stavrianos

Low trust world, I guess. If I'm poking around to see whether I like something or not, no way am I giving it a real email.

this is a _very_ false dichotomy

The problem with facebook isn't that individual users sometimes do bad things on it's platform.

Compare to trademark genericization, where a brand name becomes the word for a whole product category, and loses trademark protection because our use of the word is more important than their use of the brand. That's not something that happens instantly, there are thresholds for it. But it's also not something that never happens at all. Maybe you think that's bad, but I certainly don't. There's a whole lot of room between that, and abolishing private property altogether.

> This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.

This ignores the nature of network effects. The value of the thing is precisely that other people are using it. That's not a value that's created by reddit, it's a value that's _exploited_ by reddit.

"Just go somewhere else" requires either a phenomenal degree of coordination, OR to just bite the bullet that not everyone will move to the same place at the same time, which fragments the community (which was, again, the bulk of the value in the first place).

The difficulty of network effects is that, as the group gets larger, the value goes up faster than linear AND the cost of coordinating a migration ALSO goes up faster than linear. A gathering that's 1/10th the size, isn't worth 1/10th as much. It's _significantly_ weaker. And migrating en-mass is an n^2 coordination problem. It's closer to a hostage situation than it is to a value-add.

> How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?

Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even. Does that justify indefinite control of an important resource? Legally probably, but you can tell I think it shouldn't.

In regards to the idea of reddit rent-seeking - the primary value of reddit is not something they create, it's something they _host_. It could be anywhere, but by dint of network effects, it happens to be there. Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.

Aggressive control of the meetingpoint (which it is able to do), is rent-seeking because reddit controls _access_ to the value, but does not create the value. You were making a point that reddit doesn't provide literally nothing. That's true, but it's a red herring. Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.

edit: I'm sorry, you were not making that point. I was responding to that point.

I was absolutely not using the term in a legal sense. Is "commons" even a legal term? I suppose I should have said "should be a commons" - as in, a publicly generated and maintained 'good thing' (susceptible to tragedy).

We could fight about the actual value of the CPU, HDD, network, etc is. Not literally zero. The manpower to keep it running is a stronger argument, but I still think it's missing the point. The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.

I keep seeing people talking about chatgpt hallucinating when it's wrong, but not when it's right. Maybe I've misunderstood, but isn't it just always hallucinating? It's not like the failure-mode is meaningfully different from the successes, except insofar as whether we agree with it, right?

I've seen this conversation before, but I've never been clear on what exactly the consequences of the SSO are. I imagined, it might be that the provider gets an IP address when you connect or something. You're saying they potentially get _access as you_? Am I understanding that correctly?

What precisely are the consequences of the third-party auth? Is it, they get an IP ping each time a device connects or does anything? Or, does that only happen once, but they can revoke access at any time? *Surely* they aren't granted access to the content? That would be mindboggling.

> sperm rates in women remain constant

> Remember, you're part of the government.

This is a really important idea, and I don't think I've seen it expressed so clearly before. Thank you.

Easy: anyone who isn't specified gets the higher rate.

Exactly this. Assuming that shadow-profiles are derived on-demand, the only way to "delete" one would be to delete the datapoints it's built from.

We know that facebook can use contact info to identify clusters, right? Suppose that I don't have facebook, but a bunch of my friends do, and facebook has all their contacts' phone numbers. They can infer the circle of friends of "whoever owns phone number X" using just this info. This is probably not the extent of a shadow-profile, but I think it's a plausible stab at the underlying mechanics (repeat again with email, with browser fingerprint, etc).

In order to "delete" my phone-shadow-profile, facebook needs to remove my phone number from their internal copies of my friend's contact lists. They also need to keep a copy of my number in a "do not shadow" list, or else they'll just add me back in next time they scrape my friends' contacts. Armed with a such a do-not-shadow list, there's no need to actually do the deletion, rather than simply marking the deletion.

So, assuming my speculations of the nature of shadow-profiles are about right, the only way to really avoid facebook having one is to register your fingerprints with them, so they can tell which parts of their data are you, in order to know not to use that data to draw inferences about you.

That, or give up on drawing inferences between disparate data-sources at all.

> The majority of people need a truck a few times a year at most.

There's a big grey area around the word "need". The list of things that can be done with a truck, that can't be done with a strong-ish car/van and a trailer, plus elbow grease and planning, is almost certainly tiny. The availability of a truck, though, will change (and probably simplify) a LOT of that marginal problem-space, even if it isn't strictly needed.

From outside, there's no fundamental difference between a good argument and a persuasive one, even though they're ideally orthogonal. If there's an argument that seems good, and you don't understand why people don't accept it, the delivery is the simplest (or perhaps just least well understood) thing to update.

We don't need it to simulate the universe for a billions of years. We just need it to simulate your belief that it happened for a couple of seconds.

Bet you I can!

Doors it follow that everyone wandering into that radius for the same text?

Ha! Bet they don't. This is exactly how superstitions are made.

Well, I mean, you have to consume enough power to get a jumbo jet up to cruising speed.

Alright, but now you trust that person. Which might be fine, but as an exercise in paranoia is not the greatest answer. As a social proof, somewhat better - create the opportunity for many people to examine, and at least some of them will find things and talk about it. Now the trust is in the shape of the general mass of reviewers - that it contains people who will review the code and reveal their findings.

But, at some point there must be trust. If you don't trust software, you can try to sandbox it, but now you have to trust the sandbox. This devolves very rapidly. Open source at least provides a facsimile of recourse - just go read the code - but how much of your currently-running open-source code have you actually read? For that matter, if you had, could you be confident that you'd understood it? The Underhanded C Contest is a thing, after all. A sufficiently paranoid individual can only run code they wrote themselves. Or, they can choose to run code without a strong understanding of what it's doing.

If Apple subverts their updates, that's mostly interesting as a signal of their trustworthiness moving forwards. The coolest thing about this is that we know it's happening at all, I think.

Systems designed to prevent black swan events need to be evaluated against a higher standard than "there haven't been any since we started". That's not success, it's exactly what we would have expected anyways.

Compare to: what large tigers have attacked me since mass surveillance began?

There's an interesting class of actions in there, which are fine in principle, but in practice cannot be reasonably expected to be understood, rendering consent impossible.

The moral imperative to not be confusing.

Sure, sure, in most contexts code as communication medium is laudable. Here, the game is to make people accustomed to understanding go "the hell just happened?" when it works. I like it.

In a hypothetical where the government doesn't exist to provide justice, "vigilante justice" would be the only justice. Whether vigilante justice is preferable to a total absence of justice is the question.

More generally, the whole point of vigilantism is going outside the established judicial framework. If there is no such framework, the concept of vigilantism is meaningless.

As to what prevents/discourages this behaviour, the answer is mostly going to be "the presence of an existing judicial structure, backed by force, which disallows such behaviour".

This is how the arms race begins. Soon the manufacturers will know how much the equipment weighs, and if the car's total weight is within tolerance for that plus a test driver, the mechanisms activate.

Or whatever - the point isn't the methods, it's the pattern of one-upsmanship.