natural219

> but it may not always be as convenient as some would like.

This is the entire rub, though. Exactly how convenient it is should be a matter of primal importance to the root relationships between citizen, state, and countrymen that the founders found and advocated for. Beyond the momentary mire of the current legal/political order, one feels that all citizens should have some instinctual understanding and positive desire for the sort of healthy, dynamic, and free social order that we're all ostensibly (or increasingly just nominally) in support of as Americans. Whether this dynamic comes under repression from this type of entity or another is a flatly ridiculous non-sequitur (I'm positive that the founders had the same level of love for the East India Company as they did for the British crown)

Complicating this, the surrounding legal framework and precedents around computing technology is near-universally acknowledged to be in a state of completely hopeless shambles; every critical chunk of the system was designed and implemented in the 20th century, with the assumptions of 20th century media tech casted squarely into them. Exceedingly few TOS and EULA precedents have progressed an inch since the era of 1980s shrinkware tech. The "Congressional inquiry of big tech leaders" parade we continue to put on is a gigantic joke and a gross historical embarrassment. the DMCA and the CFAA routinely horrifies any sensible person that examines them for a couple of minutes.

So two things; while the current legal system collectively catches up to modern tech basics like "how to use an AOL modem", we should be direly concerned that a large portion of the country seems to have abandoned any personal sense of (first creeping, now a torrent) of the predictable horrors incurred under a tyrannical regimes that expressly suppress YOUR (God-given!) constitutional rights.

The second thing, of course, is that all this stuff eventually needs to get resolved in the tangible court of legal opinion. I have no doubt that Mr Torba's constitution claim will fail under our current legal system, and I generally accept the rebuke that the 'digital native' class haven't done enough of the aforementioned positive work themselves to outline how these new usages of these new technologies should harmonize with the constraints and institutional knowledge of the existing legal/political system, which has accumulated a ton of valid merit over its mostly-contiguous 250-year-long history.

At some point there's going to have to be a big palaver regarding one's fundamental right to own, operate, and make sovereign decisions (as a citizen subject to the constitution) about some part of their computing stack. Probably won't get resolved today, but I think Mr. Torba's response seems like a healthy statement to rally around.

Well put. I wonder if conservatives would have better purchase framing this as more of a 14th amendment thing (private bar owners throwing out customers whose "kind they don't want around here") rather than a 1st amendment thing.

the internet is not a newspaper.

you can't simply switch off of Facebook the way you would drop a publication you dislike. the network effects keep everyone trapped in. i can't believe we're still having this asinine back-and-forth a full decade after we learned how natural monopolies form via the ordinary dynamics of social graph consolidation.

Metcalfe's law is a thing people, you can read about in on Wikipedia [1] and we can maybe start moving beyond a 1993 understanding of what an internet platform is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

right. my view is post-internet, since i grew up in a time when the internet already existed and already had long-evolved and widely-understood cultural patterns around its use and misuse as a very slight alteration of a substrate in which to carry out ordinary public speech (every kid and grownup I knew when I was 10 understood the root guidance of "don't believe anything you read on the internet", for instance).

to my generation, this is much more poorly framed by arguing whether Facebook is comparable to a pre-internet private establishment, than it is framed by the internet being simply the air that we breathe, an ether in which sound naturally vibrates and which trying to legislate the dynamics of should seem equally ridiculous.

He literally addresses your first point a few paragraphs into the meat of the statement. Do you have any kind of rebuttal or historical backing besides "nuh uh"?

[1] https://i.imgur.com/WuvtYIy.png

So, I'm highly attracted to the marketing (I work in the "personal server" market, mostly reselling NAS devices). Overall I'm a bit disappointed with the price per capability ($450 + $100 every year after that for a 1TB server from what I'm reading). But as one the first forays into what I feel is a huge upcoming market, it's fair to start at a premium price point as you experiment with different form factors/features/costs/etc.

I more personally lament the creeping buzzword-ification of "personal server" messaging. There's a burgeoning array of different underlying meanings for the terms "personal", "server", "own your own data", "full privacy", etc. It seems likely that terms like these will continue grow in popularity with adwords searches, so you can expect more companies and products to use this claim to sell a particular architecture with a potentially large set of technical trade-offs between various ideas of "server ownership".

Ultimately where I think the general trend towards "server ownership" will land, like all new important technologies as they get integrated into the rest of society, is with a company/product that best navigates a rather tricky balance between the affirmed value of "ownership" (et cetera) vs the individual's willingness to get their hands dirty with a slightly more sophisticated, but more robust understanding of the underlying architecture.

Put simply; the less the "end-user" knows about the fundamentals of their personal computing stack, the less capable they'll be when it comes time to reason about the right decisions for them regarding privacy, security, modularity, longevity, and the other various desirable properties of a personal computing stack that truly meets their needs (as parents, citizens, businesspeople, etc). The victor of this trend will be the one that best facilitates true "end-user" empowerment, with minimal gotchas.

This all sounds well and dandy, except the best data we have for covid-19 shows a .2% - .3% infection fatality rate, about 2x or 3x worse than the seasonal flu, which is still -- as we learned in May 2020 -- highly gated to people with severe age- and weight- related comorbidities.

In short, comparing this to chicken pox or other epidemics with "massive body counts" is flatly asinine. It's a slightly worse version of the regular flu; always has been, seemingly always will be.

Fwiw, I've been saying the same thing for 1.5 years now, which is what the original data reflects, which hasn't changed since then. Whenever we get new data that changes our understanding, we should reevaluate at that point.

Garbage nonsense from a known partisan hack. Flagged.

This sounds fantastic, and I also see 0% of anything like this being implemented at scale in the US public school system, no matter what label it goes under. The different biases and values of the various regions of the US are simply beyond one structure or framework for thinking about objectivity (at least for a very long time). Idk though, I hope I'm wrong

it's been looked at several times, and a vast majority of the convincing evidence seems to fall in favor of the camp that overall mitigations do nearly nothing compared to control samples of places with no/fewer restrictions

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

Don't know why this is getting downvoted; it's an interesting question, if a simple top-level one. I'm not sure myself why the DoD can't just build its own "cloud" with a $10 billion dollar budget, instead of putting the security of our military apparatus in the hands of some private company.

Utility and maintenance are mostly labor costs, not asset costs.

Toilet paper is cheap? News to me, lol

This is really helpful; thank you

I’d also be curious about this. Say for the use case of running a small private chat server hosted on a home network; does either of these seem better suited, or are they just different architectures that can handle mostly similar things?

Restricting access to information because you feel that its potential audience is too ignorant seems a little counter-productive to me :/. Wouldn't the idea be to provide them with more information?

> When you deal in mass distribution, the dynamics and responsibilities are different than when you're in conversation/process with other domain experts.

Why? Is the implicit assumption here that people are too stupid or irresponsible to handle hearing information & coming to their own conclusion on it?

This seems like a distressingly common viewpoint nowadays...

Very cool! There’s lots of great business ideas that could use something like this.

I'll just say; both of these seem like buckets of good priorities. I too wish some aspects of the onboarding were simpler, but I also am very very excited about Spaces, and have a number of communities I'm stoked to onboard once that feature launches.

Kudos to you and the team and I've been really enjoying tracking your progress over the last ~4 years.

You just seem to be making many negative claims with little substance behind them.

Ahh, I haven’t used it before. Appreciate the feedback, probably makes Matrix a less attractive option for this case then.

Trust me, I get that; the main argument is that, in protocol wars, there's strength in numbers; IRC is a waning protocol, Matrix is a waxing protocol. I'm not saying people must change what's working for them already; my only case is that _if_ what _was_ working for you is now broken (the freenode network), you have a new opportunity to re-evaluate your position. That's all.

You don't even have to go "all in" on all the fancy new Matrix stuff; just write a wrapper to comply with being a "homeserver", and continue using the IRC API with no changes. If not, that's also fine, I'm not that invested in this personally.

What are you even talking about lol

If you’re going to switch a bunch of servers anyway, why not start over by partnering with someone like Matrix.org? Dead simple to create an IRC<->matrix bridge for people who just love the old protocol, and decentralization efforts always have strength in numbers.

Just take the aggregate of papers published on those four sites? That's certainly a rather crude methodology :p.

Still not sure where 0.5% IFR is derived from; the best data I've seen puts it at 0.25% - 0.4%.

Hey man; really love the project. I’ve frequently wanted something like this. Will probably look at this when mentoring fresh frontend devs. Great work!

I admit, I'm mostly confused as to why this article was written. The kickstarter goal is $10,000, and they've only raised $60,000 so far. Is this really the biggest scam to be writing about?

If it reached millions I could imagine it warranting some level of scrutiny.

I'm interested in the moral hazard this creates if this practice becomes widespread. If your servers are "too big to fail", and the FBI/NSA can reliably zero-day into your servers to patch zero-day bugs, that seems like a pretty good deal for skimping on some of your security budget.

I dislike both of these :). Just leave the styling layer to itself.