time to swap e-mail provider, just about confirms its part of the Western intelligence apparatus.

100011on Sweden's 100 explosions this year: what's going on?

Noticing differences and basic pattern recognition is deemed off limits in liberal polities. Only "humanity" allowed is the collectivist, communistic, mythical "unity".

They cannot for example explain why it is Sweden where grenades are sentient, but they are dormant Finland.

100011on AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race

I am going to take the contrary opinion here. AI-generated fake content will inflate away the informational value transmitted by whatever it is trying to fake. It's like 'deep fakes', they'll just destroy trust to video.

100011on Spain passes law to shut down websites and social media over protests

I obviously expect EU to come hard against the Spanish government for trying to exclude people from their fundamental freedoms such as freedom of the speech, protest and the right of peaceful assembly.

100011on Ray Dalio: The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken

I don't think Dalio minded it much when Fed bailed out banks and financial elites in 2008.

100011on GDPR fines were meant to rock the data privacy world

"A well intentioned" is a complete miss of a description. The bill is doing exactly what intended. It's evident a bigger corp. can pay bills easier than smaller.

100011on German city declares 'Nazi emergency' as extremist views and violence increase

> "authoritarian ideas devised to oppress and persecute everyone around you that does not comply with your world view"

This is a description of State governance (and it's mirror image is State institutions enforcing ideas with which it agrees). This description is impossible to distinguish from any other description of functional State enforcing monopoly of violence over territory. Liberal regimes issue heavy propaganda, such as nicknaming this as 'paradox of tolerance', to create legal and philosophical fictions to enforce the ruling elite's grasp of State power. Robert Michels called it 'Iron Law of Oligarchy', Vilfredo Pareto & Gaetano Mosca described it in elite theory. There's always going to be rulers and ruled.

So the issue in the "news" is not a Third Reich uprising through "accidents" of democratic voting, or an idealistic liberal regime being under threat, or an authoritarian threat, but the capture of State power and institutions away from one elite to another. The institutions and State power matter not if you cannot enforce your ideas through them.

Nothing is in here which wasn't already in Thucydides.

100011on German city declares 'Nazi emergency' as extremist views and violence increase

"The policy statement said "anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, misanthropic and right-wing extremist attitudes and actions, including violence in Dresden, are occurring with increasing frequency", according to Deutsche Welle (DW)."

What a joke. You have a permission to be liberal in a liberal regime and nothing else. Which itself boils down to anti-pluralism and anti-democratic attitude.

"Alternative for Germany, a far-right party, received more than 17% of the vote in city council elections this year." Oh, it's an emergency because people are not voting correctly in the democracy rightly understood.

100011on Hypothetical Explanations for the Fermi Paradox

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/katechon/

"A corollary of the Simulation Argument is that the universe’s computational capacity may be limited. Consequently, advanced alien civilizations may have incentives to avoid space colonization to avoid taking up too much “calculating space” and forcing a simulation shutdown.

A possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that analogous considerations may drive them to avoid broadcasting their presence to the cosmos, and to attempt to destroy or permanently cripple emerging civilizations on sight.

This game-theoretical equilibrium could be interpreted as the “katechon” – that which withholds eschaton – doom, oblivion, the end of the world. The resulting state of mutually assured xenocide would result in a dark, seemingly empty universe intermittently populated by small, isolationist “hermit” civilizations."