jay-barronville

To be frank, in my book, relative to inadvertently being fingerprinted and tracked wherever I go, I consider being consistently faced with “let’s confirm you’re not a robot” popups and pages to be a minor inconvenience.

> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

> Zuck: Just ask.

> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.

> Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.

Use a different browser altogether. Chrome is never ideal for anyone who cares even a little bit about privacy. Use [Brave][0].

[0]: https://brave.com

> But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.

I think that everyone (yes, literally everyone) would agree that direct incitements and threats of violence such as this would be fine to censor and deal with appropriately. As a free speech advocate, I know a lot of folks with free speech absolutist views yet I don’t know a single person who’d be against any of that.

The reality though is that, in practice, these extreme examples tend to be used to justify censorship only to end up making the rules vague and subjective enough that, sooner or later, folks start being censored for wrongthink.

Also, “moderation” is just a soft term for censorship.

> That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.

While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.

So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open that door too widely.

Hard agree. I’m always trying to get my fellow young Americans to understand this and it seems to go right over their heads a lot of times. My parents lived through multiple oppressive dictatorships before emigrating to America. Once I understood everything that they and their families experienced (e.g., family members being kidnapped, disappeared, and eventually murdered simply due their political views), I gained a much deeper appreciation for our Constitution (in particular, our Bill of Rights).

Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).

No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.

> These governments that block social media or control/monitor the internet to avoid critics of government or dissent, whether that be Nepal, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, Germany, China, Egypt, US, Russia, Israel, are always shocked when there is an uprising.

I beg to differ. I don’t think that any of these governments are shocked that the people eventually fight back. I think that they simply make the mistake of underestimating the power of the people (especially when united) and severely overestimating their ability to suppress the people and their dissent. That’s how tyranny works.

That said, freedom of speech is always worth fighting for! Once you lose your right to speak freely, it’s only a matter of time before you start to lose everything else.

> Bold of you to assume the majority of developers can read code.

Haha. Bold indeed.

As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.

I think that both of you are right to some extent.

It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable.

In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.

> You aren’t specifying your point of comparison. A nightmare relative to what? You might be saying a nightmare relative to what we have now. Are you?

Very fair point.

And no, it’s less about the status quo and more about AI being the default. There are just too many reasons why this proposal, on its face, seems problematic to me. The following are some questions to highlight just a few of them:

- How exactly would “human creators [applying] their own digital signatures to the original pieces they created” work for creators who have already passed away?

- How fair exactly would it be to impose such a requirement when large portions of the world’s creators (especially in underdeveloped areas) would likely not be able to access and use the necessary software?

- How exactly do anonymous and pseudonymous creators survive such a requirement?

> If a piece of work lacks such signature, it should be considered AI-generated by default.

That sounds like a nightmare to me.

Congratulations on getting hired in this garbage market! I wish you well!

> he's 100% the type of person to lean into the controversy it creates

Except, objectively speaking, he actually did NOT do that. He basically just ignored the “controversy” because it was such an obviously false narrative meant only to smear him that I’m sure he had enough faith in most Americans who aren’t consumed by partisanship to see it exactly for what it was.

> At that time, building favor with trump voters was good for him.

Your implication here seems to be that Trump voters, en masse, want folks who are doing Nazi salutes, or am I misunderstanding you?

Exactly. It’s so obvious that Musk didn’t do a Nazi salute that I can’t believe that anyone who considers themselves to be a serious person would still be pushing that. There’s no way that someone can watch the video of that situation and come to a good-faith conclusion that that’s what he was doing.

If the standard is that low, I could easily produce a compilation video of the likes of Obama, Biden, Harris in compromising positions appearing to show them doing things that they obviously weren’t doing.

Partisanship has turned everyone into dishonest and uncharitable actors, and it’s so unfortunate.

If an American company chooses to enter a foreign market and do business there, they should be subject to the laws and customs of said market. The complexity that comes with it is their problem to deal with. I echo the earlier sentiment that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police (although we do behave like that now).

Even after years of not building anything substantial with PHP, it still maintains a soft spot in my heart. I remember how it felt writing PHP code ~15 years ago and feeling so productive. I felt that I could do anything with it. Then the Laravel framework came around and made that experience at least an order of magnitude better.

I think the main issue for PHP nowadays is the curse that it had many issues (especially security-wise) in the past and so many folks believe that the PHP of today is still the PHP of the past, when in actuality, it's evolved into a pretty dope programming language/environment with some pretty decent features. It seems like this is something that the PHP community can't shake no matter how hard they try.

> If anything bun proves that both worlds can go together despite what proponents of web standards says

Sure, but Bun's implementation is a confusing mess a lot of times. I prefer them separate.

Note: This is no shade toward Bun. I'm a fan of Bun and the innovative spirit of the team behind it.

> Hasn't AsyncIterator been available in Node for several years? I used it extensively—I want to say—around 3 years ago.

Yes. It's been around and relatively stable in V8/Node.js for years now.

> And let's be honest, how many of us meticulously read through every single permission pop-up? Most of the time, we just tap "Allow" to get to what we want to do.

I do. I also, without exception, read and make sure that I understand every single word of every piece of legalese that I’m presented with to agree to and/or sign. My wife sometimes jokes that she married me so that I could become her in-house attorney. I digress…

You should regularly review and reevaluate all of your devices’ configurations/settings from a privacy and security perspective (I do so at least once every two weeks).

> This is why regulating AI is needed, otherwise you're putting life decisions into the equivalent of the magic 8 ball you shake for an answer.

I don’t think that regulation is the correct path forward, because practically speaking, no matter how noble a piece of regulation may be or how good it may sound, it’ll most likely push the AI toward specific biases (I think that’s inevitable).

The best solution, in my humble opinion, is to focus on making AI stay as close to the unfiltered objective truth as possible, no matter how unpopular that truth may be.

X isn't going anywhere.

Based on all available evidence, I tend to agree with X that this "investigation" does, in fact, appear to be politically motivated. I don't see any substantive evidence to the contrary.

> Maybe those people are right, though? I think the discussion starts from a place that assumes other people are wrong. If you start there, you will fail to convince people of anything, because you automatically dismiss their claim, without thinking about what they might have seen and what they might think.

Bingo. This is the correct approach. Very well said!

As someone who supported the current administration primarily due to their stated position on protecting free speech and fighting censorship, I find this story disgusting. I consider our First Amendment here in the U.S. to be the best and most unique thing about our country. I hated watching previous administrations step all over it, but in my opinion, the current administration is already proving to be objectively worse for the simple fact that they pretended to actually care about free speech only to pretty quickly start cracking down on speech they don’t like (e.g., see the Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk cases—Öztürk’s case, in particular, is extremely egregious). As frustrating as it was when the Biden regime was cracking down on speech they didn’t like, at least they didn’t pretend to actually care about free speech. Running on a free speech platform and then implementing North Korea-style speech policies is such a massive betrayal.

On a separate note, border agents being able to force you (anyone, including U.S. citizens) to give them access to your devices has been a problem for a long time and certainly should be illegal. When traveling internationally, you should either (1) leave your personal devices behind or (2) back up your personal devices to an encrypted drive (a tiny SD Card is ideal) and factory reset them. I know the EFF has been fighting that issue for a while and I’m hoping that at some point in the near future, border agents will be prohibited from forcing folks to give access to their devices.

> I think NodeJS apps typically rely on JavaScript event-loop instead of starting new processes all the time.

> Spawning new processes for every user is possible but would probabaly be less scalable than even thread-switching.

I’d just like to note/clarify that there is, in fact, multi-threading happening under the hood when running Node.js. libuv, the underlying library used for creating and managing the event loops, also creates and maintains thread pools that are used for some concurrent and parallelizable tasks. The fact that JavaScript (V8 in the case of Node.js) and the main event loop are single-threaded doesn’t mean that multi-threading isn’t involved. This is a common source of confusion.

In theory, “de-frameworking yourself” is cool, but in practice, it’ll just lead to you building what effectively is your own ad hoc less battle-tested, probably less secure, and likely less performant de facto framework.

I’m not convinced it’s worth it.

If you want something à la KISS[0][0], just use Svelte/SvelteKit[1][1].

Nowadays, the primary exception I see to my point here is if your goal is to better understand what’s going on under the hood of many libraries and frameworks.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

[1]: https://svelte.dev

Another thing I’ve observed for a while now (i.e., since everyone became obsessed with LLMs) is that a lot of founders nowadays—particularly at the pre-seed and seed stages—seem to view raising venture capital as a one-and-done type of thing.

I’m not exactly sure how prevalent this mindset is, but I’ve talked with lots of founders within the past couple of years and I’ve encountered this mindset a lot, which, to me, is a huge contrast to the mindset I encountered, e.g., about ten years ago when I was a young founder and I was raising a small round (mostly from angels)—back then, it seemed like every single founder was chasing venture capital non-stop and usually was already thinking about their next round before even closing their current round.

If this mindset is (or becomes) prevalent, unless a lot of these startups are quickly acquired for large sums, is venture capital, as it currently exists, ready to deal with this shift?

Please note that the linked comparison table has been unmaintained for a while. This is even explicitly stated on the legacy musl libc website[0][0] (i.e., “The (mostly unmaintained) libc comparison is still available on etalabs.net.”).

[0]: https://www.musl-libc.org

> You might be surprised how often multi-language programs appear. Basically all of modern day Python for starters. But also a number of important numerical libraries for C are actually written in Fortran.

In my experience, the most common use case is C-based programs with some C++ sprinkled in (especially if you need the C code to be compiled exclusively by a C compiler in order to maintain C semantics).