4bpp

So what would stop the list of hashes from being extended with hashes of copyrighted media, evidence of corruption (labelled slander or an invasion of the perpetrator's privacy) or evidence of the preceding abuses of the system themselves?

Once you have an established mechanism for "fighting crime", "don't use it to fight that type of crime" is not a position that has any chance of prevailing in the political landscape - see also all the cases of national security wiretaps being used against petty druggies.

I would go further and say that even if these things are for criminals, that is okay; and allowing some amount of criminal activity is necessitated by the basic humility of conceding that we might not have figured out the best set of rules for humanity to live under.

It might be appealing to fantasise about catching all the criminals and stopping all their dastardly deeds, but where would we be now if our governments had this capability 30 years ago? ...90? ...270? Would we be happier today if the last 1000 years had passed completely free of theft, murder, pederasty, and also free of blasphemy, heresy and challenges to the divine right of kings? Today, we are grateful for the actions of many a disgusting criminal that would have been condemned by any respectable and well-adjusted member of society (including you, had you lived then) at the time. Who knows which ones of today's criminals we will be thanking 30 years into the future?

If the author's theory were true and social media dynamics were indeed compressing the Overton window, wouldn't these sorts of "the Overton window is way too wide" posts be exactly the reaction one would expect to it on social media? Thinking that extremism is running rampant is what it feels like to be the thought police from the inside.

> The "police state" is the one ensuring your family's safety. In our modern societies, we have outsourced the monopoly on violence to the police state, so that we can focus on work and hobbies, and that comes at the expense of trusting the state and holding it accountable through democracy.

My family is approximately infinitely more likely to be considered a "perpetrator" of a crime internet deanonymization will be used to prosecute (piracy, bad opinions, dealing in the wrong kind of crypto coins, ordering the wrong kind of chemicals from India) than to be a "victim" in our own estimation, so at least in this particular domain the "police state" is only ensuring the interests of some others, at the expense of my family's safety (which they could and would directly compromise using the violence they have monopolised).

> Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.

Most societies that we would consider worth living in hold up the principle that matters of justice should be decided by the impartial and uninvolved. If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment, what would stop any petty theft and spicy insult (for the vast majority of countries where those are considered crimes) from being answered with the death penalty?

Well, if you or one of your loved ones is considering going into the being-a-chicken business, I would hope that HN would likewise dissuade you.

A quip (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung) from a more innocent era comes to mind-

> Would it not in that case / Be simpler for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?

How does it not? His resignation is a direct reaction to the circumstances surrounding the resignation of a core Rust-in-the-kernel personality over an argument about Rust in the kernel, and as the article points out his primary area of activity is another project (Rusticl) to introduce Rust into core Linux infrastructure (Mesa).

...except I figure that at least in the US (where most of the people who can exert pressure on Linux development are located), the phrase's use in this capacity is actually fairly widely known. (It even takes up a significant part of the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line)

It seems more likely to me that he used it out of a lack of political savvy than out of an excess of it, and that the pressure will now mount and he will be forced to make an apology or resign outright. It's unlikely that activists would take ignorance as an excuse, since they tend to consider ignorance of social justice conflicts to be a moral failing in itself.

The statement's recent place in the public consciousness is largely because it was used as a pro-police slogan against the BLM/"police abolition" movement in the US. The Rust community, being overwhelmingly progressive, is already sensitive about supposed dogwhistles, as well as words that cause them negative associations, in computing (in the vein of "master"->"main" renamings); having that slogan used as a metaphor for keeping out changes that they want in a technical debate would be felt by some of them as an open taunt or provocation.

It's as predictable as it is concerning how much the Rust community has hitched its wagon to the US progressive movement. Is this an attempt to remove an adversary in an engineering debate by appealing to a political alliance? Or an attempt to remove a political adversary by appealing to engineering arguments? Either way, both politics and engineering are bound to suffer for it.

I don't think that is a correct interpretation. As I understand it, Linux does not have a notion of someone being obliged to help facilitate a patch, especially if it's not the narrow case of a maintainer and a patch to the subsystem they are in charge of. What do you do if you are a C developer modifying system A, your change has implications for system B which includes Rust code, and none of the Rust developers involved with B care to volunteer time to draft the necessary changes to Rust code for you?

The same situation of course also arises between C-only subsystems, but then the natural solution is that you have to go and understand system B well enough yourself that you can make the necessary changes to it and submit them as part of your patch. In that situation you are "forced to use C", but that's a free square because you are always forced to use C to contribute to Linux code.

> "no one will be forced to use Rust in the Kernel"

Is this true, though? One reason for this altercation seems to be the basic circumstance that in Linux kernel development, if there is a dependency between two pieces of code A and B, the responsibility to keep B consistent with changes to A lies, in order, with anyone proposing patches to A, the subsystem maintainer for A, and finally the subsystem maintainer for B. If B is Rust code, such as a binding, then that's potentially up to 3 people who don't want to use Rust being forced to use Rust.

I do wonder if Linus is actually opposed to Rust in the kernel, but for whatever reason thinks that he can't afford to openly ban it or do anything beyond deniably letting it be obstructed by maintainers. The Rust language project and community are political and politically savvy in ways that few other open-source infrastructure projects are - it seems conceivable that if he declared against it, this might result in personal attacks and pressure on key backers/sponsors that would endanger his position or Linux itself.

I think you are making a mistake in assuming that the social dynamics around censorship in China are fundamentally that different from the ones around censorship in the US or other countries.

You could similarly argue that it is "funny" how every US business that builds something that can move around information must be knowledgeable about statistics that break down criminality or IQ by census race, or biological sex differences, or all manners of other "forbidden" information - but of course as members of the same social stratum as the people involved in such businesses in the US, we are not actually that worried about the possibility that our fellow tech elites will see the information they were supposed to censor and come in droves to want to introduce slavery or the Handmaid's Tale world or whatever. We consider the "forbidden" information merely wrong, evil, misguided or miscontextualised, and broadly trust our peers to see it in the same way. The real danger is instead if some other people, parts of the scary masses we don't have a good grasp of, are exposed to those memes and are misled into drawing conclusions that we know to be inappropriate, or at least unacceptable.

It's easy to imagine that a Chinese LLM wrangler would feel much the same: trustworthy, well-adjusted people know about Tiananmen Square and the Uyghurs anyway but understand that this information has to be seen in context and is prone to be interpreted in problematic ways, but who knows what would happen if we allowed uneducated and naive people to be exposed to it, and be led astray by cynical demagogues and foreign agitators?

> The final study population comprised 341 participants (90.6% females) who completed blood sampling and answered the questionnaire. A total of 232 (68%) were seropositive

How does this compare to the base rate in a similar population? Two thirds sounds like a reasonable estimate for "ever had COVID" in Denmark in 2022, though maybe a smaller percentage would in fact be seropositive. It would be interesting if self-reported long COVID had little or no correlation with having had COVID at all.

Before the other side took hold of a major platform and started doing it to their ends, "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach", "you don't have the right to a megaphone" etc. were maxims that were regularly fielded by pundits in defense of shadowbanning and any thumbprints being discovered on the algorithmic scale (though they were never so confident in it as to make the manipulation explicit upfront before it was revealed).

The "my free speech is being taken away; they are just being moderated for the common good" conjugation is something that is in fact shared between both camps. The only stable solution going forward may in fact be the pillarisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation) that we are already seeing emerge, which will leave both sides in a state of perpetual discontent about having no means to force their message upon unwilling recipients on the other but at least let the like-minded interact with each other consensually.

Depends on what you consider "influence". There are certaimly pro-Russian, or at least anti-American, posters. As for the idea that it is being targeted by a campaign of bots or payrolled humans, this seems unlikely - HN is good at sniffing out LLMs and to date we have no indication that Russia can find and afford competent English writers in bulk.

There is a curious human tendency since the earliest days of the internet to refuse to believe in the possibility of organic disagreement. The most stereotypical and funny instance of it are perhaps 4chan arguments carried out by insinuating that all opposing posts are actually made by the same person (or, recently: organised by some Discord channel), but the belief that niche comment sections all over the world are flooded by Chinese or Russian government farm comment slaves who are perfectly literate in the local language and culture and would never stand out were it not for their talking points is now being affirmed even by (formerly?) respectable mainstream institutions. I guess this produces the convenient effect that your populace gets strong memetic antibodies against any dissident positions, even as the proposition is transparently absurd. Where are all those people supposed to come from? Even lifelong techies from Russia have telltale quirks in their LKML posts, and little needs to be said about English text in Chinese docs.

Funny enough, the EU is currently calling the election results in Georgia illegitimate because they passed a similar sort of law (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-georgias-foreign-agent-law...). This is not doing a good job of dispelling the accusation that the media now uses "democracy" as code for outcomes that are desirable for US globalists and their allies.

Russia, China, Iran or any combination of the three. Any correct response is bound to draw indignation from those who consider the enemy real rather than virtual, but this is to be expected - given that every popular story of manipulative governments (including of course 1984) is told from the perspective of a dissident, we lack the narrative framework to conceptualise what such a system looks like through the eyes of someone broadly on board with it.

The warring US tribes certainly made an effort to associate their internal enemy with these (Democrats insinuating Republican subversion by Russians, Republicans insinuating Democrat sympathies with China and Iran). Arguably, this did not really catch and the majority of people are more preoccupied with their internal outgroup, which suggests that the external-enemy strategy is currently falling flat in the US. You could make a better case for it being in place in various European countries.

This sounds like what you would expect to see if everything subject to politicisation is politicised in a direction opposed by the same "kind of poster". I imagine you could observe the same sort of predictability if you looked at the social media profiles of anyone writing an article that politicization of something is actually unproblematic or good.

When it is this easy to delineate and stereotype those for and those against a measure, the appropriate word is polarisation.

Australia did contribute troops to most US-led military expeditions of the past century. Is it that unlikely that in the event of complete nuclear devastation of the Northern Hemisphere, they would be happy to tip the scales in favour of their allies among the survivors by dispatching a few tens of thousands of troops to mop up what is left of the Russian side, which would only be up against a few disorganised pockets of resistance with no supply chain to speak of?

Also, there is a chance that in the event of a full-blown nuclear exchange Russian leadership would see the showdown as fundamentally civilisational, and seek to take Australia down simply because it is unambiguously an outpost of Anglo-American culture.

> Literally judging an entire book by it's cover.

Yes, why not? Covers usually convey a lot of information about a book. Of all the books whose covers look like those an action manga, how many do you figure are a good resource for learning Polish? (Yes, in a way I'm acting deliberately obtuse about the proverb you are referring to, but the point is that there is nothing to that rule apart from it being a popular proverb. It is not hard to find proverbs that assert falsehoods.)

I don't know if the hypothetical scenario in which this logo was generated according to formal DoD-wide rules inspires any more confidence, either. It would just cast more suspicion upon other inputs that go into DoD-branded claims - if standard procedure for insignia produces this, what does e.g. standard procedure for documenting the circumstances under which a video was taken do?

The completely agrammatical "Latin" text in the AARO logo - somewhere on the level of English text one might find on a t-shirt sold on a street market in rural China - does not inspire confidence in the programme or its mission, as it suggests that

* some person in a high-up position is driven by a caricature of a notion of legitimacy conveyed by grandiose Latin mottos;

* this person does not have the diligence or attention to detail to be able to construct such a motto correctly, nor the capability for reflection to anticipate that he would fail to do so;

* either there is not enough of a culture of skepticism or criticism for anyone else to point out the mistakes and pull the emergency brakes, or there are not enough eyeballs even on fundamental materials like the programme's logo.

These are not features you want in a working group that you trust to sift through vague and contentious evidence on a topic marred by wishful thinking and military obscurantism. The group's findings therefore don't seem worth putting much stock in, and the main information that is conveyed by this is that there exist more amateurish and untrustworthy initiatives under the US military's aegis than one would expect.

(The motto itself seems to have come from a misremembered or ineptly modded Marcus Aurelius quote popular in motivational posters: https://ehoreka.myshopify.com/products/mundus-mutatur-vita-n...)

That's a fair objection, but given the context I assume he was not actually having anything other than Chinese in mind. Otherwise one might as well bring up Vietnamese, which has a similar history and lexical makeup as JP/KR and is spoken about as far east, but is now written phonetically in Latin-based script with hardly any readers of the old Chinese-based writing system remaining.

Japanese is not really the right example, because unlike Chinese the writing is really more phonetic than not (and when it isn't, as in kanbun texts, it's basically an idiosyncratic translation to a completely different language). I imagine that the reasonably educated Chinese should be able to read something like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Stele from the 8th century just fine, given the regular typeface. English, from the same time period, has Beowulf, which is incomprehensible to any lay reader.

Once calligraphy/handwriting is involved, the situation on the Western side is not much better either. Modern Anglosphere children probably would struggle with 19th-century cursive like https://www.pinterest.com/pin/375276581427478862/ ; in Germanic countries, the handwriting system underwent deeper changes, so nobody apart from selected nerds and antiquarians can read Kurrent as in Goethe's letters - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Brief_(nich... - or even the newer Sütterlin. Contra what some posters here claim, Roman cursive (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) is right out. I don't think this should be conflated with the question of whether the writing system is understood by future readers - as an imperfect computer analogy, an ASCII text document is in some meaningful sense more futureproof than an Autodesk Animator .FLI, even if the former is on a five-inch floppy and the latter is on a USB thumb drive.

(As for the effects of the Japan's Chinese character simplification, I think they are a bit overstated. I accidentally bought a 旧字体 copy of Mishima's Haru no Yuki at a book sale once, and at least as an L2 speaker I didn't find it particularly more painful to read than I find unmodernised Shakespeare as an L2 speaker of English.)

> Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.

Could you spell out the exact relevant conditions that you believe disqualify someone from delivering a "lesson on ethics"? It seems a priori unlikely that you could find criteria that are not obviously tortured and self-serving while also granting this qualification to a typical US citizen, especially one who has worked for any major tech company (as is the case for many posters here).

I assume your interlocutor was referring to how he dismissed those who complained about the move as "Russian trolls" more than the original delisting itself.

That's interesting, but these seem like they are just a slightly more structured form of the ways in which the CCP has been known to keep track of their own nationals abroad for many years. Not only is there no evidence or reason to expect that they would interact with people who are not PRC nationals, they presumably don't have guns and certainly have no actual policing powers either. If these "Chinese police stations" were to dispatch someone to my door, I could just call the actual police to have them removed. Meanwhile, I doubt I could call the "Chinese police stations" to protect me from the police of the country I live in, if they were to act upon a friendly request from the US like the Swedes and British did with Assange or the New Zealanders did with Kim Dotcom.

I doubt this particular move will complicate Russia's war efforts in any appreciable way. There is no non-fanciful way in which the named, well-established and closely watched kernel maintainers could have leveraged their status for it, and the tech scene has been one of the remaining bastions of pro-Western sentiment in Russian society. How many young programmers will be disenchanted with the West after hearing of this, and finally relent and answer their government's call to go write software for military drones or whatever?