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raoa

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Free Speech in 2021

blog.nearlyfreespeech.net
1 points·by raoa·il y a 5 ans·1 comments

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raoa
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
Odd I don't see that. I am told "People also ask" about five different questions that each of them amount to "what is carbon monoxide poisoning", which replicate the results of the search itself.

the fact other search engines get this right, even if not nearly as well as Google would have in 2008, tells me the problem is not advertising or a contentless web as much as Google specifically and deliberately preventing you from searching about what you mean.
raoa
·il y a 4 ans·discuss
Search for "carbon monoxide" on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

Google serves you an entire page about carbon monoxide poisoning, and recent news stories about carbon monoxide poisoning. You have to scroll through a lot of junk to get to Wikipedia's entry on "carbon monoxide". Bing and DuckDuckGo do a serviceable job telling you about the substance CO.

You cannot search "carbon monoxide" to learn about carbon monoxide, and that is the issue.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Would this be a good compression tool in any instances?
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
I'm on a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu right now. People some times give examples of things like external monitors not working for them on Linux.

Here is one. Randomly, based on no relevant input from me or changes in the laptop's state, my network connection dropped and the Network Manager UI was telling me no network adaptor could be detected.

Some fumbling around in the Terminal (including various reboots not solving the issue), and managed to enable the wireless adaptor which apparently could be detected and connect to my network, though at the same time the UI was telling me in no uncertain terms that no wireless adaptor was connected to my laptop.

Then later, again randomly, based on no relevant input from me or changes in the laptop's state, the UI agrees there is a wireless adaptor connected after all. This is on a machine currently in near-factory state with certified compatible Ubuntu preinstalled.

I share this example because one can at least comprehend why random monitors or graphics cards or what not do not cooperate without fiddling, can comprehend certain apps failing and crashing, can comprehend other unusual bugs. The UI thinking and acting like there is not a network card for no reason whatsoever, on the other hand, is completely illegible to even competent users.

Someone needs to just commercialise a proprietary and at least initially closed version of Linux (so as to to turn a profit) with good design principles in mind and deal with lawsuits and license issues later. There is plenty of money in it.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
This is a country where it's practically illegal to hire 13 year olds to work in flower shops, which is the sort of gig apt to teach a whole lot of commercially useful stuff. This is with or without parental consent. Maybe that is the sort of freedom people should get worked up over first?
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Yes. If I recall correctly the midseason positivity rates of flu tests is something like 40 percent, which suggests doctors are performing a legitimate differential diagnosis before prescribing flu tests. At no point ever have positivity rates been remotely close to this with coronavirus, even though it was far more prevalent.

The result of any individual test performed on a healthy asymptomatic person as part of a nondiscriminating mass screening regime is pure noise.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
It is not exactly a novel development that infection is neutralized by neutralizing antibodies, and the way the article is written suggests the existence of some cross-sectional variation whereas the more plausible explanation is a longitudinal decline in neutralizing antibodies beyond a sterilizing threshold, despite a more durable presence of binding antibodies which may be responsible for diminishing the severity of breakthrough disease. This is also suggested by the fact the ratio of binding to neutralizing antibodies shortly after full vaccination is very high, something like 4-to-1, which ratio likely explains why the dosing had to be so violently high. What I think was unexpected is the pace of decline in neutralizing antibodies, and possibly also the rising threshold of sterilizing immunity under the newly prevalent variants.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Schools have no business giving instruction on modern web literacy given that doing so correctly requires cultivating in kids an inflexibly adversarial mindset towards all the services they will use.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Even better is the jury could refuse to convict and the question of jury nullification could be taken up by the Supreme Court.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
It is also very finicky though. Unbearable on Ungoogled-Chromium when you search directly through the address bar, though a lot better after you actually navigate to the site. And very rarely a problem in Brave. Both cases on a private VPN on a VPS and pretty aggressive DNS level blocking. Google did make searching on Ungoogled-Chrome a nightmare though, so I suspect something is being done right.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Sites will not let you crawl unless you are Google or maybe Microsoft. They might have, if it looked like you were likely going to become much better than Google and would be competitive. But you will never look like that because they will not let you crawl. Is this true? I don't know, but it is one story. And gets to why there's a more fundamental economic mechanism to Google's monopoly, over Amazon's or Microsoft's.
raoa
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
I just got Office 2011 for Mac running on my iMac and it's sort of a pleasure. If nothing else it provides a lot of ambient nostalgia for middle school (well, because 2011 looks like 2008). For simple word processing tasks it also seems as good as anything modern, and in fact faster when opening a new file, copying and pasting between documents and such. (Faster may be the wrong term... less clunky might be the right one. Clunky being the general experience of what happens when you try to do things in Apple Mail).