gspencley

At a previous employer of mine, it was common to share dev accounts for certain things. These were not security sensitive things. They were there purely for dev purposes and these were things like anayltics tools and stuff that the software being built had to integrate with, so they were basically development sandboxes.

Many of these tools had MFA enabled and so it was common to share MFA codes on Slack because the MFA code was sent to an email address that only one person had access to.

One lunch and learn a group of developers shared how they solved this problem by having the MFA codes pushed to a device that was effectively an on-prem server / dev box that they installed custom built software on to take a screenshot of the MFA code and broadcast it on the relevant Slack channel.

The main point of the lunch and learn, however, wasn't so much to share the tool that they had built, but to talk about how they got around the Mac OS security protections that are there to prevent this sort of thing.

My first thought was "we've just written malware."

I'm specifically responding to this sentence of yours:

> It's especially annoying when employed by the banking apps.

After my experience with that MFA code sniffer ... I know exactly why banking apps and other privacy/security-centred apps prevent taking screenshots :)

There is also a misconception that digital vfx are necessarily easier, faster and don't take as much skill etc.

My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.

Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.

So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.

The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.

The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.

Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.

What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.

First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.

People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.

The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.

> children screeching and yelling, provided that it isn't going on for hours at a time

But it does often go on for hours at a time. And I'm not talking about a school zone or a park. As another person pointed out, if you move next to a school or a park you know what you are signing up for. But in a quiet suburb, if the issue is new neighbours that weren't there when you bought the house.. or who just started a family recently. That's something that's being imposed on you that didn't exist before.

And we don't tolerate this when it is barking dogs or loud music. Most cities have noise ordinances and I even read mine because of problematic neighbours. Not because of children, mind you. The man was an alcoholic who would get drunk early in the morning and go into his backyard where he would have loud screaming matches with hallucinations which terrified our small daughters so I wanted to know if the noise ordinance covered it. Answer is, technically yes but the police don't enforce yelling and hollering despite it being spelled out in the letter of the bylaw.

Why is it acceptable to expect people to keep their pets quiet, their music at a reasonable volume, their power tools and machinery at bay and to not have extremely loud parties where people are screaming and blasting noise ... but the second it's loud children we're talking about oh no ... you just need to learn to "live in a community"?

You can make the same argument about anything. Living with neighbours who have tall grass is part of "living in a community." Some people don't care about well trimmed lawns. Motorcycles with extremely loud engines, just part of "living in a community." Barking dogs. Honking car horns etc. etc. etc. We have noise ordinances for a reason; noise directly affects other people.

And I say all of this as a parent who raised two daughters to adulthood. I don't understand this weird standard. We (their mother and I) always expected our children to be respectful of our neighbours.

> and the laughter of children

This I will take a nuanced position on. If your kids are playing in the backyard, and it doesn't impact me at all ... perfect please enjoy life.

But I can often hear people outside, especially children screeching and yelling, over my television with all of my doors and windows shut and the air conditioner on full blast.

In those scenarios, the laughter IS adversely affecting the ability of other people to enjoy their own property.

Maybe one day crypto will get there, but in 2022 we couldn't pay bills, taxes or payroll with crypto. At the end of the day it still needs to be converted into legal tender in order to be useful, and you need a bank account for that to do anything in the offline world, like pay for utilities or employees.

It's in Article 210 of the Icelandic penal code and, from what I gather, this follows a pattern typically referred to as "The Nordic Model" where it is not illegal to consume pornography, but it is illegal to produce and/or distribute it.

Here is an article from the Reykjavik Grapevine that deep dives on it better than I could: https://grapevine.is/mag/2021/05/07/ask-an-expert-why-is-por...

And for a broader overview, see "Pornography laws by region" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region

I'm not so sure you can point the finger at the USA for this.

I ran an online porn website for almost 20 years. For 15 years it was my primary source of income.

I'm in Canada which, compared to the USA is extremely progressive.

In 2022, after a decade of doing business with a certain bank as this business, never having hidden anything about what we did, my wife and I received an urgent, signature required, overnighted letter from our bank informing us that they were terminating our accounts and that we had one month until we would no longer have access to any funds.

The way this played out was that we had an incoming wire transfer get flagged and they phoned us to ask us questions about the wire. We answered everything on the phone honestly and transparently. We were doing nothing wrong.

A few months later we get another phone call from our branch asking us to come in in person, urgently, and do an "extreme due diligence" check. During this process we had to answer an insane amount of questions about our business activities. They saw a credit card transaction from JetBrains, for example, and asked us to explain who JetBrains was and why we were doing business with them etc.

A couple of weeks later we were informed about the termination with a brief letter explaining that we fell outside of their "risk appetite."

We managed to get an extension on the closure, and for two months we tried in vain to find any banking in Canada that would take us... and we ultimately ended up shutting down a business that represented two decades of our lives.

During that time we reached out to industry insiders, some of which we happened to know were in Canada. They all told us that they bank in the USA.

One branch manager at a bank we met with was extremely empathetic but obviously couldn't put her own job on the line, and she explained exactly what was going on.

The issue is "Know Your Customer" regulations that are coming into effect that are meant to target things like money laundering. These regulations force banks to ask questions that they never really cared about before. This branch manager explained that a local strip club used to say they were a "banquet hall", and everyone at the branch knew exactly what they were but it was "don't ask / don't tell."

But once they start digging into these details because the government is forcing them to, then these things get to their compliance departments. And the policies exist because they're afraid of things like human trafficking and other things.

And our major banks have foreign investors from all around the world. Including from countries where porn is actually illegal.

While you point the finger at puritanism in the USA ... consider that in countries like Iceland, producing porn can land you in jail. Now consider MAJOR investments originating in countries like Saudi Arabia etc. and consider how that might impact your bottom line if they all pull out due to nonsense morality conflicts.

Possibly but I would expect her to use computers a lot less if that were the case. She is an Apple user - probably for the best since she doesn't want configurability and values consistency and predictability and everything being interoperable. But she upgrades regularly and, until her eye sight started to physically hinder her ability to read emails and perform tasks on a computer, she used them quite a bit for if it were a matter of "I just don't need this thing."

To add context: she was a public school educator. Began as a teacher, was actually my school Principal in grade one. So she had a need for computers in her professional life and continued to use them in her personal despite tons of evidence that she has no idea how lol

That's an interesting thought experiment. Counter-anecdote: My grandmother has been using computers in some capacity or another since the 1980s. And she is still, by most definitions, completely and utterly "computer illiterate."

Her biggest blocker is that she's terrified of making a mistake and breaking something. She would never dare explore a settings menu and tweak things just to find out what is or is not possible. So she calls her relatives to help her with the most basic of task ... and this has been going on for 40-50 years of her life.

I wonder if she had been introduced to computers younger in life if that fear of breaking things could have been overcome and replaced by a curiosity and enthusiasm to explore the digital space.

I'm also open the possibility that this fear is a personality trait and impacts her in other areas of life as well. We are just trading anecdotes after all ;)

> , but I was more referring to things like chicken breasts, etc, which often aren't great at the minimal internal temperature, but I've seen YouTube "chefs" recommend cooking them to a slightly lower temperature, banking on the idea that they will effectively be at a slightly lower temperature, but long enough to still effectively kill bacteria.

Something that is very common is removing food from the heat source before the internal temperature hits your target because heat transfer itself takes time and so the food will continue to cook inside for a short period of time after being removed. This is because the outside, which you are blasting with heat that is far higher than your internal target, will partly transfer to the inside (the rest will dissipate into the air). So if you remove it from the heat exactly when you hit the internal temp, you can exceed the target temperature and your food will be "over cooked."

The problem with a tv chef recommending using a traditional cooking method, such as baking or frying, to TARGET a lower temperature, is that is very hard with those mediums to control for time. What you are doing with those mediums is you are blasting the outside of your food with a temperature that is far hotter than your internal target.

And so say, for example, you have your oven set to 180C and you are cooking chicken and your internal temperature target is, let's say 4 degrees cooler than the official recommendation. So the official recommendation is 74C held for a minimum of 15 seconds (that's Canada) and you are targeting 70C. With traditional cooking methods, you are playing a guessing game where you're blasting the outside of the food with very hot temperatures in order to bring the inside of the food up to some target.

I don't know off hand how much longer you would have to hold at 70C to get the same effect as 15 seconds at 74C ... but while you're waiting, your food is likely to exceed 74C anyway because of the high temperatures you're working with.

So that's why I talked about sous vide... becuase it's kind of the only way you can control for those variables. No oven can hold steady at temps as low as 70C (even at higher temps they fluctuate quite a bit. Anywhere from 5C - 20C depending on the oven).

And yeah - we definitely agree on most things. The minimum recommended temperatures are "play it safe" rather than "make food delicious." I do recognize that that was ultimately your point :)

It wasn't really my point to pick on you or argue with you, but to show that certain things you said are "partly true", which is a common complaint of AI (that and hallucinations). When we're dealing with things like food safety and the general public, it is usually better to offer general advise that is play it safe.

And with certain foods this matters more than others. Chickens get infected with salmonella while they are alive, for example, and so the bacteria can live throughout the meat. Whereas if you're cooking beef, you really only need to worry about surface contamination and so you can sear a steak for a few seconds and have it still be very "blue" in the middle and you're good.

> Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a classic example of something where lots of people and lots of sources repeat incorrect information, which is often ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp that is often "recommended" is only the temp at which bacteria/whatever is killed instantly

I love this reply because you support your own point by repeating information that is technically incorrect.

To qualify myself, I have a background in food service. I've taken my "Food Safe" course in Ontario which is not legally mandated to work in food service, but offered by our government-run health units and many restaurants require a certificate to be employed in any food handling capacity (wait staff or food prep).

There is no such thing as "killed instantly." The temperature recommendations here in Canada, for example, typically require that the food be held at that temperature for a minimum of 15 seconds.

There is some truth in what you say. Using temperature to neutralize biological contaminants is a function of time and you can certainly accomplish the same result by holding food at lower temperature for a longer period of time. Whether this makes the food "taste better" or not depends on the food and what you're doing.

Sous Vide cooking is the most widely understood method of preparation where we hold foods at temperatures that are FAR lower than what is typically recommended, but held for much longer. I have cooked our family Thanksgiving Turkey breast at 60C sous vide, and while I personally like it... others don't like the texture. So your mileage may vary.

My point is that you're making a bunch of claims that have grains of truth to them, but aren't strictly true. I think your comment is an application of the dunning kruger effect. You know a little bit and because of that you think you know way more than you actually do. And I had to comment because it is beautifully ironic. Almost as if that paragraph in your comment is, itself, AI slop lol

Philosophy and religion are not mutually inclusive, though one can certainly describe a religious belief as being a philosophical belief.

Even a scientifically inclined atheist has philosophical ideas grounding their world view. The idea that the universe exists as an objective absolute with immutable laws of nature is a metaphysical idea. The idea that nature can be observed and that reason is a valid tool for acquiring knowledge about nature is an epistemological idea. Ethics is another field of philosophy and it would be a mistake to assume a universal system of ethics that has been constant throughout all cultures across all of human history.

So while I certainly agree that there is a very common hand-wave of "look the atheists have just replaced God with a new 'god' by a different name", you don't have to focus on religion, theology and faith based belief systems to identify different categories of philosophical ideas and how they have shaped different cultures, their beliefs and behaviours throughout history.

A student of philosophy would identify the concept of "my truth" as being an idea put forward by Emmanuel Kant, for example, even though the person saying that doesn't know that that's the root of the idea that reality is subjective. Similarly, the empirically grounded scientist would be recognized as following in the footsteps of Aristotle. The pious bible thumper parroting ideas published by Plato.

The point is that philosophy is not the same thing as religion and philosophy directly shapes how people think, what they believe and therefore how they act and behave. And it's kind of uncanny how an understanding of philosophy can place historical events in context and what kinds of predictive capabilities it has when it comes to human behaviour in the aggregate.

I'm your typical HN, tecchie, paranoid, privacy-obssessed "don't track me" nerd.

But I have absolutely no problem with haute cuisine restaurants doing this.

There's a few reasons that make this special, and in a completely different universe than being tracked online.

1. Most people, my wife and I included, seldom go to haute cuisine restaurants. When we do, it is a very special, once in a lifetime experience.

2. Restaurants are not staffed by hackers and advertising engineers. They are going to start with opt-in questionnaires that you will fill out when you make your reservation. That questionnaire will often come in one of two forms: a) they will just ask you verbally when you phone or b) they'll send you a package when you make your reservation. That package is usually pretty special unto itself. It's going to feel like a welcome package, and they are going to invite you to share anything that you think is helpful, entirely voluntarily. Typically they'll ask about food preferences and dietary restrictions... but I mean, they'll get a lot just by giving you a text field that asks "Are you celebrating a special occasion, or anything else you want to share?" You're free to put whatever you want in there, and leave anything else out.

3. Now we get to the social media part. This is doing a little bit extra above what most haute cuisines have done in the past. But remember - they can only find what you make public. They're not like, DM'ing people on your friends' lists etc. or hiring a private investigator to stalk you.

Once you're in the door, the idea of remembering that you were there before and jotting down your preferences etc. so that if you return they can make you feel even that more special... this isn't McDonald's, or even a fancy steak house, that we're talking about. This is a place that most people - if they go at all - are going to go ONCE. So people who return are extremely special and to show them that level of "we give a fuck about you" is what sets these restaurants apart.

One experience that my wife and I had was at Victoria & Albert's at Disney's Grand Floridian resort. We spent $2,000 on that meal. Why? Because it was our belated honeymoon. We were highschool sweethearts, got married and had kids really young and were extremely poor for most of our marriage... so we saved up and it was once in a lifetime. For that money... this level of service is a huge part of how they go above and beyond to make their patrons feel like it's worth it. If most people felt freaked out by it, that some personal boundary was being crossed ... it would be the last thing they do. But they realize that your typical dining experience is pretty impersonal. That if you're going to shell out that much money on a dinner... it needs to be more than just the world's best food.

Yes, these are often referred to as "Magic Links."

When it comes to the security implications, consider that email has long been a "single point of failure" for a lot of services in the form of the "forgot password" feature that emails you a link to reset your password.

When I'm talking to non-tech people in my life about how best to protect themselves, I usually tell them to think about priorities and disaster scenarios. What would suck the most if it got hacked? The two that are usually at the top of the list for pretty much everyone are email and online banking. Others might include Amazon accounts (hackers can order themselves gift cards with your CC if compromised etc.) Prioritize securing those with a strong password + MFA. The rest is case by case but make sure to use a password manager so you're not reusing passwords.

Not only that, but these business owners are actively complaining about an influx of business.

I get it if your goal is not necessarily to make as much money as possible and just wanted to create some small, local, "underground" thing. As a small business owner myself, I can think of a few different ways you could accomplish that in spite of massive attention. I mean you can have certain days of the week where you're closed to the general public but patrons with a loyalty card can get in or something. That's just one idea; point is there are solutions.

So I tend to agree with you - this reeks of "we just don't like foreigners. They're ruining our business by being foreign."

My wife and I are about to open our first brick and mortar business and it would be our dream come true to get popular on TikTok and to be a tourist destination. Even though we are a small business in a trendy neighbourhood doing something rather niche that is [hopefully] going to attract a loyal local following.

One way to get some insight into this is to look at the demographic break down of Iran pre and post 1979 revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iran#Religious...

Pre-1979, per the 1976 census, Iran had a Jewish population of 62,258 (0.2%). Post-revolution it immediately fell to ~9k, where it has remained - at least until the last census in 2016 (0.0% representation).

While Christian representation didn't decline by the same amount, it took a sharp decline as well. Pre revolution (1976) saw a Christian representation of around 0.5%. 30 years later (2006 census) it was 0.2%.

What conclusions you should draw from that are open to interpretation... and when it comes to life in the Middle East and North Africa, you can also draw relative comparisons (is Iran worse or better for these groups?). But it's usually not a good sign when the population of an ethic or religious minority takes a sharp and sudden decline.

> And what about that ally's actions towards Iran?

I'm going to share a personal world view. Some may find this controversial or strongly disagree with this world view and that's fine. This is my opinion, not yours.

What gives a nation-state legitimacy is how well adheres to what is, in my personal opinion, the only moral justification for having a government in the first place: the protection of individual rights.

Human beings have two fundamental ways that we can deal with each other: reason/diplomacy or force.

When reason is chosen, life flourishes. People live together peacefully and we create things, start businesses & families and build communities and thrive.

When force is chosen we get war, destruction, poverty, misery and death. We get gangs, thugs and instability.

The need for a government comes from this dichotomy. Government exists, fundamentally, to remove the element of force from civil existence.

My definition of liberty is "An environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual."

No country, even the freest in the world today, adheres to this principle perfectly. But we can certainly say that some do it better than others. We can even say that some do it a HELL OF A LOT better than others to the point where there is no rational basis for comparison.

Therefore, the question "And what about that ally's actions towards Iran?" places Israel and Iran on equal moral footing.

I reject that wholeheartedly.

On the one hand you have a nation state that is a liberal democracy. It's not perfect, but people can live and pursue their lives there in relative peace and freedom. You can believe what you want to. Live your life as an LGBT+ individual without interference. Start a business. Own property. Have a family and pretty much do what you want with your one and only shot at this life.

On the other hand you have a religious theocracy that murders women for not covering their hair and throws LGBT+ people off of rooftops and executes people just for criticizing the government.

So, what ABOUT Israel's actions towards Iran, exactly?

To point the finger at a free country taking action against a dictatorship is to suggest that that dictatorship has rights.

It doesn't.

The entire basis for a country's right to exist is the recognition and protection of rights. You can't, on the one hand, say "I have the right to exist and to defend myself" while routinely infringing on the rights of your own citizens. You can't violate peoples' rights and then go and hide behind the concept of rights. That concept is based on the mutual recognition, respect and value for reason and diplomacy over force.

That's a very fair point.

I think the difference is that Iran has been actively trying to follow through with its threats and this has been demonstrated through its actions towards an American ally over the past year. This gives reason to believe that Iran's threats are both credible and, while a full-scale war between Iran and the USA might not fare well for Iran ... you don't need to demonstrate that you are capable of wiping out a population or winning a war in order to represent a credible threat. If only one of Iran's missiles manage to land in a densely populated area... people die. And that's enough to warrant a response IMO.

> Why are we toppling all these foreign governments

I don't want to speak to the other foreign governments, and I think there is a LOT of room for healthy criticism of how the USA handles its foreign policy, past & present.

But to answer the question directly with respects to Iran, specifically: the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history and have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program. It calls Israel the "Little Satan" and America the "Big Satan." A mantra often repeated: "First we come for the Saturday people, then we go for the Sunday people."

Say what you want about the USA. I'll be the first to join you in criticism of many of it's foreign policy actions, including the 1953 CIA-backed Iranian coup that arguably led to the Islamic revolution in 1979 and got us the Iran we have today. And if people want to express concern for what evils could fill the vacuum if the current regime falls... fair.

But I'm certainly not going to blame any free country for responding to an enemy state vowing to destroy it while actively trying to develop the means to do so. If there is ever any moral justification for going to war - that's it. It's defensive. That's arguably the only justification for going to war.

Feel free to disagree with me about the threat that Iran poses to the western world. Maybe it's all propaganda and overstated. You're welcome to that theory. But this is the answer to the question: "Why should the USA get involved?"

> Maybe you meant 'everyone' rather than 'anyone'?

Maybe. IMO the sentence works to convey the meaning I had intended either way.

It is not a strawman to suggest that there are people, a lot of them, who believe that certain words are bad by nature. That any given person (the fully qualified way of expressing "that anyone") who hears them will be offended, or have their soul diminished, or other bad things will happen as a result of hearing them. It's not a strawman, because I grew up around such people. They exist. And that's what I was talking about.

And while I was not talking prescription - what we should do as a result of such people existing - I would ask a rhetorical question. WHY do people get offended by certain words? Is their offence rational? And how should rational people regard such offence?

> But in this context, the purportedly irrational belief is that some phrases are offensive. If you accept that there are people who would, rationally or not, be offended by some phrases, then I don't understand why you would even make the claim that it's absurd to believe that some people would be offended by some phrases.

Now I understand why we are talking passed each other. Thank you for the clarification.

You are reframing my premise and, in doing so, changing it to something I never said.

Although before I explain the source of our misunderstanding, I want to point out the irony that you are coming from a philosophically "subjectivist" position and are defending a philosophical "intrinsicist" position. Usually they are two opposite extremes and tend to be at odds with each other.

Subjectivism is the idea that perception creates reality. We often will hear people use language like "my truth" vs "your truth." Your position is subjectivist in the sense that you are clinging to a premise (that I never refuted or discussed) which states that "SOME people are offended by certain words, therefore 'bad words' exist."

Again, that's not the premise I stated or was discussing. But after your clarification, this is the premise that you thought we were discussing.

The intrinscist position states: "Certain words are bad by their nature. They will automatically cause ANYONE who hears them to be offended."

it is the "intrinsicist" position that I was calling absurd. I never said that there aren't people who hold this belief. And I never said that there was no such thing as PEOPLE who get offended by words.

I was saying that the idea that a word unto itself can be "bad by nature" is absurd. And I stand by that.

> Surely you are aware that there are actually people with religious beliefs?

Yes. What's your point? It doesn't make those beliefs rational. Faith is belief in something despite the absence of evidence. I am using the term "religious belief" interchangeably with "faith based belief system."

> belief that there are people with religious beliefs is anything but irrational.

I have no idea what you are trying to say in this sentence.

- I don't "believe" that there are people with religious beliefs. I observe that to be the case.

- I never described "belief that there are people with religious beliefs" as irrational.

I think your point might be that, because there are people with irrational beliefs out there we must appease them? Or something?

I really don't know what you're trying to say here. There are people out there who believe in crazy things. We agree on that. How we should treat those people, or react to their existence, is entirely outside of the scope of conversation. It is perfectly acceptable to call an irrational belief irrational.

We were talking about language and communication and the absurdity that there is a such thing as an arbitrary sequence of phones or characters that would cause anyone exposed to that to be offended. All I was saying is that such a belief is unfounded. I honestly don't know what you are trying to say.

> So "dicks 01" or "fuck me 01" instead of a bland "check 01" or whatever. For some reason, that seems much more unprofessional than a comment like "this code is shitty but works, need to clean up."

Agreed.

Context matters a lot. People say "shitty code" all the time. I don't see that as unprofessional. But "dicks01" I would probably change if I came across it in code. Not because I would find it offensive, but because it serves no purpose other than to be juvenile... and that can easily be counter-productive if the goal is easy to read and maintain code.

With respects to "shitty code", I'm not even sure that I would personally even consider the word "shit" to be a swear word in 2025. I'm reminded of the TV show on Showtime called Bullshit (by Penn & Teller). They wanted to name the show "Humbug", which was considered profane in the early 20th century when Houdini was alive and famous. But Showtime didn't like it because they figured it wouldn't land with a modern audience. "Bullshit" it was.

That said, the article even includes the word "crap" (though perhaps they are making the point that it is replacing other, "more profane" words). That one strikes me as odd. If that is considered rude and offensive, then surely "humbug" ought to be as well. Probably very culture-specific.

> No more absurd than the notion that a mere sequence of sounds could convey any other meaning of elicit any other response.

I completely disagree. It is a lot more absurd. Language is not a priori. It must be learned. It requires both a speaker and a listener. Both must understand the meaning of the spoken word as well as other factors of communication, including tone and body language, in order to interpret and understand the communicated meaning.

The idea behind a "bad word" is that the word is offensive no matter what. It doesn't matter what the dictionary definition of the word is, or the intended meaning of the word or the subject of the sentence that employed the word. The word is intrinsically "just bad" according to this religious belief.

Objectively, sometimes there are polite ways to use a "four letter" word such as "fuck." The preceding sentence is one such example. But ... if you hold the irrational view that I am describing, there is no such thing. It is ALWAYS "bad." This is a faith based belief system. There is no grounding for such a position. Under such a position, even an academic discussion of the word would require it be censored for fear of offending someone.

I don't personally care about language choices in code, but I'll play devil's advocate and speculate as to why a business might be concerned.

1. Reputational harm in the event that code needs to be shared. Say, the code gets read in court, or an outside consultant is brought in who is given access to the code. The company likely wants to maintain the same standard of professionalism that they expect when their employees write or utter spoken language in the workplace for the same reasons.

2. Similar to #1 but nuanced enough to deserve its own mention: code is a business asset. It can be sold or licensed out. The company may fear that language that it deems unprofessional could depreciate the value of that code in the context of selling or licensing it to 3rd parties.

Personally I think that the fuss over "bad words" is deeply irrational to a religious degree. The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd. But you can't choose what planet you do business on and, on Earth, there are a lot of silly people.

> You don’t have freedom for Self dealing, price fixing, collusion, bribery, false marketing, antitrust violations, selling baby powder with lead and many other things.

It's funny how often people will not read what you wrote, and instead read what they want to read.

Not only did my comment preempt that specific reply of yours in the very sentence you quoted, but you seem to have a warped working definition of the word "freedom": where you think that if someone uses it they mean "freedom to do literally whatever the hell they want to no matter who they hurt."

That means that your mental model of the word "freedom", at least when you hear others say it, begins with a straw-man.

No discussion is possible under those conditions.

I'll help you out: my personal operating definition of "liberty" is "An environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual."

That's why, as long as you are not infringing upon the rights of others (the part of my quote that you just completely dropped and ignored so that you could react to what you wanted to read instead of what I actually wrote) you don't need the permission of others to build something. You can just go and do it.

> So then, your actual opinion is Yes a "content neutral hosting platform." does exist?

No. Common carrier and "hosting platform" are not the same thing. If someone wanted to apply common carrier status to broadband infrastructure, it might make sense. Applying common carrier to knitting forum does not. They are two very different things. One facilitates discrete communication between two distinct parties while the other publishes and distributes content to a wide audience. Conflating the two is an exercise in mental gymnastics that only makes sense if you have a political agenda and don't care about being intellectually honest.

Not only is it subjective but V8 does so much to optimize JavaScript code that I wouldn't be surprised if the benefits for most applications were negligible anyway.

Although JavaScript is still an interpreted language, it basically gets "compiled" when the browser parses the bundle. On the surface, the only thing WebAssembly automatically gets you is you get to skip the runtime compilation phase.

I might be talking out of my ass, so take this with a grain of salt, but I wouldn't be surprised if once we start collecting real data on this stuff, SOME WebAssembly code could actually run slower than just using JS code. My hypothesis is that if you're starting with non-JavaScript code, you might be doing things in that language that would be slower to do the same way in JavaScript. I'm thinking of things like Array.map(), .filter() etc. ... which are hyper-optimized in V8. If you're taking an algorithm from C code or something which then gets compiled to WebAssembly, it's not an automatic given that it's going to compile to WebAssembly that is just as optimized as what V8 would do when it comes across those API calls. Again, this is just a hypothesis and I could be way off base.

In any case, what we need is real world data. I have no doubt that for certain applications you can probably avoid land mines by hiring devs who are experienced building certain performance-critical things at a lower-level than your average JS dev... and their experience in those languages may transfer very well to the browser. In this scenario, you're not getting huge perf wins from using WebAssembly per-se... you're getting huge perf wins for not doing typical stupid, lazy, ignorant things that most average JS devs do ... like cloning large objects using the spread operator and then doing that over and over and over again "because immutability."

> We’re talking about content neutral hosting platforms.

There is no such thing as a "content neutral hosting platform." I know that people like to talk about social media services in the same umbrella as the concept of "common carrier", which is reserved for things like mail service and telecommunications infrastructure. And that might be what you're conflating here. If you're not, then please point me to the law, in any country even, where "content neutral hosting platform" is a legal term defined.

> If you want to not be liable for the content posted to your platform then you may not moderate or censor it seems like a fair compromise to me.

Compensation for what? The "platform" built something themselves. They made it. They are offering it on the market. If anyone is due compensation, it is them. No matter how much you don't like them. You didn't build it. You could have, maybe. But you didn't. I bet you didn't even try. But they did. And they succeeded at it. So where does anyone get off demanding "compensation" from them just for bringing something useful valuable into existence?

That is a pretty messed up way of looking at things IMO. It is the mindset of a thief.

> Either you are knitting forum carefully cultivating your content and thus liable for what people see there,

Thank you for conceding my argument and shining a spotlight on how ridiculous this is. You agree that according to your world view, the knitting forum should be liable for the content others post on it just because they are enforcing that things stay on topic. Even just for removing SPAM bot posts this would expose them to this liability.

> Right now we let people platforms be whichever favors their present goal or narrative without considering the impact such duplicity has on the public users.

The beautiful thing about freedom is that along as people don't infringe upon the rights of others, they don't need your permission to just go build things and exist.

The YouTube creators didn't have to ask you to "allow" them to build something useful and valuable. They just went and did it. And that's how it should be.

I get that certain creators run into trouble with the TOS. Hell, I've tried to create an Instagram account on several occasions and it gets suspended before I can even use it. And when I appeal or try to ask "why?" I never get answers. It's frustrating.

But the difference between you and me, is I don't think that people who build and create things and bring valuable shit into existence owe me something just by virtue of their existence.

> Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech.

> But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it.

There is no contradiction there.

Imagine a forum about knitting. Someone, who has it in for the owners of this knitting forum (or perhaps even just a SPAM bot) starts posting illegal, or even just non-knitting content on this forum.

The entire purpose of the forum is to be a community about knitting.

Why is it the legal or moral responsibility of the knitting forum to host SPAM content? And why should they be legally liable for someone else posting content on their platform?

You're equating specific pieces of content with the platform as a whole.

There is no reality where I will accept that if I create something. I spend and risk my money on web hosting. I write the code. I put something out there... that other people get to dictate what content I have to distribute. That's an evil reality to contemplate. I don't want to live in that world. I certainly wont' do business under those terms.

You're effectively trying to give other people an ultimatum in order to extract value from them that you did not earn and have no claim to. You're saying that if they don't host content that they don't want to distribute that they should be legally liable for anything that anyone uploads.

The two don't connect at all. Anyone is, and should be free to create any kind of online service where they pick and choose what is or is not allowed. That shouldn't then subject them to criminal or civil liability because of how others decide to use that product or service.

Imagine if that weird concept were applied to offline things, like kitchen knives. A kitchen knife manufacturer is perfectly within their rights to say "This product is intended to be used for culinary purposes and no other. If we find out that you are using it to do other things, we will stop doing business with you forever." That doesn't then make them liable for people who use their product for other purposes.