m00g00 · HackerTrans

m00g00

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vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

> 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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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

Why? I'd say because Douglas Crockford.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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";
   }

And of course with 'with', everything is a fluid interface, and with the flexibility of being able to enter code between the function calls.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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).

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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???"

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

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.