guidovranken

> On several occasions between late March and early May 2020, before Twilio’s public earnings announcement, Sure, Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam used internal chat channels to discuss in Telugu whether Twilio might exceed market expectations in its quarterly report of earnings, due in May 2020. They concluded that Twilio’s stock price would “rise for sure” after the quarterly results were announced publicly.

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-5...

I assume "internal chat channels" means the company Slack so this wasn't well planned at all. I wonder if they were even aware they were committing a felony at that stage.

Read the books they want to ban. Thanks for the heads up.

>HTTrack for any wiki I found useful.

On the Internet Archive you can also find many .warc files which are website backups that can be used for offline viewing.

I agree and I don't care if it's RT or ISIS or China or the Westboro Baptist Church. But the past two years have made it clear that all those lofty, lapidary ideals upon which our so-called free societies are supposedly grounded can be disposed of without the slightest reluctance, so this is no surprise, certainly not from the EU, always busy banning, mandating, regulating and fining everything in its path.

Awesome, thanks for the heads up.

HN employs algorithms to automatically downrank sensitive political topics (flamewar detector).

1000+ or so. I often visit thrift shops where books are extremely cheap and you find things you didn't know you were looking for. The nice thing about (older) books is that they comprise a whole world of information that's not available on the internet. By far not all books have been scanned, uploaded and indexed yet (if you spend a lot of time online, this is a little counter-intuitive) so in thrift shops and libraries you can make great serendipitous discoveries. I've run into amazing books of which there is barely even any online record, let alone a PDF or audiobook. Occasionally you can also find valuable things, like a rare book I bought for 1 EUR which I found went for about 400 EUR in an auction (I still have my copy). Highly recommended if you like books.

https://imgur.com/a/9ql1Ayb

  The bottom line is that when you need to redact text, use black bars covering the whole text. Never use anything else.

That actually may not be enough if you're applying the black bar to compressed image data like JPEG because compression artifacts surrounding the black bar can be leaking information about the covert data.

The COVID interviews are with highly credentialed professionals, and are quite reasonable, honest and nuanced, far more so than the insane corporate media 24/7 propaganda machine that relies on repetition and histrionics to get everyone's opinions aligned.

I suggest everyone with an open mind to listen to them, they're on Rumble and elsewhere.

I'm clueless as to what this is supposed to do.

These restrictions on speech seem well-intentioned but are of course another step in locking down the narrative.

  The government said the bill would not prohibit "misinformation" as long as those spreading it were unaware that what they were saying was false.

Laws like this one extinguish journalism (or what is left of it). Back in the day you could still counter the government narrative and claim Iraq didn't have WMD without legal repercussions (though it could get you killed [1]). With this, they'll arrest you on grounds of spreading harmful deboonked conspiracy theories. It's not hard to see that this is how it's going to play out.

With "misinformation" laws getting implemented amidst a wider trend of sanitizing the narrative, investigative journalism has now not merely fallen out of fashion, it has become illegal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

  GPT-NeoX-20B will be publicly downloadable from The Eye on the 9th of February.

The Eye as in the-eye.eu? That site has been down for a long time.

Brave is the new Mozilla. Mozilla is a husk. Brave launched a new search engine (which works great. try it!), have built-in Tor support, Wayback Machine support, experiment with new revenue models and unlike Mitchell "we need more than deplatforming" Baker, Eich actually seems to have the visceral inclination for the things that Mozilla claims to stand for.

Developing a modern feature-rich browser is a gargantuan task and you need many skilled (expensive) developers to work on it; easily millions of USD yearly in salaries alone. Some donations here and there won't cut it, you basically need FAANG money to do it. Additionally, at least the last time I checked, Mozilla has made it impossible to donate to Firefox development; donations go to their activism branch, not browser dev [1]. In 2020 they also fired 25% of their work force [2]. They'll probably sunset the product altogether within a few years and that leaves us with an ever-greater market share of Chrome and derivatives, and from here on out it's hard to conceive of a viable strategy to develop an independent browser. Maybe a government or EU could do it, but that comes with its own set of problems.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...

QR codes.

In other festive COVID news from Canada:

>Canada's Justin Trudeau on the unvaccinated:

>“They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist....This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?"

https://twitter.com/KevinBardosh/status/1476838517007257600

My patience with COVID cultists is starting to run quite thin.

The trifecta government-media-big business now have optimally aligned incentives to not relinquish this historical golden goose of power and money. Add to that the cultural component of ostracizing anyone who goes against the narrative and record investments in FAANG and pharma as a means to ease money devaluation caused by runaway printing, and you end up with a colossal gridlock of incentives that is not going to resolve itself, at the severe and permanent detriment of the middle classes and personal freedoms, with oligarchy emerging as the victor.

A lot of comments are optimistic about COVID-related measures relaxing, and I'm confidently predicting that in 2022 they will be proven wrong again.

Every morning before I open my first beer I read 3 spoopy greentexts of the shapeshifter variety.

I used to follow Balaji on Twitter, he frequently had original and eloquent perspectives on things, but his incessant web3 evangelism turned me off.

Soft White Underbelly

Interviews with addicts, homeless, prostitutes, pimps, murderers, gang members and other interesting folk on Skid Row, LA.

I've heard some really mesmerizing, tragic and bizarre things on that channel.

https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftWhiteUnderbelly

The real conspiracy theory is believing that a company demanding that you will indefinitely have experimental medication injected into your veins as a scheme to ward off people who might be thinking the wrong thoughts privately in their own heads.

Just a few years ago, uttering such a view would be grounds for institutionalization, but it is the situation we are finding ourselves in today, and that is a far more terrifying reality to reckon with than the virus.

FAANG flourish because 1. lockdowns boost tech use 2. runaway money printing to fund the pandemic devalues money and forces people to invest. Both are at the direct expense of ordinary people whose businesses and savings are being destroyed. FAANG + pharma + gov now comprise a powerful coalition that controls information streams and regulation and which is incentivized to proceed with 'new normal' measures forever, regardless of their medical merit, and I wish it were possible to discuss this more openly and critically without devolving into a polarized left wing-right wing polemic.

This is astrology-tier. Look into the Illuminati card game for some baffling predictions.

I understand why a lot of creators need to use Youtube (revenue, discoverability) but I suggest that anyone who doesn't strictly depend on them to upload their content to random other video websites. Video streaming is a solved problem and there's no reason Youtube should have a near-monopoly on it. The more you limit their market share, the more likely they are to listen to their "customers".

The internet is infinitely interesting and I'm still as spellbound by it like I was 25 years ago. You just have to look beyond the FAANG websites. Most recently I have been having a lot of fun using AI image generators like https://neuralblender.com/ and grepping 4chan's /x/ archive for cool spooky stories and anecdotes. Did the same with Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28598590). I can give a lot more examples of how to find interesting content.. Let me know if anyone would like me to do a blog post on it.

BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.

They also published this related Tweet: https://twitter.com/pfizer/status/1458184495530758146

It is the wet dream of megacorps like Pfizer, who would sell you the air you breathe if they could, to make it acceptable to ostracize or criminalize critics of their products. Be careful.

With regards to timezones, there are a bunch of software companies which are completely remote and global which operate fine. If employees have a fair amount of autonomy and/or work with their local teams, and have sync calls during mutually suitable time slots, there is no real impediment to operating a functional company.