cutitout

If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.

If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.

I use FreeFileSync to synchronize my Thunderbird and Firefox Profiles, KeepassXC files, web server stuff etc. I also prefer portable applications that keep their preferences in their own folders. So I also don't mind if a machine randomly dies, but I still have all my stuff locally, plus backups, and what I upload is always a copy. Other than stuff that lives on chat servers or social media, of course, Soundcloud and YouTube playlists -- but that stuff, but that stuff will go away sooner than the files I have locally. Stuff that lives elsewhere is just a way to interact with others and show them things, not the keeper of anything that matters to me.

The downside is that I can't just change machines nilly-willy, I need to sync first, at least if things overlap. For example, I can use one Firefox profile on one machine, another on a second machine, and use Thunderbird on a third, but I can't use the same profile on several machines without getting a merge conflict, so to speak. That was confusing and annoying for like a week, since then it's not been a problem, and by now I'm so pampered by it, I simply avoid stuff that doesn't play nicely with my workflow. Smartphone apps, for example, or programs that doesn't allow me to configure the paths it uses, and so on.

Since I use applications and work on data, the OS doesn't that matter much. I mind changing Windows from the ass-backwards defaults much less than sticking with the defaults, and I do that as I go along, i.e. when I use a feature or get annoyed by the default, I just change it. That doesn't require any thought and very little time, so the configuration I would have to repeat on a new system isn't something I consider valuable, I'm pretty sure it takes much less time in total than working with the default config, in the long run. If I had to do it more often than every once in a blue moon, I'd find ways to automate it.

I am just not interested in something that could go away based on the decision of some pointy-haired boss, which is tends to be inferior software in the first place, anyway. Like, compare Directory Opus with Windows Explorer, one is a serious application, the other is a toy that constantly gets in your way.

You haven't addressed a single point. Being an expert should help a person to make arguments, and sometimes does, but it's not an argument in and of itself.

"Making the world a better place" is terribly generic, and not impressive in context of stubbornly refusing to even acknowledge, much less warn users about, an issue that puts actual lives in danger. If they ignored her for so long, what was the excuse before she dared to say "asshole" to adults who dabble with something as serious as this?

By presenting the issue the way she did, people moved the conversation away from the issue

By HER doing A, OTHERS did B? That doesn't even parse as English, and betrays doublethink.

If it's an issue in any app that can lead to privacy leaks, it's a showstopper issue for something like Signal. It being an issue with any app is even more reason to tell people about it, not less.

But if a person has something important to say, calling people that don't know about the issue assholes is not a great way to go about it.

I don't mind it at all. If someone uses "being called asshole" as a reason to not even inform anyone, they would have found another excuse. Some people simply register it as strong language and otherwise focus on the content. At any rate, it's very easy to judge what someone says in frustration when you yourself don't even suffer from the situation and/or don't care about those who do.

But it's not like everyone tries to annoy other, it's more an issue of ignorance.

So she shed light on that, and instead of talking about the important bit, people think it's super important to teach a random person to not be rude, ever? That's what we're focusing on?

calls them assholes that don’t care about what happens outside of western society

That's hardly her main point:

For Chinese who are used to a specific IME- like Sogou, trying to type on something else is a tiny bit like a QWERTY user suddenly faced with Dvorak- we can make it work, but it's slow enough day to day that 50/50 they just install Sogou because what's the big deal right?

The Signal "fix" is "Incognito Mode" aka for the app to say "Pretty please don't read everything I type" to the virtual keyboard and count on Google/random app makers to listen to the flag, and not be under court order to do otherwise.

Needless to say, Sogou/Baidu dos not respect the IME_FLAG_NO_PERSONALIZED_LEARNING flag. So basically all hardware here is self-compromised 5 minutes out of the box.

so unless journalists tell them otherwise, which they have not been doing- users will install Sogou.

This is important.

I responded to someone who didn't even attempt to make the case how all users of Parler are "violent extremists", they just pulled out that broad brush to justify a transgression. That's intellectually so dishonest I see no functional difference between that and what one would criticize extremists for, and I don't see a meaningful difference between "not minding" a breach of someone's rights and committing it, so that's the violent bit.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

But if you don't mind their use of "violent extremists" apropos nothing, no, I don't particularly "care to" explain myself to you for using the same phrase in response to them -- I just do it because I can. You could simply remove or ignore my re-using that phrase and my point would stand unchanged. Address the core of an argument, don't just play "gotcha" while ignoring the context and the woods for the trees.

Godwin's law just says that as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of a nazi comparison approaches 1. It says nothing about that even being a problem, much less losing the argument. Even better: as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of any comparison, any string of words, any combination of letters, "approaches 1". Something you can say about anything you might as well say about nothing.

People heard the meme a lot, so they think it has weight without actually having thought about it. Encouraging people to reveal this about themselves, with pride no less, is the singular useful property GL has.

I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.

Then I fail to have any sympathy and solidarity with you. You're just another violent extremist in my eyes, and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend by a long shot.

I think one man's flaw might be another man's feature in this case:

The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.

    <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>

It's amazing to see this downvoted within a minute of you posting it, probably by someone not even aware they are only underlining your point.

Of course it's concerning, but it's also concerning how quick people are to dehumanize and call for censorship, putting a lot of energy into discussing endlessly just how evil or stupid or unreachable those other people are, rather than root causes [0]. The mainstream is whipping itself into hysteria just as much as QAnon does, and it really does seem like circus all around. Just for some perspective:

The capitol has been the site of multiple bombings, shootings, assassination attempts, and stormings for centuries. Pretending its an unbespoiled sacred Church which has never been penetrated so vulgarly is just ahistorical.

-- https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/kt0xpm/in_1954_4...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiCeqySVhCE&t=20m55s

edit: clicking a button doesn't constitute an argument. You can only ignore Chomsky, neither tie his shoelaces or address his points. Shame on you.

Responsibility is not a chain

No, but events are. The question of how to use a tool arises from the existence of the tool.

otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold

You're still just responsible for your own acts, and they for theirs. If you were being a dick to them needlessly, that's your fault, and if it tipped them over the edge, it's natural to feel bad. Not fully responsible, but also not as if you had zero to do with it.

Just like when someone gets bullied and commits suicide, you don't just look at that act of suicide and talk about who had the most agency and what one should focus on.

You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers.

There is no need to "focus attention", and holding one party responsible for their actions is orthogonal to holding other parties responsible for theirs. This is a tech forum, Weizenbaum was one of the greats when it comes to writing about technology and morality, and I dare say it is the responsibility of technologists to be familiar with his body of work.

And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.

That's why I don't, and never hinted at doing so, and even clearly stated the opposite when I said "All links in the chain are responsible for what they do".

All links in the chain are responsible for what they do, there is no single packet of "blame" that gets to reside with any single party, and denying one's responsibility will not make it go away.

It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.

But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.

If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

from the judgement of the International Military Tribunal for Germany, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judnazi.asp#common

Haters also downvote, making the upvotes effectively invisible.

Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm

He said that 1958, in an interview with Mike Wallace. Since then the gap between rich and poor (and between rich and mega-rich) kept exploding, media have been consolidated further, people have been uprooted even more, have been shit on and lied to even more, and have even less stakes in the outcome. Just doing more of the same will never lead to different results, yet by now many use current the state of things to argue for exactly that.

Well, the article speaks of "Deutsche Bank strategists" and "experts", and it is Deutsche Bank Research that made the suggestion. Digging further, the person who made the suggestion is a "Macro Strategist" doing "Macro Research", certainly not just a junior.

https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD000000000051...

there are countless articles to be found about this if you just look for anything like "working from home tax deutsche bank", for example:

https://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-bank-proposal-to-levy-income-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/deutsche-bank-proposes-a-5pe...

I'm very happy to see that the German tax break is basically the opposite of what Deutsche Bank Research suggested, namely extra taxes for people who WFH, because they "contribute less public transport and the economy", and should "pay a tax for that privilege". They suggested the employer pay it, but still.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/...

I love how the circuit diagrams were part of the manuals. Admittedly, an Amiga 500 was vastly less complex than a modern computer, but still: what today companies like Apple want to keep under wraps, so not everybody can just repair anything easily, everyone got whether they wanted/needed it or not.

Amiga nostalgia isn't just nostalgia, the Amiga was great. From age 10 to 14 most of my life revolved around my Amiga 500 and then Amiga 4000, and while it was great then, too, I feel doubly blessed in hindsight, considering what tech has become and where it's heading, to have been allowed to catch a brief glimpse of what could have been. And the music. All that music.

Playing around with it made me realize just how much I miss those good old derpy days, and how many great times I had on myspace and then mostly forgot about. It made me a bit emotional even. Thank you!

I don't have that much time atm, but I can't wait to get into the CSS and whatnot <3

Or as Roland's teacher Cort put it:

"Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing."

- Stephen King, "The Drawing of the Three"

Now that is an outlook I can get behind much easier than what many turn it into.

Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.

-- Meister Eckhart

Free, conditioned on believing it -- if you get called and pulled in the first place, which isn't true for most. They just get preached the Gospel, so people can say "hah, now it's your fault for not believing it".

Image you owe someone else money. An anonymous stranger pays your debt. Why would you have to acknowledge that, for that someone else to receive said payment?

God in the form of Jesus paid your debts you have with God, but unless you believe that, God won't recognize that, will still kill you at best, torture you forever at worst, depending on who you ask. You can call that love or salvation, but I won't.

10 minutes in and it's still mostly about Silicon Valley and private companies, as announced as the main subject by Greenwald in the beginning of the video.

One man's edge case is another man's line in the sand.

99% of the time it’s some dude who didn’t check the date on the thread and posts “omg me too!” on an 8 year old post.

Comments could be marked by mods (or voted on) to not bump a thread, making it a minor occasional annoyance rather than a real problem.

I also think a technical reason due to the scale of reddit

Reddit also just stopped working on UI (other than to make it worse) a long time ago. Why not have an additional view to "new", "top" etc. that sorts threads as if new comments bumped them?

That one should only talk about what a lot of other people currently want to talk about, or only for a certain amount of time, is really a dead end to me.