2,219 karma · joined July 30, 2015
1. Do they reduce complexity of the (already insanely complicated) web/internet infrastructure?
2. Do they reduce barriers of entry for new companies?
If you look at thing Google consistently pushes forward, the answers are almost always in the negative.
It's an honest programming model that can deal with real life. A lot of modern systems converged to Kay's OOP model, except the implementations are implicit and created by continuously tripping over problems that were already solved in the 80s.
JavaScript is SmallTalk minus elegance, minimalism and orthogonality.
Web pages with JavaScript are self-interpreting data in the exact same sense Kay's objects are.
Microservices are crude, bloated objects that communicate through routed messages.
Containers are a validation of Kay's idea that sharing encapsulated objects is easier than sharing data.
Most people commenting here about SmallTalk either never watched any of Kay's talks, or simply are too dumb to understand what he is talking about.
>But in-process?
Most of the real programming problems these days are not in-process.
Moreover, if you're proud of how hard it is to learn ins and outs of your tech stack, you're likely using a shitty tech stack and costing your company tons of money.
Let me rephrase this for you. A lot of so-called "knowledge work" is just tedious, mind-numbing bullshit. Not only that, but you have to plow through it while fighting information overflow and your own overly complex tools, while acting completely alone. There are no librarians on the Internet.
No wonder everyone craves distractions.
>In the context of the browser, how do we contextualize pages and interactions inside some abstract task?
This train has sailed off its tracks long time ago.
Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption so that Google and co can harvest your money and attention as efficiently as possible.
I can list several hundred things a web browser should do if it aims at being "knowledge worker's tool". Let me just give some categories:
1. Features for pausing and restarting work in different mental contexts. 2. Local personalization. Shit like Timelines should be local and user-controller. "This is too complicated, so let's let Facebook/Twitter/Microsoft do it" is a lame excuse. 3. Did you notice that browsers still don't have any good authoring tools? Every websites reinvents their own WYSIWYG. "Developer tools" have everything for debugging, but almost nothing for creations of stuff. 4. User-driven integration between pages. (For example, something as simple as "when I open this page, go to that other page, find all the entries with word X and paste it here".)
Bah, that's enough. I can continue, but I think the point was made, unless the reader doesn't want to see it on purpose.
This happens all the time with databases like Dynamo. All of them feel amazing when you use them in the "intended" way, but they also have extreme limitations and those limitations are different for every product. Why? Because they aren't based on some fundamental data storage model, but rather on an aggregation of specific use cases, which are different across different products.
Here is a mild practical example: https://blog.codebarrel.io/why-we-switched-from-dynamodb-bac...
Almost all applications aren't distributed in any meaningful sense of the word.
Some time ago I worked with a bunch of people who staked their careers on moving everything to AWS and converting it to serverless architecture. Here is just one example of how fishy it was. They used Dynamo. During presentations to the outgroup, they constatly praised Dynamo as being flexible, scalable and fast. However, internally they constantly struggled with various limitations of the database, from limitations of indexing to not being able to get certain types of metadata.
My point is, the architecture they were designing was heavily bent around Dynamo's strength and weaknesses. Considering how extreme and peculiar those strength and weaknesses are, switching to another database would require heavy re-engineering of the rest of their architecture, much more so than, say, switching between Oracle, MS SQL and Postgress.
Amazon doesn't control where you buy random stuff, but they have disproportionate influence in some areas, like books. I'm pretty sure they are already in the position to make or break some brands simply by banning or promoting them.
Yeah, I'm sure that allowing companies to merge right until the point where they make consumer's lives a living hell is great for the society and the economy.
>The classic example is: Coca-Cola has a 95% market share of the cola market in some countries. Does it mean it has a monopoly? No.
There is no such thing as "cola market". There are soft-drinks, and there are tons of them in every store. (Although, most people don't realize how many of those brands are owned by Coke or Pepsi, and what kind of shit they're doing to buy out and suppress the competition.)
But more importantly, soft drinks don't control any aspect of people's lives. Google, Facebook, and Amazon control not only what you can do as a consumer, but also how smaller companies can interact with you and how those companies run their businesses.
Here is a fun mental exercise for the reader. Imagine that you run Alphabet and want to destroy an arbitrary medium-size business that threatens you in any way. How hard would it be, considering you control pretty much all the search queries on the web and tons of other things?
Because that is not the correct response to someone who casually describes eight hundred thousand users as "a few jerks". Or someone who smugly dismisses a well-reasoned article by saying the author "beats an ocean with a stick". If you insist on promoting gross misrepresentations of reality, all you will get in response is well-deserved pushback. The ideas and constructive suggestions will flow to people who actually listen.
This attempt to frame deplatforming as something enacted by concerned stakeholders is out of touch with reality. It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to affect. It takes about 10 seconds of web searching to find all three in Gab's case. @deplatfromhare and so on.
>Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral trade-offs involved in excluding someone.
Why are you switching attention to a completely different incident all of a sudden? Are you claiming that this single example disproves many other instances of deplatforming occur due to blatantly obvious external pressure?
Speaking of Cloudflare:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cloudflare-and-its-free-speech...
"Tech companies have cut ties with the extremist-friendly website Gab, but digital security company Cloudflare appears to be standing by the site."
It is absolutely laughable to say there is no bullying going on when the press is fully of articles that point fingers and draw spurious correlations.
>PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal.
My post above talks specifically about "banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions". PayPal TOS apply only to such transactions:
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that [...] relate to transactions
involving [...] the promotion of hate, violence
If this isn't about the owner, then it is about the website. So the question is whether hosting hateful content of your users does by itself constitute "promotion of hate". Considering that PayPal does business with Cloudflare the answer seems to be a resounding "no".
By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.
>Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs.
That is not what it means and what you described here is not freedom, but law of the jungle.
Like I said above, the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way. The moment the tactic stops working or applies to them, they switch back to moralistic arguments or demands for regulation.
Moreover, this argument was initially used to advocate for deletion of specific content on normal websites. Then it was used for banning individuals from large communication platforms. Now the exact same thing is being said about simultaneous multi-company service termination for a messaging platform with hundreds of thousands of users. As if those things are logically equivalent scenarios.
It it not a consistent position, but mere convenient nonsense.
But really, the list is meh. It's not about individual technologies. The impressive part is that most of his books have more overall relevance now than when they were written. That is a sign of great science fiction.
For example, he wrote a lot about emergent phenomena of all kinds. Not something I see a lot in American SF of 60s-70s, but as we create more and more complex systems, emergent phenomena (runaway computer viruses, etc) becomes more and more important.
When PayPal start banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions, PayPal effectively condemns certain points of view. Which might sound sensible at first, if the views are questionable, but it also implies that not banning an account is a way of endorsing the holder. And just like that, you arrive at the conclusion that PayPal and other service providers are responsible for the moral quality of all their clients, and not just can but have to ban clients who transgress. How's that for freedom of association?
The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me".
There is a reasonably easy path to do exactly that. But it has dependencies, and certain people are manipulating these dependencies in any which way they can to control online discourse. And you're cheering them on, pretending that not publishing someone's article is exactly the same as closing someone's bank account on hearsay.
And yet I am 100% sure that if someone started following you around and pressuring companies to close your accounts and stop any dealings with you, you would immediately decry it as grave injustice and invent some reason why it's "different".
>I believe in common spaces
In hypothetical ones, that don't exist.
>Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.
So, what exactly in your arguments binds them, preventing you from saying the exact same things about this hypothetical zero-layer public space when it gets sabotaged? Nothing, really. You will just say "you're still free to build another one, somehow".
In Soviet Union families of political prisoners and people who publicly defended the repressed often found themselves unemployable because of blacklisting. That did not involve any use of military or police force. Does it make it okay?
To put it more directly: if a sufficiently large entity can create effects comparable to government repression, why should we reason about those effects as fundamentally different from ones created by the government?
Casting mere absence of de-platforming efforts as an initiative definitely gets the golden medal for mental gymnastics in this entire discussion.
>A platform's identity and ability to attract an audience are determined by the activities they accept / cultivate, not vice versa.
It's interesting how you don't factor in the actual value being provided. As if the only thing that can drive people to use a service is whether the company bans the "right" people.
Also, since when does a DNS provider or credit card processor suddenly need an "identity"?
>Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.
Users trust PayPal because it moves money in a predictable way without leaking credit card info. This has nothing to do with some unrelated vendor using the system, as long as that vendor isn't scamming people.
Are you seriously advocating baking activism? Do you understand how unstable the entire society will become if more organizations follow this suit in more cases?
>And there's plenty of reason to think they're right: super-permissive platforms exist and work (4chan et al.), they just don't attract the same broad audience.
4chan as opposed to what? Most platforms that are currently at the top of that food chain rose there by being permissive and they're changing their mottos only now, when they feel they can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter used to be staunch advocates of free speech when they actually needed to attract users, instead of relying on the network effect. But that's not even particularly relevant to this discussion.
>When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough". I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.
Gab was a social media platform. Their audience wasn't provided to them by PayPal, GoDaddy or Azure. Your argument makes no sense in this context.
For example, speech recognition AI is supposedly within fraction of a percent from "average human level", and yet auto-generated captions are awful. They have no punctuation, they don't distinguish between different speakers, they aren't visually grouped, and fail miserably dealing with slang. So turns out researchers are measuring only one aspect of the problem their algorithm is good at and ignoring the rest.
On the flip side, we have animal intelligence. Bees aren't nearly as smart as humans. So surely modern AI, which surpasses humans in this and that, would have no problem outperforming a bee with its 960 000 neurons, right? But in reality, there is nothing even approaching bees' versatile intelligence. Of course, modern AI researchers would just hand-wave this saying the problem is not well defined. Convenient.
>The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. [..] Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero.
Worse. It brought it in the negative, at least perceptually.
Did you ever stop to think why? It's not like the barrier of entry was high. People simply did not find it worth their time. Chances are, big social media isn't worth their time either, but people are kept there by social pressure and purpose-built addiction mechanisms. And you're spinning it as if this is some kind of positive thing.
Connectivity is like food. The benefits to the person don's scale linearly. Forums and IM were already above the bare minimum. They were like a hearty meal. Social media today is like having a binge eating disorder.
This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc.
Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this:
https://www.upmc.com/media/news/lin-primack-sm-depression
"Social Media Use Associated With Depression Among U.S. Young Adults"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/
"There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media can influence suicide-related behavior. "
No, you don't. You don't need a CoC for sensible moderation.
Good moderation is a combination of clear, actionable rules, good intentions and wisdom. Documents like Contributor's Covenant do not help with any of that. They're vague, their intentions are debatable, above all they're the exact opposite of "wise".
At this point in time face-replace videos can be relatively easily spotted if you watch them in high quality. At least the ones I've seen demonstrated.
But overall, videos are getting either to fake. At the same time, the weren't bullet-proof in the past either. The bad part is that now you can do a lot of it in near real time. So you can change something in a live report.
I see a growing need for public services that cryptographically timestamp files.
Also, I would like to see research in using machine learning to spot fake videos.