psyc

> Personally, as a German I see way too many parallels between the current USA and the pre-1933 Germany for my liking

I don't have much else to say that's worth arguing about. I just wanted to say that I acknowledge that you have a perspective on it that I can't have, and if I were in your shoes I'm pretty sure I would not ignore my intuition on this. As far as what I would do about it.... That's going to take some number of sleeps to think on.

Oh and Josh doesn't whine. He's kind of the dutiful servant. I think if you read his writing you'd see he actually speaks with a consciousness of the other side's point of view that almost nobody ever does when they're embroiled in this type of war where nobody will cede an inch. But that isn't enough for people. They won't accept anything short of him changing his mind.

I'm whining for him :)

It's the same Science you know and trust, now with 50% more social consciousness!

I guarantee you that if the guideline documents in TFA came to the attention of Twitter, they'd already be dated, and somebody would start righteous-indignation-tweeting to get their personal army to boycott Nature until they change it to say what the mob wants it to say. And I'm not being flip. For once.

Everyone's gonna tell you this is fully explained by nostalgia and various cognitive biases, actually, cuz that's what we do hyea. But I'll back you all day. I know they literally can't hear it, but I always have the urge to tell Gen Y and later that for a minute in the mid-late 90's we had this shit mostly, not totally - that'll never happen - but mostly figured out. And then they blew it all up, and damned us all to hell. And they'll never, ever know that it happened.

Ok. I don't think I disagree with anything you wrote. But you seem to just assume that "Kiwi Farms does/did such an such to so and so" is a fitting description of events that, just for example, a court of law would reach. And that hasn't been demonstrated. I'm well aware that your insinuations are considered documented facts among those on that side of the issue. But in the big picture, they're accusations, narratives, interpretations, assumptions, etc. Don't bother trying to persuade me it's fact - I've spent seven years and hundreds of hours closely and critically following many a Kiwi saga. I'm acquainted with volumes of details about how they operate over a long period of time. And I'm also well aware that my interpretation of why they do what they do will never be acceptable to at least 90% of the types of people who visit here, and the rest wouldn't get into that can of worms publicly, not even me. And just for the record, that's not me being crypto-anything. I am 100% NOT on board with the persecution of any half-decent person absolutely regardless of their identity, in the current colloquial use of "identity". But you lot would not accept my definition of "persecuted" either so there we are.

What the hell was I trying to say... Oh. Yeah I really didn't want to get into the moral side, but I had to say a bit. What I really wanted to say here is simply that you will never hear one single word of protest from me if law enforcement ever investigates Lolcow LLC, charges, and convicts. Or any individual user for that matter. The admin himself has made it as clear as anyone can to his users that if they commit crimes he won't hesitate to hand over evidence if he has it. And as I said elsewhere, do not make the mistake of thinking that's some wink, wink, nudge joke to him. The guy is already tied up in litigation constantly and he doesn't enjoy it. I'm just sick and fucking tired of mob justice on the internet and in the media, and I am neither a pragmatist nor a consequentialist so to me the ends don't justify the means unless my own blood family are in the crosshairs. Sort it the fuck out legally, preferably without trashing the US Constitution.

I know. I see it. And I don't know anymore how to tell people the emperor has no clothes. On odd numbered days I think the culture is going in a dangerous direction that will lead to unintended consequences. On even numbered days I think I'm just an old man yelling about the cloud, and if Gen Z really thinks all this is good and normal then fuck it. It's your world.

> the same 5 resturaunts

In my case you'd be off by at least an order of magnitude. You like variety, eh? I mean.. I can get any kind of cuisine at all that can be found in a big city... Not sure what suburbia has to offer on top of that. I mean, you do you. Just saying your argument could maybe use an accuracy adjustment.

Your experiment is the first interesting argument I've found in this whole accursed thread. As someone who gets triggered by child abuse, thinking about it forced my mind past the Cloudflare issue to what is my real issue, and the whole reason I take any interest in the KF situation in the first place. Because I can't bring myself to say Cloudflare should host your thought experiment, in spite of them not wanting to host it.

But as much as I hate it, and I do hate it, your example should be allowed to be on the capital-I Internet. Because the only reason this is an issue is that WE ourselves have long since lost our innocence / ignorance of pedophilia and fetishes, and we're imagining how they would see it, and it's nauseating. But like we always used to say, if you see something dirty it's because you have a dirty mind. And as much as it's sickening, what goes on in other people's minds and how they view the world, as long as it stays in the mind, is none of anyone's god damn business except their therapist and maybe their spouse, if they're interested.

If anybody thinks the girls are being abused, the site should be investigated by the FBI or equivalent. I have no idea but I hope to God there's a law somewhere that says the site owners can be convicted for their intended purpose, for example if there is no evidence that there's a legitimate explanation like pageantry (ugh) or fashion. Or if they're using a known porn payment processor, or if they require payment in BTC or something. But ultimately the law is the (changeable) law. Samantha Fox's mother put her in real softcore porn when she was 16 and it was shot, bought, and sold in the open, legally. Yup. Her mom.

But my issue that I'm trying to get to is this. The real problem is that it turns out that the Internet, from an architectural / engineering standpoint, ain't quite so amazing as we thought it was back in the 90's. It turns out the Internet can't route around shit, because way too much of its infrastructure is privately owned, and there may not be sufficient or well-written-enough legislation and regulation to prevent these private pieces of the network from acting unilaterally when they should not.

Here's an article another HNer posted the other day. It's called Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet, it's written by the admin and owner of Kiwi Farms, and it explains the problem way better. It also explains exactly why Josh won't back down for anything.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-10-28/where-sidewalk-end...

My interest in this, in addition to just as a concerned netizen, stems from my own attempt to solve a much harder version of Kiwi Farms' problem. I failed. Josh hasn't failed yet. I wouldn't stop rooting for him no matter WHAT was on his site, legally. All these people on a forum centered on internet tech, who can't see past doxing and swatting and think they're better people than those monsternaziterrorists, and meanwhile I have more respect for this Josh kid right now (I was online and coding before his parents met, probably) than anyone in this industry right now. I don't care about the content. I care about the censorship at the scope of the whole planetary Internet, as well as free speech in the U.S.

If people make things up, they're doing so against the written rules. I'd link to it, but the site is under a DDoS attack being very proudly and loudly organized by an individual they believe fits said narrative. The gist is: "[Stick to what you can document, that's more than funny enough.] Misinformation is not welcome here." The un-bracketed part is verbatim if memory serves.

Narrative is a tricky thing. Neither side of the controversy would exist without their narratives.

It's been documented by very angry, frustrated people who feel personally attacked. I don't trust people with all of their own skin in the game to tell the truth. I expect them to say whatever they have to. People have been going after Kiwi Farms for at least 8 years now, relentlessly. Why can't any of these mobs turn all of this documentation into a court order? Kiwi Farms has been sued repeatedly, close to ten times I think. They're being sued right now. Every case but one has been thrown out immediately. That other one took 3 days to also be thrown out.

Lol. I know, right? But there aren't many of us old-school "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" types left anymore. And sometimes it feels like we're getting run outta town. We always knew this day would come, and Kiwi Farms is kind of a perfect litmus test for whether legal controversial speech can actually persist on the Internet. It's almost the only one left. 8chan is pretty dead. 4chan sold out years ago.

So, this was 100% a false flag, there's not even a question. The caller did give the user name of a current moderator. That mod didn't even know what happened until people told them like hours later. Nobody on KF thinks it was them, and it makes zero sense. Despite what most people seem to believe, SWATing is insta-bannable on Kiwi Farms, where almost nothing is considered ban-worthy. A current moderator doing something he bans people for, and for which the admin would ban them for in 2 seconds? Unlikely.

Secondly, I forget where but somewhere in the site rules or in Josh's Plea it explicitly states "DO NOT UPSET THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IN ANY WAY". So again. A current moderator SWATing MTG - WHILE the site is under intense and very possibly existential scrutiny already? Come on.

Oh ok. That makes some sense.

I'd link to the thread, but the farms are presently under ongoing DDoS attack at the behest of one 'Keffals', noted Twitterninja and the Fastest Ratio-er in the Wild Wide Web.

They have been having some trouble with n00bs trolling. What do you expect when the media and, frankly, most of you spend 7 years telling everybody it's a 'trolling and harassing forum', i.e. lying through your blueteeth, just because you want to see the site gone. The thread I was going to link is the sole site admin literally begging the n00bs (people who've joined relatively recently and think trolling is cool) to stop trolling the subjects. There are a lot of joke threads and the Kiwis are ironic in the extreme, but that thread is not a joke thread. It's been Josh's stance forever: look and laugh, don't mess with them. If you're an asshole and you want to make dumb trolling plans, do it elsewhere. It isn't just the admin and the mods, either. Pretty much all of the OG users have always tried to quash trolling talk as much as they can. What the hell else can they do? They can't control what a few of their thousands of users do off-site.

Ask yourself if you want a global pseudo-public internet where any one of its critical private infrastructure companies can de facto censor the planet-wide web at the request of aggrieved Twitter mobs. Ugh. I don't think I have the energy for this today.

I can sort of see the "barely understand" part being relevant if I squint. Really don't know how "megacorp subscription" relates to a tool's toolhood.

Ahah. One of my peeves about the streaming era is having to squint at the thumbnails to make sure it's the genuine article.

> every time somebody calls themselves a 'software engineer' I have to supress some heavy eye rolling

I'll always back you on that one. I wish I could make every company I've worked for not call me that. I'd accept literally anything else, but I always liked programmer. Developer seems like a fine compromise, I don't see what's wrong with that. It seems to convey building something potentially multi-faceted or sprawling via a variety of different activities plus programming, but when it comes down to it just by any means necessary.

LOL! This is very gratifying in a kind of egotistical way. Myself and some close friends (artists, musicians, game developers) have always, always found 'content' too disgusting to ever utter. If we have to, we pronounce it "caaaaahhhhhntent". Blech.

I always had a massive personal problem with "community" depending on usage. Are you talking about a neighborhood where people know each other? Little League? Block parties? Barn raisin's? Totally fine. That's community. Bacteria? Bees? Cool, that's a biological definition.

Extend it to something like a corporate apartment complex where I've never said more than one sentence at a time to a neighbor on my way in? ("Join our community, sign a lease today!") Now you're getting gross. Programming languages, ala 'ruby community', 'c++ community'? I'm giving you the side eye. You'd better be referring specifically to the people who go to conferences, meet each other, serve on committees, and write in journals or at least blogs so that members of this alleged community know of each other a little. If you call everybody who writes C++ code 'the C++ community' I don't want to talk to your euphemistic ass anymore.

But the most revolting usage of all, the one that's sure to make me have to lie down and breath, is extending it to Internet-Only Shit. Forums. Groups. Discords. I don't know you, I've never met you, I've never seen you, I don't know whether you're a dog, if I even recognize your gibberish username chances are excellent that I don't like you, I'm here because I have a crippling addiction not because we're all buildin' somethin' together....

Oh dear. What was the other one?

Oh yeah. Culture. It's quite like community. Anthropological and biological definitions. It's basically fine as a descriptive word. But this one... I've never enjoyed the actual thing that it points to, at least in many cases. I never liked how people almost always glorify these so-called cultures. Talk about them glowingly, with reverence. Can't say anything bad or criticize a culture unless you're sure everyone agrees it's really really bad! Meanwhile ignoring that culture also transmits much grief, suffering, and cruelty. But then when people do try to bring up certain bad cultures I don't always like that either, depending.

And then the implications of everybody in a group being involuntarily programmed to talk the same, act the same, think the same, participate in dumb-as-fuck rituals that I would never say anything bad about of course, one of us, one of us, one of us... Shudder. Culture is the fuckin' twilight zone, man. Fine word though.

So is "creator".

At least he gave you something you could work to improve. Try not to have so much banking experience in your past in the future.

Seriously though, I participated in many an interview loop as interviewer at FAANG and elsewhere. This is unprofessional, tactless, ignorant, and elitist to the point of delusion. This interviewer needs a talking to at the least. So do some of the people in this thread. I don't give a shit if you worked at a bank yourself and it was bad. Way to pull that ladder up behind you. I think you should meditate on personal bias and the sample size you're working from. You think "it's a signal we need every signal we can get cuz hiring is so hard" - no sympathy here, I've long, long been of the mind that companies actually fuck the hiring process over by obsessing so insanely over the dreaded false positive.

If you like the other candidate's background better, then go ahead and hire the other candidate because you think they're a better fit! Hire whoever you think best! But don't fucking tell the first person that it's because they worked at a bank! You can't ask the bank person the same filtering questions you ask everyone else? You didn't ask them to describe what they did there? YOU DIDN'T SKIM THEIR RESUME BEFORE YOU WASTED THEIR TIME AND INSULTED THEM FOR THEIR TROUBLE? Jesus at least if you're a bigoted snob don't fucking announce that fact to the candidates so they can go tell Hacker News.

> Kiwi Farms is a ball of hate just like the Daily Stormer is.

That's some prime wordsmithing. Read it one way and it's debatably true or at least truthy. Read it another way and it's false. Confuse the two and the reader is now misinformed. Impressive rhetorical mischief.

> "hate or want to ridicule"

Is that one verb or two? Because the ridicule part is objectively true. But the hate part requires a) mind reading, and b) assuming that the feelings of a community of hundreds of people are all the same.

But you can't just say 'ridicule'. You need the 'hate' part to make your point. Hence: "hate or ridicule". As if it's all the same either way. Hate, ridicule, what's the difference? Humor, violence, what does it matter? Humor is hate, funny is violence.

I’ve built several AMD systems over the past 20 years, and until now all the ones with nvidia GPUs were absolutely rock solid wrt hardware. The Radeon builds suffered various mostly minor GPU driver problems.

But son of a bitcoin, my current PC has this exact stuttering problem! And all this time I just assumed it was Windows being stupid about normal I/O. But come to think of it, I did recently have a conversation with my even-hardware-geekier brother in which I said something like “How in the hell can Windows have become so sloppy that the mouse cursor can be regularly interrupted during normal use? That should be logically impossible by design.”

But now I bet it’s this motherboard thing preempting everything and it all makes sense.

As a former outdoorsman I’ve been in situations where I had to rush to a potentially critically injured near-stranger, and other situations where I was startled by a large wild animal, and as far as I can tell it’s the same response. My rational mind simply disengaged like a clutch, and it was barely even informed of what I was doing until minutes later. My memory says my body was moving without my help. I’m usually the one who’s calm and troubleshooting like a robot while others are freaking out, but when the brain decides it’s time for an adrenaline flood I believe that trumps every other thing.

I am so disappointed in this species. I mean, I was before I read that too.

I can certainly understand how that would be upsetting. I'm sure you understand that KF isn't about respecting.... anybody. At all. They are as irreverent as anything I've ever seen.

But yes, they're attacked almost exclusively in bad faith by everybody. Everybody. As soon as somebody says "There's a website dedicated to making trans people commit suicide!" in this our Age of Outrage, there is a part of most people that wants to believe it immediately.

Which really makes me wonder why the media doesn't stick to reporting on what they actually say and do. Why isn't that bad enough? It would still make everyone mad.

Is it? I'm one of those free speech people, I think, but I do recognize that some 'speech' is harassment when combined with action. Not because of the content, but because you're intending to disrupt somebody, such as following them around all day and yelling. DDoS seems like that. Doesn't it? I mean you're not even saying anything. It's like saying throwing rocks at a window is speech. "What? I'm just trying to say I don't like you. Speech!"

They sure did! I don't know who tho. Wasn't me.

I think it's ridiculous to pin it on them.

You probably aren't meaning to, but you're spreading outright lies that always originate with people who are mad at the Kiwis. This is just plain made up. Maybe you're thinking of 4chan circa 2004. Maybe you think all internet trolls are one big community. I don't know.

The problem is that just about nobody outside of KF has any reason at all to know anything about them, besides what they hear second hand from people who are upset with them.

Saying one word on the forum even hinting at the encouragement of what they term "GayOps" - or interacting directly with / harassing the subjects, is perhaps the only bannable offense there is. And that's not a term of endearment, and this is not a wink, wink, nudge thing. I know your mind wants to reject this, but it is the case. There's no secret chatroom. If there is it's a completely separate community because they wouldn't be able to talk to the actual community about any of it. The forum OGs will attempt to mock you into submission before things get to that point. The vast majority of the users have no interest in messing with them and it is against the culture. A few people will try to talk to the subjects on Twitter and in 7 years I've never once seen it go past that. Not once.

99% of their activity is screencapping public tweets, making mean-spirited quips about them, and... and nothing. That's it. That's what they do. People aren't mad about what KF does. They think they are, because people aren't capable of thinking clearly about this, particularly when they're the targets. People are really mad about what they say. They just can't believe it's legal to say the horrible things they say. But it is. And they're mad about where and how the Kiwis direct attention. And the more postmodern targets have lately taken to yapping about what they've termed "stochastic terrorism". That's the idea that the speech on the forum raises the statistical likelihood that somebody might decide to commit a crime OR that a target might commit suicide. Stochastic terrorism. This is how they're able to say with a straight face that the Kiwis are terrorists, committing terrorism, in addition to being nazis, fascists, alt-right, inciting violence and all the standard by the book things that you people have taken to calling every single person who doesn't exercise their right to talk about shit in the way you think they should.

Almost everything I've ever read about Kiwi Farms was blatant and obvious lies with an obvious agenda.

I don't trust you concerned "we live in a society" types any further than I can throw yous.

(This is tongue in cheek. I'm not upset.)

Ethics? Please. It's moral panic. The putatively ethical folks having a "harmless" academic discussion about which nice things everybody is or isn't allowed to have, according to them.