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I’ve received an update from our experts stating that you need to enable ads for your video. Once you enable, your video will be available in the USA.

This is an actual quotation from Youtube support, unless you're suggesting that the Blender Foundation is lying. If what an employee of Youtube says about Youtube while representing Youtube can't be taken as evidence of Youtube policy, what can?

AI applications we will not pursue

Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.

They already failed.

There's two ways of looking at it. One is with a sense of personal accountability. "If you use Facebook, then the first thing you should do is stop." A humorous example can be found here: http://observer.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-...

Since you've done that, you have several options to change other people. You can evangelize. You can promote or design alternatives. GNU Social has been extremely successful. Running an instance would be an easy and educational way to help. You could write libraries for the newly specified social web protocols.

The important thing to remember is that it's okay to fail. It's better to be a hypocrite than apathetic.

People are certainly talking about excessive social media use whether FB likes it or not.

The goal of propaganda is not to make people think a certain way; it's to get people to act a certain way. Entertainment is centered around consumption, not interaction. If I can get people who dislike something to read entertaining articles about how it's bad instead of going out and protesting or canceling accounts, then I've successfully suppressed dissent.

The solution to Facebook was already spelled out in the article. There just wasn't a call to action.

Facebook’s revenue, for example, is almost entirely a function of the number of minutes the average user spends per week engaging with the service. Reducing this by even 5 to 10% — by tamping down or eliminating some of Facebook’s most addictive features — would have a disastrous impact on the quarterly earnings of this $500 billion company.

Just stop using it and it will die. I don't. Why can't you?

Who cares? Even if she is a fraud, the result of pointing this out is only going to give her more support and attention.

The only reason young or female developers get weird media attention is because the same companies who abuse visas and get convicted of wage fixing are trying to get more cheap labor. They pour money and volunteers into charities and media; offers dwindle.

This isn't news, is it? Google hates decentralization. Visa and money transfer restrictions force them to improve the areas they're based out of. Open communication makes it harder for them to control public opinion. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, coauthored a book, The New Digital Age, about how in the future there won't be any border restrictions and 'fake news' will be censored away. Here, I have quotes!

More effective communication across borders and languages will build trust and create opportunities for hardworking and talented individuals around the world. Bureaucratic obstacles that prevent this level of decentralized operation today, like visa restrictions and regulations around money transfers, will become either irrelevant or be circumvented as digital solutions are discovered.

Imagine all of your accounts -- Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+, Netflix, New York Times subscription -- linked to an "official profile." Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results.

People who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.

Oh, and if any of you disagree with them, don't worry. They made a point of saying they can't be held responsible, and that boycotting their products or refusing to work for them will hurt you more than them.

It is, after all, much easier to blame a single product or company for a particularly evil application of technology than to acknowledge the limitations of personal responsibility.

Certain subsections of the technology industry that receive particularly negative attention will have trouble recruiting engineers or attracting users to and monetizing their products, despite the fact that such atrophying will not solve the problem (and will only hurt the community of users in the end, by denying them the full benefits of innovation.)

Don't be evil. Don't be Google.

Sublime Text 3.0 9 years ago

But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it.

I don't believe that. The people who snub Vim and Emacs, but are willing to sink time into learning new editors, new languages, and new frameworks have no excuse. If they were less susceptible to marketing, then they'd be able to learn something old every once in a while.

I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.

People have been attempting this for years with little success. The only projects I know of that have traction are Spacemacs and Neovim. The former is just an Emacs distribution and the latter is backwards compatible with Vim.

Sublime Text 3.0 9 years ago

You can make your Emacs setup minimalistic by hiding the toolbar and scrollbar. This blog post gives a pretty good starting setup. https://emacs-doctor.com/emacs-strip-tease.html

C-x C-f opens files, but will also open a file explorer if the path is a directory. The 'q' key will immediately close the file explorer. I'm not sure about git interaction. I usually just use the Emacs shell to enter git commands.

Price isn't the only issue; speed has to be considered as well. If you have a program, and it only uses a small amount of memory, it'll fit into the cache and run fast. If you have a program that uses many times more memory than the cache can hold, it'll run slow. No matter how cheap RAM is, the cache is still going to be fixed to a small size.

I fail to see how political correctness is both a nebulous concept and a dogmatic belief system at the same time.

I didn't say political correctness was a nebulous concept, I said it was a nebulous term. The issue isn't vague concepts; the issue is that it's hard to tell what concept we are talking about. Lots of words have to be defined. If you're reading something about art you better hope there's a definition for the term "art" toward the front. The same is true for terms like "political correctness", "liberal", "conservative", and "culture". Defining vague terms before using them is very common. This should not be so hard to understand. For an extreme case, look at Guy Steele's speech, "Growing a Language".[0] He defines every word longer than a certain length.

Along the same lines, the idea that their is some sort of over-arching "liberal elite" belief system that colleges slavishly adhere to is laughable, or it would be, if folks like the author of this piece didn't take it serious. While professors in any given discipline often share a number of "beliefs", colloquially known as "facts", if you get a few of them together in a casual setting, they'll more often than not take to arguing about the finer points of their field. In fact, this sort of behavior is often encouraged, in both casual and professional settings. That's why grad students write and defend a thesis. I also think that accusing professors and students of using political correctness as a tool to further their own aims and to preserve their entrenched power is assuming quite a lot about the actions and motivations of a huge swath of people.

Rather than argue with my summary of someone else's writings and your own second hand perception of him, why don't you read his work and argue against his own points? Did it occur to you that evidence and responses to your very replies might be inside the text or do you just not care to find them?

Actually, don't even bother. I've been telling you to read the article since my first post and you obviously still haven't. There is no worth while discussion happening here. Turn off the computer. Read a book. Practice listening to someone else for a few hundred pages. Then maybe you can handle ten.

[0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

If the author didn't want to talk about the banh mi thing, why even mention it? It is relevant to the discussion after all, since the portrayal of such instances in the media have had a strong influence on the way political correctness is currently defined and understood.

The banh mi thing was one example out of a dozen paragraphs of examples. It is relevant, but focusing solely on it is missing the forest for the trees. It's cherry picking.

I'd also like to point out that the definition of political correctness, as it's used colloquially, doesn't change just because you say it does. I also don't think that using the term political correctness in the sense that practically everyone understands it constitutes a deliberate misconstrual. Also, to the authors point, I don't think the majority of commenters on the right (when did this become a discussion of partisan politics again?) are talking about "the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets" when they rail against political correctness. More often it seems they are railing against the perceived suppression of their unwelcome beliefs and ideas. Hence my comment to the effect of "don't dish it out if you can't take it."

The term "political correctness" is nebulous. He defined the term because he wanted to clarify what he was talking about. If you read what he wrote using different definitions than he gave, then you're not really being fair to him. You have to accept some premises to understand what he's saying. But if he was defending one definition and claiming to use another, you could call him out on it. For instance, if he was defending your colloquial definition, but pretending to use his definition, then you could say he's being disingenuous, but that doesn't seem to be what you're arguing and I don't think he's mixing definitions either.

As for the second passage you copy/pasted, I don't see how that disagrees with what I said.

He thinks current methods do more damage than aid. He also thinks they're motivated by selfishness. When you read my response to your next point you'll have a better understanding of why he thinks this.

Also, since you seem to have read the article more thoroughly than I, what do you make of the authors closing statement, where he says,

His article is about two religions. The first religion is the political correctness religion. The second religion is meritocracy. He attempts to relate the two. He says that the elite use the religion of meritocracy as an excuse to further their own gain and political correctness as a religion to place themselves outside of their own system. Professors and college students benefit from systematic bias the most, but they use political correctness to feel morally superior by focusing on problems that don't threaten their life style. It's easy to take responsibility for bias. It's hard to take responsibility for poverty.

In either case, "political correctness" is only an exchange of tokens of respect. A transaction of political capital. "If you speak in a culturally respectful manner then I'll listen to you. Otherwise, I won't."

You're using a different definition of political correctness than used in the article. It's very easy to make something sound bad if you redefine it.

When you said, "There appears to be a alchemical transformation that results in people's minds, where "<Obnoxious Statement X>" on its own is obnoxious, but "I know it's politically incorrect to say so, but <Obnoxious Statement X>!" makes you a Free Speech Martyr and a real deep thinker.", you were implying that free speech shouldn't protect obnoxious ideas, but that's wrong. Free speech exists specifically to protect unpopular ideas.

Wow, a snarky straw man based off of the first sentence in the article. Then you make points that the author specifically refuted in the article without discussing what he wrote. It's like you tried to read it and gave up so you could regurgitate your opinion.

You: The situation online or in a college is a bit different, but at the end of the day I would consider it similar to talking to a stranger at a bar; if you talk some shit, expect to get shit talked. If you have a problem with that, you can go crying to the bouncer, but if they are at all good at their job, they will either nod and ignore you, or kick you out if you are out of line.

Him: A clarification, before I continue (since deliberate misconstrual is itself a tactic of the phenomenon in question). By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.

See? He made a point of defining political correctness in the second(!) paragraph, but it didn't stop you from arguing with your own definition. He even anticipated you would use a different definition.

You: I realize the analogy is a bit crude, but as other commenters have pointed out, most of these so called "pc police" are just trying to correct centuries of systemic racism, sexism, etc. by having a reasonable discussion. If they are a bit shrill sometimes, just be thankful that they aren't using the same tactics that were once used to keep them from speaking out.

Him: Let me be clear. I recognize that both the culture of political correctness and the recent forms of campus agitation are responding to enormous, intractable national problems. There is systemic racism and individual bigotry in the United States, and colleges are not immune from either. There is systemic sexism and sexual assault in society at large, and campuses are no exception. The call for safe spaces and trigger warnings, the desire to eliminate micro-aggressions, the demand for the removal of offensive symbols and the suppression of offensive language: however foolish some of these might be as policy prescriptions (especially the first two), however absurd as they work themselves out on the ground, all originate in deeply legitimate concerns.

See? He made a point to answer people that think political correctness is just fighting systematic bias, but you just zoomed right past it. He criticizes the methods used to fight systematic bias, not fighting systematic bias itself.

How can any conversation on serious topics be worth having if people refuse to listen and respond? Nothing good can come of dumping the same preconceptions into the other persons eyes and ears.

It inevitably comes down to a choice between institutionalized discrimination and latent discrimination.

You could weigh it based on which drives more talent away, but I don't care if Silicon Valley can keep wages low for another five years. I care more about individual choices.

We can assume our behavior is wrong for reasons we can't understand and try to correct for effects we can't measure, but I see this as missing the point. The entire reason discriminating by sex or race is bad is because it creates unnecessary suffering. The bigot lets his emotions and gut feelings drive his decisions and the result is that all parties suffer. If racism is fueled by subjective feelings choking out objective truths, then why would we ignore our own judgement based on how we feel about ourselves? We should try to make better decisions, not give up on making good ones.

One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea...

By accept, you mean assume, and assuming is what Oxitendwe was warning against.

I did not know about the open source definition. Is that just a guide line or does it carry some weight?

It carries the weight of the names of the people who support it. Take a look at who is involved in it. Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, is a co-founder for the OSI.

Also, is it discrimination if I give users a choice? You can use my software whoever you are, you just have to disagree with racism.

Rephrasing it doesn't change anything.

Though it seemed for a period that Reddit/Facebook ended the constant migration, the cool kids are once more on the lookout for a new coffee house as it has become clear the current platforms have many intolerable shortfallings.

Yeah, I guess there were people stupid enough to think Myspace was forever too, but that's not your entire demographic! I bet all the cool kids can't wait to switch over to the newest social media platform. Oh wait, all the cool kids are still on IRC, email, and personal websites.

The pre-alpha version is to be released sometime this month when we can all see how this works in practice, but from Alisie’s description, the platform is a mixed combination of Medium, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all in one.

Medium, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebok all in one?! Sounds legit.

Combined with the quadratic voting mechanism we mentioned earlier, the entire project becomes very interesting.

Yeah, I always felt like using the same voting system as bees would improve my social media experience. Super interesting.

The people who use Reddit, Facebook, and Hacker News(!) aren't desperately looking for an escape. They don't care. They have and have had plenty of places to switch to. They only care enough to get angry and then do nothing. That's what social media is. Getting mad about things and then doing nothing. If you actually care, do something besides up vote an angry post.

Keep a Changelog 10 years ago

The age of animated gif files is over. You want something that creates webm videos, like VLC or ActivePresenter.

Engineering manager at Google posts story where whistle blowers that target Google are called anti-Google researchers. The original article references another article that calls the group a shadowy project that's attacking Google. By the way, when's Google finishing the Wedding Crashers trilogy? I need to see how great moving to California is again.