mikedilger

The Internet has democratized information. Big media has lost their monopoly on news. So they are lashing out and accusing small media and independents of anything they can accuse them of, including fake news, fake views, plagarism, anything at all. It's not that their particular accusations are necessarily wrong. But the story they have been pushing front and center for the last few years now is the idea that all news sources and websites other than big media are somehow suspect, dangerous, untrustworthy, fake. This is self-serving and disingenuous.

> Key takeaway: It is impossible to have a neutral arbiter that is also perceived as neutral.

Actually, it is impossible to have a neutral arbiter. The problem isn't one of perceptions and allegation of bias. Most statements either are not objective (Trump is a bad president) or are objective in theory but cannot be determined (Trump intended to dig up dirt on his political rival). Nature doesn't provide a zero detent, so there is no way to be a neutral arbiter.

The problem with Big Tech determining what is and what is not fake news isn't censorship, it is that they have proven time and again that they are no better at determining what is true than we are. Big Tech doesn't have some rigorous technique, they pass the buck to media companies. Media companies pass stories along like Chinese whispers... nobody bothers doing investigative reporting anymore because it's too expensive given the shifts in the marketplace. So on a per-story basis, only a handful of people actually have direct knowledge, and as humans with biases they relay their interpretation of that knowledge. Everyone down the line parrots the bias unknowingly. The only way we find out the mainstream media is wrong is when another person with direct knowledge took perhaps a video and posts it on YouTube. Unfortunately for that poor sod, he gets the video taken down as fake news.

Trust isn't transitive

clarification: this doesn't answer your question about what he means, this is a critique of what he said.

"True homomorphic encryption isn't possible, and my guess is that it will never be feasible for most applications. But limited application tricks like this have been around for decades, and sometimes they're useful" - Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/google_releas...

I agree that this is a tragedy of the commons situation. But there is a tiny bit of hope. After all, we did fix the ozone hole, even while someone in China kept releasing massive amounts of CFCs. So at least when the problem is limited and the solution doesn't require overwhelming sacrifice we can and do sometimes work together. This problem is much less tractable though.

It's hard for people to work out what information is true, what information is denial, and what information is hyperbole. Unfortunately the warnings we are getting via the media are inconsistent, alarmist, and don't put things into useful human terms that you can use to make decisions by. There needs to be a concerted effort to do better on the messaging front. I don't have any hope that the news media will do better while Western society puts little value on honor and doing the right thing, and puts high value on making as much money as possible.

Given the inconsistent messaging, people cannot rationally work out the answer to the following question: Which is worse? Giving up meat, my SUV, and air travel... or dealing with a +1.5C temperature shift? Most people think the former is worse, and quite rationally keep living as they have been at carbon footprints well in excess of 10 mton-co2e/year. Alarmist messaging doesn't fix that situation because people aren't dumb and can tell what is alarmist and what is a statement of solid facts. In fact, I've yet to hear a statement of solid facts that lays out the case why I should give up my (meat + SUV + air travel) that isn't highly speculative. Personally I am giving up these things and planting trees, but only because I bothered to deeply research the situation. The messaging is still really bad.. especially in the US where people apparently have no will to listen to each other anymore.

Most of your points are valid. That's why I'm suggesting Mozilla support it. It would be a lot less "shoddy" if someone shepherded it. I think it is the right idea.

The last point is only true because they aren't recognized, which recognition would immediately fix, therefore it is moot.

Existing .org domains they can't move without overwhelming disruption, so most will just pay whatever it costs. But for the future, we need to move the Internet towards having peering relationships with TLDs such as OpenNIC.net.

Motivations:

* This issue of .org being sold for profit

* The fact that OpenNIC had to rename their TLD domains (e.g. .free to .libre) when ICANN created a colliding .free domain, demonstrating clearly that they are not peers.

Internet technologies such as browsers and operating systems should recognize ICANN and OpenNIC roots as peers, with DNSSEC to both. Should ICANN decide to create a .libre domain, existing browsers and operating systems should consider it a DNS attack and not recognize it. I think an organization like Mozilla ought to (1) flesh out any technical challenges, (2) support OpenNIC and (3) push for this.

I use rust for commercial projects because I can specify the language and sometimes rust is the right language (most of the time python is the right language). I was hired into this role many years ago as a PHP developer. And we haven't needed rust devs. So I have no experience with the rust job marketplace.

I also have a lot of personal pet projects written in rust: an MMORPG-style game, accounting software, various WASM widgets, some OS fiddling, some work extending servo as a browser that implements umatrix-like control but lets you set options per domain (e.g. 3rd party cookie, user agent setting, etc, all per-domain).

I've also contributed a number of small libraries that I wrote for my projects to open source (textnonce, float-cmp, mailstrom, formdata, mime-multipart, solvent, ddsfile, pemmican, resolv-rs, email-format, and others).

I like file and line numbers with my errors:

  // No need to use this directly. See the e!() macro.
  #[derive(Debug)]
  pub struct ErrInfo {
      pub file: &'static str,
      pub line: u32,
      pub msg: &'static str  
  }

  impl std::fmt::Display for ErrInfo {
      fn fmt(&self, f: &mut std::fmt::Formatter) -> std::fmt::Result {
          if cfg!(debug_assertions) {
              write!(f, "[{}:{}] {}", self.file, self.line, self.msg)
          } else {
              write!(f, "{}", self.msg)
          }
      }
  }

  /// Use this with `failure` crate's `ResultExt` like this
  ///
  /// ```
  ///    $r = function().context(e!("Function failed"))?;
  /// ```
  ///
  /// Error context will then include that message, and the file and line number.
  #[macro_export]
  macro_rules! e {
      ($msg:expr) => {
          $crate::ErrInfo {
              file: file!(),
              line: line!(),
              msg: $msg
          }
      };
  }

Before that Sun tried the JavaStation, also an attempt to return to the mainframe/terminal paradigm. Management was stuck on the idea that such a paradigm was the only solution for Sun as a company.

I've been disappointed with all of that too. The only EV in any quantity here is the Nissan Leaf, used from Japan with reduced battery capacity/life.

Where I live I can't ride my bicycle to work without taking a risk higher than I'm willing to take, riding on a road without shoulders alongside milk trucks.

I looked into converting one hectare into native forest to get $4000 from the government. The cost is $20,000, and requires supervision by council and a "management plan". I became disheartened and decided to just shove poplar and willow branches in the ground and let it go wild. Government pays me $0 for taking that farmland off the market.

There are a lot of basic practical things that are holding people back who want to lower their carbon footprint, things that don't need any new innovations but just need to get done.

Local news commentary: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...

Perhaps similar (I had this for months): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_de_debarquement

I don't disagree with that.

This complaint about robots and AI taking all our jobs is hundreds of years old. Still hasn't happened. US is at record levels of employment. Humans are terrible at predicting the future. Let's just wait and see and react when it actually happens. My guess... there will be plenty of jobs for humans for thousands of years to come.

Ever since the industrial revolution jobs have gone by the wayside. We no longer have wagon wheel makers, or people cutting pins from long spools of wire. If you just look at the jobs going away, you're missing the other side of the picture, the jobs being created.

Jobs are essentially just things that humans do to improve our lives. If you imagine that you were infinitely rich, what kinds of things might you want someone to do that isn't getting done? I've got tons of housework and yardwork, construction work, programming ideas, hell my brain is overflowing with stuff that will never get done. Too many jobs. All those things are jobs. Most of them cannot be automated anytime soon.

Author makes many dubious and unsubstantiated claims:

* Claims to know what the heart of the matter is, and that it is power

* Claims those recommending antitrust are "mostly stuck in the industrial age"

* Claims publisher vs carrier dichotomy is a "trap" without explanation

Nonetheless, when he started talking about an API I got pretty excited.

I agree gender is irrelevant here. I'd even go so far as to agree that there may be more than two sex states on individual bases (multiple X or Y chromosomes, different levels of testosterone, hermaphordism, chimerism etc). But these are neither particularly common nor genetically transmissible and thus do not exert pressure on the nature of sexual dimorphism. Sex can be modelled quite accurately with a single binary bit even in individual cases, and entirely accurately for species in evolutionary terms. Distributions and multiple dimensions have not shown themselves to be useful. If you disagree I'd like to see references to the relevant research papers.

I don't mind recognizing any individuals uniqueness or their socially less-privileged situation for social or political purposes, but it shouldn't have any affect on the science of sexuality which should just reflect nature as it is.

Sexual dimorphism in animals can be dramatic. The male angler fish is a tiny parasite, the dramatically larger female does all the angling work. And we aren't seeing non-binary angler fishes. If none of the other species are coming up with non-binary specimens, why should we assume humans are any different?

Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.

There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.

I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.

Study link: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

The study was done in NZ in Dunedin. I wonder how much difference/coorelation there is between locales. I've found that Wellingtonians walk very fast in general - I thought I was a fast walker always passing people in San Francisco, but when I moved to Wellington everybody was passing me.

240 sq ft sounds too small. I think the tiny house movement overshot.

I've been living alone (with dog) in a 540 sq ft garage conversion for 7 years and it's just about the perfect size for me. It has a small bedroom (queen bed), larger office, even larger LR, smallish kitchen and a bathroom (no tub). If I bothered to change antying, the kitchen could be slightly larger, the bathroom could use a tub, the laundry could be moved indoors (it's out on the covered deck) and the water heater could be moved indoors too. It's not well designed and space is not utilized well (bare walls could be shelves). But with a better design I think it would be completely satisfactory. I like having less to clean and less to heat, but I wouldn't attempt anything smaller.

I should add that my house has nothing to do with affordable dense city housing, it's on a farm in New Zealand, which has other buildings (garage, storage container, shearing shed).

You are correct that we cannot know. I've made some assumptions I can't prove. But I think they're likely.

You are correct that we cannot know. I've made some assumptions I can't prove. But I think they're most likely.

Yes I'm outside the camp you describe. I side with due process and the presumption of innocence, name supression (not calling someone out who hasn't been found guilty) and I've been against the mob justice aspect of "me too", and I've seen it and cancel culture in general as a kind of social madness. But recently I started to understand the other side better, and I wanted to share why that side feels the way that they do... it's not as mad or as illogical as I had once thought.

This is a very difficult issue. Most sexual assaults happen in private, so there is rarely any evidence a victim can use to convict the perpetrator. Most accusations are real, but some are questionable as to whether a crime was committed, and some accusations are false. Given there is almost never any evidence, victims are at a severe disadvantage in the innocent until proven guilty paradigm. I can understand why some people want to flip the tables and "believe all women" but it's also clear that such a flipped situation has it's own severe problems, and that IMHO there is no good solution. Knowing this I have more empathy for everybody's view on this topic, rather than being in one camp and demonizing the other.

If I know it's crap, and you know it's crap, but I don't know that you know it's crap, I may think that it still works as a social signal. Once it becomes common knowledge, the jig is up.

I've only been in the newspaper once regarding a finance company collapse (I was a customer) and I remember two problems. First, I was motivated by the questioning to couch my story as one of hardship (it wasn't really, but clearly that is what they wanted) and I complied. Second, when it was in print they quoted me almost correctly but framed the quote entirely wrongly giving it a different meaning. I suspect that the reporter understood at the time what I had meant, but when reading her notes later on didn't remember the context and recreated a wrong context to save the quote.

perhaps https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/24/world/america...

I was thinking more about the issue of fallout. A president ought to know at least a little bit about nuclear fallout. He does have the nuclear football.

It's not just for school children, it's good advice for everyone all the time. I know plenty of ineffective adults who are constantly on guard defending their image, behaving in pretentious ways, and focused altogether too much on sending social signals (hell I'm probably doing it right now by posting this comment, trying to send a social signal of intelligence). We try to remind each other of wisdom with catch phrases like "think outside the box". I think "ask all the dumb questions" might be a good catch phrase too.

As for Jimmy Carter I agree and I have to wonder: why is it that intelligence seems to be strongly inversely coorelated with effectiveness as a president? Jimmy Carter was wildly intelligent and a really nice guy, but couldn't get anything done. Donald Trump is less intelligent and often abrasive, yet he seems to be getting heaps of accomplishments under his belt (not all good ones, but largely so). Is it quantity vs quality? Or paralysis of analysis? There is no definitive answer as these are judgement calls, but I think this is fertile ground for aspiring entrepreneurs to try and grok.

A teacher I remember fondly and highly respect once said to the class "there are no dumb questions. The dummy is the one who doesn't ask questions." I'm relieved that Donald put it in the form of a question, yet suprised at the number of things he must be ignorant about to think that this idea might be viable.