madacoo

This would seem to be contingent on paying businesses that don't rely on ad-based revenue models. Rather than paying a company on top of their ad-based revenue.

Afterall, it might be the case that non ad-based revenue is only viable once you've secured enough ad-based revenue. I hope that isn't the case though.

Which arguably makes the NRA look reasonable in comparison.

Providing tech support by responding to customers is a different beast entirely to content moderation, however. It may be the case that human oversight of algorithmic moderation is also unreasonable, but I find this fairly unlikely. I wouldn't expect it would require quite so many man hours. But again, could be wrong.

That takes an odd tangent into sex/race issues. Surely privacy violations apply to all individuals and the questions of whether or not software can a) have dicriminatory bias and b) be purged of them are entirely orthoganol to the initial human rights concern.

It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently.

One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at least oversee the algorithms and respond to erratic behaviour as described in this article?

It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology, albeit not the kind that probably hasn't hurt Techdirt in this case.

The aspect I believe you're missing is that any Chinese company with over 50 employees is not a legitimate private company because the CCP essentially claims ownership over them. This means ByteDance is essentially state run and makes the national security risk a legitimate concern.

I believe the national security risk argument is stronger in the case of Huawei. Since having a state run company build essential communication infrastructure is clearly a bad idea. However, I think it also applies to ByteDance. Why would you allow a foreign government uninhibited access to huge amounts of data about your citizens? Especially when that government is a hostile totalitarian regime currently engaged in serious human rights violations.

Are there any non-shitty people?

I think not because lacking any quality that others would consider shitty would suggest they are far too perfect not to be considered shitty.

By whose standards do we decide who is or isn't shitty? And why would 'being shitty' mean they shouldn't be listened to?

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

I'm the same. I think because I'm more concerned about the surrounding lighting and making sure the brightness of my monitor is appropriate for that. Once that's done, light mode has greater readability for me than dark mode.

I've tried dark mode a few times in the past because I felt like that's what you should use to code. But I simply don't like looking directly at bright text.

It's interesting that there are such diverse experiences of DDG vs Google. I'm also in the camp of finding DDG to be better at finding what I'm looking for.

I wonder if the difference has to do with variations in search strategy or interests, or a combination of both. In any case, DDG does seem to have been improving, and I don't see any reason to believe that the trend won't continue. Particularly since Google seems hell-bent on making their search useless.

So you're saying vote with your wallet but also publicise the fact you are so doing on social media?

Isn't that exactly what the user you replied to did? How else could you have replied to them?

I'm curious what your silly thoughts are. How do you know that I will share your judgement of what a silly thought is? What is a silly thought to you after writing something down might be of interest to a random internet user. Is it not presumptive to assume that everyone else will share your judgement?

I'd be worried if my wife expected me to call more frequently than that because it would imply our relationship wasn't as solid as I thought it was. Also British.

To me a strong relationship is one that lasts across time and physical distance without constant attention. Obviously within limits. But if my wife expected me to call her everyday, or vice versa, I could only assume that there was an insecurity/neediness that hadn't been appropriately handled.

Hello James,

Please could you take a look at an amateur logo and offer some advice and/or maybe even fix it up a bit?

Location: Norfolk, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Anywhere inside UK

Technologies: Python (Flask), MySQL, SQLite3, JavaScript, HTML/CSS (Bulma/Bootstrap)

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/matthewdcooper/cv

Email: matthew {at} dcooper.co.uk

I'm looking for a Junior Web Developer position. I have a number of hobbyist years in programming and these skills became useful in my previous role in private education. I have a strong self-taught understanding in the foundations of both front end and back end development and I am highly motivated to learn more about this craft.

It's difficult to accept this assertion at face value. After all for any given proposition p, regardless of the domain under which it ought to be considered, we can always choose not to immediately accept it without sufficient reason for doing so. We can always ask why p has been offered up to us, what the arguments for and against p are, and what the implications of accepting it would be.

Is there a non-Facebook source for this information?

I suspect HN users are likely to be either a) willing to pay or b) able to circumnavigate paywalls by using private windows, blocking cookies, disabling javascript, or whatever else works.

I wonder how long before paywalls aren't so easy to get around.

There is a big difference between opting out as an individual and suggesting that this is a reasonable solution for others.

I can't speak for the experience of Windows 10 because I stopped using Windows altogther some time around 7. But I entirely sympathise with OP's habit. Maybe not as fequently, but at least once or twice per year, I reformatted my disk and reinstalled Windows just because if I didn't the whole system became sluggish and unusable. Looking back on it I think it was also a way of exerting control over a system I knew wasn't truly ever mine.

# August 6, 1945

  In the Enola Gay
  five minutes before impact
  he whistles a dry tune

  Later he will say
  that the whole blooming sky
  went up like an apricot ice.

  Later he will laugh and tremble
  at such a surrender, for the eye
  of his belly saw Marilyn's skirts
  fly over her head for ever

  On the river bank,
  bees drizzle over
  hot white rhododendrons

  Later she will walk the dust,
  a scarlet girl
  with her whole stripped skin
  at her heel, stuck like an old
  shoe sole or mermaid's tail

  Later she will lie down
  in the flecked black ash
  where the people are become
  as lizards or salamanders
  and, blinded, she will complain
  Mother you are late. So late

  Later in dreams he will look
  down shrieking and see

  ladybirds
  ladybirds

I tend not to buy new phones until my current one is done for. But if the Librem 5 pans out and is well received by the first buyers, there is a high likelihood this will be my next phone.

I would expect the strength of the effect is only one of many differences between the two.

I think you've conflated online downvoting behaviours with real life social conformity pressures, each of which probably have quite different effects on the propogation/extinction of certain beliefs.

Why four weeks? Surely you could have reached a similar conclusion in a day, or less? Or did you learn anything in that time that couldn't have been learnt in a short burst of unprotected internet activity?

Which apparently yields a boiled egg with not too tough whites that has a relatively easy shell to peel.

It's definitely an interesting question as to whether goal-choice itself can be a rational activity. Of course, it is necessary for a rational agent to begin with axioms and from there make choices. It seems perfectly coherent to me that we could, from those axioms, choose a further set of goals, each of which can be attained following a course of actions, and so on.

And so I would contend that the goal 'cause the cessation of a particular belief' is not axiomatic at all, but an instance of a goal that serves something more fundamentally axiomatic. Like 'make the world more comfortable'. Or 'make the world conform to my expectations'. Or something like that.

From this model we could absolutely talk about choosing goals in a rational manner that aids certain axioms. The question then would be: could the axioms themselves be chosen in a rational manner? Probably not but then it doesn't seem impossible to argue that some sets of axioms are better than others. It would be nice, say, if the axioms guiding the behaviour of a rational agent, didn't contradict each other.

Let's start by assuming that a rational agent might choose as a goal the complete cessation of a particular belief. In that case I'd argue that downvoting patterns, as previously described, are not rational because, rather than having the intended consequence of reducing the likelihood of the expression of that belief, they would in fact simply cause that belief to strengthen and then be expressed elsewhere in alternative echo chambers. In order to establish which of our claims is correct we'd need to empirically observe the propagation of beliefs as a result of downvoting patterns. That would not be an easy thing to do.

However, I would also argue that choosing a goal like 'bring about the complete cessation of a particular belief' would be irrational. Although I accept that once I make that claim the conversation is directed towards very shaky territory. The question of how to choose rational goals is probably impossible to answer definitively.

But I will say that when I claimed that the rational thing to do would be to engage with a disliked belief in a meaningful and polite manner, my assumption was that a rational agent would choose to behave in a way that facilitates growth for both the agent and those with which they engage. Of course, once again, this choice of goal is by no means self-evidently rational.

this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause

I dispute this is rational. Creating echo chambers polarises and intensifies opposing viewpoints. The rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion with people with whom you disagree. This would diffuse extreme opinions and allow people time to consider whether or not their position is justified. Rather than reacting in a knee-jerk defensive manner that serves to protect identity by strengthening belief, they are then given space to examine beliefs in order to strengthen identity.

https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

This software uses a license that seems to solve both the problem of ensuring the user has control over the software and also allowing the author to sell and distribute binaries without worrying (too much) about others undermining his control over the market.

It appears to work quite well in this case. Although I do not know how much he actually makes from software sales, it appears to be non-negligible based on its popularity within a niche community and the fact most users would rather pay $15 than learn the skills necessary to compile from source.