claudiawerner

If your legislature does not listen to you (because you're "not the one in power") then that's a far more serious issue than facial recognition by any metric. If the government is abusing power, that's not the same thing as doing it with the support of the populace, as the 'slippery slope' argument supposes.

Devil's advocate: Why must facial recognition necessarily set us on the the slope to abuse of power? What precedent is there to suppose that?

I'm not sure if I buy this argument; the legislature need not, and generally does not, work on the basis of previous precedent. There are two main responses to the idea that we ought not to do X because it's a slippery slope to Y in political theory: firstly, people disagree about how bad Y is (unless Y is made patently absurd); secondly, slippery slopes require justification.

It's evident that one can't simply allege the existence of any slippery slope - for example, the 'slippery slope' of legal gay marriage leading to adult-child and human-animal relationships. So there must be some work put in to justify the existence of a slope which is claimed to exist.

In particular as it relates to issues of free speech and 'facial recognition', I have seen no evidence presented to justify this slope as a rhetorical or political device.

It's genuinely distressing to me how the author has shoehorned in a suppsosed link between fictional fantasies published between adults on Twitter and actual child sex abuse and grooming. The fact the author chose to include these, as well as the dictionary rendition of 'loli complex' without delving any deeper into the reasons this subculture exists between adults shows a shocking lack of due diligence.

The fact that somebody likes gay furry porn and posts nude pictures of themselves in adult spaces has nothing to do with child sex abuse.

On the other hand, it isn't all that surprising; crusaders against porn and deviance frequently tie in far larger and more serious issues, but this author has done the opposite: take very serious issues of CSA and in order to inflame the reader's sensibilities feels he must mention that 'deviant' content.

No, you're right. It says "you have a right to free speech except where we've illegalized certain other speech prior to creating this document and after creating this document". One might think that a bill of rights would be a foundational document by which other laws must defer to first, but apparently not. It's just words with no power of their own. So still, so-called "extreme pornography" is illegal to produce even if all participants are consenting, and certain Japanese manga are still illegal even to possess. The Obscene Publications Act remains in full force.

There is no right to free speech in England and Wales, never mind a law aganist the government from restricting speech in all but the worst circumstances (threats, child pornography, incitement to harm, etc.) but now the government and their supporters can say "yes there is!" while pointing to a 'bill of rights' which any speech-restricting law is overriding and can override in future.

I work for a company where we basically sell access to a SaaS behind a frontend powered by React. The customers pay, very well as I'm led to believe by our figures. There's no advertising. Nobody cares that the frontend is slow, because that slowness is because it's an SPA and that's factored in as a necessary cost of business.

In other words, even if you pay, there's no reason to think the software should be any better.

Harry's single ambition through the books is becoming a member of the Wizarding police/SWAT team (Aurors), totally integrated into the system. The only things he had any personal problem with was occasionally who's in charge. In fact, he stays (almost) moot through the entire series of books on questions such as the fact of elves being literal slaves, where people who speak out (e.g. Hermione) are portrayed as shrill whiners.

I think the point that GP is making is not that every subreddit that a group of people complain about is nothing to be concerned or worried about; rather, that people who inhabit subs dedicated to banning other subs operate within a moral framework which on the whole is dubious at the edges. For example, clamoring to ban consensual non-consent (CNC, a form of kink) subreddits because they perceive it as "normalizing" certain behaviors, or banning content of fictional characters, or banning support groups where various "degenerate" people frequent. These are edge cases which do not fit into the generalization of "jailbait"/"stealthing"/"creepshot" subreddits, which are non-consensual by nature. It's disingenuous to suppose that a subreddit for roleplaying BDSM/risque fantasies between members falls under the same moral realm of regulation as subreddits that post links to childrens' social media accounts to gather risque photos.

I'm all for illegal and non-consensual content subreddits to be banned. That's not all the mentioned "Ban This and That" subs are asking for, so I won't accept their moral opinions beyond the issues of non-consenting and illegal materials. They are prescribing a sexual morality, one which I, and I think many reasonable people, disagree with or at least have qualms with. If you don't believe me, r/BFHS seems to be a hotspot for anti-kink and anti-porn activists who suggest that women with kinks need to "heal"[0]. If that's not moralizing, I'm not sure what is.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BanFemaleHateSubs/comments/unaa88/c...

To play the other side a little, it's interesting to mention that the relative uniformity of some moral statements across time and cultures has also been deployed in support of moral anti-realist arguments, or at least evolutionary debunking arguments. I can't find the paper at the moment, but I don't think it's accurate to use the uniformity of some moral views as an argument against moral relativism, for the same reasons why you can't use the disparity of some moral views between cultures as an argument for moral relativism.

The fact that some number of people agree on some ethical standards, even almost everyone, does not do any work to prove their accuracy outside human opinion and experience, much in the same way almost all societies except those who believed in the Abrahamic God found others who did not to be (repugnant/heathens/blasthemers/barbarians/baby killers).

One of my best friends, a man from Iceland I met in Overwatch a few years ago plays both Overwatch when he feels like really digging into something, and he'll play simulator games (Truck sim, Cooking sim, etc.) when he wants to 'chill' or wants less of a challenge. It works well for him, since his disability means that gaming is pretty much his whole life now.

> It is a proxy for other people, so you are essentially saying "everyone else owes me a house and I am willing to use governmental violence to get it."

This is pretty much the principle behind distributive and legal justice, expressed crudely. I have no prima facie problem with the idea of a program which is constructed to recognize that everyone is owed shelter, and if it takes declaring that as a "human right" (whatever that might mean) then so be it.

A definition need not meet the legal bar for us to consider what kind of things a formally specified law might include; there are doubtless many possible definitions of 'hate speech', and debating those and reaching an agreement among various interested parties is part of the legal process that involves the whole of society. Someone is going to disagree with any definition given, but that doesn't mean that the sovreign lawmakers can't come to some agreement when put to debate.

In other words, unless the person you're replying to is a lawmaker with supreme authority, there is no need for them to speak for what you might have 'hate speech' defined as in law. Most people aren't lawmakers, but they are involved in the process of creating laws.

>Words literally have no ability to hurt people unless screamed with such volume as to cause hearing damage. Actions can hurt people.

This doesn't seem true; it is very possible to cause damage with speech alone, anything from hurting someone in a fragile mental state to the point where they might commit suicide, to spreading rumors about someone with full knowledge of what might happen. I'm reminded about the quote from a professor who said he'd rather break his left leg than have a false rumor begin to circulate about how he slept with a student. Your thesis rests on the principle of mind-body dualism (which is increasingly rejected among philosophers and neuroscientists alike), and that speech isn't itself an action (metaphysically, of course it's an action).

>But hurt feelings aren’t something that should ever be addressed by the legal system.

To say that any effect words can have on another person only amount to 'hurt feelings' is inaccurate. Every human alive knows the anguish and pain, sometimes even causing physiological pain, that words can cause. Mental states also have physiological effects of many kinds, such as mental stress leading to inflammation. The principle isn't alien.

>People really need to get thicker skin

Why doesn't the same apply to literal thicker skin or body plating to prevent being stabbed? Is that really what a civil society looks like?

I'm not a regular reader, but I'm interested in why you say that. Any particularly egregious examples in your opinion?

>...is to subject all freedom of sentiment to the prejudices of one man, and make him the arbitrary and infallible judge of all controverted points in learning, religion and government

This doesn't seem right. Firstly, we generally operate under the principle that laws are created by the populace, not "one man", the censor. That seems to contradict the idea that a control on freedom of speech would be up to the whims of one person, if the censor is restricted in his activities by the voting populace and the lawmakers they elect. Secondly, this type of restriction has precedent in several other important areas of life, such as food and drugs. While many people disagree with the FDA's decisions, very few people argue for its abolition in its role as a 'censor' of which products can be sold and in what quantities on the American market.

Of course, the usual retort would be "I trust the state to regulate food and drugs more than I trust it to regulate speech", but to convince someone else of that point, you'd have to also provide evidence and reasoning that our hypothetical censor cannot be trusted to censor according to the law that the citizens vote for via their representatives. Another retort would be "Free speech is more important than food and drug availability", but that statement implicitly admits there's an issue with any food regulation, it's just not as important as speech, which leads to the question of why so few free speech absolutists care about abolishing the FDA.

I haven't really seen any convincing argument for a slippery slope when it comes to regulation of speech, nor any reasoned argument on why there ought to be an absolute constitutional protection on speech. That said, I'm not personally in love with the idea of a censor, as I've seen that censors in other countries have practiced unjustified censorship - but that seems like a problem with the democratic process and oversight rather than the idea of a censor.

You're making an assumption that the actresses are chosen on whether or not they can twerk, and then an assumption that the producers of the show (or the audience) see it with a pedophilic gaze. Are parents who read shop catalogues showing children in underwear pedophiles, or looking at the image in that way? How about the people who take the photos?

I really can't see why it would be disturbing, unless the person watching is doing so in service of a pedophilic desire - and you still have to prove that.

I'm curious by what standard the film's production sexually exploited the actors, and it's a serious accusation. On first approximation, having watched the film and due to the fact nobody has been prosecuted by and government for the film, I'm inclined to disagree.

Anorher commenter in the thread called it 'child pornography', which is an even wilder claim, from a legal or moral perspective.

I found out that at least 300+ people block me, but I'm not blocking anyone. Even 9 people are blocking my private Twitter account, despite the fact they have no idea what I post on that account.

I've never really been persuaded by the 'facts are more important than feelings' statement. At best, it's an apples and oranges comparison in most cases. People don't typically claim they feel creationism is true, rather they take creationism as a fact. Similarly, the fact that I feel this way is nevertheless a fact, one which we take on good faith many times a day in person and online. If someone tells you they're angry, we're usually justified in believing that fact about their mental state. The degree to which we're skeptical of that claim is heavily influeneced in turn by epistemic trustworthiness and epistemic justice.

I think GP's point is that being or not being non-binary is unfalsifiable. I don't have a horse in that race, as I'm not sufficiently informed on the topic. However, it's important to note that (i) falsifiability is not the only reason to believe something and (ii) there is serious criticism of the idea that a statement must be falsifiable to be considered scientific.

I accept that someone is non-binary the same way that I accept that someone is a man or woman. I haven't had any issues with it so far, and it has the added bonus of making people feel validated, accepted, and comfortable around me, which is also a benefit to me in turn.

I use Clementine (or its more recent fork, Strawberry) as my FOSS music player on Windows. It's also available for GNU/Linux, but I just use mpd + vimpc on my Linux machine.

The article is also light on what this actually means for sites not even hosted in the UK. I assume that eventually sites like PornHub will be blocked entirely, for everyone, unless they comply with adding these checks.

Very, very few porn sites anyone actually uses are hosted in the UK and therefore very few must obey UK law on what they host and to whom they show it. But they can be pressured into it, I imagine.

I've had a very hard time finding a new job given that my current job doesn't use any kind of "tooling" or outside libraries to get things done, other than rather obscure and domain specific ones (e.g. libgps). Ideally I'd like to pivot to web development given that I have some hobbyist experience with it, but I'm not very good at "specific frameworks".

If someone were to ask me to sit down and write something in React/Vue.js/whatever on the first interview, I don't think I could without the docs or a tutorial available. I can write JS just fine, I can't write any specific framework, even though I have the mental model and concepts behind how they work and how to use them. So when I see a job that specifically asks for e.g. React, I just don't apply. Same story with companies that ask for Django rather than the more generic "Python web development experience". I could pick up Django within two weeks if you hired me. I know what it is and what MV(C) is. Isn't that enough?

Thanks a lot for the responses, I understand now :)

Forgive me if you will, but I don't really understand the idea behind privacy on DNS. If you're not using a VPN, even if the DNS resolution is private, the ISP can still see what IP you're connecting to. It's trivial to do a reverse lookup on that. And if I'm not mistaken, even on HTTPS sites, the domain is visible in the request in plaintext too. So why is there so much focus on proxying DNS?

Dialect variation, English second-language speakers, etc. may be classified as better or worse (though this is controversial and I'm not entirely convinced for the dialect variation case), but that doesn't mean that they don't have something important to say. Some of the most productive conversations I've had are with people with far less mastery of English than native speakers, and even people whose grammar and spelling are poor.

>pornography and perversion that percolates into the mainstream life via innocent channels - manga, anime, Reddit, and so on

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but it's interesting how manga/anime is invoked in these discussions, often unintentionally or even unknowingly recalling the image of 'weird Japan', a supposed hotbed of child abuse and perversion, where no material, much less anime and manga are safe for Western eyes, supposedly more moral and discerning.

I recently read a paper about this kind of discourse, in which the authors pointed out, quite rightly in my judgement, that the popularity of such readings in the mainstream Western press projects a certain idea of fiction and its relationship with reality which is not shared by many in Japan, and certainly not by the consumers of this 'pornography and perversion' according to ethnographic research on their opinions and perceptions.

Second is the idea of 'stumbling' upon porn. Some people even class Neon Genesis Evangelion as 'perversion' in its own right, and recently in the US, portrayals of adolescent sexuality in stories and books, which some lawmakers are trying to remove from libraries. I'm of the opinion that the sparation isn't nearly that easy. Teenagers writing Harry Potter slash fanfiction is a far cry away from Blender animated monster porn, and a fannish teenager or younger will have a greater interest in the former.

Consider just how well moderated most Internet communities are. The chance of seeing porn (as opposed to the anime equivalent of a very softcore porn gif) on r/all, or even r/anime is slim. A child is much more likely to 'stumble' accross it if a friend they know in real life sent it to them through Discord. The only other place I can really think of a child 'stumbling' in a zone meant for children would be Twitter, but then we're talking about Twitter, not 'reddit', 'anime', or 'manga'. In other words, I'm saying that just because the material exists, it doesn't mean it's innocently 'stumbled' upon by a wide-eyed child. Children get curious, especially when you tell them not to do something, or society provides that narrative.

Personal anecdote: I don't drink during the day, only after 9:30pm. It started out as weekends only, i.e. Friday and Saturday. Then I started doing it on Sunday. Then Thursday. Soon enough, I was drinking every day of the week, only after 9:30pm. I'd stay up until about 1am or 2am, sometimes 3am. This worked fine, until I started having to attend work meetings at 9am on the dot. I wormed my way out of some with excuses about personal commitments (my manager understands that not everyone can be available at 9am on the dot).

I need about 150ml vodka and 3 beers to get to the state I want. It wasn't always that way, of course, but it escalated gradually. I don't sleep well, but oh well. It's worth it, in a way. I can forget about my troubles, my bad pay, and my work pressure by drinking and watching movies or playing video games at the same time.

The next day? Sometimes I wake up with a headache. Not often, now that I know exactly how much water I need to drink before I sleep to avoid that. But the next day is always normal and I'm pretty well functioning, if lazy and procrastinating. I just need a 20 min nap after 12pm and I'm pretty much set to function.

Will I stop? I don't know. These things on my mind may seem utterly trivial to some. I wasn't abused, I haven't lost anyone in my family, I live fairly comfortably. But I need to get my mind off those thoughts. I can go days at a time, even weeks, without feeling the need to drink, so long as I just forget about its feeling. But why would I do that? When I have a 2L bottle of vodka and an 18 back of 5% beers? With them, I can enjoy the night more than I would otherwise. That's got to be worth something, at least to me.

>What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?

I can't speak for others, but I'd be less stressed, and I'd be more easily able to savor the moments when work isn't coming. I'd have more motivation to program rather than play video games, just as I used to do before I got my job. To say "we have more time off" when the comparison is the generation that came before me, never mind the standard from 150 years ago - to me means pretty much nothing. It's very similar to how people sometimes say "what are you complaining about? Compared to the standard of living in medieval times, you're living like a queen!". Who's that really going to convince?

The second point is that there's a tension. Many of the same people who subscribe to some variant of utilitarianism still want to moralize about how people use their time, by dividing things into higher or lower pleasures, without being able to justify it. For example, they say a high pleasure is programming or (maybe) chess. A lower pleasure is, as J.S. Mill described it, something for pigs revelling in their own filth (today, people will say this amounts to video games or 'media consumption').

When people say "things are better than they've ever been", I'm inclined to agree, on most fronts. When people use that as an argument to tell me to shut up and deal with my lot in life, it's profoundly sad.

This is a very good point. It was pointed out quite a while ago that talk about 'decentralised' systems can hide the technical features of those systems and the mode of governance like a 'veil'. 'Decentralisation', aside from being a technical word for certain aspects of a technology, can also hide centralised structures, whether maintained by a small number stakeholders controlling a majority of nodes, or governance driven by major organisations people depend on for that decentralisation.

"Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems" (2019): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244

>They really think work itself is the product of capitalism, as though it isn't part of the human condition and a necessary part of every society that has ever existed.

The idea of 'work' in our society is quite different to the idea of 'work' in past societies. Time is allocated in a particular way (to particular people), usually by particular people, and the direction of the labour performed during that time, as well as the restrictions within that time and the end purpose of labour during that time, is determined by a complex social arrangement. There are several reasons why someone involved in that arrangement would be critical of it to various degrees.

For example, some people on HN are critical of the five day work week. Others are critical of the "back to the office" rhetoric pushed out by big corporations. Still others are critical of what Graeber called "bullshit jobs". These are all criticisms of 'work', usually from the point of view of wanting to do less of it, and under different conditions of society.

Nobody - not even the orthodox Marxist or the anarchist - believes that society functions without labour. However, they do recognize an important point: 'work' is a particular implementation of a much more abstract 'labour' in a particular (global) society. It's necessary, but not immutable.

Ah, I understand that frustration; I suppose I had in mind more casual games, that is, no fixed size on teams (anyone can just join and play so long as you're not over the server-set limit of players), and unranked.

In ranked games (or games where the objective of winning is more important than just having fun) the lobby system does work better, because you're not really looking for community in that case. If modern games like Overwatch had both systems (join a server with regulars and make friends as 'quick play'; matchmaking for competitive), I think things would be better.

The only time I get properly annoyed in a game is when team sizes are fixed, and people are trolling or not pulling their weight. But on a server where anyone can join and you're chatting between spawns? That's fun. Sure, you care about the map objectives, it's not serious. If you lose you just stick around for the next map in the server's rotation and play more.