typenil

Yes. The more control centralized authority has the more they can control hate speech. Please babysit us apathetic cynical regulatory capture mechanisms - I mean politicians.

I’m so tired of seeing these posts. Private people can criticize whatever they want about Facebook and the crappy things they do. Commenting isn’t some “illegal activity” when it’s critical of legal activity.. Legality isn’t the ultimate shield against, guess what, criticism.

Good. Maybe this’ll clarify for some people that a tech oligarchy isn’t the optimal way to control speech.

I care about the reality of free speech, not the abstract concept. It matters to me not one bit who the censors are if the end result is the same.

A handful of companies control the vast majority of discourse in the world - and there's no competition in their moderation styles. It's either time to split them up or to regulate them.

Yeah, let's forget that taxpayers paid for the internet and so much of the internet infrastructure in US. But it's cool to cut off the people who subsidized it.

If the US antitrust machine hadn't been asleep at the wheel for a couple decades, it wouldn't be a problem.

"There's no mechanism to force a private business to do a thing" - but bakeries have to make cakes for gay weddings - which I'm not opposed to.

If the vast majority of tech companies are based in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, and they're going to ban any thought that falls outside of that narrow range, then political views need to be the next protected class.

Yes. An expansion of government powers. An added protected class. Or antitrust can come out of hibernation. Either way.

Neither party values freedom or privacy. Who can I vote for who even pretends? I'm gay and largely agree with leftist ideals, but completely disagree with modern tactics by both parties. But the left controls technology, and so I criticize them more because there's more at stake.

So I'm an identitarian for criticizing Silicon Valley for constantly engaging in that kind of discourse? Are you identitarian for assuming I am one?

I criticize Silicon Valley because they are worthy of criticism. You say they aren't?

Thank God Jeff Bezos is protecting us from these vile terrorists.

We need to take down Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The insurrectionists were customers and bafflingly, these companies don't moderate their texts or phone calls whatsoever.

As long as it's framed as a way to cut off immoral right wing extremists from the financial system, Silicon Valley will enthusiastically embrace dystopian government control of currency.

That's totally the same thing - because downloading a paper destroys the original copy.

Referring to the straw man platform, obviously.

What's embarrassing is the fact that our industry is so obsessed with censoring wrongthink that it's not enough to drive thought criminals off of mainstream platforms - we have to drive alternative platforms off of their infrastructure.

Let's sweep all the dirt under the rug and then act surprised when we find it's so much grosser than the rest of the floor.

After WWII when the Soviets took control of nations like Poland, they didn't flat out ban free speech.

But they did make sure only the communist-aligned outlets had unlimited access to paper.

Like so many censorship-happy people today, the USSR could also say that the government wasn't censoring speech. They were only controlling paper.

I really like the way they lay out the probability factors that contributed to their conclusions - it's easy to follow, at least.

I'm glad they put money behind it, but dislike that they're expecting $10,000-$100,000 in risk from submissions. They hyped up the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, but - as far as I can tell - that challenge didn't require the applicants to take on such risk.

I get that they want to stem the tide of low-quality submissions, but doing it this way really takes the wind out of their James Randi spiel.

With the paranormal challenge, you could say "the lack of applicants indicates they know the claim is false." With this, the lack of applicants could just as easily indicate a lack of funds/risk tolerance.

Unsurprising. I wish that mass surveillance didn't have complicit bipartisan support, but people in power only ever seem interested in expanding it.

A lot of fun facts here - definitely a pick-me-up as the year closes out.

I'm cancelling my upcoming polar bear liver eating party ASAP.

Over the last several years, I've stopped buying games that aren't on Linux. It's just too much of a hassle to be switching around when there's plenty of Linux-supported fun to be had.

> De-monitized just means advertisers don't want to advertise on those channels via YouTube

It means YouTube believes that advertisers don't want to advertise, or that journalists are running hit pieces on the vertical.

It may be correlated to advertiser demands, but the direct causation isn't there most of the time.

How will all the poor rent seekers survive?

What's happening to this country? I thought regulatory capture was the #1 priority, here.

> U.S. courts have held that constitutional protections against unreasonable searches do not apply to non-citizens overseas.

In effect it's harder and harder to find cases where the 4th amendment protections apply to US citizens, either.

Being skeptical of the motivations of those who write and lobby for regulation is not overly cynical - it's a recognition of reality.

The less skeptical we are, the more self-serving regulation we'll get.

I believe they meant that the API bindings themselves are autogenerated - which I think is pretty likely given how baffling and un-pythonic some of decisions in boto3 are.

You're right that much of the documentation clearly isn't auto-generated. Of the many Amazon APIs and tools I've worked with, boto3 among the better of them in terms of documentation.

Ah nice. Facebook resorts to intimidating bug bounty participants acting in good faith by threatening them through their employer instead of talking.

Can't say I'm surprised, given the level of ethics Facebook exhibits at every conceivable level.

I use wakatime.com for tracking IDE time. Generally I spend between 4 and 7 hours in an IDE.

My best days, I can hit 9-10 hours IDE time - but generally when I hit that, it's because I've spent the evening working on my own stuff.

It's incredibly difficult (and undesirable) to hit that number working entirely on my main job. Diminishing returns come in fast. Switching contexts to a project I'm personally interested in is critical.

I think the better approach to being productive is to aim for ~4 hours of IDE time, maximizing deep work as much as possible.

I use codestats.net for tracking code volume (measured in "XP"), dividing it by the IDE time in a spreadsheet to get the hourly code volume each day.

XP/hour a very noisy signal* , but not useless. For me, it usually varies between 400 and 2000 XP/hour - a very rough proxy for deep work when averaged out over long periods. I'm always trying to improve on the mean.

*e.g. debugging time yields a far lower XP/hour than greenfield development.

> Zodiac made a mistake while constructing his complex cipher

Think I made the same mistake in a Cryptography course cipher exchange. Felt bad for my counterpart who was supposed to decrypt it. No one died, though, as far as I know.

> Or at least take the battery out when not in use.

What percentage of phones even have this option, these days?

If, by "infeasible" you mean, "impossible" you're right. But it's not practical by any sense of the word.

Just another way for Google to nudge you to use Chrome and make sure you're always logged into Google so they can track you.

ReCAPTCHA is spyware first, competition suppression second, and a tool as a distant third - like most Google products.

This kind of elitist nonsense where people say "Accredited Investor" as if it implied some kind of education or certification.

It was always just a certification that you had an excessive amount wealth.

Sounds like you believe someone with a net worth of $900k or a salary of $190k is objectively incompetent become they're barely under the threshold.

"Objective definition." What a joke.

I had to stop using Google music when it stopped working entirely on Firefox.

Glad I got out before they killed it.