TheOperator

Buying Microsoft for it's OS and Apple for it's hardware? What is this opposite day?

Silicon Valley is infamous at this point for running loss leaders to lock people into their ecosystem with the expectation of being able to milk people dry later. The fact that the services are "worth the money" doesn't mean it's economically in China's interests to allow for easy access to them.

An IP based economy just on its face seems like such a laughable house of cards. So your economy is based on government enforced imaginary rights to ideas? The proliferation of tax havens should be a sign that the system is bullshit - it exposes how little is actually keeping the profits of IP endeavors within a nation.

There is incredibly little respect for the society owning the means of production in a tangible real sense, instead we have economies that run on intangibles, where the intangibles allow 600lb gorillas like Oracle to engage in much rent seeking while simultaneously avoiding paying dues to the precise body that granted them their imaginary rights. The entire status quo feels like something some rich tycoons dreamed up to sell to the public the merits of systematically weakening their negotiating position on the promise that one day a Bernie Sanders type would descend from the heavens and deliver universal basic income fueled by the efficiency of private industry through nothing but incorruptability and force of personality.

China seems to be successful in part because they have no qualms with flexing dictatorial power to increase the leverage of the state itself. This may be less economically efficient but it means they actually get to harvest the fruits of any efficiency. Intellectual property law? They just ignore it and don't get punished, since punishing them would be anti-trade.

The point wouldn't be to sell laptops.

This article was eye rollingly heavy on moralizing ultimately to only eventually hit on the point that what the algorithms are measuring is the odds somebody will be convicted and not the odds somebody does illegal things. Appearance is known to dramatically affect your chances at trial.

I know exactly what he's talking about as somebody who ran a win7 and Linux VM on a 4gb MBA. I had to be incredibly choosy about what I kept open at any given time or my system would keel over. It enforced discipline that I just didn't have normally which helped keep me organized.

I have made one complaint about signal in my entire life after the outage hit 9 hours. They did fail. It's just an inconvenient truth thus the character assassination and apologism.

Yup they're already under 99.9% reliability for the year. Never mind WhatsApp this makes them a questionable replacement for SMS. Not only "was" it a disaster for signal the disaster isn't over.

Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.

Go back to WhatsApp. Signal is crashing because it appearantly went up 5x in userbase. I can't guarantee any other service would cope with such a rapid expansion of their userbase other than WhatsApp.

Or stick it out a little and sms people.

For me what made me give in was realising how useful the features would be in regards to ADHD, allowing for a new input modality that just straight up reduces the friction it takes for me to set a reminder.

It's routine that I will just leave an item and forget where it is several times a day that I take it almost for granted up until it causes me to be late going out the door. Now I can yell "Find my phone" (or wallet, keys, etc) and my phone is there. Yes I could go to my computer, go to the find my phone page, but there's just more friction and these issues happen to me all the time. The more things I link up to voice control, the more options I have in regards to accomplish a task, and sometimes voice is the most efficient means of going about it.

I can get entertainment like a podcast or music without a single screen being involved, which given that I inherently have low impulse control, is a nice separation of things. Or I can again, find my stuff without looking at any screens. Voice input can act as a lesser evil to screens.

Saying to just use FOSS and air gaps, because of how immature such solutions are, is effectively saying you shouldn't use these systems at all. The benefits of using the systems that exist today makes it so that the average person, like yourself, judge me less because I appear more punctual and less forgetful and more productive and better rested and so on. Being human, you are likely to disrespect me for being late and disorganized no matter what my excuse is, whereas you'll only disrespect me for using voice assistants if you know I'm using them, so it's a winning tradeoff. Just like how some will judge me for taking medication but only if they know I'm using it.

I just think that rating the interpretation of what Trump meant, as equally valid to the literal truth of what Trump said, is veering right into the territory of "Alternative facts". How we felt about what Trump said has become just as important as what Trump actually said. His supporters can overlook that what he says is BS and can just focus on "What he meant", and his opponents can ignore that he didn't say something and condemn him for "what he meant".

It all feels very post-truth to me and seeing a fact checker endorse this sort of view is absolutely depressing in a way. These are institutions of which there is broad support for making the arbiters of truth on social media for whom truth is subject to subjective interpretation. In which case what's the point of fact checking at all?

I don't read his post as pointing the finger at all Republicans. I see it more targeted at people like Cruz who refused to even Certify Biden for President. I doubt he's saying Pence who was notably outspoken in his support of certifying Biden and had violent threats against him as a result is who he's talking about just because he's a Republican.

How would one prove that Trump knew they would do this? The vast majority of "reasonable persons" sure didn't expect this to happen despite hearing Trumps rhetoric around this. Most people were completely shocked.

I think there is plenty of room for Trump to get blamed here even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he didn't expect this to happen. He was droning on about how the election was stolen from him on twitter as people were dying. He riled people up over his horsecrap sore loser claims and people died as a result.

Not really. They said it was sort of yes and no because he said “you have to show strength” and “demand that Congress do the right thing”. No those are not telling people to storm congress, in the context of what he was saying before, this clearly refers to showing strength and making demands in the form of a protest. The answer is just No. He did not say this. They didn't even give this a "Mostly false" and give a spiel about how "He encouraged people to protest at the capital + his supporters may have interpreted his words that way", they said it was half-true, it was mixture, that claim is no more false than it is true. Rating scale: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check-ratings/

He sure as hell riled people up and he set the seeds for what happened and has a degree of culpability for what happened. However in regards to the specific question "Did Trump Tell Supporters to Storm US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?" the answer is No. Intermediate ratings on fact checkers are what are used to slip bias into what are not very ambiguous situations, because you can say "Yes, but..." or "No, but..."

The good thing about fact checkers, and the reason I generally support them even if I don't see them quite as neutral, is at least they write down the facts so you can come to your own judgement. I just ignore the ratings they give at this point, the articles are much better.

Anything that touches the GPU is notably flaky over parallels (or any hypervisor for that matter), otherwise it's more or less seamless. I always had Windows open on my Mac before I abandoned them during the 2016-2020 dark ages.

If it takes a court order to get pornhub to remove content they have failed.

Not only "It's filled with rape and child porn" but "It's filled with rape and child porn and revenge porn that pornhub tacitly tolerates by ignoring removal requests"

While sterilization has jumped up several times, one cannot actually effectively commit a genocide by performing sterilization operations on an entire population. Most of what's going on is coercion and soft power.

Protesting electoral fraud is also absolutely required, even if I am extremely extremely sceptical that it actually happened.

Some of the protests that happened in the civil rights movement were indeed violent although this has been rather aggressively whitewashed in government approved public school classes meant to teach students the way to affect real change is to stand around with signs and sing songs and have racist white police officers beat you until you win (Kings flirting with communism and advocacy of reparations doesn't get much mention either). Ever hear of this guy called Malcolm X who wrote quite a bit about violence, he's definitely not somebody who could be allowed on social media. Race riots happened, people got beaten, some were killed largely by the police (just like in this most recent protest) but also by protesters (just like in this most recent protest). Did this delegitimize the civil rights movement? No, it was a noble movement, people just whitewash and dramatize it instead to prevent any degree of cognitive dissonance, and then compare modern day movements to the whitewashing to whitewash the modern day equivalents.

Back then like today, the degree of violence was greatly exaggerated, disproportionately by the media and by racist segregationist's. Protests are mostly a dull affair filled overwhelmingly with non-violent people and only the exciting bits hit the front pages. The extent of violence by Trump supporters too is greatly exaggerated, mostly by media and their political opponents. If one police officer dies and 4 protestors, the only reasonable reaction is a speech crackdown against those who blame this incident on democrats dubiously. Since obviously cracking down on the free non-violent exchange of ideas and advocacy of peaceful protest is what prevents violence from happening.

Point I'm driving at is that if the entire argument is based around the idea that any violence, or even violent mobs, delegitimizes a large movement than virtually all movements from BLM to the Civil rights movements to... whatever this is.... are delegitimized. Really the issue people have with the Trump supporters, above all, is that they're wrong and unpopular. As such they're a good test for exactly how much people REALLY support freedom of speech and the right to protest a cause that isn't broadly supported.

The story has nothing to do with Steve Bannon's podcast channel and everything to do with the sea change in how social media moderation policy is being interpreted and enforced.

Gonna need to ban a lot more people than Bannon if you're going to ban everybody who used figurative calls to violence and was associated with some group which engaged in violence. Especially given 9 people died in BLM protests last year.

Regarding this incident Zuckerberg didn't ban him at the time because he said that Bannon didn't even violate his sites policy in regards to how many times you have to say things like this before getting banned. He reacted with a removal of the video. Zuckerberg was correct and for all the hate leveled against him he seems to be one of the only people who is resisting political pressure and fighting to enforce policy fairly and unarbitrarily.

An extremely broad amount of people will once or twice say something like this regardless of political affliation and the banning of Bannon here is mostly a mixture of hindsight and bias and arbitrariness. Bannon wasn't banned today based on an equally applied sober reading of social media policy, but because the capitol riots happened. Trumps supporters messed up a building and got themselves killed and that's being used as a pretence to treat other Trump supporters arbitrarily online for the greater good because they're just too dangerous.

Free speech for a corporation is allowing them to ban whatever they want that's effecting their bottom line.

That's freedom of association.

The fact this isn't a 1st amendment issue doesn't mean by extension this isn't a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech as a concept is much broader than the 1st amendment as well as the United States. Anonymous feedback boxes are an example of an tool meant to ensure freedom of speech.

I'll bite.

Censorship of social platforms is absolutely necessary and this is obvious if you think about the problem for long enough, and even more obvious if you try to run one. Spam is a form of speech. You will get DDOSed by bad faith actors selling viagra without censorship. Now of course that's not what people are discussing, but almost all moderation is censorship. Censorship is table stakes to even be able to have a public community beyond a certain size, an uncensored public community would just be static, noise.

If you look at the pure numbers only a small minority of (human) users actually get banned, and most of the censorship happens further down the moderation chain. What people are arguing over, in practice, is if maybe a fraction of a percent of users should be banned or not or should have their posts removed or not. Censorship is so pervasive it's not even recognized as such. The actual disagreement is over a very small fraction of users and rules that would in practice affect a fraction of a percent of users and perhaps spark a trend of self-censorship. Censorship of social media platforms is good, what's in question is if we're perhaps going too far, but the actual difference between peoples views when you look at things from far enough back is actually fairly narrow. Additionally trying to enable the average person to have "Freedom of expression" online while NOT engaging in censorship paradoxically isn't even possible.

The key then as I see it is to keep censorship as minimalistic as practicable, have the rules be well defined, and to empower user self-regulation. It's also a concern to avoid, as much as is practicable, creating community schisms where a group splits off and creates it's own filter bubble which I consider to be outright dangerous (A threat to safety, if you will). For this reason, but also for its own sake, I argue for making efforts to avoid tyrannies of the majority. Because of these priorities, I usually present myself as a free speech proponent since I always seem to be saying people shouldn't be banned or suppressed, but in reality I support broad and sweeping and even automated censorship.

I'm not quite in that rough shape but I have several medical conditions and for years I just stared at summaries and "Pay just $40 to read this article" and the article would be a freshman level essay about the sociological implications of illness. Now that sci-hub exists medicine is accessible.

Anybody who wants to take it down is declaring war on the sick and disabled. Shut down Elsevier instead because they're an organization of long corrupt middlemen.

Yes, and?

You think it's worse to interpret a word literally if that literal definition is broad, than it is to interpret a word in a way that makes the other person seem delusional and nonsensical? In the context of a specific conversation, its more reasonable to interpret somebodies words in a way that makes their words make sense, than in a way that makes them sound delusional.

So Trump got kicked off twitter, and people can get kicked off various platforms for saying extreme things, but deplatforming does not exist because you agree with the reasons why those people got kicked off, and therefore other people are delusional and living in fantasies, and you have an opinion on if this concept which does not exist causes violence.

First definition I found https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deplatform (transitive, formal) deplatform 1: To prevent someone from utilizing a platform to express their opinion.

I believe you're bias towards centrism and the belief that the truth is somewhere in the middle, the cited people are wrong, and their perception of this site having a socialist lean is precisely what demonstrates their own bias. Believing that other people disagree with me proves we must both be wrong is ridiculous, you can in fact be wrong along with the people you quoted, rather than the sole voice of reason in an irrational site.

I made that statement because I saw the thread the other day about the same topic and all the top posts were people who think any store owner should have a right to remove problematic references to medical drugs. Including many posts about how the person in question should just give in without protest. Because of strong tyranny of the majority effects intrinsic to systems like Hacker News, once an update put the view that the person should "just give in" in a bad light, the slim majority of posters stopped posting and the slim minority of posters who were critical of apple thereafter posted with confidence. The reason you see so many people with differing views is that the community actually has a great diversity in its views, but still has slight biases, which are amplified by the site format, not the fact that everybody who notices these slight biases are bias themselves.

My favourite part of psychiatry is that diagnosis never shrinks, it only grows, and this makes people healthier and the increase in mental illness is just us "discovering" that people were mentally ill all along.

The field is an endless dynamo of medicalization because they serve as a gatekeeper to funding, and if you throw enough money at anybody start to feel better, which creates an incentive for more and more to get diagnosed. For a broad swathe of new people to be diagnosed as mentally ill does not require biological evidence, or even proof that the classification improves patient outcomes, it just requires abusing the criteria used in broad all-encompassing intrinsically political typologies (Like DSM-V) until you can hammer most of the population into the mentally ill box. The diagnosis's aren't falsifiable and in multiple cases attempts to falsify a diagnosis proves the diagnosis.

There are also various absurdities with this status quo. The literal meaning of what a mental illness actually is in in flux and has literally changed multiple time over an older adults lifetime. If you meet 5 criteria you're healthy and get no assistance, if you meet 6 criteria you're definitely disabled. A bad reaction to an environment causing issues, the classic example being the child fidgeting after sitting in a desk for 8 hours being diagnosed with ADHD, leads to the child being blamed instead of the environment.

I don't think psychiatrists have no role in society I am just heavily sceptical that they're actually scientists, they seem like people using applied science like engineers.

It's Hacker News do you expect people to not compulsively bend the knee when a corporation is discussed?