notafraudster

It's possible that "censorship" denotatively means suppression of any speech (including the parade of horribles -- viagra spam, stolen IDs, abuse content, etc.) and connotatively means suppression of speech with at least some political valence. Or alternatively that it's denotatively ambiguous and has multiple connotations.

A case that sort of rubs up against this in the U.S. -- I use an American example because in Canada s.1 circumscribes all legal rights, including freedom of expression, so it would be academic whether this raised speech concerns or not -- is Morse v. Frederick.

In this case, a student, Frederick, raised a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in front of some television cameras. The behaviour occurred off school grounds but nearby, and during an event that students were allowed to leave school early to attend. The school suspended Frederick because his banner promoted drug use.

A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was. One argument is that it was essentially dadaist, absurdist speech (Frederick's claim. Another argument is that it was promoting criminal behaviour (the school principal's claim; Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito in the opinion). Another argument is that it was political speech, aimed at contesting a public policy (Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg in dissent; Alito and Kennedy in concurrence)

Although there were other issues in the case, namely to do with how speech is regulated within schools and whether this constituted a school event, one of the undercurrents is that constitutional protections for political speech seem to be more crucial to many of the justices than constitutional protections for gibberish speech.

So I don't think it's crazy to suggest, at a minimum, that there exists a well-support denotative use of "censorship" that specifically refers to speech with political characteristics, rather than all speech. Through that lens, copyright enforcement could either be censorship (to the extent that the enforcement is designed or has the effect of prohibiting the dissemination of political speech or prohibits commentary on a public policy) or not (to the extent the content being restricted is fundamentally apolitical). And this is true even if there are other denotations that consider stopping any speech to be censorship.

I mean, real time mechanics were uncommon when T:AOOT was released and they're uncommon now. But there are examples of them sprinkled throughout the history of gaming -- which was the purpose of showing examples that are spaced out from then until now), including well after the purported decline in youngster competence described in the article. Want more recent examples? Outer Wilds, Twelve Minutes, Forgotten City, Deathloop are all in the last 5 years and all feature the loop version of the time gating mechanic. The Longing is a game that takes place in real time over a one year period and that's been picking up a bit of notice. Consortium is adventure-ish and uses real time.

I'm not saying that these mechanics don't have detractors now, just as they had detractors then. I'm saying there isn't really a generational gap that would make me believe that kids these days wouldn't have a similar reaction to it as people did back then, and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.

In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies. It's possible that some unspecified journalist made some unspecified remark about taking notes while playing Elden Ring and some unspecified Twitter demons gave him some unspecified grief about it. And yet, a huge number of people who play Elden Ring do it with a wiki open. Fandom has raised something like $100,000,000 in VC and its primary business model is being a wiki for video games; it's almost entirely supplanted traditional FAQs.

There are of course games that require more traditional "stuff I learned" notes these days, a prime example is The Outer Wilds (> 1 million sales on Steam despite a one year late release, Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, probably my favourite game of the 21st century, Adventure Gamers Game of the Year 2019 so let's sidestep whether you think it's an adventure game please). You might also think about Stardew Valley (20 million+ copies sold, is played almost entirely with Wiki lookups) or Minecraft (300 million copies, has a thriving ecosystem of secondary information and content, including videos, wikis, etc.) What would convince you that there is still a demand for games that require or encourage the use of supplementary information and thinking?

As to team size, point and click adventures don't require the budget of an open world game like Red Dead Redemption 2. About 15 people are credited on Myst. About 20-25 on Secret of Monkey Island. Tons of PnCs today have much larger budgets and larger team sizes than they ever did. The fact that the market also sustains an Asssassin's Creed game made by 2500 people over 3 years doesn't take away from the space for creative adventure games. The relative terms framing is just bonkers. James Cameron has half-billion dollar budget films, but Parasite still exists.

Monkey Island was never a juggernaut. The US sales in the first two years were about 100,000 copies. You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US? Thimbleweed Park (2017, Ron Gilbert) is well over 100,000 copies in the US across platforms. Broken Age is around 100,000 copies on Steam. The Witness over 500k on Steam. Inscryption is over a million on Steam, and that just launched 9 months ago. Papers Please around 2 million on Steam. Agent A, which is I think 3 people in a flash-style animation, is coming up on 100k on Steam. The Grim Fandango re-release is coming on the game's entire original sales run. Phoenix Wright in the 500k range. Gorogoa in the 500k range. The Room around a million units. Granted you can play with the numbers -- lifetime versus first few years sales, discounting, countries of availability, upfront MSRP, availability of console ports versus just PC, whatever. My point isn't to prove all these games outsold Monkey Island, it's to suggest I don't see the apparently cavernous collapsed alleged in demand for PnCs.

It's true that nothing is Myst anymore, but nothing was Myst back then either. PnCs are alive and well.

Hollow Knight is likely around 10-12 million copies sold by now (one typical rule of thumb: Steam reviews * 30-40 = Steam sales, 201k reviews, and the game also did gangbusters on consoles). This is half my point. The perceived decline in relevance discussed in the article is not real. It may be real if you measure sales as a percentage of the highest selling game in the extant universe, but that's a foolish measure.

I don't really understand most of the other stuff; yes, some games have slightly more punishing implementations of mechanics than others (Dead Rising uses the real-time forward-only approach). I named some high profile examples which are in the approximate orbit of what was discussed. It can't possibly be the article's thesis that minor variation between two games implementing a quasi real-time progression gate constitutes a major arc in the history of narrative gaming.

Naive but skeptical questions:

- How much of the carrying capacity is eaten up by the batteries necessary to hit the range target?

- Would anyone operationally want to fly a 10,000 mile flight? Is speed a huge barrier for trying to do this in a single round the world flight?

- Is helium scarce enough that there'd be negative externalities for medical helium if they actually produce these in any numbers?

- What's the status quo ex ante here? I would guess you airlift relief supplies to the nearest safe staging zone using a herc or similar and then use chinook or similar to get directly to the disaster zone? Is there actually a problem to be solved here?

(I like dirigibles and electric tech, so I hope there are good answers to all of these that make me look foolish)

> After all, could you really, badly, critic a 30’s movie because it is not shoot in HD?

1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Limited-Anniversary-Collect...

A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly.

Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely, technical barriers have affected peoples enjoyment of film and still do!

In video games the most obvious period of time that is conspicuously a donut hole is the Playstation 1 / early 3D era. The PS1s 3d games featured really quite nauseating affine texture warping due to a lack of hardware correction support. Here's one video of many talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI Early 3d controls are atrocious -- the "tank controls" of Resident Evil are famous for this -- because controllers initially didn't have analogue sticks and when they did, they didn't yet have basic paradigms around how to best use them. The Nintendo 64 was built around analogue control, which is why Mario 64 works so well, and yet it has a completely rotten camera system because there's only a single analogue stick and the c-buttons aren't a good substitute. And that's the PS1/N64. If you go back to the earlier era of 3D, especially on the Super Nintendo, you find low framerate, awkward controlling messes with flat polygon shading. Try playing an unmodified copy of StarFox or Stunt Race FX, I dare you.

No one is saying to throw Casablanca out with the bathwater, just as no one is going to throw Super Mario Bros, out with the bathwater. I'm not saying that technical issues mean we should never play old games or watch old movies. I'm saying that it shouldn't be surprising that people do count technical issues as part of the reason why they prefer newer stuff.

I also think the article misses widely when it pretends that "old ways" of making games don't exist today. Games are made in now-dead genres, with now-dead mechanics, all the time. They have commercial budgets at least as large as they ever did and large, warm communities. In many cases, the original teams working on games in the 1980s and 1990s still make games. I can't find an example in the article where you can't find similar games to play today.

The article mentions that isometric games would be anathema today. Disco Elysium is one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Wasteland has two recent sequels, both well liked. Hades is also one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Age of Empires IV retains a basically isometric perspective for an RTS. Diablo Immortal just launched and Diablo 4 is coming. Huh?

The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it. Majora's Mask (1999) is considered an excellent Zelda because of its time mechanics. Dead Rising (2006) was one of the first major hits of the HD era of video games and it's on a fixed timer. Final Fantasy XIII-3 (2013) uses a similar mechanic, and while the game is often criticized for being terribly written nonsense, it's not because of the mechanic.

Or if not the time mechanic, then needing to take notes? Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open, to say nothing of From Software (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) suddenly becoming the apex of prestige developer. Point and click adventures are still quite popular: The Return of the Obra Dinn is widely considered among the best games of the 2010s.

The article claims unnamed gamers today are reacting negatively to the visual choices of the new Monkey Island. This just seems entirely untrue. The reaction across the internet, including on gaming forums, reddit, and here, was overwhelmingly positive. A few people said "okay, this style reminds me a bit of the not-great LucasArts Singapore modernizations of the first few Monkey Islands". This does not presage a great backlash against the game, it's just people shooting from the hip, the vast majority of anyone who cares to comment is excited even if they have concerns about the visuals. And anyway, 99% of the people commenting are greybeards like the rest of us, not young people.

Overall I can't find much here that resonates with me.

I agree oligarch doesn't characterize Musk (tycoon or magnate might be more appropriate), but there are a great many oligarchs that end up on the losing end of the tides of politics -- surely this is true of Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine or countless now semi-exiled oligarchs in Russia.

But I also wouldn't want to exaggerate the temperature of the hot water Musk is in; he's under fairly minor securities scrutiny thanks to a series of unprecedentedly stupid foot-in-mouth decisions he had 100% control over and could have immediately and trivially avoided at no real cost, he picked a fight with the government over reasonable COVID restrictions and they more or less declined to fight back, and lately he's posted a bunch of tweets of the form "DeMoCrAtS mOrE lIkE dImOcRaTs pwnt!!!!" while a joke video game site slaps him around with a trout. Besides that the most credible claim there's political antagonism is a bizarre to make the White House press secretary say the word "Tesla" which seems at best to be a re-run of the "Why Won't Obama Wear A Flag Pin" controversy, only somehow stupider.

I'm just saying I wouldn't describe myself as having an antagonistic relationship with the government because I get parking tickets sometimes and I have tweets calling elected officials clowns.

I agree that new R programmers should start with the tidyverse, though actually the first element of the tidyverse I'd teach is the pipe and that's now part of base R; the second element I'd teach is using the readr stuff mainly to not have to worry about stringsAsFactors and stringsAsFactors is now default off.

Still, I think ggplot is a better way of thinking about plotting than base R's multiple and not very coherent plotting systems, dplyr beats the pants off any kind of base tools for manipulations, a lot of the tibble/pillar display stuff is great, and personally I disagree with Norm and think functional programming is as accessible as loops are to novice programmers.

I write code in both daily. I don't think there is a burning need to know both, but there are definitely tasks each is good at. The RStudio IDE is really quite wonderful for interactive stuff. The pipe operator (allowing left to right evaluation of function chains) makes for extremely literate code. Most of the basic statistical functions are substantially better than their Python equivalents. Many of the ways in which you use Python for data science stuff are just poor imitations of R (in particular, pandas is a take on R's data frames that is imo not as productive). In some conditions R can be faster [in others, slower]. The R package ecosystem for more off the beaten path statistical stuff is better than the Python package ecosystem (if you're doing more intense ML and CNNs, the opposite is true). If you're doing dashboards, Shiny is great. But in each case, you can basically work in either language and you'll be fine.

I think it makes more sense to think of R as replacing Stata, SPSS, SAS, and to a lesser extent Matlab, rather than replacing Python.

Julia is also fun.

So, I want to share a use case. I use a Mac and iTerm. iTerm comes with a nonstandard terminal extension called `imgcat` that allows you to output images, including over SSH. My understanding is basically that it works by passing some special control characters to iTerm itself, who then render an image accordingly. Clearly this is well outside the bounds of what a normal terminal does.

I have a project that involves maintaining an image database of about 15,000 images. The images come from one of three canonical sources, or they can be gathered manually and added. Over time, more data points get added (typically every few years a new batch of a few hundred are added), and manually added images are replaced with canonical images, and canonical images upgrade in quality. I wrote a command line tool that basically allows me to monitor missing images, available upgrades, sources for each image I have, etc.

So, I run my tool, and it says, say, "there is a canonical version of image 12714 available, do you want to replace the current version?". Typically it's going to download both versions, and I'm going to proceed by imgcatting both versions and making a judgment call. This is happening on a remote server than isn't running a windowing system. I make a decision there and it's solved quickly.

Absent imgcat, the workflow is that I maintain a full copy of the database on my local machine, rsync the image directories, use a window manager to open a file explorer and preview both versions of the image, make a judgment call, and then return to the same terminal environment where I tell the same command line application which version to keep. Repeat several hundred times. This doesn't seem like a better workflow to me.

So I guess my question is how do I benefit from my terminal emulator not being able to display images, based on the design I've just told you?

Typically when someone says "accounting" or "bookkeeping", they don't mean payment processing. Accounting and bookkeeping typically refers to tracking payments, invoices, credits, and debits, not actually taking payment. This could be an English <-> German thing.

I'd also say that the norm in this space is that your 7% fee should cover this (and if it doesn't, whatever fee you do set should cover it). Saying you charge a 7% fee when actually you mean 7% + some amount is sort of shady.

I would consider hiring a professional English copywriter, generally, as the language page reads as ESL. ("digital contents", "where ever", missing comma after "fruits", generally prefer oxford commas, "where ever [sic] you want to super fast" oddly informal, "receive a link that leads customers to your product", "place your fruits link wherever your customers are", "content formats", redundant "files and content formats of all kinds", "where your customers are already", "every channel, really every one!", missing period at end of secure payment bullet point, missing period at end of automatic billing bullet point, "any open questions", "set itself the task", about us list also missing an oxford comma, "anyone who wants it", "for this purpose")

The site alleges that there are a number of positive self-treating anecdotes found on the internet. Is there a medically justified explanation for these? (It's ok if not -- an alternative is that they're cranks or lying, both of which are very plausible). What is the minimum vision improvement from behavioural adjustment that would be medically surprising to you?

Given that Russia directly, intentionally, and provably shot down a plane full of Dutch nationals, lied about it, and escaped major sanction let alone active war, I think it's fairly safe to say that an almost surely accidental airspace incursion almost surely caused by a technical error, of unclear national origin, that could have been from a presumptive ally, probably wouldn't have caused WW3 even if it landed in Berlin instead of Zagreb.

For this to be a downside, you have to believe that the person expressly wants to remove their email address from your view, but nevertheless wants to reconnect with you. That's possible, but I don't think a sane thing to build around.

There have been about 24,000 people under age 40 who died from COVID-19 in the US during the pandemic. Suicide data is not available for 2021/2022 yet, but based the age ratio of past suicides (around 50% of suicides below age 40) and the total number of suicides in 2020 (around 40,000), then the number of suicides is likely to be higher than the number of COVID deaths but in the same qualitative arena.

Further apples to apples comparison is tough because kids 0-5 die of COVID but the US does not record any death below age 5 as a suicide.

A related comparison: more school age children died of COVID during the pandemic than have ever across all history died from school shootings.

Right, but then it starts a meta-conversation about why the article got posted, or even written. It doesn't have the down-the-rabbit hole trait of an individual project of passion, or the sort of authoritative voice of a conference talk or even a Netflix blog post, it doesn't really speak to specific actionable technologies so it's not the kind of onboarding a Toward Data Science post would be. And that meta conversation inevitably leads to, oh, it's a marketing funnel. So just saying "this is content marketing" I think is a shibboleth for the entire conversation that starts with "pretty shallow and non-descript".

Of course I didn't write the original comment and there's something to say for flag-and-move-on or whatever, and other people did enjoy it. I'm just saying I understand the impulse to short-circuit the entire tedious conversation!

It's a short-hand for the treatment of the subject being pretty shallow and non-descript, which seems to apply to this article exactly. I read this and didn't learn anything.

My father died from a glioblastoma multiforme. Median survival length for a glio is 11 months. He was diagnosed September of 2010. My father was in his late 50s, lifetime smoker, not particularly amazing or poor health before the diagnosis. He had surgery, chemo, radiotherapy. He died in March 2015. During that time he had occasional seizures and memory issues, but no progressive physical symptoms. We went to concerts while he was sick. He traveled. Other than the memory issues nothing was impairing his life.

The first sign anything went wrong at the end was a routine scan showing a small amount of growth 2 weeks before his death. The second sign anything was wrong was a phone call I got on a Friday where his speech seemed very tired. On Monday I got a phone call saying to fly home. He was awake but not especially alert when I got there. He died on Thursday or Friday.

So all that to echo that the trajectory of this person's illness is believable, whether or not the story is ultimately true.

The proposed "blind referral" system, where people refer people they don't even know for jobs, seems like it should be a completely worthless signal on the hiring side. On the referrer side the benefit is obvious, if the person gets the job you get cash. But on the company side, what is the value of a referral that's predicated specifically on a shallow social interaction?

I just spent a week in Morocco, a 3,000 USD per year GDP per cap country. In Marrakech, the modal service worker (so, we're talking about a guy who sells one dollar meat pitas, or leather goods, or whatever in a small store) speaks fluent Arabic, passable English and French, and probably at least some Amazigh. I got catcalled in German, Spanish, and Hebrew as well, just walking around shopping areas. This is a country where it's not unusual for someone to have a grade 5-8 education. I was in a Berber village where the modal young adult leaves school around age 10 to take part in agricultural activity; the village I was in got electricity around 15 years ago and is currently working on its first paved road. Everyone had conversational English, and fluent Arabic, native Amazigh -- this is probably an area where the GDP per cap is below 1,000 USD. Additionally, Moroccan Arabic is pretty strange compared to, say, standard Egyptian and so being a fluent Arabic speaker likely entails a bit more work. A friend of mine is currently in Nairobi on research (2,000 USD GDP per capita) and universally people speak fluent Swahili and English; most also speak various local languages.

In California, my social circle is mostly PhDs. These are phenomenally smart people. You go to a JPL party and the average IQ has to be 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean. There are a lot of rooms where I'm by far the dumbest person. But most people I know are either unilingual or bilingual. Even in Southern California, a majority of people have sub-conversational levels of Spanish. I know very few people who are conversationally trilingual. Where I grew up in Canada, E/F bilingualism was somewhat common but very, very, very few people spoke a third language and most people had halting French. I'm in Ireland right now and native-born Irish speak English and a culpa focal of Irish, and that's about it.

What this says to me is that it's pretty unlikely that a country's tendency towards multilingualism is meaningfully correlated with education or economic status. And while I know the idea of measuring "intelligence" is completely fraught, I can at least say it seems unlikely that a random sample of people in one place are as intelligent as JPL people.

All this to say that in all three of the anglosphere countries I've lived in, people seem to have a mental block on the idea that a second language is essential, or that a third or fourth language are even feasible. Someone who fluently speaks four languages is considered a polyglot, a freakshow, some kind of Beautiful Mind. But then you go to Netherlands or Switzerland or Morocco and it's normal. And the reason for this isn't obvious to me: it doesn't seem to relate to income, education, it doesn't seem to obviously correlate with intelligence. It seems to just reflect some kind of cultural premium placed on language acquisition. I'd love to read more about why this is.

You legitimately can't say I didn't warn you.

Hey dude, I just want to give you some feedback as an outside observer.

You advanced your own website as somewhere between a solid execution and an ideal for minimalistic design. Virtually every reply you've gotten has been some variation of "Wow, I don't much like this design". You reply to each of the replies insisting you're right and demanding people explain to you how you're not. People are taking time out of their day to give you (admittedly critical) feedback. It probably doesn't work that well to demand more of their time. When you send signals that you're not internalizing the feedback you're getting, people are going to be loath to offer more.

It's OK if you don't want to incorporate feedback because you're happy with your work, but the context under which you linked it is such that it's perfectly natural people are going to give it to you unvarnished.

Your site is great (and minimalist) -- honestly, really really very good job.

One note: in general there's a UX recommendation not to use flags when you mean languages. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/

I'm not exactly sure the best way to solve this for your blog. Maybe something like adding alt-text to indicate "German Language" and adding a parenthetical to the end of titles "(German)" or something?

Hey. I am sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but just to let you know, your comment comes off as sort of petty and ill-motivated.

I've never heard of AAJC. You linked a news article that proves her donation but doesn't make the organization seem sinister. I search AAJC and I get a bunch of results that do nothing to tell me anything sinister. I check Wikipedia and there are a handful of political stances, some of which are expected from political NGOs. I can't find any indication that anyone views this organization as anti-Asian. Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard. Again, I had to do research to figure out that was what you were thinking of, I couldn't read your mind.

I'm not saying you're wrong in your belief, or that you can't make the argument you're making, I'm saying short-circuiting the entire argument and just declaring it so is both intellectually facile and unlikely to inform anyone about anything. I've seen the same argument before when people on the right baldly assert that the SPLC is a "hate group" -- when what they means is some nuanced take on a particular political stance SPLC takes being disagreeable to conservatives.

But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. I think a much more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Mackenzie Scott supports affirmative action in college admissions, doesn't mind supporting an organization that supports affirmative action in college admissions, and knows exactly what she's supporting.

Again, not trying to change your mind about the organization or about Scott, trying to encourage you to express yourself in a more useful way so that readers actually know what it is you're trying to say.

What is the epistemological framework you use to identify possible sources of unknown unknowns and bound their harms? In the absence of any framework you basically have a sort of nihilistic solipsism.

Looks like this got flagged so I can't edit, but obviously typo: "social made platform" in the second last paragraph should be social media platform.

This seems to be inherent to what Patreon is. Patreon is a thin layer to take money for subscriptions, generally in exchange for off-site content. Although people do make blog posts on Patreon to announce content, the general gist of the platform is that the person's content is elsewhere online. I would personally characterize Patreon as something closer to Venmo (or Paypal or VISA or...) than to a traditional social media platform.

So it would stand to reason that any kind of code of conduct rules are enforced based strictly based on off-platform content. Like, you don't need to agree with the rule or the enforcement, I'm not trying to sidestep the debate about when and why a platform might ban people for what they say, I just mean the "off-platform" element highlighted in the title isn't really all that relevant here. If they only banned for on-platform and not off-platform then you'd just see users who fall afoul of rules stop using the blog post function on Patreon and just keep doing their content elsewhere.

I think the choice to not name the social made platform, the user, what they said, or provide any context in the title is likely disingenuous and not in keeping with the best title practices for HN posts.

It's a bummer because I think the actual policy debates around off-site conduct are kind of an interesting grey area, just not one that applies here.

Quite literally: the blog post is from 2019 and the behavior is from 2018.

The text of this article is barely literate English: typos, grammatical errors, weird diction. No evidence whatsoever is introduced in the article. The citations mostly seem completely irrelevant to the premise, and many of the citations are known junk studies. No name publisher. Core claims are introduced out of nowhere and not cited at all. Most of the conclusion section is completely unrelated to the title or thesis and includes a bizarre and uncited claim that having a cell phone in your pockets makes you infertile.

Would the submitter be willing to articulate what they found intriguing or compelling about this article?

Wikipedia isn't the source of the scientific information -- as is immediately apparent from the quoted sentence -- and I think basic media literacy requires that you not participate in the conversation if you can't parse that from the quote.

The sources are this expensive review: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975

And this related letter by the authors summarizing the review: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsmedchemlett.7b00139

High impact factor journal, at a basic scan the quote is accurate to the article, and the article uses standard methods. Authors all seem appropriately credentialled and working out of real institutions. Article itself has a high record of citation, and the constituent studies are all properly cited for you to proceed.

My own views sort of shifted but not in the same way. I was 17 when the War in Iraq started. My view at the time was of very skeptical support; having lived through the 90s I had an engrained view that the world needed to use force to help prevent ethnic cleansing. We didn't intervene early enough or strongly enough in Rwanda, and that particularly bothered me. After the beginning of the war, I pretty quickly became anti-war when it became increasingly clear to me that the pretexts (WMD, Saddam is going to attack the Kurds again) were not justified. I would say by about mid-2004 I was pretty comfortably anti-war. When Bush called for the "surge" I was definitely all the way against the War in Iraq.

Today if you asked me what I thought about it, I would say Iraq was the worst and least justified misadventure America embarked on that had some ostensible humanitarian pretext. So I guess my position would be that I still wish we could prevent genocide, but I'm increasingly convinced it's difficult to tell justified reason from pretext in time to intervene, either as a country or as as individuals trying to hold our leaders to account. I guess I would say is that Bush struck me as a person who embodied the way in which misguided motivations could lead to terrible results.

But with Trump, there was no misgivings. He had terrible motivations. His view on the use of force was two fold: (1) I don't give a fuck about any other country, why should I? (2) We're number one and I'll blow you up with my bombs.

I think it's tempting for many to look at his isolationism as a repudiation of Clinton-Bush-Obama era, but it was a repudiation only of the duty to care about others. His frequent verbal escalations and tactical willingness to disregard collateral damage (in Iraq/Syria), as well as his weird outbursts like threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons, and his constant constant constant remarks expressing praise and respect for violent autocrats justified by admiration of their will to power make it clear that he was just as willing to use force, just as militaristic, just for somehow even worse reasons. I am very thankfully that none of the bubbling tensions ever came to a true head under him.