Hacker News Reader

BrainViruson When the push button was new, people were freaked

>The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like:

- Disconnect of people from nature an each other.

- Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to be perceived as the real thing.

- Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact with (initially) and within (eventually).

Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of these fears were irrational.

BrainViruson How Underground Groups Use Stolen Identities and Deepfakes

Mark my words: this narrative will be used to deepen global surveillance, further centralize our communication systems and greenlight various large-scale manipulations (e.g. censorship).

Kind of like 2FA is currently "solved" by requiring mobile numbers instead of something like Ubikey, even though SMS is insecure and awful for privacy.

BrainViruson Why Cancel Tchaikovsky?

It's disturbing to realize that for so many people things like freedom of speech, cultural tolerance and individualism were merely The Current Thing to "support" only while it was easy, popular and fashionable. Still, I guess it's better than not realizing it.

BrainViruson Reading Soviet Sci-Fi at the End of the World

This is a great comment to illustrate how ideology (especially various brands of nationalism) destroys genuine dialog. Instead of talking about the writers and their works people are now talking about which pigeonhole each writer belongs to. Not because those pigeonholes improve anyone's understanding of the books, mind you. It's a matter of taking credit for their works and applying those credits to the current meta-narrative.

BrainViruson Zero Trust SIM

They want to be in front of every website, behind every DNS request and now they want to control your cellphone traffic - while bleeding money by tens of millions of dollars a year and making promises they don't intent to keep. The trajectory of this company's life is obvious in advance.

BrainViruson Iran’s Internet Shutdown Hides a Deadly Crackdown

We need better news outlets than Wired to cover stuff like this. Frankly, after the last few years I don't trust a word they say about freedom of speech on the Internet. I don't have any reliable knowledge about Iran, so there is no easy way for me to double-check anything without spending hundreds of hours on research, and even then the results will be uncertain. We live in a kind of dark age of news media, while simultaneously suffering from information overflow.

BrainViruson 58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

The modern approach is to do a universal rest:

  *, *:before, *:after {
    all: unset;
    display: revert;
    box-sizing: border-box;
  }

BrainViruson The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

>The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well.

Roughly 1/3 of my YouTube bookmarks are dead and most of them are much more recent than 10 years. They purge videos at an alarming rate.

BrainViruson The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

>Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago?

I have a better one for you. Ever wondered why it's so hard? Why web protocols have nothing related to archiving? Why web browsers are a hellscape for aggregating information over time in a meaningful way? Why this continues to be true, despite countless Microsoft and Google engineers writing all these heartfelt posts about knowledge?

If your answer is "because it's hard to implement" than you understand nothing.

BrainViruson PayPal closes account of UK's Free Speech Union without explanation

Anyone who argues in favor of coercion over persuasion, in favor of PayPal suspending accounts and Stanford creating institutionalized snitching - anyone like that clearly considers themselves a part of the orthodoxy and believes all the coercion will flow the other way. For them free speech, indeed, poses a significant danger... of losing their power over others.

BrainViruson PayPal closes account of UK's Free Speech Union without explanation

>I guess they consider some kinds of speech more free than others.

False equivalency. Setting up a snitch website has little to do with speech and everything to do with administrative action.

Clearly, many people here don't understand jack about why free speech is important. They just parrot that phrase when they feel it advances their pet ideology, literally not understanding what it means. They treat it as if it's just some clever construct made up by "the other side". This is how we get persistent false equivalency between communication and disrupting communication.

BrainViruson Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

Who needed it? People who like to deny the obvious, even when the obvious is stated by Ph.Ds. in psychology like Jonathan Haidt.

BrainViruson Facebook bans Holocaust film for violating race policy

This is not an exception. This is the norm. All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. The scale of censorship is ming-boggling. The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding.

The big lie of online censorship is that controversial cases where most people think the person "deserves" to be banned are unrelated and totally separate from cases like this one, where it's obvious the ban is preposterous to anyone possessing common sense. They are directly related. They are created by the same systems built under the same assumptions with the same mentality.

This is not going to be fixed by "better" algorithms, because it's not an issue with the quality of the algorithms in the firs place. The algorithms seem low-quality to you because you're judging them by a standard the company running them didn't use.

BrainViruson Denmark not offering second Covid booster shot to healthy adults under 50

>Their claim was that adversaries are spreading vaccine disinformation. This is backed up by evidence.

Their implied claim was that the comment is relevant to the current discussion. That's insinuation.

BTW, did you notice that the very first reference in your reputable report was to NYT, which says very similar things and in turn cites declassified intelligence. Government citing NYT citing government. Even ignoring its dubious quality, the report is dated August 2020, which predates all the Covid vaccines and vaccine-related policies.

BrainViruson Denmark not offering second Covid booster shot to healthy adults under 50

This flavor of argument-by-insinuation is getting really, really old.

Dismissing people or statement because they sound vaguely similar to some foreign source is in itself an obvious propaganda technique that uses exactly the same mentality as the dumbest conspiracy theories out there.

BrainViruson How San Francisco makes it insanely hard to build housing

https://youtu.be/balGGAd6ZrI?t=802

BrainViruson Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

>We take privacy very seriously at Discord.

You don't even have something as basic as adjustable message retention. You host your service on Google Cloud and AFAIK, you don't use E2E for anything, not even direct messages.

Your privacy policy includes the following clause:

  We may share information if needed to enforce our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, or other policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and others.

Which, as anyone semi-aware will realize, is generic enough to allow for sharing anything with anyone.

Oh, and according to the same privacy policy you retain deleted account information for at least two years by default. Anything else requires the user to "submit an ID for an age verification appeal". That's telling in its own right.

BrainViruson Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

Branding. Discord had references to games, gamers and gaming both in their client UI and official website. Placeholder images, Easter eggs and so on. All of that was scrubbed or replaced. Above all, it was a change in whom they consider their real target audience.

BrainViruson How San Francisco makes it insanely hard to build housing

A recent Peter Thiel video[1] has a great comment on this subject. If building 1% extra houses drops the cost of all remaining houses by 2%, would the city be really interested in increasing the supply? Especially if property is seen as investment first, place to live second.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=balGGAd6ZrI

BrainViruson Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California.

Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company.

I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.

BrainViruson Privacy vs. “I have nothing to hide” (2019)

It's a matter of making people use a dumb mental model that benefits someone else. Even better if the dumb mental model goes viral.

"I have nothing to hide" mental model is dumb on many levels. The most obvious one has already been mentioned here. Leaked information is stored indefinitely, while standard of behavior in our society currently change at an insane pace (by design).

Another big misconception is that you as an individual can realistically evaluate how someone else will perceive your private information. You don't control the context in which your information will be consumed. (Not to mention that the context can be manipulated.) You conversation with a friend will sound very different to a paranoid federal agent whose only job is to find terrorists.

With the advent of global communications you can't even predict who will be using your information and for which purpose. (E.g. tons of people know your home address and it's not a problem, yet doxxing is still a thing. The fact that 99% of the people are benign doesn't mean anything if the information is accessible to 100% of the people.)

Etc, etc. It's the same bad reasoning at all levels, neatly packaged in a short virtue-signaling phrase. It so neat, it seems engineered.

The same goes for "You can’t be truly private online!" It's another dumb mental model. "Truly private" is a fake standard used solely because it's unattainable. In reality, the more information you uncontrollably leak, the worse off you are.

BrainViruson Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

>They aren’t being arrested for being anti-monarchy though. >They are being arrested for being rude about it.

We're truly scratching the bottom of the barrel of pro-censorship arguments here. This is parody-grade stuff. "I am for freedom of speech an all, but this person held a rude sign during a massively public political event. Arrest them and drag them through courts!"

BrainViruson We need a fossil-free internet by 2030

How interesting. Here is a quote from Google:

"We’re decarbonizing our energy consumption so that by 2030, we’ll operate on carbon-free energy, everywhere, 24/7."

https://sustainability.google/commitments/

Do you think this is a coincidence? No, this is how companies that already made fuckton of money using cheap fossil fuel energy of the past plan to keep their future competition forever crippled.

BrainViruson How to bury carbon? Let plants do the dirty work

>Plants use the atmosphere carbon to grow and that carbon is then released when the plants die and is decomposed.

Plants do not melt into thin air when they decompose. They compost, become part of the soil, feed bacteria, fungi and other plants. Some of these processes release various gases, but it's nowhere near 100% conversion. If it was, there would be no fossil fuels to begin with.

BrainViruson The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

>The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?

That's what the world's biggest marketing company wants.

Otherwise, I think it's pretty obvious that the idea of rating artists, journalists, engineers and educators primarily on their salesmanship skills is a disaster in the making.

BrainViruson Meta cuts Responsible Innovation Team

It's like reading that BP disbands their team for renewable energy innovation. Am I supposed to be sad? I'm not. I don't care. It was all fake from the very beginning even if the team had many people who were naive enough to think otherwise.

The point of such teams is not to improve ethics. The point is to have enough credibility to affect the discussion. (E.g. observe how much "research" in AI ethics has financial ties to large companies that are heavily invested in AI-based products at the time.)

What a properly ethical corporation would do is openly admit conflicts of interests and listen to external feedback.

BrainViruson Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

Did someone come up with a good explanation of why Peter Daszak and various affiliates of EcoHealth alliance were involved in nearly all the media "coverage" (dismissals) of the lab leak hypothesis when it first popped up?

And why The Lancet published the initial letter dismissing lab leak, clearly coordinated by EcoHealth alliance?

And why Daszak also was on the WHO investigation team?

And why to this day no one apologized, let alone got fired for this?

If you don't admit these (now-obvious) facts, you are not discussing the lab leak hypothesis in good faith.

BrainViruson I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

There are posts about specific events and dates on that Twitter feed. And it's just a quick example I found in 2 minutes, one of countless such accounts.

BrainViruson Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare

A lengthy article about the ban supposedly written on the day of the ban by Taylor Lorenz? Taylor Lorenz who doxxed people[1], lied about companies and people, was actively involved in several deplatformings and is currently being sued for defamation[2]? If anything, this makes me even more suspicious of the narrative about Kiwi Farms.

This looks more and more like a coordinated campaign. A basic search reveals a huge amount of recent articles that clearly aim to sic people on Cloud Flare[3][4][5][etc].

By amazing coincidence all these articles got published within one week of each other and within one week of Cloudflare dropping the website? Sure.

[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/why-taylor-lorenz-can-dox-whoever...

[2] https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/ny-times-reporter-taylor-loren...

[3] https://thenewstack.io/cloudflares-kiwi-farms-support-may-so...

[4] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-cloudflare-pres...

[5] https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/clo...

BrainViruson I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and Cloudflare helped

Twitter hosts Antifa types who use it to recruit and coordinate political violence. Takes about 2 minutes to find an example, so they clearly don't moderate this stuff:

https://nitter.net/zelda_in_black

Let's disconnect Twitter from the Internet!

The same people gravely concerned about an infrastructure website being neutral are perfectly fine being on a social media platform that's used for coordinating all kinds of sketchy shit.

"Whataboutism!!!" is the only reply one usually gets when pointing it out.