DanAndersen

We should keep in mind that these tips are specifically chosen because of their unusual and laughable nature, and so should refrain from attempting to generalize about the nature of medieval medicine from a biased dataset.

I grew up LDS and remember a church youth speaker saying something like "It's OK to pull the ox out of the mire on Sunday as long as you didn't push him in on Saturday." :)

The article raises good points about the need for formal societal taboos against constant work. The ideal (often violated, though) in our modern society of the "40-hour week" as a reasonable amount is one of them. Having regular times for contemplation and separation from the bustle of the world is important.

The gig economy has dangers in it. There's a liberating aspect in that people "can choose their own hours," but then that means that they have to work more to keep up with someone else who is working a few extra hours to get ahead in their own lives. It seems like the world of labor has a tragedy of the commons aspect to it, where it's in everyone's immediate individual interest to work just a little bit longer, but the end result is that everyone has to work more for the same reward. A bit like the two-income trap: some benefits, some liberation, but there's also a cost.

I do wish, though, that the article fully grappled with the issue of the 'shabbos goy.' It praises the virtues of having everyone able to participate in a time of separation from work, but then there's this practice where the conveniences of life are still indulged in by having an outsider labor for you.

The same ideological mindset that agitates for the current change also has issues with many sorts of ingrained hierarchies in general. They're probably find titles of nobility gendered and thus 'problematic'. Euphemism treadmills never stop.

Is there any evidence for your claim? Do programmers who view the word "slave" and "master" in a programming context poll higher on support for slavery? Should we expect that the ones pushing for changes, because they see the words "slave" and "master" more often than normal on their own computer screens (because they're in the habit of agitating for changes surrounding them), are secret would-be slave-owners because the words are infecting their brains?

Slave slave slave slave slave. Master master master master master.

By how many fractions of a percentage point have I increased your propensity for oppression now that you've viewed that?

All this language control is an attempt to cargo-cult one's way to an imagined utopia. There's this idea that a perfect tolerant society, created ex nihilo, would obviously not have words for slave and master, so in order to get our own society towards it we should expunge those words. It's no different from a cargo cult in that it thinks that the outward effects can be summoned to bring about their typical cause.

Direct arxiv link to the preprint in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184

Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own.

>“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.”

It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair.

One thing I would love to see in a city generator like this is a simulation of time and how gradual evolution shapes a city.

There's a picture book called "Barmi: A Mediterranean City Through The Ages" by Xavier Hernandez and illustrated by Jordi Ballonga. It illustrates a fictional city from Neolithic settlement to Roman outpost to medieval town to modern city. Some images can be seen at http://jordiballongaen.blogspot.com/p/baronia.html

In this book, you see how a Roman amphitheater decays during the Dark Ages, and the structure is partially used and cannibalized to create a circular set of apartment buildings, which then influences the later layout and design of the city in modern eras.

Procedural generation unfortunately tends to try to generate everything at once, as if a medieval city was created ex nihilo. It would be interesting to see what it would look like if such designs incorporated evolution over time.

If you do actually have kids, please understand that such an action is extremely traumatic and leaves scars that never fully heal.

>This represents a great challenge for those who believe that individuals left to their own devices are most likely to make rational choices.

The unfortunate reality is that institutions, organizations, and governments are also not prone to making rational choices when left to their own devices, due to them being made up of individuals as well. Paternalism requires a faith that those in charge are somehow more free from the limitations of our flawed nature while also having others' interests at heart.

From what I understand, the issue is that labor is limited compared with the sheer volume of material to be digitized.

I wonder if any such libraries have considered programs for volunteers to come in and digitize some materials. Would it be worth it for them to do some sort of minimal training for people to learn to handle materials correctly, run a scanner, and do data input? It's the sort of thing that I think I would find enjoyable and meaningful to do as a weekend activity.

The term "refutes" seems incorrect here. Perhaps "denies" instead. I was expecting a public demonstration of proof or evidence against the claim beyond an assertion.

The hedonic rush of social media is an unfortunate aspect to modern travel. Vacations and trips have always had the aspect where the traveler plans how to tell friends/family about the trip after the fact. However, I've caught myself mentally planning out a social media post about something I'm seeing right at the moment.

I wonder how we would treat our travels differently if somehow we were not allowed to share anything visual with other people. There's something diminished that happens when it becomes so easy, so low-effort, to capture something about a place you're in. You don't have to observe or be in the moment; you just run from place to place collecting views you can horde in exchange for likes and clicks. It's a mechanization/industrialization of experience.

That assumes that the opposition is willing to spend political capital arguing "in favor of extremism."

If Congress makes laws banning distribution of firearm blueprints, it's considered a 1A/2A violation (or at least legally dubious).

If social media companies ban distribution of firearm blueprints on their sites, it's not considered a violation ("they're private platforms!").

If members of Congress, who hold power to threaten regulation of social media companies, tell social media companies to ban it for them...

>Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don't like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you're always free to pick up and move to a different one.

Last I heard, Mastodon didn't support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem because it strongly discourages exodus; Twitter itself shows that people will put up with a lot of nonsense before leaving to alternatives because they've cultivated a brand and a following and don't want to lose it all. Moderators of instances are not a static thing; like any political system it shifts with whoever is in charge over time. An instance that seemed friendly to a user initially can over time become more oppressive to them, but the user has invested so much into that instance that they would have to leave behind that they'd put up with it when they shouldn't have to.

I'm curious how the "they're a private company, they can ban whatever they want, it's not a 1A violation" argument fares when you have government officials publicly urging Reddit and other companies to ban 3D-printing files [0]. Do these companies feel free to act independently, or does this signal governments attempting to use wink-wink-nudge-nudge influence on private companies, then being able to claim that it's the private companies that are exercising their own rights to censor? Seems like we are entering an interesting future of public-private cronyism.

[0] https://www.menendez.senate.gov/news-and-events/press/menend...

There's a strange conflation in the article between "owning things" and "owning land." I think there is something fundamentally different about the two, in that having a patch of ground for which you are responsible for can help build a sense of self-reliance, investment in the future, skin in the game. Accumulating a wall-full of VHS tapes doesn't do that.

I don't much mourn the lack of ownership of a lot of worthless junk that doesn't bring fulfillment or human flourishing. The late 20th century West let itself fill garages and storage units with consumerist nonsense.

But it's important to recognize that the corporate consumerist system is all too willing to mutate, to adapt to people's changing tastes and to offer them a product they feel is liberation. If you've heard "Don't buy things, buy experiences," then you've heard this new advertising. Companies are all too willing to make you think that an "authentic" vacation around the world will bring happiness and meaning in the form of selfies. Restaurants play up the 'foodie' advertising to make consumption of their product seem like a life-altering experience. The companies realize they can sell the same thing again and again digitally to customers who binge-watch Netflix and pride themselves on cutting the cord and not vegging in front of the TV like their parents did. And at the end of the month you find yourself subscribed to so many services, so many pseudo-addictions, you wonder where your money is going.

Rather than buying things or buying experiences, consider what you can make yourself or find for free. There is already more than enough media content out there to last many lifetimes; why not look for old material that has stood the test of time? Why not build a skill and learn the value of becoming self-reliant in some small way?

Interesting to see the lack of "it's their platform, make your own browser and app store if you don't like it" justifications here.

That would honestly be a pretty good pivot. The trouble with Gab and Voat is that if you only bill yourself as a "free speech alternative," you get almost-exclusively populated with the sorts of people who have to worry about that (i.e. fringe characters). The community becomes strongly influenced by the "founder effect" of the digital refugees that made up its founding stock.

It would be interesting to have a sort of two-column format, where one column is who you normally follow, and the other column is an auto-generated list of people in the most opposite social-graph cluster.

The lifeblood of places like Twitter is the ability for people to get into loud arguments that people feel matter more than they actually do. If Twitter ever actually did a full purge of one side of the ideological spectrum they'd find a massive decrease in interest. People want to fight deep down and so need the other around.

>The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.

Exactly. As society moves more and more online, it moves more and more into a virtual territory that is owned at every level by corporate entities who grant no rights to their users. If we're not careful, we could end up with a strange cyber-feudal arrangement.

The "it's their platform" argument seems strange to me when you start getting into the question of corporations beyond a certain size or monopoly. In the 1700s I'm sure there was a lot of arguing that certain kinds of protest were groundless because this is "the King's land." It took a re-examination of what the boundaries should be before that changed.

Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks.

By way of analogy, consider you are the owner of a small independent city paper -- the sort you see offered for free in boxes on streetcorners.

Now imagine a large corporate entity -- perhaps a competing paper or someone with a personal grudge or a political mission. Every day, they go to all the locations where the paper is offered, take every copy, and destroy them so that no one else can read them. You spend the money you have to put it on more streetcorners, but your rival has deeper pockets than you and can hire people to go to all the new locations and take and destroy those papers too.

Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights?

The main difference we are seeing in this new world of large tech companies is that the role of the "judge" is diminished. Groups figure out the fine lines on which to make judgment, but only as a matter of internal company policy, behind closed doors, which none of us get to have a say in or even read the guidelines.

When a judge sentences you to prison, you know pretty well exactly what sentence of which law was the one that did it. When deplatformed from these private-but-ever-growing services, vague "ToS violations" is the best you get. Very easy for "rule of law" to become "rule of man."

Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players?

One tactic for deplatforming undesirable sites is a DDoS -- if you put your home server online, what options do you have for DDoS mitigation if the big players in that space decide they're on the political side of those doing the DDoS?

One thing that hasn't yet been remarked on here is that the 48-hour-warning message said that the linked posts were flagged for having phishing links. Notice that the statements made afterward by MS were not on the grounds of the original "phishing links" report, but focusing on the content.

However, if you look at the posts, you'll see a fair amount of unsavory content but no phishing links.

I feel like this was purposeful on the part of whatever political group made these reports.

Most likely, these hosting companies have automated anti-spam/phishing systems whereby, if a large number of reports come in, they will automatically send out an alert to the suspected offending party.

If Outraged Group X goes to the company saying "this site you're hosting has vile speech and so you should take it down," it probably has to go through an internal company process, which might have a slightly higher bar for acting on it.

However, if Outraged Group X falsely claims that "this site is hosting phishing links", something which might trigger an algorithmic response, then the company cannot easily reverse course -- because then the story becomes "Company ABC actively reverses course on allowing hate speech." The PR fallout locks them in.

There's an argument that putting children through traumatizing simulated events has unclear psychological consequences. Western education at young ages goes surprisingly graphic when talking about certain historical atrocities (think seeing Schindler's List in grade schools). While this sort of shock-and-awe storytelling can be impactful, its consequences may not be all positive.

Another issue is that a stronger reliance on "empathetic/emotional" learning experiences can delve too far from education and too much into propaganda. Group A can produce material that hits deep at our psyches and highlights the evils of Group B, and vice versa. Whose side wins the popular debate isn't from the facts on the ground, but from which group has the tech/production skills to make their story grip the heartstrings. In that way it's like any other over-produced documentary, but VR can have the seductive appeal that it's "more real" and thus more objective.

The issue of "experiential VR learning" becomes harder and harder to do right the further back in time you go, because of the mistake we moderns make when trying to "relate" to the past. We often imagine time-traveling and dropping ourselves in a past environment, thinking that's what it would be to be, say, a medieval peasant. We too easily forget that our own mindsets and approaches would be fundamentally different in some ways.

Be careful what you wish for.

>and we should demand that neutral platform organizations like Apple, Facebook, or a university don't do it either (which is not the same thing as saying that they should be forced by law to do it)

What sorts of demands would be listened to or have any chance of being effective if not having the weight of force of law behind it?

Related: selecting points on the surface of a sphere https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random-points/

Poisson disc sampling can be quite useful.

Footage from Venezuelan TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew0RN8ozA8I

"PIN number" is just a shorthand for "number that is a PIN." Never understood the pedantry on this one; when spoken (a lossy channel of communication), "PIN" is similar enough to "pin" and "pen" and "pan" that people have found the need to further disambiguate to be understood.