mindblock

After some thought on Larry Summers' hypothesis, there seems to be one major assumption that he's making that needn't be true - that the major culprit for high engineering and academic positions is aptitude. If this is the case, then he may well be correct, as it makes a lot of sense. But it is still a major assumption.

Agreed. I've had display: flex make a component inline on random elements in a web app. No discernible reason whatsoever, just some flex elements dont appear on the screen as boxes. There's a reason web devs say Safari is the new IE.

I guess the idea is to access some Apis that are not present in the browser, like fs. This was mentioned in a question to StackBlitzs CEO, but he seems to be an AI that just pastes the same text over and over again.

I would imagine there is also a very big differeence between the USSR reported numbers and western estimates. Not sure what the reality you speak of is.

Why the hell would you want a private company to censor political advertisement? Are they required by law to do that? Why is censorship bad if enacted by the government but it is ok when a private corporation does it?

Imagine that Facebook is required by law to check every fact in every advert that is on their platform. Is that even possible? Would they have the resources to hire unbiased, critical-thinking people who are capable of doing htat? How expensive is that? Would they just rely on the cheaper option - algorithms.

A friend of mine got banned from Facebook for a month for sharing a meme, posted by somebody else, that had a swastika in it. The meme was of the sort "Nazis were horrible idiots". He appealed the ban, on the grounds that the original post was not taken down (he just shared it) and that this had nothing to do with nazi propaganda. It was, in fact, the opposite. An actual human being looked at that appeal and still confirmed the ban.

What makes you think the process will be any more efficient and rational with political advertising? Relying on companies to police content is absurd in every respect, from freedom of speech rights to just plain capability. There's an entire court system built up with the sole purpose of determining truth and even that isn't 100% accurate. Trust the same responsibility on a corporation?

Yeah I don’t think smart people pay a membership fee to an organization to be certified as smart.