catiopatio

Poe’s law strikes again. I legit cannot determine whether your comment is satire or genuine.

Your first false equivalence arises out of trivializing the qualitative differences in freedom between China and the USA/EU, implicitly framing the limitations in China as comparable to those in democratic societies.

This is misleading given the severe restrictions on human rights, freedom of speech, and rule of law in an authoritarian regime like China.

Your second false equivalence is in your equating of limited, private content moderation by a social network with systemic human rights abuses by government.

Do you get paid by the word, by the post, or are you actually this nuts and do this for free?

It’s possible to simultaneously drive economic development, lift a populace out of poverty, and not construct an authoritarian regime.

See also: Western Democracy.

Remind me again which government was responsible for the deadliest famine in human history?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/

Dong Jianbiao, the father of Dong Yaoqiong, who authorities disappeared for splashing ink on a poster of President Xi Jinping in 2018, died in a prison in Hunan province.

The new Measures on the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services came into effect in March, prohibiting individuals or groups from teaching or otherwise propagating religion online without official approval. A widely used Catholic app, CathAssist, shut down in August because it was unable to obtain a license.

Authorities in Jilin province forcibly disappeared human rights lawyer Tang Jitian.

A court in Shandong province held secret trials of prominent legal scholar Xu Zhiyong and human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi for “subversion.” Their verdicts were unknown at time of writing. The men were detained in 2020 and 2019 respectively after organizing a small gathering to discuss human rights and democracy issues.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/china

You have conspicuously avoided addressing the specific, systemic human rights abuses unique to China.

Instead, your post employs a series of rhetorical tactics aimed at stifling constructive dialogue:

First, you assert a false equivalency between China and the USA/EU by trivializing the qualitative difference in freedom levels, thereby attempting to normalize authoritarianism.

Second, you use a slippery slope argument about social media moderation to suggest that all limitations on freedom are essentially the same — equating limited, private content moderation with systemic human rights abuses by government.

Third, you engage in an ad hominem attack by accusing me of being influenced by propaganda without providing substantive counter-arguments.

Were I to adopt your approach, I could easily make similar sweeping ad hominem accusations based on your behavior here.

In another comment, you claimed that “Black Lives Matter leaders … died in mysterious accidents and car fires.”

This ventures firmly into the realm of conspiracy theory.

Do you feel you are presenting objective facts, as opposed to participating in disinformation or propaganda?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37722962

I don’t believe you’re engaging in good faith; you are employing tactics meant to stifle discourse:

1. False Equivalence: Suggesting that economic progress and freedom of speech are interchangeable or mutually exclusive is intentionally misleading.

2. Relativism: By stating there's "no objective way" to compare, you are deflecting any form of critical evaluation.

3. Unfalsifiability: Your assertion that any evaluation is "inherently biased" is an unfalsifiable claim meant to immunize your argument from critique.

Human rights and human prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive.

On top of which, they did such a terrible job of lifting people out of poverty, they unnecessarily killed tens of millions in the deadliest famine in human history:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/

By all human rights measures, it is worse. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion … you name it.

Feel free to read the yearly reports from the HRW:

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/china

Random selection from the report:

In May, a court in Hainan province sentenced former journalist Luo Changping to seven months in prison for a Weibo post that questioned China’s justification for its involvement in the Korean War.

Details on his case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Changping#Arrest

Sanya Ji'an Police Bureau summoned Luo for investigation into his "illegal remarks" suspected of "insulting heroes and martyrs".

Xinjiang internment camps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

Censorship in China: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China

Four Cardinal Principles (enshrined in the constitution): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Cardinal_Principles

Open Constitution Initiative (shut down by the government): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative

The issues are plain, endemic, and well-documented. It is not propaganda.

For all the faults of western democracies, the Chinese Communist Party is far worse. That’s not anti-China propaganda.

You comment on this issue a surprising amount, and clearly feel strongly about the US’ views on China. I’d be curious as to exactly how you feel China is being judged unfairly.

It’s very rare that bicycle is going to mechanically fail and send you flying.

Short of the time I was hit by a car, I’ve never had a bicycling emergency — road or mountain — that I wasn’t able to walk away from through some combination of hoping obstacles and/or putting the bike down in a controlled side-skid.

The design, maintenance, and alteration of parachute equipment is regulated by the FAA; equipment must be approved under the FAA’s technical standards, and anyone packing a parachute must be an FAA-licensed rigger.

AFAIK there are no such standards (mandatory or voluntary) applied to Onewheel’s devices.

They could have voluntarily applied hardware and software standards from other safety fields (e.g. automotive engineering), but they apparently chose not to.

As the peer commenter said: move fast and break bones.

It’s very likely that the hardware and/or firmware was not designed to meet a quality standard appropriate for the associated customer risks.

As someone who has been saved from more serious injury by a helmet more than once … that’s flat-earth levels of delusion.

Why do you take umbrage with a such a relevant fact being disclosed?

Helmets save lives, and isn’t it literally their job to inform us of such facts?

I didn’t agree to terms that require I provide them with plaintext traffic to analyze.

SNI monitoring is a reasonable compromise, and I think a healthy one

No, it’s not.

ISPs have no right to know who I am speaking to or why.

You’re right, I see that as embarrassingly trivial. This whole thread is inane — if using a simple API is “amazing engineering”, what do you call the actual amazing engineering you’re holding in your hand right now?

I have nothing against Flighty — this has nothing to do with Flighty. Background notifications are trivial and all apps can and should be using them to solve this type of problem. It’s detrimental to have folks mistakenly operating under the belief that this is complex, unusual, or difficult.

Sure, the payload size is limited, but it’s not impossibly small, and custom keys with arbitrary payload are explicitly and obviously documented as supported.

Overly-effusive praise doesn’t do anyone any favors.

I have not missed the point.

Background notifications can and do carry arbitrary application data, and are used to update the application state in the background.

This is their intended purpose, it’s what they’re documented to do, it’s how Apple intends them to be used, and it’s common application behavior.

This is literally a plainly documented feature of the platform. It’s not clever or unique or unusual — it’s a simple feature that Apple specifically documents.

I cannot even begin to fathom why people are confused about this, and it’s truly mind-boggling that this has required a thread at all.

Slack/Discord/Teams are non-native applications that do not leverage the platform’s support for updating application state via notifications. That does not mean the use of background notifications is unusual or rare. It is not.

A mobile webapp is still a webapp, and “I cannot share” does not mean “I do not have”.

You’re the one with an extraordinary claim here — that applications aren’t using such a basic, documented, widespread feature.

It’s patently silly and I have no idea why you’re so self-assured in your ignorance.

Why?

Do you genuinely believe it’s uncommon for applications to leverage this useful, trivial, long-standing platform API for its intended and explicitly documented purpose?

I can’t imagine why you’d believe that, but another commenter already provided the requested single example up-thread.

Slack/Discord/Teams? Those are desktop web applications hosted via Electron. Failing to leverage basic platform functionality is practically their telos.

It’s a trivial, documented, supported, long-standing API for a common use-case. It is widely used, as documented, for its intended purpose.

I cannot share information about specific applications.

Tons of apps do that. It’s a built-in, supported use-case!

It’s also the trivial, obvious approach to anyone who asks the question “how can I push data to the application when it’s not running.”

A cognitive filter that misrepresents reality is toxic.

I build AI/ML systems.

What’s the relevance?

Push notifications aren’t some odd “alternative pipe” and conveying data via push notifications is a known and supported use-case.

amazing engineering

Background updates are a built-in, supported, documented feature, widely employed by applications on the platform, and accessible to anyone that reads the two pages of documentation required to use them:

“Pushing background updates to your App — Deliver notifications that wake your app and update it in the background.”

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

edited for politeness

Linux is doing more than “just fine” and is in no way similar to OpenSSL.

This individual wasn’t robbed of the opportunity for a contribution. He received credit for his contribution via a reported-by flag. It’s a tiny patch — all the work was in identifying the bug, which is what he received credit for.

He did something valuable, and has every right to write it up, but clearly has limited understanding of the development process he’s participating in. It was wildly inappropriate of him to of put anyone on blast in response to this.

As a long-time OSS contributor and an active maintainer on a different OSS operating system, I can definitively state that the answer is: yes, it’s absolutely limiting.

They received a reported-by credit, which was more than sufficient — especially on a tiny patch that got rewritten.

The important work was identifying and reporting the issue, and they got credit for that.

By turning around and writing an angry blog post, they turned a non-issue into some seriously unpleasant drama. Nobody is going to particularly want to deal with them again.