218 karma · joined January 20, 2026
They were told: buy guns because freedom, and they repeat "we buy guns because freedom".
Then they were told: never mind freedom, lets shoot this unarmed person, and they repeat "never mind freedom, shoot the person".
"we need our guns to protect our freedom against the government" idea could have some merit, but the reason right wingers say it is different. They say it because that meme has infected them, and uses them to replicate. A meme in the original sense
> A meme is a term referring to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another.
Extremely non trivial. What I'm hearing is "security by obfuscation".
If there's one thing we learned from Snowden is that the NSA can't break PGP, so these people who live in the world of theory have no credibility with me.
The question here is NOT "if Signal didn't leak your phone number could you still get screwed?" Of course you could, no one is disputing that.
The question is "if you did everything else perfect, but use Signal could the phone number be used to screw you?" The answer is ALSO of course, but the reason why we're talking about it is that this point was made to the creator of Signal many many times over the years, and he dismissed it and his fanboys ridiculed it.
Turns out they were right.
Ignore the other idiot. If you want to have a rational conversation I'm open.
Mastodon is pretty cool and proof that we can make federation work.
Yes!! Exactly. When it comes to my PRs, he once made this snarky comment about him having high expectations in terms of code quality. When it comes to his PRs, he does the things he tells me not to do. In fact, I once sent him a "dis u?" with a link to his own code, as a response to something he told me I shouldn't do. To his credit he didn't make excuses, he responded "I could've done better there, agreed".
In general he's not bad, but his nitpicking is bad. I don't really understand what's going on in his mind that drives this behavior, it's weird.
Eventually I've told him "if your comment does not affect performance or business logic, I'm ignoring it". He finally got the message. The fact that he accepted this tells me that deep down he knew his comments were just bike shedding.
My theory is that the people who are impressed are trying to build CRUD apps or something like that.
But then you'll have HN: NOOOO it's not effective, people will just use VPNs nanny state! Oppression! Freedom of speech!
What's more hacker than experimenting to get the results you want?
I find it utterly frustrating to read the "think of the children" mockery here on HN.
I argue that this is good.
There's many reasons why children having unfettered access to the internet and different campaigners care about different aspects, so I'm going to talk about the one I care about: addiction, destroyed ability to focus, and dopamine desensitization. In the UK (and elsewhere in the world, I imagine) there's a huge problem with people addicted to phones and children are especially vulnerable. I don't care if adults are vulnerable, they have to make their own decisions. But I care that parents that do everything right in terms of educating their children on how to be healthy with respect of phones (like me and my partner) then have to send their children to schools where they're given ipads. It's not fair to say "banning doesnt work you should just not give your children phones", but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions.
It's a matter of network effects (something that HN loooves talking about). In addition to the fact that phones are engineered to be addictive, you have the fact that in many schools EVERY child is on social media, and so any family that wants to stay away has to decide between isolating their child from society, or selling themselves into the "engagement industry".
I think that banning is a valid approach. It won't be 100% effective, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that it will introduce friction (another thing that HN looooves talking about) and so will reduce the total number on children that is on social media and therefore reduce the social need for other children to be in.
So, we're adding friction to break or weaken the network effects that keep these cancer companies harming children in schools.