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People outside of tech have no concept of what the algorithm does and in general take what’s on their feed at face value. How could they not? The news very often runs stories about tweets and Twitter trends as if they represent the real organic sentiments of the citizens.

Americans eat too many calories already. Let us eat some vegetables for a few weeks, it won't kill us.

The east bay has hundreds of people on a waiting list just for shelter space. There aren't enough beds for the night, let alone supportive housing, so we haven't even come close to trying the "build all the houses that these people need" (and make they available) strategy.

That's because people come from all over the country, since the bay area is homeless friendly. The best solution is to make project room key permanent.

EDIT: FWIW I learned about the waitlist problem while listening to this podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

I listened to that too, and in the final episode, you hear exactly what I'm talking about. In the interview with K.C., the narrator mentions that she had been in a shelter, but they didn't allow dogs and she didn't like the lack of privacy. Some people won't take the help you give them, and not preferring the solutions offered doesn't give you an absolute right to public land.

Small government means not making laws which otherwise interfere in the citizens' ability to make their own choices about how to live. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the military, whose missions are mostly abroad to protect trade routes anyway.

Putting them in jail prevents them from doing things that the taxpayers don't like: building fires under overpasses, leaving needles and human waste in the streets, harassing passersby, etc. It also puts them in contact with social services, in some cases.

It's not a perfect solution, or even a good one. We can and should develop a more compassionate alternative.

There are no simple solutions here. I do believe the homeless ought to be assigned housing by making California’s Project Room Key permanent and national. If you can prove some connection to the location where you’re sleeping rough, you get first crack at local housing. Otherwise it’s back to where you have that connection — could even be where you were born.

These motels will be slums. There will be prostitutes, and drug dealers, and crime. But it will also be a central location for service outreach without the prerequisites of other places.

ultimately it is an illegal annexation of public land that belongs to the taxpayers and has other intended uses (even if that use is just greenspace or empty land).

This is exactly how I feel seeing the homeless camps in Austin. Primarily, the first question I had was: what happens when one homeless person wants to spot of another? Neither has a legal right to it; are we not encouraging interpersonal violence by refusing to enforce the property laws that separate us from the state of nature?

my experience has been that most are not locals, despite what surveys say, because the surveys always rely on volunteered answers about origins, rather than proven identity

Right. Why would anyone tell a volunteer they're from out of town? Seems like the first rule of being homeless: get a story that appeals to people. "Born here and down on my luck" is much more compelling than "Where I came from is worse than this place so I hopped a ride here."

Basically, we can spend all the money in the world and build all the housing that people need, but the personal liberty that this country espouses -- personal liberty I agree with! -- means that no one is obligated to take it. There is already a myriad of excuses I hear in these threads for why the homeless don't go to the shelters, participate in the programs, etc. "They don't allow my dog." "They would make be get sober", etc. Until we accept that there is a significant population of unhoused that prefer it that way, and then decided what we want to do about that, all the little villages and things won't scratch the surface of the problem.

Really? I recall netbooks being pretty bad. Cramped keyboards, short battery life, weak processors... the worst of all worlds, really. What attracts you to them?

This was written by a person, not the editorial board of NYT. Could you please back your claims of antisemitism? That is a serious accusation that is unfortunately overused to apply to anyone who criticizes Israel.

I made no statement about whether anyone's actions were justified, only that they made sense given the state of affairs.

This is a the consequence of having an administration that transparently lied at every turn. Even if they were right, no one would believe them.

Oh the users would most certainly be tracked by the government. In fact, that's part of the point. One of the unfortunate byproducts of Parler getting shut down was the loss of visibility of right-wing terrorists.

I'm not sure I follow the code-as-free-speech argument, or how it would apply to a government website. The government banned the use of cookies in 2000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/10/24/r...

It certainly could again.

Of course it would be taxpayer funded.

It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.

Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.

Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.

My vision doesn’t create a distinction between commercial and personal speech. In fact, it does the opposite, by not privileging commercial speech and giving it a special space on the page. If you want to advertise you wares, do so, but you don’t get to pay to get attention. Get people to follow you because they like what you have to say.

There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.

But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.

Sure! Your account is going to be linked your driver's license. It's your space. Go nuts!

The issue at stake: governments telling private businesses what they can and can't host on their servers.

Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.

To be clear, in my vision of this, people would be allowed to advertise however they want. Businesses could have accounts. But having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out.

The point is that it settles, once and for all, the role of government in policing social media. If social media really is the replication of the public town square, then one that has the same operating model is called for.

Doesn't matter if people want to go there. The point is that it exists, and the model is governed by the taxpayers.

A public option for social media is exactly what I want. Townsquare.us, run by the government, where all speech except that which is literally illegal is allowed. Supreme Court for challenges. No ads or tracking allowed. Post illegal content? Feds come knocking.

Then, let FB/Twitter etc do whatever they want

It applies to anything said by the judge in open court. It is intended to elicit a response from the parties. Judges don’t make comments on their thoughts out loud for the benefit of participants.

but it seems like there's at least some indication of how she feels about it.

This is not true. The judge's job is to follow pertinent line of inquiries to the case and get responses from the plaintiff and defense. Not pursuing a line of questioning might indicate that the questions were already resolved in briefs, and are therefore not needed in open court. Open court is a very, very small part of these trials, so trying to get a read on what a judge thinks based on questions in open court is spurious at best.

This is because you are translating your words to fit the medium. It’s a reduction. This is exactly what DHH folks have to do, except it’s to practically a different language.

It’s a combination of a few things:

(1) Tech demands a lot from its employees. We are dedicating a significant portion of our waking hours. They expect us to believe in their mission, and so we also expect that mission to align with our values.

(2) Technology itself is much more far reaching than any other industry. These corporations are massive, and with them massive budgets for lobbying etc. Not demanding that they reflect the values of their employees and customers would be a massive waste of that power or worse — letting them actively use that power to make the world worse.

I think Apple's point is they think users are too dumb to handle that and they don't want user ignorance to reflect poorly on them or their product experience.

And I sympathize with this argument, which is why I propose calling the outside-the-garden toggle “Developer Mode.” Apple already has “Pro” phones and headphones. This is just an extension of that.

So when the user toggles the Developer mode they get a dialog box that says we can’t do refunds or offer support until you turn this off, which will delete any 3P apps.

Written English is quite different from ASL. For a person who was born deaf and learned to sign from the start, text chat would not be easier.

This is an acknowledgment that sign is a distinct language and, the same way that Apple Stores are localized in different countries, this localizes the Apple Store experience for DHH folks

No, I don’t see anything bad about this, because I don’t see how a user misses out.

What lock-in does ALAC afford Apple? If Apple took FLAC and tweaked it a bit to make it work with their streaming better, would you have a similar objection? The outcome is the same.

It might be the case (I’m not sure) that Apple invented ALAC because they thought they could shape the future of lossless audio to their advantage, and get some royalties for the format. But that certainly hasn’t happened, so I’m just really not sure what there is to lament here outside the ideological adherence to open standards.

Instead of building hardware that can efficiently play FLAC, they created their own format in order to promote harder lock in to their walled garden.

I don't follow how ALAC promotes a harder lock into their walled garden. If you have a file in ALAC (not a streaming instance, an actual file), it can be converted losslessly to FLAC. Moreover, ALAC has been open source for almost 10 years. Android plays it fine, as does linux.

iPhones have supported FLAC natively since 2017. There's apps that play back FLAC files in the App Store.

So, overall, I don't see what's sad about it. Apple Music is a subscription service that's streaming DRM protected music. Whether it's FLAC or ALAC doesn't make a difference to the user.

It’s sad that Apple is using an open source codec for their streaming service? Why?

Is that how he feels about surveillance, too? Is that why he's building probably the evilest corporation out there?