News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

GrassFedAltCoin

Re:Coronavirus has caused a bicycling boom in New York City on Saturday March 14, 2020 @08:20PM (#22579879)
Not being from New York, it was hard for me to comprehend how much political power the police union has there. Dating someone from there, and by extension taking a passing interest in the city's politics, it has been eye-opening to see how much influence their protests exert over the mayor's office/political process more broadly.
Re:Jitsi Meet: open-source video conferencing on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @10:32PM (#22480995)
I try to use open source tools wherever possible with my team. Can anyone experienced with both share how this compares to Zoom or Hangouts? Is it reliable?
Re:Should we abolish time zones? (2019) on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @09:18PM (#22188328)
No, but we should certainly abolish daylight savings time.
Re:San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless on Thursday October 17, 2019 @08:57PM (#21287743)
Something annoying about this kind of reporting is that the writer constantly refers to the homeless population as a monolithic group called "the homeless."

The writer ascribes all kinds of attitudes and beliefs onto them, ostensibly based on the writer's interactions with homeless people in investigating this story.

There's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy going on in which the writer only interacts with homeless people who are behaving in the way the writer would like them to. You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs to test your fentanyl for you.

Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.

I don't disagree at all — but in your hypothetical situation, they're clearly not being banned for causing "unrest." They're being banned for creating fake accounts to spam the platform en masse, "regardless of what the message is" as you say.
I'm amazed at how certain people seem on either side of this debate. This seems to me like an incredibly difficult problem, and I can't see a solution that doesn't involve significant trade offs.

On one hand, silencing people for "inciting unrest" does sound like something a dystopian judge would say before passing sentence. On the other, there is a philosophical argument—and economic incentive—for Twitter to protect its users from harassment and targeted manipulation, especially when it is state-sponsored.

Where the line gets drawn for these definitions seems to be the hardest part.