simondotau

What part of what I said was wrong?

South Africa is a meme analogy which doesn’t fit the history. If you’d like a better analogy (though there are no good ones) I’d look at India and Pakistan in the 1940s.

I also happen to know the history of my own country, Australia, and when I try to draw parallels between Australian history and Israeli history, I see that the excuses we give for continuing our presence here are weaker in every way. So it would be hypocritical for me to holier-than-thou the decision of Jews to declare a homeland where a non-trivial portion of their global population have always lived.

That’s certainly one way of describing it.

Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.

This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.

I don't need to in order for my comments to be intellectually honest. My prior posts in this thread stand on their own as statements of principle: that declaring an interpretation "not up for debate" is at minimum intellectually empty; I would go further and describe it as both foolish and dangerous.

If you choose a normatively loaded assertion in place of a good-faith argument about meaning, you're not resolving the disagreement; you're simply declaring your own interpretation authoritative, to no end. That's literally how primary school children argue in the school yard.

It wasn't a matter of aiming low. NACS is arguably the perfect connector for the North American marketplace, or as perfect as anyone could reasonably expect for a standard of this class. The only other option on the table was a migration to CCS1, which would have been an objectively worse choice in literally all respects. CCS1 is more cumbersome, more fragile, and never enjoyed any numerical/incumbent advantage, peaking at 31% of deployed vehicles and plugs.

Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.

(For reference, I'm in a CCS2 marketplace.)

I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.

When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.

But that’s all history now.

Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.

If an app has a menu option that makes a Finder window appear showing the relevant file/folder, I would expect that to be labelled “Show in Finder”.

If someone says a word has a different meaning, then that necessarily affects the meaning of what they said. You are not in a position to assert that your interpretation of their words is more objective than theirs, unless you're explicitly intending to be intellectually dishonest, or come with further evidence proving their intellectual dishonesty.

Or we treat them like humans and make each one do job interviews to work out what tasks they’re suited for.

“Not up for debate” is a much scarier string of words than anything that guy has said.

I’m a web developer and I have never dailied Chrome or a Chromium descendant. Firefox for daily, Safari for the occasional cross-check.

This isn’t analogous to repeated addition giving multiplication. You’ve switched from applying an operation nine times to counting how many times an operation can be applied.

You chose 81 because it’s the one number that makes your argument appear to work. Try the same reasoning with 80 ÷ 9.

SQL Server stored procedures don’t provide a separate tier of T-SQL functionality. Anything they do to the data can generally be expressed and executed as a T-SQL batch. If you think you need stored procedures to avoid network roundtrips in the middle of your transaction logic, you’d be wrong.

Stored procedures are essentially a crude, database-bound API layer. For serious application development, a proper service layer provides stronger contracts, authentication, testing, versioning, observability and source control in a sane general-purpose language, ideally the same one you’re already manipulating the data with elsewhere.

That’s mostly occasionally accurate.

That interpretation doesn’t make sense. Repeated subtraction does not correspond to division in the way repeated addition corresponds to multiplication.

"Nine times" literally means multiplied by nine, but here we're dividing by nine. It's not unintelligible (because the corrupted verbiage is so commonplace) but it is needlessly awkward. Like saying "resulted in a size reduction increase of 10 megabytes."

Moral condemnation has little coercive force unless it is backed by material power.

The answer to every problem is to rebuild statistics. (And never use stored procedures. It's just a shitty API layer in the worst language imaginable, sitting outside of source control. If you need an API layer, write it in a real language, ideally the one you're already using.)

For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.

1 is true: if you control the web server, you control whether the content is published as readable by anonymous visitors.

2 is true: if you disagree, provide the name of that singular corporation. To be clear, you're always relying on corporations, but there's no single gatekeeper.

3 is not the same: if I see something published on "www.water.dcceew.nsw.gov.au" I can be reasonably confident that it is published by my local Government. If I see an X account of @NSWDCCEEW_Water then I need to start looking for context clues, most of which can be faked.

1. It's always publicly readable;

2. It is not reliant on any singular corporation, or trusting any singular corporation.

3. The established domain name system proves authenticity.

And of course the information can still be posted to X, etc.

That's what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference.

The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.

You substituted a different question ("who owns the platform") for the one I originally raised ("how its information and narratives are governed in practice"). Call that a red herring or simply a non sequitur; the label isn't important. It didn't rebut the argument.

You're missing the point of those examples. Of course you can reverse them -- and that is precisely my point! Organisational form or ownership tells you very little, by itself, about whether an institution behaves well. My criticism of Wikipedia concerned how authority over contested information emerges and is exercised. "But Wikipedia isn't owned by an evil oligarch" doesn't answer that criticism.

The key difference is that Reddit has never been treated like a synonym for objectivity.

In terms of species-level harm arising from the ways their systems can be abused, I’d rank them roughly as follows. To be clear, I’m ranking a platform’s potential for species-level harm based on its scale and its ability to concentrate, enforce, or algorithmically amplify a shared narrative or behaviour while limiting meaningful challenge or escape.

  S-tier: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube [shorts, recommendations]
  A-tier: Facebook
  B-tier: Wikipedia, Reddit
  C-tier: X, YouTube [subscriptions]
  D-tier: Most major LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT.
  Null-tier: Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon, etc. (too irrelevant to have any meaningful species-level effect.)

I can imagine how this analysis might look bonkers at first blush. But I strongly account for how much disagreement is surfaced. Say what you will about X, at least the arguments are visible for all to see. By contrast, the proportion of Wikipedia readers who also read the talk pages to understand active disputes probably rounds to zero.

LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.

As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.

It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as a self-selected poll: the people most motivated to participate are not necessarily representative, impartial or even particularly reasonable. What appears like a diverse community of fair, objective and well-intentioned people is nothing of the sort.

The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engineering. Lift the lid on almost any contentious topic and you will find a fiefdom of committed obsessives who assert seniority, weaponise whatever rules they can, and ultimately wear down anyone with an opposing viewpoint.

"XCancel Taken Down Again" is the title of this thread.

If you want to make the rules, start your own club.

> And yet, wikipedia is not owned by...

That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully.

A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them.

A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.