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> because it means you are implicitly deciding your current existence is not enough

> that is what bothers me with religion as well: it is a rejection of ourselves and reality traded for comfort. I get people need it due to bad life circumstances, but like any addiction it is just a pain killer for a festering wound.

Is it only drugs and religion though? And not just illegal drugs, but the legal ones as well?

Couldn't one argue that people seek out religion for emotional needs, and that emotional needs force people to reject themselves in favor of the community? Or is this a misguided take?

> I'm curious as to what differentiates cannabis from other psychedelics such that you think there is a healthy path to it and not to anything else.

Experience. Also you're more likely to come across it due to legality. When you cross the threshold of legality you're more likely to find yourself in bad company

> I personally think turning to psychedelics as form of subjective exploration is perfectly healthy, despite the risks.

Maybe it is, but if I had kids I wouldn't allow them to take that risk

Imo there is no healthy situation that leads someone to any drugs past pot. At that point you enter a rabbithole

> Just curious, were they already fairly normal? I'm wondering if the benefits are only in a narrow group, setting, condition, etc.

This is the problem: is anyone? Does anyone have a perfect upbringing? How could they be sure?

Tbh I really don't know whether they were normal, one of them had an abusive dad and afterwards decided to cut family ties, drop out of college, and do more drugs

The problem here, and why I don't recommend hallucinogens to anyone, is that people read the warnings about hallucinogens and think their upbringing was "healthy enough" to handle them. How could they actually know that for a fact?

Could you elaborate on the girlfriend, best friend, and other friend? How did their experiences play out? What about it changed them?

Of the people I've known who did hallucinogens, I knew them all before and after.

NONE of them were better off afterward

You can read all the "life changing experiences" that people have online, but when you take these you roll a dice. Keep this in mind. There's a lot of people who shill them super hard, and they might've had a positive experience, but consider the risk vs the reward and tread lightly

edit: And even the people who had "life changing experiences", they weren't better off. They never came out of it "enlightened" or any better than where they were before (based off of their behavior and the lifestyle choices they made)

People who (implicitly) say "you better do X or care about Y or else bad things will happen!!111!"

it's like: what's going to happen? Am I going to spontaneously combust if I just ignore you?

FWIW Gonzalez v Google might not have as much of an impact as what the comments here indicate.

> The case — Gonzalez v. Google — seeks to hold Google legally liable for a deadly 2015 Paris terrorist attack, alleging the tech giant recommended ISIS videos to users and boosted the terrorist group's recruitment.

If the focus is on the recommendation of content and not on the hosting of content (I know they're both related, but bear with me), then the effect of the ruling might have a narrower scope. If a company like Google is recommending terrorist content in such a way that affects many people, that's a problem with the recommendation engine. If the problem is broader and about hosting the content (as opposed to just recommending), the effect might be more extreme

Notwithstanding this ruling could have a catastrophic effect and turn social media sites into lawsuit piñatas, it could be the single most significant fuck up of this court to date

As a recent grad, this doesn't at all seem surprising

I had a class where literally half of the people in it cheated on the autograded assignments and got caught. Then after getting caught a bunch of them cheated again by just refactoring what they already wrote

There were two to three other classes where a group of 10-20 people banded together and started insisting out of nowhere that the class was "too difficult". We had one lecture where the professor was reviewing the exam material and this group literally wasted the entire lecture bitching about the class and yelling at the professor over zoom

I've found that you only hear about it being a "hard" class if a bunch of people get together and start insisting that it's hard. Which then puts pressure on the professor and uni to water down the class, which then makes it worse off for everyone else and dilutes the program

Sorry for the rant but this stuff still pisses me off to this day

edit: I feel like video lectures (and class group chats without uni oversight) enable this behavior. This and the sheer complacency on the part of universities for prioritizing "student well being" over actually teaching something

In hindsight pompous would've been a better word

Why does the author write in such laughably pretentious language?

> It is the emotional register that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the digital flows for which they are a portal

Why not just say "it's the feeling of being addicted to social media"?

Another example:

> I skim the surface of each emotional experience, but rarely can I plumb its depths or sound out its meaning.

This isn't a satire but I wish it was. If the author has something to say, maybe they should actually make an effort to say it instead of larping as a philosopher

The TPP was more complicated than this and there was bipartisan opposition to it. The opposition to it wasn't merely Trump's isolationism but genuine concerns about the economic affects it would have on domestic citizens

extensions.pocket.enabled

Except they post pay ranges and not a single salary. They could just make the pay ranges really big and use the ambiguity to avoid the intended effect

Also I have no clue whether it actually helps reduce pay gaps on average. I remember reading a study in either Australia or UK (can't remember where sorry) where it had the opposite effect

> You can, I suppose, go find the settings one by one and disable all the places they appear

It's like one setting in about:config

> Switching to Firefox means accepting ads built-in to the browser, something that (AFAIK) Google has never done

Google might not build ads into the browser, but if you use it as they intend and log into the account all of your activity gets tied to your account. I would rather have pocket then not be able to sign into a google account without google signing it in across the browser

> I mean, sure it's great that ad blockers still work, but let's not pretend that Firefox is some kind of bastion of pro-user sentiment.

Yeah mozilla has a shitty track record I'll admit and firefox is a lower quality product, but at the end of the day it's still the lesser of two evils

> But, stuff like this should make Facebook employees angry. Zuckerberg is not a person to envy.

It's a wonder he hasn't been pushed out yet. I'm pretty sure he's holding enough stock to prevent it from happening, but you have to wonder what kind of internal pressure there is in the Facebook C suite right now

> Facebook (Meta) cannot innovate. Their growth since inception is almost exclusively through acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus.

Innovation at this point != success

Just look at Oracle... they're still alive and doing OK

They don't need to at this point. They have FB, IG, WhatsApp, and Messenger

That's already a lot to begin with, they could've just coasted and they'd be fine

But instead they have their idiot CEO creating PR nightmare after PR nightmare (just look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8q2BQOGRGE and tell me he isn't a liability) and funneling billions into what's going to be the biggest business mistake of this decade

> Would topic forums see a rise in popularity

I highly doubt it

> or would sites like Reddit draw in some of those users

probably. I get the impression reddit is doing more marketing to non tech people, and more people I know have said positive stuff about reddit out of nowhere

but also... I feel like this is unrelated, but reddit has seriously gone downhill since what it was in like 2015. It's a good idea but the users make it insufferable

> Metaverse is an interesting idea

It just seems like a mix of xbox kinect and roblox

maybe zuck is just having a midlife crisis, who knows

This isn't what new grads actually do. They're in the same boat you're in, algo classes have a lot of theory but LC is a different beast entirely

I mean people buy google phones, it can't get a lot worse than them. And they aren't bad phones either.

Imo at the end of the day people don't give two shits about privacy, convenience is king

> cough Proton cough

I'd take Proton any day over a neutered ad blocker

I can't see this panning over well without the supreme court establishing some sort of discretionary middle ground.

One camp says the platforms are like newspapers, the other says they are like email companies. Imo the platforms are neither.

Content moderation is necessary, moderation of more extreme and malicious viewpoints is necessary, but in recent years a boundary has been crossed with regard to what constitutes "malicious" content (e.g. someone rationally questioning a supposedly widely held viewpoint and being silenced without explanation. The act of censoring someone for making a good faith argument solely because the censor disagrees is in itself malicious)

The companies have shown a lack of discretion in this regard and the current application of the 1st is unsustainable long term

> It is widely thought that SCOTUS decides based on ideology and politics, and only justifies it with the text of the Constitution after the fact. Although they like to present it as some kind of rigorous reasoning, there are always sufficient vaguenesses and internal contradictions to justify any interpretation they prefer.

I'd say that this is true for the three liberal justices and the four most conservative justices. Roberts has demonstrated otherwise, and Kavanaugh to a lesser degree has joined him in disagreeing with the other conservatives on some cases

I think your view of the court is grounded in a sort of cynicism that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If we convince enough people to see the court as a political institution it will normalize packing the court, which will permanently turn it into a political institution

the merit of the court lies in its ability to operate independently of partisan influence. While this doesn't happen often, normalizing the court as a political institution will prevent it from happening entirely

Posting this just because I read the comments and saw (most) commenters advocating for this.

Is the NYT comment section just braindead? It seems like they are

Do you think that someone who says "X politician is an idiot, and their policies are stupid"... do you think that the poster of this should be fined or imprisoned? It seems like Germany is making a gradual return to totalitarianism, go figure

> If everything had to be known to everyone, it would remove the ability to do a lot of things that nearly everyone would consider good for themselves and society.

Would it remove the ability to do these things, or would the collective change lead the prerequisites for these things to change as well? If this change were implemented, it would fundamentally alter how we see ourselves and how we see society

> Do you tell everyone about your incontinence, ED or irregular menstruation, sudden fainting spells, etc?

I said "ideally". Nobody would ever talk about these things and thus doing so is faux pas. But if we lived in a world where secrets were nonexistent, it would fix the corruption and disregard of humanity present in our society through radical transparency. It would make our concept of life and what it means to be human less of a caricature. People would have less to hide and less to fear. This rule applies 100x to politicians and the rich and powerful

> And there's quite a froth on porn. So much is not related in the slightest to trafficking, minors, violence, etc but it all gets tainted by what is related.

Not just the issues associated with the production of porn, but the consumption of porn. Libido is a major driver behind society. If libido is collectively directed onto private fantasies as opposed to collective experience, there will be less collective experience because libido is finite

Because there's a lot of questionable and predatory content online, parents (and local communities) should take responsibility to make sure their children don't fall victim to it.

Also because having a divide between things someone privately searches up vs things they publicly talk about is unhealthy. Ideally there should be no divide and everything should be known to everyone

Just wanted to say: I think (unironically) this is a good idea

One is career related: I always keep coming back to the Cormen algorithms book because of its clarity and beauty of explanation. Sure, you can find explanations on places like geeksforgeeks, but they will never match the clarity of the former

Two fiction:

War and Peace: There's just has so much life in this book. The things you read, they age with you over time. I wish I could read it in the original

Ulysses: I don't know why I like this book tbh. There's a lot of "fluff" to it, but the parts that are good are so exceptionally good you will need to come back to them. I started reading the Wake a year ago and took a break bc busy. I still think about it though: he writes about culture like it's this drunken, surreal, fever dream. It's like you read it and wonder if this is how things actually are