AlexMax

As somebody who used PHP through that transition, I have to say that the 5-7 (skipping 6) transition was especially well handled from my perspective. There was certainly breakage, but the amount of things you had to fix was relatively small.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.incompatible.php

It was really easy to write code that worked in both 5 and 7. Most of my time was spent waiting for dependencies or frameworks to make the same jump.

Then again, I suppose PHP developers had the hindsight of Python 3 and Perl 6 as a gigantic warning klaxon of what not to do.

We're at 12 years of Wayland and counting and the thing still isn't really usable outside a very narrow use-case.

Must be a wide narrow you're talking about. I've been using it as my default session across two different distros and the only problem I can recall having was strange mouse-grabbing behavior in Firefox, and I don't even think that was Wayland's fault.

Good for them. Does this mean we're going to get a GNOME 4 as well? I'm quite curious to see what neat things the new version of GTK enables in practice.

Regardless of the bike-shedding over the exact syntax, this would be really cool to see. I have no clue how C/C++ made it into 2020 without this language feature - and yes, I know about incbin and xxd, and Go having it ahead of those languages would be ironic given how new and conservative of a language it is.

The goal of climate change denialists is to deny climate change by any excuse necessary. If the hot button topic wasn't the existence of different gender identities, they'd find something else as a wedge issue.

Sorry, but I think this is a poisonous, thought-terminating cliche.

Python has had multiple ways of doing many things for a very long time, and the longer you program in any language, the more you realize there are often many solutions to a problem and the "best" approach either depends on context or you realize there is no one "best" approach and go on preference.

I think the idea should be judged on its own merits without having to consult the Zen. That said, I seriously don't see the point of it. Python 3 already forced everybody to convert all their print statements to look like function calls, and now GVR wants to bring the old style back as an option? It's just parenthesis, what's the point?

If he wants to put that new parser to work, how about taking another look at multi-line lambdas?

You seem to lack empathy for people who's content is being removed from these platforms.

I lack empathy not because I disagree with their politics, but because "getting booted out of a social space on the internet" seems like a strange non-problem.

Keep in mind that Twitter moderation is a joke no matter what side of the aisle you're on, and people leave not only because they got banned, or somebody they liked got banned, but also because of the perception that the moderators are asleep at the wheel and are too slow to take action - if they ever do.

Thing is, this is the internet. There are other sites out there. Most of them are accessible from typing something in your web browser. If there is a social space out there whose moderation you find more agreeable, why would you hang out someplace you're not welcome?

We have to continue to protect peoples' ability to express themselves universally as technology evolves and provide platforms where they can't be bullied and destroyed by a riled up mob or institutionally silenced and de-platformed for dirty content.

You're not going to find that platform on Twitter. But you shouldn't have expected to find it on corporate-owned advertiser-friendly Twitter in the first place. The revolution will not be televised; brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions.

What that signals to me is that practically they should be considered a speech platform

I'm not really sure what problem you're solving here. The social space is too big to moderate effectively, so hamstringing what little power the company chooses to exercise over its own space is supposed to somehow make things better? I don't see it.

How can filtering infringe free speech? People can say whatever they want, but why should I have to hear them?

Simple. There's people agitating for free speech on idealistic terms, and then there's people agitating for free speech because they have an agenda and want a captive audience.

You can even see it in this comment thread. Take a look around and see if you can find any greyed-out comments that are arguing against the pro free-speech crowd. Down-voting is censorship via mob rule, so that should be twice as distasteful, but yet you see greyed out comments. The folks doing that are the latter, and not the former.

And yeah, we also need usable and effective filtering, so everyone can choose what to see.

I'd be careful about mentioning filtering.

I just remembered that there was a Reddit Masstagger that helped folks with that filtering, but people got really upset about how it infringed on free speech and might have even gotten Google or Mozilla to remove it from the extension store.

I think there might have also been some for Twitter, which I imagine would have elicited a similar reaction.

I am saying that the concession that we need to moderate "dirty" behavior is, in and of itself, the rhetoric that validates the mob behavior we're seeing.

I think that's a stretch.

The problem with Twitter isn't the moderation or the "leaning", it's the sheer size of the thing. Any sort of decent moderation is completely impossible at the scales of Twitter, and I voted with my feet a long long time ago and frankly don't feel like I'm missing anything.

On the other hand, there are plenty of smaller social spaces out there that are well moderated, do not treat all viewpoints equally, but at the same time somehow manage to prevent their users from anti-social mob justice.

To be clear, are you saying that if I don't agree with preserving the abstract freedom of expression on private social spaces, I am pro angry mob destroying peoples lives?

Exactly. Because once everything isn't protected, someone gets to choose. So what we need are systems where content can't be removed, and users can't be banned, by design.

This is naive at best. I know of no social space on the internet that has light moderation, no moderation, or primarily user-driven moderation that isn't also a dumpster fire.

This is the internet. There are uncountable social spaces on it, and the fantastic thing is that the owners of each social space are free to enforce rules as they see fit. If you are unhappy with the moderation of a social space, or if you get booted, find another one. Or, you could even create your own.

Heck, because this is the internet, you are likely keeping up with many of the people you know from a social space through multiple other platforms, and if you want to peace out from one, you can coordinate a migration.

And? What did people expect would happen? You cannot trust large corporations with those kinds of discussions.

The thing is, I don't think the solution is to force Reddit to host those kinds of subreddits - the solution it to find or create a different social space. Alternatives to those spaces exist, you just have to look for them.

Actually it does matter, if we want to be honest about why we're even having this conversation.

Deplatforming and banning doesn't happen because of some abstract whim, so defending it in abstract terms sans context seems like it's overlooking a large chunk of the conversation.

Further exasperating the issue is the fact we deplatform people with opposing opinions. Now Reddit is even removing people who upvote stories or comments differ from their ideology.

What are the opposing opinions and the differing ideologies that you're worried about being silenced?

A karma system

Upvoting and downvoting can and have been gamed by users and groups of users. It's a fine distraction to drive engagement in a social media space, but you cannot delegate moderation to the crowd without it turning into hot mess.

and/or paid accounts.

At some point this might have been a good idea, but it doesn't stop bad actors from joining or returning through credit card fraud.

- - -

Have you looked at tildes? It's a reddit/HN-style site, but with stronger moderation and no downvote button. But the most interesting feature is that you have to be invited to the site by somebody, and the chain of invites is tracked, so if there are a bunch of troublemakers that all seem to have a root at one individual, the moderators can get rid of the whole tree if need-be.

highly engaged moderation

This in particular. It took me a very long time to recognize how important this was, but looking back the very best social spaces I've ever been in have all had reasonable standards of moderation with moderators who actually paid attention to the various conversations going on. That's not to say that all spaces with moderation standards are good, but I can't think of a worthwhile social network with hands-off or primarily user-driven moderation.

Trouble is, we haven't figured out a way to scale "good moderation" up to something like Facebook scale, and organizing a mass exodus from large social space is a lot harder to do en mass unless you have a Digg v4-scale unforced error.

Free speech crowd wants another thread to try and convince onlookers that banning people from online communities for people expressing "free speech" is a bad idea.

TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature. Almost like it was created to convince Java and C# developers to use JS.

On the contrary, as somebody who learned programming with a mix of static and dynamic types, I felt like TypeScript showed me what a good type system was capable of in giving me the best of both worlds.

Instead of being pedantry, I felt like the type system was actually on my side for once and helping me to write correct code with fewer unaccounted-for corner cases and unexpected runtime crashes. And it does that while avoiding the feeling I got from previous statically-typed languages I used where the type system felt like a straight jacket incapable of expressing non-trivial concepts and relationships.

I was actually censored from a certain platform for defending stallman's right to express what he thinks regarding pedophilia.

So? I've been booted from platforms over way less justifiable reasoning than that. When that happens, you go find a new place to hang out.

Is this not a science related-debate?

Not anymore. As a species we lost our science privileges on those subjects after we realized what horrors scientific racism led to.

Trashing a person's reputation and character through a targeted internet campaign (hello Twitter mobs) is another matter.

Isn't that also free speech? Or should free speech only apply to the first hypothetical individual stumping for "race realists"?

So I've been sitting in this comment thread for a while and something has been bothering me. I'm noticing two things that are consistently brought up:

1. Free speech as some sort of abstract enlightenment ideal.

2. Cases of clear injustice in our past that stemmed from denial of free speech.

But that's not really why this article was posted, was it? It's really part of the ongoing modern conversations we're having around certain groups claiming their free speech rights are being infringed.

I think that injustice was done to Galileo, but I'm not going to shed a tear for somebody who was booted from an internet community for arguing that certain races have a lower IQ and LGBT+ folk are degenerates that need to be sterilized, even if they do it in a faux-earnest way.

The problem is that even that perspective is your personal bias which you're using to justify censorship

To clarify, are you asserting that hiding political advertisements - either by not allowing them like Twitter or by giving people an option to opt-out like Facebook - is censorship?

The Internet has been "toxic and racist" since, oh, the first chat room...

In any respectable community, those sorts of people tend to get unceremoniously ejected from the community - from IRC channels to web forums to community-run game servers of old.

Now, games are match-made and game companies are pretty much forced to exercise discretion about what kind of community they want to have playing their game. Personally, I no longer have the patience for losing 30+ minutes of my life to a game that was lost because there's a 3-stack on my team who do nothing but throw, team-kill and think they're the height of comedy because they say offensive things or have a swastika as their profile picture.

I'm not sure how best to fix that.

At a certain scale, I think threaded conversations are incredibly difficult to follow without a voting system to sort it out, and once you introduce a voting system you end up with voting system problems as you mentioned.

I honestly think that flat forums are more fit for purpose. Multiple concurrent conversations end up being a bit messy, but there was at least a reasonable chance that someone would reply to any given post, since everybody in the thread was on the same page.

Heck, you can even gamify engagement with a flat forum - one of those that I still frequent allows you to "react" to any given post. It doesn't actually do anything except have a number beside the post tick up, but people still use it.

Frankly, I don't see what's so funny.

I don't presume to know if EEE is Microsoft's strategy here, but if it is, do you think a fleeting moment of amusement at Linux's comeuppance is worth the damage done to the larger open source ecosystem in its wake? Linux and FreeBSD are on the same team here.

I don't like political authoritarianism apologia no matter where it's coming from. I've seen both neo-nazis and stalinist tankies overrun and completely ruin communities and I don't care for either.

An internet community having a solid framework of rules that is strictly enforced that keeps discussions friendly and on-topic is a completely separate axis entirely.

Of all the problems that the_donald had, their exclusion of dissenting voices was not one of them. They made it abundantly clear what kind of sub it was, and I think even codified it in the rules.

And I don't quite follow your second concern. Most of the time when I'm socializing I'm not in the mood for pseudo-anonymous debate club, I just want to talk to like-minded people about our shared hobbies. If I want dissenting opinions, I know where to find them.

I just found it strange that _all_ of the examples were anti-trump, especially when various conservative pro-trump subreddits were guilty of the exact same thing.

And frankly, I'm A-OK with communities having heavy-handed moderation no matter what side of the aisle you're on. That's great! At least when you join those communities, you know what you're signing up for.

But the trouble comes when you have lightly-moderated spaces that are targeted by authoritarian extremists with the explicit goal of trying to shift people's opinions. That's subterfuge, and lightly-moderated spaces are defenseless against it, since at point you either introduce moderation or throw up your hands and let the extremists win.