It's astounding how smoothly we went from "you can criticize the government" to "you can make a documentary about someone who criticized the government and got royally fucked". As if those two are the same thing.
1,187 karma · joined June 26, 2022
I recall the debates around banning Jones from YouTube. It was "sold" as an unprecedented step to combat unprecedented violation of basic decency. And here were are a few years later, when simply mentioning some wrongthink words automatically demonetizes your videos, splatters them with warnings and even cuts live streams from air. People are banned from YouTube left and right (pun intended). It's the new normal and brave technologists who posed as defenders of "real" free speech are mostly rationalizing and cheering it on.
BTW, would you care to explain how something that happened in the last 24 hours is relevant to the issuance of default judgment that occurred in November last year?
Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.
Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.
I would like to point out that this is, effectively, a very clever way of saying that Wikipedia is controlled by a tiny group of people whose goals for Wikipedia do not match the expectations of the general public.
Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.
1. We move from using leap seconds to leap minutes.
2. We move leap minutes to timezone offset, because time zones are already a clusterfuck and you can't make them any worse anyway.
3. One-time adjustment to all timezones to get the system started.
Result: Z timezone is equivalent to TAI. When you want to account for planet-related BS, you apply a timezone offset.
You can definitely criticize this, but with a caveat: if you believe that Unix timestamp doesn't have leap seconds or that timezones only come in 1-hour increments you clearly have no idea how computer time really works and should probably read up on that first.
No, it's because programmers don't want basic timekeeping in all devices involve the worst issues of managing a distributed system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nvTgSW2L8Q
https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/nyc-a-documentary-of-urb...
https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/why-new-york-city-has-ga...
https://rumble.com/vpc60g-heres-what-downtown-portland-orego...
Not so fun, eh?
Using HTML instead of parsing Markdown by applying white-space: pre-line with some additional styling for semantic tags.
Styling style and script tags as visible to embed examples into HTML pages without duplicating or entity-encoding them.
Using files as a key-value store. (File name = key. File content = value.)
Using folders/files as a one-to-many messaging bus. E.g. one app creates empty do-something.txt file in a folder, couple other apps monitors the folder and do stuff. Very simple setup, but allows to create multiagent systems in different languages with persistence and easy way to debug/interact with the whole thing manually.
Using inheritance instead of mocking frameworks. (Instead of mocking something out, extend the class, override "mocked" behavior and test that class.)
If you don't update your dependencies all the time, you will be vulnerable to old bugs and issues.
The current software engineering paradigm has no meaningful answer to this, no matter what "security experts" tell you. In a sane industry this realization would lead to a change of the paradigm, but people in our industry seem to be only doubling down.
"Use a build tool to do dependency checks!"
And then what?
"Only update libraries if they have vulnerabilities."
So, should this be a manual process where I have to dig through obscure warnings every time I build something?
"No, you can automate it!"
Congrats, you've just outsourced the decision making process about which versions of libraries to use to some 3d party. You've also made your build process reliant on yet another online service.
"But it's not a hard dependency, you can still build if the 3d party service is off."
So the exact software you compile will depend on whether or not you can connect to a 3d party service? Do you understand the actual implications of this?
Etc. People with clever advice don't seem to think it through. We're fighting fragile complexity of too many tools ducktaped together by ducktaping more tools to the whole setup. Again and again and again.
Any thinking predicated on the notion that we should just gouge ourselves on endless amount of stuff (services, products, information) without asking any questions is faulty at best.
Your certainty is completely unwarranted.
Here is a lawyer from Arizona talking about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Id3RJ3tCuM
It's a short bill, but it has complex implications, especially considering that it's somewhat self-referential (law about law enforcement). It's going to be a mess in practice.
Unless they are enforcing the law. Which they will be, because they will be enforcing this law.
6 A. IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR A PERSON TO KNOWINGLY MAKE A VIDEO RECORDING
7 OF LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY, INCLUDING THE HANDLING OF AN EMOTIONALLY
8 DISTURBED PERSON, IF THE PERSON MAKING THE VIDEO RECORDING DOES NOT HAVE
9 THE PERMISSION OF A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER AND IS WITHIN FIFTEEN FEET OF
10 WHERE THE LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY IS OCCURRING. IF THE LAW ENFORCEMENT
11 ACTIVITY IS OCCURRING IN AN ENCLOSED STRUCTURE THAT IS ON PRIVATE
12 PROPERTY, A PERSON WHO IS AUTHORIZED TO BE ON THE PRIVATE PROPERTY MAY
13 MAKE A VIDEO RECORDING OF THE ACTIVITY FROM AN ADJACENT ROOM OR AREA THAT
14 IS LESS THAN FIFTEEN FEET AWAY FROM WHERE THE ACTIVITY IS OCCURRING,
15 UNLESS A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER DETERMINES THAT THE PERSON IS INTERFERING
16 IN THE LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY OR THAT IT IS NOT SAFE TO BE IN THE AREA
17 AND ORDERS THE PERSON TO STOP RECORDING OR TO LEAVE THE AREA.
18 B. THIS SECTION DOES NOT ESTABLISH A RIGHT OR AUTHORIZE ANY PERSON
19 TO MAKE A VIDEO RECORDING OF LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY.
20 C. A VIOLATION OF THIS SECTION IS A PETTY OFFENSE, EXCEPT THAT IF
21 THE PERSON FAILS TO COMPLY WITH A VERBAL WARNING OF A VIOLATION OF THIS
22 SECTION OR HAS PREVIOUSLY BEEN CONVICTED OF A VIOLATION OF THIS SECTION,
23 IT IS A CLASS 3 MISDEMEANOR.
Given its text, I do not find the original statement reasonable at all. Simply recording police from 7 feet and not immediately stopping when a cop tells you to is a misdemeanor. This is crazy and has little to do with protecting reasonable police activity.
Common sense tells me Kavanagh is a manipulative bullshitter. I am so tired of this governmental and corporate double-speak.
This should not require any new laws. If you are interfering with official police business, it's already illegal. If you are not interfering, then recording them should not be a problem.
The response itself is a classic manipulation technique. You add more words to a statement without changing its meaning, but confusing people about its purpose.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-deadliest-dam-failur...
For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is likely abandoned is a very different experience from browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is identical. The same principle applies to authoring.
I have seen countless claims that all the technology that someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the point. The social project that was web 1.0 is now defunct.
Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.
Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity.
About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing.
About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.)
Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published.
Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.
If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.
In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.
You've literally just explained why a large company would be perfectly willing to be overcharged by a cloud provider in order of millions of dollars. They would have to pay that for migration anyway and there is always a risk of creating disruptions in the process.
How do you know if someone posting a random nasty comment on the internet is a "Gamer"? How do you know if someone posting a nice comment is not?
You're projecting identity on people and then project attributes onto that identity. Most likely you're unconsciously selecting who to project the identity onto based on the same attributes. This creates a feedback loop. This is literally how stereotypes are constructed and reinforced.
My point was that there is a logical discrepancy in how most people process statement about privacy. When presented with a specific example of an "outgroup" violating their privacy, there is quick condemnation and outrage. When presented with an example of an "ingroup" doing the same, people usually respond with some non sequitur like "I have nothing to hide". However, somehow, people mentally disconnect these two cases and see them as different. The reality is, they are profoundly connected. The simple fact is that after your private data has been collected and stored, you don't get to choose which group gets it.
Replace "gamers" with "book readers" and it should become obvious why this is not an insightful comment, but rather an expression of some kind of existential angst mixed with outdated stereotypes. Gamers ceased being a distinct consumer group when the medium of games went mainstream and ceased to heave anything resembling a coherent subculture.
The cherry on top of it all is that ProPublica uses Google Search for their website. I am moderately sure that after I post this someone will jump in to comment and defend this practice, showing nothing has been learned.
Privacy is important precisely because after your data has been collected and stored, there is no telling where it will end up and what it will be used for.
The are both trivial (e.g. post-modernism) and non-trivial (e.g. McLuhan, Postman, Ellul) versions of this idea. They have vastly different implications.
All software engineers would benefit from at least some understanding of the non-trivial versions.
For example, I've heard many engineers seriously suggest that it would be for the benefit of the whole society if traditional publishing would collapse and be completely replaced by self-publishing on Amazon. When they say that they have all the imagined benefits right in front of their mind's eye. (Everyone can publish! Cheap books! Fast/digital delivery!) Simultaneously, it's blatantly obvious that they haven't spent even a minute thinking about what that would lead to. (Hypercentralization. Turning books from artefacts to services. Complete demolition of the highly evolved ecosystem that produced good books in the past.) This is how tech people are trained to think.
Extend this example. Search for some articles or comments debating eReaders. Pretty much none of them ever consider anything beyond the immediate tactile experience and convenience. I mean, even people who argue in favor of physical books.
We deliberately raised the gas prices to punish Putin. Gas prices affect the price of food due to shipping. Food prices affect the price of software due to eating. Don't worry, it's all under control. We will soon fix this by printing more money, prohibiting gasoline cars and making people eat insects for protein. Meanwhile, we suggest you weather the storm by investing most of your money into cryptocurrencies[1].
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cryptocurrency-and-the-esg-i...