> are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands?
and the topmost comment IS just sophistry, e.g. "So yes, i support having moderation." and so on. Pointing that out isn't "the flamewar style", it's anger at people being dishonest and spineless, even about an issue as important as this. You are ruining the bucket HN exists in, to protect sophistry on HN.
> Regardless of how right you are or feel
I am right, and these issues will take the WORLD to hell.
> It's possible to make your substantive points while staying within the site guidelines, so please do that instead.
> are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands?
No, they aren't, and when that time comes around they won't own up to the sophistry they spout today.
Nobody has the right to leave it up to them. That is all there is to say. Don't ask the most spineless percentile, no matter how large, how to handle issues of this importance.
edit: oh fuck off with your cowardly button clicking already. If you can't own it, it's shit. Cope with it.
> If I have to communicate to every bad actor how I identified them as a bad actor, that only helps them sidestep my prevention mechanisms.
If you don't, you're the bad actor. If specific actions lead to a ban, the way to sidestep that is to not do those actions. If you don't even look at the actions but some BS meta stuff, or have wishy-washy rules you enforce randomly, you're the bad actor.
I use FreeFileSync to synchronize my Thunderbird and Firefox Profiles, KeepassXC files, web server stuff etc. I also prefer portable applications that keep their preferences in their own folders. So I also don't mind if a machine randomly dies, but I still have all my stuff locally, plus backups, and what I upload is always a copy. Other than stuff that lives on chat servers or social media, of course, Soundcloud and YouTube playlists -- but that stuff, but that stuff will go away sooner than the files I have locally. Stuff that lives elsewhere is just a way to interact with others and show them things, not the keeper of anything that matters to me.
The downside is that I can't just change machines nilly-willy, I need to sync first, at least if things overlap. For example, I can use one Firefox profile on one machine, another on a second machine, and use Thunderbird on a third, but I can't use the same profile on several machines without getting a merge conflict, so to speak. That was confusing and annoying for like a week, since then it's not been a problem, and by now I'm so pampered by it, I simply avoid stuff that doesn't play nicely with my workflow. Smartphone apps, for example, or programs that doesn't allow me to configure the paths it uses, and so on.
Since I use applications and work on data, the OS doesn't that matter much. I mind changing Windows from the ass-backwards defaults much less than sticking with the defaults, and I do that as I go along, i.e. when I use a feature or get annoyed by the default, I just change it. That doesn't require any thought and very little time, so the configuration I would have to repeat on a new system isn't something I consider valuable, I'm pretty sure it takes much less time in total than working with the default config, in the long run. If I had to do it more often than every once in a blue moon, I'd find ways to automate it.
I am just not interested in something that could go away based on the decision of some pointy-haired boss, which is tends to be inferior software in the first place, anyway. Like, compare Directory Opus with Windows Explorer, one is a serious application, the other is a toy that constantly gets in your way.
You haven't addressed a single point. Being an expert should help a person to make arguments, and sometimes does, but it's not an argument in and of itself.
"Making the world a better place" is terribly generic, and not impressive in context of stubbornly refusing to even acknowledge, much less warn users about, an issue that puts actual lives in danger. If they ignored her for so long, what was the excuse before she dared to say "asshole" to adults who dabble with something as serious as this?
If it's an issue in any app that can lead to privacy leaks, it's a showstopper issue for something like Signal. It being an issue with any app is even more reason to tell people about it, not less.
> But if a person has something important to say, calling people that don't know about the issue assholes is not a great way to go about it.
I don't mind it at all. If someone uses "being called asshole" as a reason to not even inform anyone, they would have found another excuse. Some people simply register it as strong language and otherwise focus on the content. At any rate, it's very easy to judge what someone says in frustration when you yourself don't even suffer from the situation and/or don't care about those who do.
> But it's not like everyone tries to annoy other, it's more an issue of ignorance.
So she shed light on that, and instead of talking about the important bit, people think it's super important to teach a random person to not be rude, ever? That's what we're focusing on?
> calls them assholes that don’t care about what happens outside of western society
That's hardly her main point:
> For Chinese who are used to a specific IME- like Sogou, trying to type on something else is a tiny bit like a QWERTY user suddenly faced with Dvorak- we can make it work, but it's slow enough day to day that 50/50 they just install Sogou because what's the big deal right?
> The Signal "fix" is "Incognito Mode" aka for the app to say "Pretty please don't read everything I type" to the virtual keyboard and count on Google/random app makers to listen to the flag, and not be under court order to do otherwise.
> Needless to say, Sogou/Baidu dos not respect the IME_FLAG_NO_PERSONALIZED_LEARNING flag. So basically all hardware here is self-compromised 5 minutes out of the box.
> so unless journalists tell them otherwise, which they have not been doing- users will install Sogou.
I responded to someone who didn't even attempt to make the case how all users of Parler are "violent extremists", they just pulled out that broad brush to justify a transgression. That's intellectually so dishonest I see no functional difference between that and what one would criticize extremists for, and I don't see a meaningful difference between "not minding" a breach of someone's rights and committing it, so that's the violent bit.
> He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
But if you don't mind their use of "violent extremists" apropos nothing, no, I don't particularly "care to" explain myself to you for using the same phrase in response to them -- I just do it because I can. You could simply remove or ignore my re-using that phrase and my point would stand unchanged. Address the core of an argument, don't just play "gotcha" while ignoring the context and the woods for the trees.
Godwin's law just says that as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of a nazi comparison approaches 1. It says nothing about that even being a problem, much less losing the argument. Even better: as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of any comparison, any string of words, any combination of letters, "approaches 1". Something you can say about anything you might as well say about nothing.
People heard the meme a lot, so they think it has weight without actually having thought about it. Encouraging people to reveal this about themselves, with pride no less, is the singular useful property GL has.
> I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.
Then I fail to have any sympathy and solidarity with you. You're just another violent extremist in my eyes, and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend by a long shot.
I think one man's flaw might be another man's feature in this case:
> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
<label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
Of course it's concerning, but it's also concerning how quick people are to dehumanize and call for censorship, putting a lot of energy into discussing endlessly just how evil or stupid or unreachable those other people are, rather than root causes [0]. The mainstream is whipping itself into hysteria just as much as QAnon does, and it really does seem like circus all around. Just for some perspective:
> The capitol has been the site of multiple bombings, shootings, assassination attempts, and stormings for centuries. Pretending its an unbespoiled sacred Church which has never been penetrated so vulgarly is just ahistorical.
No, but events are. The question of how to use a tool arises from the existence of the tool.
> otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold
You're still just responsible for your own acts, and they for theirs. If you were being a dick to them needlessly, that's your fault, and if it tipped them over the edge, it's natural to feel bad. Not fully responsible, but also not as if you had zero to do with it.
Just like when someone gets bullied and commits suicide, you don't just look at that act of suicide and talk about who had the most agency and what one should focus on.
> You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers.
There is no need to "focus attention", and holding one party responsible for their actions is orthogonal to holding other parties responsible for theirs. This is a tech forum, Weizenbaum was one of the greats when it comes to writing about technology and morality, and I dare say it is the responsibility of technologists to be familiar with his body of work.
> And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.
That's why I don't, and never hinted at doing so, and even clearly stated the opposite when I said "All links in the chain are responsible for what they do".
All links in the chain are responsible for what they do, there is no single packet of "blame" that gets to reside with any single party, and denying one's responsibility will not make it go away.
> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
> are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands?
and the topmost comment IS just sophistry, e.g. "So yes, i support having moderation." and so on. Pointing that out isn't "the flamewar style", it's anger at people being dishonest and spineless, even about an issue as important as this. You are ruining the bucket HN exists in, to protect sophistry on HN.
> Regardless of how right you are or feel
I am right, and these issues will take the WORLD to hell.
> It's possible to make your substantive points while staying within the site guidelines, so please do that instead.
Nah, I'm good. Save your own soul.