m00g00

If you're a drug addict, the ideal way to kick the habit is self-control, but after a certain time, rehab might be needed. There are downsides to rehab (cost, isolation etc.), just as there are downsides to regulation (compliance costs, unnecessary burden on small and otherwise well-acting companies because of the abuses of others).

There's also the fact that "regulation" is a nebulous term that says nothing of what the actual laws are that manage to get passed/implemented. If history is a lesson, we should all be weary of rules written up by people who do not fully understand the domain they are trying to regulate, and who are often lobbied by the very firms that would be most subject to said regulation.

So, no guarantees in the slightest that regulations will bring about a healthier tech ecosystem.

I would say that persuasion based on facts is perfectly fine. It’s the deceit that was particularly troublesome

This is just using different terms to say the same thing. Facts can and often are used to manipulate, by framing and context, and by what is left out. Opinion, supposition, and FUD are also commonly used to persuade. That people usually believe what they are saying does not mean their opinions were not originally based on deceitful or self-serving propaganda.

last election.

This has been going on since politics existed (ie. civilization).

Foreign influence is another issue. It is however deceitful to suggest that the issues foreigners (Russians) are accused of inflaming were domestically non-issues, non-controversial, or not-inflammatory before their interjection.

Fine, and they should be punished for whatever election laws they broke.

But when it comes to people influencing people, especially over the internet, I doubt very many knew or cared of the country of origin an opinion/idea/piece of "information" came from if it jived with them. Much less whether the identity of the poster was falsified.

Indeed with the anonymity provided by the internet, no nationality whatsoever, foreign or domestic, need be provided.

A lot of people would see it as persuasion by their side, and manipulation by the other. Same with "information" and "propaganda".

As an aside, I kind of appreciate how in the past, mostly before WW2, governments would have agencies such as "Ministry of Propaganda", or "Department of War". Now we use doublespeak terms ("Public Affairs", "Defense") to calm the masses, even though they mean the same thing.

What if what the foreign actors are saying is the same as domestic? What if someone from the UK or France or wherever has a good strategic idea, are you not allowed to use it?

Pretty sure everyone in the entire world with internet access chimed in at some point on the US's last election. I doubt many people looked into the country of origin of a tweet before deciding on whether or not to be influenced by it.

I've seen some nasty political TV ads aired between shows, especially for local elections. The issue of critical thinking and not just buying into whatever hitpiece/campaign sign one last saw transcends facebook and social media.

False and especially misleading information is sent through broadcast TV all the time, both through advertisements and aired content. Political content is egregiously bad in this regard. There's no accountability for hit piece TV advertisements routinely aired by and against local politicians; where facts, if they are even present, are twisted and stripped of context and surrounded by scary voice overs and graphics. To say nothing of TV "news" shows liberally salted with opinion, or just general product ads.

It's propaganda all the way down.

Sure, we could trivially make our own star. All we'd need to do is move at least 100 Jupiters worth of mass into close proximity, and voila! Insta-star. That last part is not so trivial though...

The difficulty us mere mortals have with sustained fusion is keeping the reaction from blowing itself apart (as in dissipation, not bomb). Gravity keeps things in check for free, but since gravity is so weak compared to atomic forces, you need an awful lot of it.

Our current containment solutions using electromagnetic forces require a lot of energy to maintain and so far, more than produced from the resulting fusion reaction.

Took the words right out of my mouth (literally, and 5 minutes faster).

Why? I'd say because Douglas Crockford.

Which is awfully similar to JavaScript's much maligned 'with' statement.

Never understood the FUD and 'considered harmful' screeds against it. Yes I'm aware of the performance/optimization concerns, but honestly, the whole javascript language is a massive performance/optimization concern and we've managed pretty well.

Simple things like changing style properties on DOM elements:

   with(element.style) {
       display = "block";
       marginLeft = "5px";
       background = "green";
   }

I mean, that style of title exists accoross the political spectrum on YouTube and it's beyond stupid. Whenever I see "X DESTROYS Y" titles I assume the video will be a waste of 3-10 minutes with no particular moment of linguistic destruction on either side and is in fact just two people bickering.

Just clickbait titles is all it is.

Regardless, I don't see how any of that can really count as "extremist" or "conspiratorial" content.

Note that this is already kinda the case for fretless instruments, such as the violin. What you are suggesting to be done by a computer would be done by the player themselves. Obviously deciding exactly what tuning of each note to land on for any part of a song relies on musical intuition which computers are notoriously bad at. But when decided to be appropriate, on the violin perfect 5ths and 4th intervals would be actually (to the limits of the players ability and ear) perfect ratios. The major 3rd itself, which is decidedly enharmonic in equal temperament would sound cleaner and less "beaty".

I've always thought Bach would love the keyboard tools we have today. Simply the ability to switch tunings on the fly, rather than stopping to laboriously change gears on your harpsi/clavichord. I imagine the ability to switch to whatever temperament/tuning you want at the press of a button would have masterfully been taken advantage of by him (to say nothing of arbitrary sound/timbre for each voice/key-range etc. I think he would have loved Switched-On Bach).

My point was our "general political disagreement" is the chaos. It's not being caused by an outside source. That's just an excuse, and a cudgel used to dismiss one sides ideas. We would not all be holding hands and singing kumbaya if it were not for the Russians. We've been whipping ourselves up into a frenzy for awhile now, and I think we like doing it. The internet helps too.

Come on....do you really think there are no legitimate sides to contentious political issues like gun control? How about abortion? That "other side" you speak of, presumably actual US citizens, is not interested in "basic democratic stability", they just want their political argument to win out and become (or remain) law. That's where the division comes from, not conjured out of thin air by the Russians.

But the fact remains that whether you are an outside instigator looking to sow discord, a citizen participating in a political flamewar, a politician looking to whip up their base, or the mass media looking for clicks, the tactics are exactly the same. You could wrap a bubble around the United States and cutoff all outside communication and you would not see much difference.

If anything pours gasoline on this fire it is the detachment of social interactions on the internet. And that Twitter is such a hotbed of political "discussion" is a sad testament to the times, considering its very design precludes the possibility of respectful, informed discourse.

I think the analogy is more like trying to pin an execution on one particular member of the firing squad.

Everyone is throwing matches, at the same time, into an already burning dumpster fire.

Do you figure pro/anti-gun twitter posts from actual users are less likely to result in us being at each others throats? Really seems like pissing in the ocean.

And yet I still instinctively skip over links I see to video/audio content as it generally takes much more time, concentration, and attention to get value/information out of them.

Agreed, reddit's ban hammer is often arbitrary and self-serving and r/the_donald drives too much traffic to reddit for them to seriously consider it for them (even more so with Twitter and @realDonaldTrump)

Admins should contemplate banning less, and users on all sides should chill on demanding it for subs they don't like. No one forces you to go to a sub, and you can even filter them from the front page without extensions now.

But live-and-let-live is not particularly in-vogue these days. As in this submission, the top post is (nothing to do with topic) "Why isn't this other sub also banned hmmm???"

Perhaps so but the post of examples linked by GP has the vast majority of offending posts upvoted <= 5. Only 9 were >= 10 and just 3 >= 20. Really? This is a sub where popular posts and comments get hundreds and thousands of upvotes. Could they not have compiled a better list? It must be easy if the place is as bad as we're all told.

But I agree, reddit just wants the traffic, and r/the_donald does deliver on that for them.

I think his point is that the mods of the sub have done their best to enforce the rules, despite missing a handful of very lowly upvoted comments here and there.

Thus "they" (the people who run the sub) have not broken any rules, just some bad actors which presumably would have been dealt with if their posts got more attention.

If random users making bad posts that almost no one notices in highly active subs constitutes a total subreddit ban, then all subs would end up banned.

Clearly the CEO of reddit feels the mods of r/the_donald have done a reasonable job at policing their sub overall, despite having missed a handful of extremely lowly upvoted comments.

Do you suggest the AutoModerator filter for words like "hang", "kill", "shoot"? Why not implement that site wide? I'm sure that would go over well with the rest of reddit.

Programming is automation though. Scripting is a (loosely defined) form of programming. I'm really not sure what the distinction is. You could just as easily say bash "is really about automation", because it would also be true. Water is wet, etc.

PowerShell is useful on Windows because it does something that could not be done easily or at all before, that being automation without using GUI's. It does this by providing hooks into the Windows infrastructure to change settings and perform tasks without fragile registry edits and GUI manipulation. But UNIX systems have no need for this by virtue of it's command-line first design. If MS was still using DOS and ini files the situation would be similar.

So what does PowerShell really offer in UNIX land? Configuring and automating nix systems is drastically different than doing the same on Windows systems, so having a common scripting language probably does not help much.

I guess a better question would be what does PowerShell offer in the way of "automation" that is so much superior to bash and *nix command line programs.

Not only is it not just a problem in tech, it's not just problem for women and minorities.

Focusing on tech is fine, but claiming there's a unique problem of demoralization, underappreciation, shit management etc. to only "marginalized people" is what makes this article highly questionable.

All that "toxicity" applies just as well to white males in tech.

No idea, but there was a bunch of articles and probably related tweets accusing this game developer of racism because of the era their animation style is an homage to.

I'm very much tired of articles whose sole basis for existing is random fucking tweets. You can always find bad ones, from every sect of society. Deranged scribblings on walls did not used to be worthy of news articles.

Libertarians support open borders as a means to free movement of labor. As you alluded to, they also do not believe in taxpayer funded social services, much less granting rights of citizenship to not-naturalized immigrants.

This combination of ideas is not at all what is being espoused in liberal universities. They are pushing for both open borders (or at least amnesty and much less restrictive immigration laws) and guaranteed social services for immigrants.

Libertarians certainly don't view nations as "completely artificial illegitimate social construct" and I seriously doubt most college professors are teaching from that ideology's point of view. Libertarians are often as demonized as Republicans at universities.

"Everyone is jumping off cliffs therefore so should you"

This is nothing but grade-school peer pressure coming from adults and supposedly legitimate news organizations.

You meant "moral panic" right?

"They're burning all the witches even if you aren't one..."

It's the selective nature of their disabling of comments. Notice on this very article, at the top, is a link to a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album, and comments are enabled for it.

Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.

No idea what their arbitrary rules are, but I noticed a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album linked at the top of this article did have comments enabled. Both of these are obviously opinions, so I'm not sure what the difference is, besides the fact that one article (GP) was way more likely to receive backlash in the comments than the other.

Please link me to any other article from The Guardian complaining about one of the scores of other popular music artists who have also said nothing about Trump.