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Privacy protections should apply regardless of whether it's a megacorporation or a disorganized group of independent actors.

Most of the individuals targeted by Kiwifarms are not running for office, or own prominent businesses. They are for the most part unemployed nobodies who live at home. I don't see any public interest in naming these people.

Kiwifarms legal opponents aren't celebrities, or politicians, or even ordinary people. They are some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. If I had to be sued by somebody I would pick someone living with severe mental health issues every single time.

I'm not arguing that the court should ignore the law and rule otherwise, I'm arguing that the law itself should be changed.

Something can be both legal and ethically wrong. You can apply your same reasoning to Cloudflare's censorship of Kiwifarms: nothing Cloudflare did in this case was illegal, so what is your issue with it?

I'm not sure that "this person only faked their suicide to escape harassment" really absolves Kiwifarms of much...

The site exists to document the lives of and poke fun at some of the most vulnerable people in society. Even if explicit calls for illegal actions are banned, being featured on Kiwifarms is like having a target painted on your back. Their efforts to violate these individuals privacy and pry into every aspect of their lives is just incredibly immoral.

If Kiwifarms users can't see that what they are doing already is unethical, why should anyone believe that they truly think these other illegal actions are wrong? They just know not to talk about it out loud because then you will actually get in trouble with the law.

The only reason the site has been able to get away with it for so long is because they are targeting vulnerable people who are least well equipped to legally defend themselves.

This is the same argument made by anti-free speech people defending companies that censor/deplatform.

Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.

Yes, that is the problem that I was describing.

Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.

The fact that Kiwifarms have won every suit against them is an example of the legal systems failings. Organizing mass harassment should be illegal.

It shouldn't be up to harassed individuals to seek justice, prosecutors should be able to go after them. If the issue is with the law itself, the government needs to effectively legislate.

Kiwifarms should have been dealt with by the traditional legal system years ago. It is honestly shocking to me that the operator has never been charged. The site has been engaging in mass harassment for years and is responsible for multiple suicides.

When the legal system fails, people turn to vigilante justice, and we get this mess instead. People feel so strongly that Kiwifarms should be taken offline that they engage in illegal behavior themselves.

The anti-war protestors were not inciting panic in public places. They were simply distributing flyers representing their anti-war and anti-draft views. The analogy was used to equate this reasonable and legitimate political speech with inciting panic in a crowded space.

I think it stands as a good example of how restrictions on certain kinds of speech that look very reasonable in a moment of crisis can in turn be judged very poorly in the long term.

I don't personally know where I stand on the free speech issue, I just want people to stop using this stupid "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy.

Are you aware that this analogy originated in a supreme court case where it was used to support restricting the speech of anti-war protestors during WW1?

“Fire in a theatre” is a great example of using a reasonable sounding analogy to support behaviour (prosecuting anti-war campaigners) that today we judge very poorly.

The fire in a crowded theater analogy originated in a US supreme court decision that upheld restricting the speech of anti-war and anti-draft protestors during WW1. This is a case where exactly the kind of speech that people worry about being restricted was in fact restricted.

If you want an analogy for when it's correct to place restrictions on speech this one is a very poor choice due to it's historical context.

Brian is a journalist more than he is a security researcher, anything he publishes as a journalist should be held to held to a higher standard than an random person just speaking their mind. He had ample opportunity to get out ahead and issue a retraction of the story when it was known to be false, well before the Ubiquiti lawsuit.

I don't think it's fad driven, it's the inherent design of the app that makes it so addictive. Video only, video content is lowest effort to consume. ALL content is super short form and shallow, anything longer than 20s is considered long, so it's easy to keep that dopamine cycle going. It's a content graph rather than a social graph, people eventually get bored of whatever uninteresting thing their real life friends are up to. And the recommendations algorithm algorithm is finely tuned to deliver the most addictive content.

I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.

I mean obviously TikTok keeps their data close so we only have anecdotes.

But anecdotally for myself and anyone I know who has used TikTok, the app is just so much more addicting than any other social media has been before. I'm not a social media newcomer, I have used social media nearly all my life. I have used instagram in the past.But never before have I felt the same addiction/compulsion that exists with TikTok. I don't think this is that unusual an experience, have you tried using the app yourself?

All social media apps have the same goal: soak up as much of your attention as possible to get you to look at ads. But it's a difference of degrees, TikTok is simply so much more successful at soaking up peoples attention than competing platforms.

TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before. Any social media person will tell you how insane the numbers are on TikTok compared to their competitors.

Air ticket pricing is already extremely opaque, the most surprising part of this is that it is listed as a seperate surcharge rather than being silently factored into the ticket price.

Insider trading laws apply to everyone, professional or amateur alike. Probably worse for a professional because you jeopardise your career prospects at the same time. And insider trading is just so much easier to discover and investigate compared to other kinds of financial crime.

This chart is complete garbage though, it's graphing inflation adjusted income against inflation... If you want a comparison it's possible to draw a valid conclusion from you need to compare non-inflation adjusted income.

If I'm being charitable, they made a mistake in their analysis, if I'm uncharitable they didn't care about the methodology and went in looking for a way to write a provocative conclusion like "86% less purchasing power". Obviously a lot of energy was spent here drawing up the pretty infographics, probably should have spent more energy getting the basic statistics correct first?

This is the core issue that prevents reliable consumer products from becoming more widespread. Even if demand exists for more reliable consumer goods, consumers don't have the ability to actually evaluate reliability at the time of purchase.

Manufacturers can't justify producing a more reliable product at a higher price point, because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price.

This study found that energy expenditure when playing chess was ~2.3x higher than when resting.

And these are just amateur players. Maybe it's not 6000 calories but it is a significant increase over the base rate.

Pinterest hides the actual image from the search results in a sea of unrelated images, and blocks you from accessing the images without a login.

It’s impossible to find the actual image from the search results if the source is pinterest now that Google removed the direct image link from the search results.

At the same time though, building a game that is easy to port is good engineering in the first place. Even if you only release on mainstream platforms, writing platform-agnostic code can save you so many headaches down the line when you want to release on console/mobile etc.

K8s provides a cloud-agnostic solution for (mostly stateless) configuration management.

You have to record which ports your applications listen on, which subdomains are used for what, how to access that storage bucket with the data files in it etc. somewhere. The moment you have more than a couple of individual services managing this all by hand becomes a nightmare. You need a really strong culture of good practice to make sure that the exact production config actually ends up in source control.

You can be a k8s expert, or an expert in your own home-spun configuration management/git-ops workflow. But not having any workflow here just isn't an option in my opinion. You too easily end up with spaghetti infrastructure that everybody is too scared to touch. With k8s I can take my repo of yaml and change cloud providers in an afternoon.

In a traditional REST api I can version each resource independently. I can make a breaking change to just one type and it affects that type alone. Graphql is inherently less flexible in this respect as I have to version the entire API together as a single unit.

Graphql itself has no concept of versioning so I need to go out of my way to host a different schema at a different endpoint. And god help any client that's not consistently up to date with the latest schema in all places. You want to query for new feature X only available in api v2, but your client is on api v1? Better go back and upgrade all your existing api v1 schema queries first. Or have a separate gql client for each api version, and remember to use the correct one in the correct place.

Saying "just use better api design" isn't an answer to missing maps. Maybe I am dealing with third party data where I don't have control over the schema?

Our monitoring says all the requests are 200 OK, why is the client down?

Right, but on the backend someone had to think ahead of time that somebody would want to JOIN between those two types, and remember to put the field in place, and implement the JOIN.

Why use graphql at all if you are going to use it just like a traditional REST api? You don't get much of a benefit from the client selecting which fields it wants, the backend probably fetches the entire DB row anyway so why not just send the whole thing over?

The limitations of the query language make code size explode the moment you step outside simple toy examples. It doesn't have any concept of a JOIN, or of the actual relationships between your types (graphql has no concept that me == me.parent.child). You end up writing data loaders for every type so that loops in your schema can be resolved efficiently.

Managing permissions is so much more of a pain compared to REST because exactly what data is returned is so much more dynamic. If you have some confidential data nested 10 layers deep in the query, you get two choices. Either fail the entire query with a NotAllowed based on one deeply nested field that the client maybe does not even care about, or you have to make your schema super loose and make every single field that's subject to permission management nullable. So much easier on a REST endpoint because the response is more constrained.

Even on the latest model Pixel phones Google still refuses to commit to more than 3 years of Android updates... They have at least lengthened the security update timeline to a whole 5 years.

I bought an iphone around the launch of the Pixel 4, which is now nearing it's end of support. Meanwhile Apple has provided the latest updates to devices that launched 7 years ago.

Getting drivers upstreamed is a political/legal issue, not a technological one. If google wants android drivers to get upstreamed, they can do so by throwing their weight around. Google can add a clause to the bottom of the license of the next android release that the licensee agrees to consider kernel modules a derivative work, and voila Google would have a legal crowbar to get drivers source released to the public.

The only thing it's a signal of is that $54.20 is much higher than the "true" stock price.