wyattpeak

I disagree. Engaging implicitly validates the argument. If you refute X, they can just come back with "yes but what about Y?" and, should you eventually get bored or run out of time, they use your failure to properly rebut as evidence of their thesis.

I'm also not familiar with any argument that a Gish gallop must make claims not supporting a single thesis, or that they must be hard to refute (as opposed to simply harder to refute than to state). Whatever it is, I don't subscribe to it, and I don't believe those are the traits which make the argument style inappropriate.

No, they shouldn't. Piling on claims is a well-known bad-faith argument tactic called the Gish gallop[1]. The poster has provided no source, and it would take hours just to verify all the claims, before even getting to whether or not they were material. It works precisely because it's much easier to make claims than refute them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

They banned wallstreetbets to get out of the firing line before the senate hearing.

It was weak, but I don't think it was motivated by anything approaching a moral imperative, it seemed entirely pragmatic.

Just because a lot of people are commenting on this without seeing the form, if you go here[1] you can see it in action (no association with the page, it was the first one that turned up on Google).

A couple of takeaways missed by various comments:

The hidden input box can in fact be manually edited, and if the user selects "Founding member" that fact is highlighted (the cursor is inserted into the textbox).

The hidden input's name attribute is "value". The guess that 1Password is basing its guess on the "/year" text is probably accurate.

[1] https://nonlinearproject.com/subscribe

From memory, published arguments have only been against right from the start, because it was so popular that the pro side needed no support.

Comments and social sections were the big in-thing in the latter part of the noughties, if you were trying to make your site modern and hip, it was assumed you'd have comments and share links on everything. I recall a degree of belief that social media was the future and if you didn't integrate with it you'd get left behind, but I think as much it was just a design fad.

The issue isn't universality but consistency. It doesn't matter to person A how person B gets their kids to school, what matters is that person A doesn't need a different system for half the year.

I live in Australia, and we do have a few public toilets, but honestly 90% of the time if I need one when I'm out I'll use one in a food court or a department store or some other private enterprise which seems to have a financial incentive to provide good quality amenities.*

Does this not happen in the US? And if not, can anyone muse as to why? I would figure that the incentives would be the same.

* I expect that there's a legal requirement for many of these businesses to provide toilets, but the level to which they maintain them is without doubt over and above any requirement of law, certainly better than any public facilities.

Well, yes. A B+ high-school student can also reliably recognise the number 710. If you think that AI should be able to do something just because a high-school student can, I think it's your expectations which are out of touch.

That's a heck of a question to expect an AI to answer. It's weird (we almost never discuss half animals), oddly phrased ("on the moon" is much more standard), and runs afoul of an imprecision in English (we normally given masses when asked about weight, this requires an answer in force, or else by analogy a mass with equivalent Earth-weight).

> This is simply tu quoque

Not the original poster, but I don't think it is.

The problem is that, since all countries acknowledge that there should be limits on speech, it's inappropriate for one country (or company, for that matter) to decide what should be the limit in another country.

If it were black and white, there'd be a much stronger case. But this is a company saying "our shade of grey is preferable to yours".

I obviously don't agree with what the Turkish government demanded, but I'm unconvinced that this in particular is a strong argument for a foreign company to decide to overrule local law. And I really think that should be a very high bar.

I don't know how it was received (if at all) in the rest of the world, but in Australia at least Facebook is still reeling from their news ban, I suspect the populace would support Apple for a few days, and that's realistically as long as the ban would last if implemented.

Rather than the parent's comment coming across as mistrustful, yours comes across as apologetic for authority.

The idea that someone in authority, on being reminded that they're wrong, will turn around and do what's being asked by their subject is contrary to virtually every study on authority and, indeed, daily experience.

This entire discussion is in response to an article highlighting the prison system's refusal to update a system to provide inmates with their guaranteed rights.

Of course the state, in principle, makes such exceptions. The question is whether those exceptions are respected. And especially in light of the context in which we're debating (the article), yours and not the parent's seems the extraordinary claim.

I already control my phone while in my pocket using my headphones. Others do it with their watch. Still others just shout at their phones.

I don't think it's impossible that there's an even better solution hiding in this product, but it really does seem to address a solved problem, to my mind.

It's fine for now, but it makes assumptions about the future state of your database.

The arguments presented in the article may or may not be applicable to your particular application, but I think it's a solid principle that you shouldn't assume your database will retain its schema indefinitely. If you're relying on "SELECT *" to mean "SELECT A, B, C", you're in for a bad time.

Unless you had multiple teleprompters around the room, that sounds like it would be less successful than the unprofessional ways some of the students came up with.

I feel like the trouble with this line of thinking re large consumer-facing companies is that many of their loyalty relationships are in conflict with each other, so even when they're acting in the interests of preserving trust with one group, they're undermining the trust of another.

When Github restored youtube-dl, they increased user trust while undermining media industry trust. When they pulled popcorntime, they did the reverse.

In each case, they were presumably acting rationally to preserve their relationships as best as they could. But whether or not that benefits you as an individual is more or less a toss of a coin.

That's not the point that the article takes issue with. Not the difference in time, which the author acknowledges is important, but the classification of those later years as being inherently less valuable than the younger ones.

I suspect it's just not a big issue. Famously, you need a working prototype in order to patent a perpetual motion machine, so the patent office is apparently willing to implement such a test if necessary.

I'm not sure I agree, but I certainly think it's possible that that's the bigger threat.

I don't think it changes the calculus, though. WhatsApp will be concerned with all serious threats to their market share, and I certainly would disagree with the position that diminished network effects isn't up there.

I think Facebook would be unwise not to care, and whatever else they may be I don't think they're unwise.

All of their products trade on enormous network effects, so I think they'd be very aware of maintaining that barrier to entry for new competitors. They've stumbled badly on that front here, and once competitors gain a foothold it'll be hard to keep them out.

I agree few people are going to switch immediately and permanently, but I reckon they've created a long-term drain on their userbase. The policy change prompted me to finally download Signal (as apparently it did a lot of people), and while I'm currently using both side-by-side and will continue to for the foreseeable future, given the choice I'll be suggesting Signal from here on out.

> It is perfectly reasonable for something to be both moral and illegal, and remain punishable.

I take extreme exception to the idea that somebody should be punished for an act generally considered moral by the public for the purpose of dissuading others.

If some idiot takes it upon themselves, based on a pardon of Snowden, to reveal something not in the public interest and harmful to the state, let them be punished as a warning to others. Leaks of state secrets have been a reality since the beginning of civilisation, one more isn't going to destroy us.

I feel like the demonstrated effectiveness of quarantining old people is the reason you can't do that. It sounds great on paper, but it turns out that homes are staffed with lots of casual workers who work multiple jobs, and keeping covid out of them is near impossible.

Could this be addressed? Sure. Should it in future? Probably. But we don't get a whole lot of tries when there's a pandemic going around. It didn't work at first, how many attempts do you have to give it before you say "we need to solve that next time, right now we need a different solution"?

That was Jobs's error, though, not the parent's. And the fact that Jobs said it is the relevant point.

I don't know that that would be losing protections, merely having nothing that qualifies for protection.

If there were some content on that site which was 3rd-party generated, say comments, they would presumably remain protected.

But it would be a trove of data if we did.

We don't know the Minoan language, and we get by. But that doesn't mean we don't value knowing Greek.

I suspect the parent isn't talking about theoretical implementations but choosing an existing GUI framework for a project.

I don't know much about GUIs but lightweight tools often fail to take accessibility into account, and hand-rolled tools almost always do.

Probably not, but does making a person in making one mistake abdicate their right to privacy?

Have they said that? They've previously removed the ability to search for users by phone number, so they recognise the problem.

I can see why someone would have unthinkingly added the profile picture to the recovery screen, but since the downside of resetting the wrong account is so low (an SMS that can be ignored by the rightful user), it seems easily fixable.

Atomic transactions, as with any database. After sending the money, confirm that it arrived. If it didn't, undo the subtraction.

That said, shoddy implementations of these systems often do fail in numerous ways. As an end-user, you really just have to live with it.