repolfx

Ah, but TSX is also used to block attacks (on SGX enclaves). So just disabling it entirely seems over simple.

Look at codebar.io and then adjust your priors for what you consider a "right wing caricature". In particular read https://codebar.io/student-guide#eligibility (straight white men not eligible) and the preamble on the first page.

No reasonable lefties spoke up against this. Indeed they defended it as necessary and proportionate, as they did when the company started discriminating against men in other ways.

People didn't just suddenly start killing jews in nazi germany

Comparisons to the Nazis are especially stupid in this context because you're right, they didn't just start killing Jews. They started by banning them from various high-status roles and jobs, describing them as the source of problems, hypothesising a Zionist Conspiracy to explain why so many Jews were running rich companies etc.

And that's exactly what we see happening today against ordinary white guys. These days if we're CEOs/on company boards/in high earning jobs it's a problem that needs a "solution" (sound familiar?), it's the result of a conspiracy of the patriarchy, and the solutions start with banning white men from educational opportunities, speaking opportunities, replacing them on boards and so on.

No reasonable lefties spoke up about any of this in Germany either, because the left is fundamentally built on narratives about oppression by one identity group of another. It always has been. It gives people easy excuses for their situation in life. Whether it's the proles vs the capitalists, Jews vs the Aryans, women vs men, blacks vs whites, LGTBQ vs straight white men, if there's a way to treat people as lumpen groups and pit them against each other then you'll find the left doing so as much as they can. The 21st century is no different.

The real problem here is a deep political schizophrenia in modern society, or at least parts of it, which demands decisions be deliberately biased towards the outcomes they politically desire. These people then turn around and describe results that are not biased as "biased", which is utterly Orwellian.

I think your comment shows that you understand this. You accept that a decision may be correct, when measured in totally cold and statistical terms. But such decisions would not "change the status quo" and that would be a problem.

But that position is a deeply political one. Why should decisions at banks, tech firms, or wherever be deliberately biased to change the status quo? It's social engineering, a field with a long and terrible track record of catastrophic failure. Failure both to actually change reality, and failure in terms of the resulting human cost.

Injecting bias into otherwise unbiased decisions by manipulating ML models, or by manipulating people (threatening them if they don't toe the line), is never a good thing.

Creating unbiased data is, imo, impossible, as I am also biased, and so are you

What about just learning based on the entire web?

I think you're using the word "unbiased" to mean "heavily adjusted for US centric views on racism and sexism" which isn't what the word really means.

If you train an AI on everything written - all books, all web pages, all newspaper articles etc ... a not impossible task these days - then you can argue you're as close to bias free as possible.

However a small number of AI researchers don't like the results they get when they do this, because the AI learns the world that truly exists instead of the one they wish would exist. But that's not a bug in the software. It's a bug in the researchers.

There's only been one case of being unable to recognise black faces that I know of, and it was shown later to be due to the lighting conditions the guy was using leading to very low contrast imagery. The same problem was replicated with white faces: there was no racism anywhere as you would expect given that unconscious bias hasn't been shown to exist at all (the studies that claim to show it have all collapsed).

If you asked the developers of the facial recognition library, "does your software have problems with very low contrast conditions" they'd surely have answered yes. Fully conscious of the issue but, that's software. It's hard to get everything right 100% of the time.

Why would a name letter bias be biological caused? Or do you mean bias about biological factors?

Bear in mind "bias" is just a perjorative for "generalisation" or alternatively "lesson learned". AI algorithms are good at detecting patterns in data and bad at being politically correct. This is not a flaw of the algorithms, it's a flaw in people who can't accept measured reality and go into denial.

So an AI trying to hire programmers discriminates against female sounding names, because it's learned that this is correlated with success? Apply it to hiring nurses or primary school teachers and it'll probably do the opposite. This is only "bias" if you start from ideologically driven blank slate assumptions. Otherwise it's just common sense.

The web is anything but small/lightweight and WASM requires a full blown JIT a la V8 to get good performance, so WASM being "small" (relative to what?) seems hardly a benefit.

JVMs are sandboxed and verifiable too, not sure what use a fallback to stock JS is but you can run a JVM in JS (look at TeaVM), it's way easier to emit bytecode for almost any modern language than WASM simply because JVMs do garbage collection for you and it's not really any easier to build tooling for WASM than any other VM.

In the end the main reason to do WASM over other VMs is that this way Mozilla/Chrome guys get to own it, instead of a competing firm.

Damore didn't condemn anyone, that's just a smear attack.

Physical safety trumps most other things in our culture, rightly so.

So political activists realised they can brainwash or pressure idiots by claiming that any opinion, person or class of people they don't like creates "lack of safety". It's a kneejerk reaction: safety first.

The worst case I saw of this so far was an event organised by my workplace, for teaching programming. But straight white men were banned. If you were a white man you had to show photos from Facebook to prove you were gay. The justification for sexism and racism was stated as creating a "safe" and "collaborative" environment. Implication: straight white men are unsafe. Except when they're teaching, of course. Then they're needed, so stop being unsafe.

There's nothing new about this sort of abuse. Orwell focused on the way leftists constantly manipulate language in 1984 with the idea of Newspeak. Consider the contradictory term "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how every communist country calls itself a People's Republic despite not being a republic, nor run by/for the people.

They aren't really asking, are they? Asking is a question at TGIF. What these people were doing is trying to create a bloc of activists that comes with the implied or explicit threat of coordinated employee action or pressure, as they've engaged in previously. They're pushing the boundaries to see how much control over management they really have.

Bombing has become a regular occurrence in a first world European country that isn't fighting a war, or experiencing mass civil unrest, nor are there any major terrorist groups or separatist movements occurring.

How is that not "very interesting"? It is extremely unusual, the onset of this violence has been very sudden, and the accompanying wave of censorship and debate-suppression that has accompanied it is very much within the scope of what HN regularly discusses.

As for (3), you give yourself away. Your problem is not that it's not interesting but rather you fear the political right and their message about immigrants.

Here's a thought. If their message is merely an "agenda" that they're "pushing", and if they're wrong, the Swedish authorities could kill it dead by simply recording the origins and ethnicities of the people blowing up Sweden and showing that they're all long term Swedes. But they refuse to collect this data, for obvious reasons: it wouldn't show that.

For as long as the Swedish government and people keep engaging in a massive coverup, you will continue to see the Sweden Democrats grow stronger. Their criticisms aren't being answered or met with compromise: they're being ignored, smeared and suppressed.

The IPCC, being a UN body of government appointed scientists, economists etc, consistently take an overly conservative view

No, IPCC predictions have been wrong/over-aggressive in the past. Their 1990 long range predictions can be compared against the present now and are 40% out:

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/the-ipcc-1990-far-predictio...

People have a tendency to cherry pick predictions that worked out or which assert a requirement for even more panic, whilst ignoring predictions that didn't work out (of which there are many).

Your argument is basically unfalsifiable: scientists must be listened to because they all agree (itself a dubious or false claim), but the internationally agreed consensus must not be listened to because it's "bland" and influenced by people who might disagree (but who in the end endorsed the report anyway).

It appears that evidence is only accepted as legitimate if it's more alarming than past evidence: how could this argument ever ramp itself down? And how can the argument both be argument by authority whilst simultaneously attacking the credibility of those authorities?

Is it? Political threads are pretty routinely allowed and surface. This one is patently being killed because a lot of people really hate the implications.

Yes, for sure any implementation is very much about the design subtleties. I did work once on an email spam filter so I have a pretty good idea of the complexities involved in that space, which includes things like some people's spam being other people's ham, people replying to spams, problematic user interfaces and so on.

My point is a more general one: people argue for censorship as the only way to maintain a workable forum, but, I don't believe that, based on my prior experience. I'm not saying it's easy to build a really great spam filter for social forums, but Slashdot proved out a lot of good techniques, and anyway censoring stuff en-masse just creates a different set of problems: social rather than technical.

Who underwrites the investment risks taken by Bill Gates exactly?

Wealth mobility in the USA is pretty high. It's entirely possible for billionaires to stop being billionaires, or for people to temporarily become rich and then lose it again. Lots of stories like that out there. Elon Musk has made fortunes and lost them several times, I think.

Taxation is not an illegal or immoral appropriation of property

Obviously it's not illegal by definition.

Immoral? Yeah, I think a 100% tax rate i.e. communism would be deeply immoral. And taxes today are very high, and frequently lead to huge misallocation of resources. I think you could easily argue for lower taxes from a moral position.

Spam didn't break email's network effects. Yeah, it hurts it a bit, but there were lots of attempts to build competing email networks that didn't go anywhere.

This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.

As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.

1) This is the case, isn't it. In America the Republicans were far more relaxed about the ruling allowing unlimited US campaign money, then spent around half the amount the Democrats did and won.

If they were really being duplicitous about it you'd have seen major freakouts amongst Trump supporters about his very low levels of spending, but I don't remember much of that. You saw far more angst amongst Democrats about the "free" news coverage he got by virtue of saying popular-but-unpopular things.

I'm not saying people are totally consistent on this, but at least in the last election, Trump's behaviour appears to have matched the overall right wing pattern of not really believing political spending is a big deal. The US needs a pretty high baseline of political ad spend just to communicate "there's an election on day X, vote for candidate Y" to 350+ million people in a very short space of time. Beyond that it doesn't seem to matter.

2) Why shouldn't they protest? It's perfectly possible to both believe that government control over speech is bad on principle, and also that political advertising isn't as powerful as your opponents believe.

3) Why should people doing political ad spending be forced to be identified, but people posting political views on the internet not be? A good reason to not force identification of such people is to stop retaliatory attacks by extremists designed to silence people, a very real problem. This is especially important in elections where there's a risk whoever comes to power will try to get revenge on people who supported their opponents. Not normally a risk in US politics because of the First Amendment but it's been seen elsewhere.

I think it's a difference of additive vs subtractive distortions.

Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas.

Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert.

The "get money out of politics" position is based on an unstated assumption that if you buy, say, 1 million adverts, then it's practically guaranteed that (say) 5% of those adverts will successfully change people's minds regardless of how bad your arguments are, and so if you keep spending more and more then you can eventually buy whatever outcome you want.

But is that assumption true? I don't think it is. There have been studies of this which showed political advertising is pretty ineffective in general, beyond informing people that there's an election and who the party candidates are. And there have been two high profile cases in 2016 of votes that were won by the side that spent by far the least (Trump and Brexit). If money was so powerful they should have had no chance, but it didn't work.

Additionally if this really worked, you should see taxes always fall as rich people buy ads supporting politicians who support lower taxes, which in turn frees up more money to buy ads, ad infinitum (ho ho ho). But this isn't what we see: ignoring occasional spikes to levels so high they were totally ineffective at being collected, the tax burden and size of government has gone up over time rather than down. Rich people seem to be doing pretty badly at buying the sort of policies they're supposed to want.

On the other hand, if people don't know a position, idea or possibility exists at all they can't possibly support it. You can ignore voices you disagree with but you can't pay agree with voices that don't exist anymore.

It's easy to write laws such that totally blocking automation is allowed, totally blocking human written content is 'censorship', and categorising/hiding by default/ranking content is allowed.

Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).

Depends what you mean by "a forum like HN". Before HN the main geek watering hole was Slashdot, which famously never censored content and fought strongly against attempts to force it to do so.

Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.

You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.

In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.

Spam can be solved by just making it easy for people to spot when something was classified as spam, e.g. as spam folders do.

I don't, because you can still see such comments (it may require an account and flipping a switch). And in fact I browse Hacker News with showdead turned on, and I often start from /active so I can see stories and comments other people don't want me to see. This isn't censorship because Hacker News itself still makes them visible: it's more like spam filtering in that regard, where content is being categorised but not censored.

Spam filters in particular are not censorship because they are ultimately just labelling devices. Because of their accuracy many people often accept and act on those labels automatically, but they don't have to, and actually recently Gmail's filters got terrible and so I have to check my spam folder all the time now.

In some cases spam filters flat-out reject messages and don't even show them to the recipient, not even in a spam folder. I understand the technical reasons for that (full storage and processing of spam is expensive), but, that gets much much closer to the border of censorship, with the only real difference being one of intent.

They say they would consider it? Sure, such a weak claim is bound to get 90%+ agreeing with it. Who wouldn't say they'd consider it?

Now how many actually do? Not that many, for sure.

See my other comment on this thread about that site. Most of those "myths" are actually cases where the press told the truth and the EC just didn't like it.

That's what cryptocurrencies allow, since Bitcoin. People can pick a dispute mediator who gets involved and can reverse the transaction only if there's a dispute. It's all done with OP_CHECKMULTISIG. The mediator is not an escrow service and can't steal the money. So you end up with a competitive market of tiny "courts".

And yet Europe has massive youth unemployment throughout large regions, there is poverty, there are problems. Why are they spending money on trivialities like circus performers in Africa: a place Europeans don't live?

If you can't see why many people would be upset by forcing taxpayers to cough up money and then spending it on that, I'm not sure what to say. Resources aren't free.

I don't follow. If money is invested then by definition it's not sitting idle.

That's the EU loyalist line but look at the comments in this thread. Tons of people saying, yeah, old news, EU money is corrupt and distorting, why is this suddenly in the NYT? But notice how they're all people reporting personal experiences. They're not linking to investigative journalism. That's because journalists largely refuse to report on this kind of thing ... except in the UK where the EU is actually held to account by the press.

The EU routinely claims any criticism of itself is a lie, a myth, made up etc. But it's not the case.

The Commission actually had a huge blog dedicated to rebutting the "myths" as they put it, from the British press. But if you examine the posts you'll see many of them admit the stories were actually true. They aren't myths at all - that is itself a lie!

For instance:

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-developmen...

The attitude on display here sums up EU grant awards in a nutshell. A story about a wasteful grant to train trapeze artists in Africa (wtf) is described as "the press chose to ridicule circus artists and coconut production"! No, the press was ridiculing the EU. The rest of the answer to this "euromyth" is stating the funding did happen but it was all for a good cause so that's ok.

Or this one about agricultural grant budget going up and fraud levels being high.

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/cap-subsidies-are-they-...

The story is primarily about fraud, asking why the EU can't stop it. The Commission's response to this "euromyth" is that it's not their job to ensure the subsidies aren't gamed, which is hardly a rebuttal.

Just go read stories from the UK Eurosceptic press over the decades. They've been digging up stories of EU corruption since forever. The only reason the UK is seen as "weird" by people in other EU states is because the press is ideologically loyal to the EU institutions throughout most of the world and doesn't report on or investigate this stuff. But in the UK they do (to some extent).

Even look at this story. The NYT really wanted to go digging for dirt on Orban and Hungarian society in general, Orban being famous mostly for resisting EU integration and resettlement efforts, and being notoriously unpopular in Brussels. But they found they couldn't because the EU lacks even very basic levels of openness. You aren't going to read about EU corruption from them, that's for sure - the fact that they only just noticed this says they've been turning a blind eye for years.

For instance, go look at the stories in the UK about farmers being paid to not breed pigs. I'd like to get paid to not breed pigs! I think I'd be good at it!

The NYT appears to be going after Eastern European politicians here, which is surely deliberate as they tend to be conservative and against immigration, so the ideological enemies of the New York set. But it seems they got distracted along the way by the shocking discovery that the EU is opaque and corrupt. The most interesting thing about this story isn't that some Hungarian academic thinks he got fired for criticising the government (i.e. his employer) but rather, that the New York Times' Brussels correspondent has never previously investigated the EU itself.