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dave2000

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Well, your argument was that trump was a right wing phenomenon caused by "left wing media shaping" but there IS no left wing media in the US as far as I can tell. The right wing/elite serving media like to pretend there is to drag the public/debate further to the right. Movements like trump are people knowing they're getting screwed but having the elite (people like Trump) blame mexicans or muslims (people with no money or power) or whoever rather than the banks, corporations and government itself (who have all the money and power). It doesn't make any difference which story trends on facebook or which youtube video gets pulled. If people wanted to learn about where the power is and how and why people who have generally good intentions are tricked into voting for people like trump then they'd be watching chomsky videos/interviews which are never pulled. By your logic chomsky would do well to get them taken down so that people try and discover what they're missing. But it doesn't work that way.

From reading that, the only criticism that seems sane and fair is that they should have chosen a different string to "trending"; "recommended" perhaps, or "curated". My expectations that i'm going to receive a much-needed education in some topic from occasionally clicking on the "trending" link on facebook aren't especially high; perhaps yours are a little misplaced if present?

Also, I note that that article states that other "curators" denied such a bias exists. Facebook have denied such activities. Ok, being sceptical, they would say that. But it could be bullshit spewed by an ex-exmployee So, where's the study? The data? How do we show whether or not there is a bias, assuming you care enough to investigate? It's just more conspiracy theories and "typing" isn't it.

I'm not confusing the concepts. And I'm not stopping you from saying what you want. I don't see the point though. There's no content there.

"This company is legally allowed to deny random user #24232's attempts to get us to stream video #198284, but I don't agree with that; I think they should be allowed to upload it". Well, so what? Who cares?

If you felt that strongly about it - not just "i'm going to type a really angry comment about it" strongly but "actually do something about it" strongly then you'd be hosting content yourself. Or at the very least trying to show why it's so important that this particular company should be hosting it. Or you could find another company which would host it and tell people they should be using that site instead. A lot of the complaints I read about freedom and censorship just seems like empty posturing about what companies should or shouldn't do. It's just lazy. These companies only do it at all to make money. Your statements about whether a company should or shouldn't host something would be better phrased as "this company should be hosting this video because it will make them more money". Of course, with a lot of this content the opposite is likely true; complaints from advertisers, users etc will cost them more money (and hassle) than any money they'd make from the average video. It's time to stop thinking of facebook, youtube etc as being a social media version of the First Amendment and more like a conservative pension fund.

If by "extremist content" you mean religious fanatics beheading people, or calling people to arms, or giving tips on producing bombs or whatever, then you are entitled to treat this as "unpopular ideas" which "need defending in a free society" or whatever, but don't be surprised if sane, rational people take a somewhat different view and decide they don't want to spread hatred, nor leave themselves open to lawsuits for the honour of hosting this content for free. All companies like to talk about fostering freedom or whatever, but as organisations which exist to make profit it's partly because censorship costs them money, and also the more content they have, the more of a surface they have to make money from. They don't really give a shit about you or your freedom, and there's precious little internal conflict about whether to host this months crop of terrorist atrocities.

They need broad rules because whatever rule you come up with, some clown is going to try and get around it. Or just post something obviously against the spirit of the rules then argue about it. Users don't have a stake in Facebook, YouTube etc, but the companies running them do. They'd probably all prefer to just have "don't be a dick" but we live in a world full of pedants and lawyers and professional irritants so by having something a little more concrete it preempts a lot of rather tedious complaints.

If you're a rebel prophet with something exciting to say then no-ones stopping you paying a small amount of money for a domain name and hosting and away you go. If you can't do that then I'd agree there's censorship and there's a problem. Other than that, you should have absolutely no expectation that other people are going to do the heavy lifting for you, whether that's paying for your hosting/bandwidth, or taking the heat when users, advertisers etc complain about your content.

"For example, the error rates for image recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing have collapsed to close to human rates, at least on some measurements."

I've always laughed at how poor speech recognition is. I know it's probably a hard problem, and I know that sometimes you can transcribe a whole sentence without error. But how long will it be until it will just work; I'll be able to just speak normally, in English, and have it transcribe without error? Microsoft put up a page recently with a demo and prices, but it was a lot worse than the last one I tried.

Pretty much any post 1980's Jazz. You can start off comparing Miles Davis's Amandla with anything he was doing in the '60s or '70s (Live Evil, On the Corner, Cellar Door Sessions etc). Herbie Hancock is another one who did stuff both pre and post 1980.

Amandla still has some great tracks, and there's some great post 1980s Jazz out there. But it always sounds like too much attention has been paid to how much reverb there is, how much echo on the drums, and to limit how much the guitar -if present- deviates from permitted parameters. Jazz from the '50s to '70s doesn't have these problems, and a lot of it was extremely well recorded, compared with all the dreadful sounding recordings of most rock from the '60s and '70s.

It's a bit like Jazz (and to a lessor extent most other forms of music) from before the 1980's, where they started that horrific over-production which made it sound plasticy and homogenous.

A brief update 10 years ago

Are you talking to the person who wrote about helping soldiers, or is that not political, and it's just commenting on helping soldiers which is out of line? Because that seems a little one-sided and naive.

A brief update 10 years ago

You don't need to spend more than most of the rest of the planet on the military to defend an area of land that's a tiny proportion of the world's surface. Are you sure you've been paying attention to US foreign policy over the last hundred years?

The biggest one being a C-centric view of programming that has cost the world untold billions of dollars when dealing with untrusted data.

I'm not sure it cost anyone anything. I mean, a lot of the OSes were/are written in it, so if you were going to go down that path you'd have to not totally forget to add a rather large benefit in the credit side. It's hard to imagine but programming wasn't always about compensating for not quite understanding how the 17 different frameworks you've downloaded from github and dragged into an IDE worked by just getting a faster machine. Once upon a time people had to carefully measure how much to unroll the loop, or how small a lookup table they could get away with before the errors become a problem.

That'll be because the world is getting hotter. In some places in the Northern Hemisphere it's increasing at the same rate as if you moved south 30 metres every single day. The current measurements are far worse than even the most pessimistic estimates of around 20 years ago.

And Obama criticizes Israel sometimes by stating that the murder of thousands of civilians or the expansion of illegal settlements are "unneccesary" or "not helpful to peace" too, but it's just window dressing and not to be taken seriously. Certainly it makes no difference to the outcome whatsoever, and never will.

No, it's perfectly meaningful to talk about Israel/Palestine - and by extension the US - when criticizing actions by China. Otherwise you end up with the same narrative you get in pretty much every media outlet in the world; whatever the US does is good, no terrorism or support for murderous dictators there (cough south america..cuba...saudi arabia..iran...iraq...indonesia etc etc etc ), and whatever China does is bad.

I think people knew the logo redesign was a joke immediately. It was obvious she was the wrong person to run such a large company and no-one liked the company to begin with. It's hard to blame people for having the advantage of hindsight when they were criticizing her at the time. Being an average executive at that level just doesn't cut it.