neuland

Or, people are just inconsistent and not thinking about things beyond their politics.

People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.

People are fine with Parler getting banned by all their vendors for not moderating violence and threats. But people would loose their minds if the same thing happened to Facebook for their failure to moderate violence around the Rohingyan genocide.

Ah ok. Yes, I was mistaking Aether Pro. You have excellent docs!

Oh cool. I didn't actually try it myself, since I read in the docs that it would take a long time. Good to see it's quick. Urbit looks like a really interesting system with great design underpinnings and philosophy.

I was looking at your service recently while surveying the landscape of currently active P2P projects.

Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?

This is difficult to balance with having data be available when you are offline.

If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it.

If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.

Where are you getting an Urbit ID in 3 minutes? I am not super familiar with Urbit. But my understanding is that even getting a temporary Urbit ID (a commet) takes hours.

It's not strange if you view it through from their point of view. Rightly or wrongly, these people just want to see much less centralized moderation. And they feel unherd and oppressed (again regardless of whether that's actually true, that's what they experience and feel).

They see things in a more absolutist free speech lens, meaning any content that is legal should be allowed. And they don't see platforms as being responsible for moderation. They view centralized moderation as inherently biased and illegitimate. If they can't or wont allow legal speech, then they think 230 should be repealed and these sites should cease to exist.

They are reacting to takedowns from social media sites, SaaS providers, IaaS providers, and financial services because they view these sites as an oligopoly acting in unison to bar them from the basic infrastructure of modern life. Imagine if typewriter companies ganged up to stop selling to right leaning newspapers and authors. Or, imagine if telegraph companies said they wouldn't transmit messages for Abraham Lincon.

On 230, they see social media sites as a monopoly due to network effects. Also/alternatively they talk about a bait-and-switch, where the social media sites held themselves out as public squares when they were small. But once they were big, they started enforcing their views.

Generally, I think people are failing to put themselves in a Trump supporter's shoes. Imagine you genuinely believed that the election was stolen. The court cases were almost all dismissed on standing and laches. From their perspective, no one will substantively address their videos, affidavits, statistical anomalies, etc.

And when they protest, people call them violent insurrectionists, despite all year BLM doing very similar things (again from their perspective).

I don't see how these apps dont eventually get taken down like the Fediverse apps earlier this year. Eventually (probably once it's polished enough to be usable) the deplatformed communities will discover SSB and then Google/Apple will take the apps down.

How do they enforce the code of conduct on E2E encrypted rooms?

This project seemed innocuous enough. And it's a shame Discord killed it. As long as services are centralized, platform owners keep doing things like this.

I realize most wouldn't. But I would accept that trade. HN is a rare exception. And, there would still be sources for tech news: personal blogs, company sites, LWN and other news sites. It's true that news and discussion would flow less freely. But, I think that on-net 230 is doing profound damage to our society.

I didn't watch the episode. But, I don't think the effect of repealing 230 is in dispute. It would make hosting content you didn't write unfeasible. The questions is whether that is a good thing or not. And what new rule would replace it if any.

Personally, I think even a complete repeal with no replacement would be a good thing. The vast majority of social networks, forums, comment sections, and other public spaces online are a cancer that are destroying our society.

And censorship is a poor alternative. Even if you find yourself on the favorable side of the censors now, inevitably they will come for you.

I agree the web as a platform for publishing static information is feature complete. You can publish basically any kind of static content you want (news, academic articles, personal sites, business landing pages, restaurant menus, etc) with ~2005 era tech and no JS.

But once you start to consider forms and interactive content, the possibilities for expanding interactivity are near endless: raster or vector maps, the spam bot / capcha arms-race, custom form widgets (ie. better dropdowns, file upload dropzones, datatables, drag/drop items), different connection types or wire protocols (XML/JSON vs. binary formats, Websockets, WebRTC, QUIC, more UDP-based stuff in the future), rich API's like payments, hardware security dongles, and social networks (webmentions/activity-pub/etc).

Kind of like Excel, these are each must-have's for some industry or app. Each one requires a different 10% of core features to work. So, we need them all if the web is going to be an application delivery platform. And for better or worse, it is the current de-facto standard cross-platform apps.

But I think this shows an interesting effect: platforms are very unlikely to ever be feature complete. Whereas distinct pieces of software are. PDF is another example of this kind of scope creep.

The author mentions Sway and i3 window managers as examples of finished software. I'd be interest if anyone has more examples. What is a piece of software that is feature complete in your opinion?

A couple more examples I can think of:

- jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

- pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/

- tokyo/kyoto cabinet: embedded key value database

- awk: text processing tool / programming language

- (almost per-se) any game that shipped on physical media

I pulled the trigger on remote years ago and took a about a 5% salary cut. The state I moved to has an income tax. However after adjusting for lower income tax, cost of living [0], and my RSU's being unaffected, I ended up slightly ahead.

After a couple years, the company did start adjusting RSU refreshes to reduce grants to people outside of top cities. Even with that though, I'm still breaking even or ahead.

Just another voice saying that you need to do the math and think about your company's policies. You can only account for changing policies so much.

I got in at a time when the deal was very good. Today, my salary reduction would be much higher (2-3x the reduction) and all other comp has caught up to being location adjusted. But, the deal at my company can still be good as long as you check the math.

Another gotcha to watch out for is benefits. Make sure the company health care plan(s) have doctors in-network where you are moving. Since health care networks are very regional, this is not always the case. I had to switch plans.

Also, you won't be able to use a lot of the other tech company perks that people don't price in a lot: free food/snacks/drinks, gym, spa, health center, daycare, etc. Though some company's will give you money to get a gym membership, but probably not the other things.

[0] The cost of living savings mostly came from housing. But nearly everything local (grocery's, restaurants, gas, etc) is 30% to 50% cheaper where I'm at, which adds up quick too.

I’ll be spending much of 2021 scouting new places to live - places that never locked down in 2020. So by the end of 2021 I hope to have decided where to move and living in an apartment there.

Yeah, I think people in this thread are really underestimating the ability for courts to over-apply laws that talk about commercial activity. If growing food on your own property for personal consumption can be "interstate commerce", then really any human activity can be justified as "commercial advantage or private financial gain".

Tell that to the family that lost their job and is now homeless. Tell that to the people who've lost love ones to suicide, overdose, alcoholism. (see I can be snarky and unhelpful, too)

The broader point is that it's not clear that lockdowns are beneficial or necessary. They have real costs. Nobody is talking about how we weigh those costs and benefits. And despite the lockdowns, California still has a swamped medical system.

To move the conversation forward: people will never give up their sacred cows. The lockdowns were never about COVID, they're about control and rewarding political allies. Texas tried to ban abortion. California tried to ban religion. And nobody cares if the lockdowns work or not.

Florida, Texas, and Sweden seem to be doing fine.

Edit: also, the military, FEMA, and non-profits built temporary hospitals in spring, but they weren't needed.

Florida, Texas, and Sweden seem to be doing fine enough.

And yet they didn't stop the lockdowns once it was clear the stimulus was not going to happen.

Yeah, that would be perfect. It'd be disruptive to force everyone to pick. And, I'm sure there'd be some demagoging about which options there are & how they're presented. But, I haven't heard any other suggestions that don't lead to further conflict.

Ultimately, I hope there can be a solution to this that let's everyone see the content they want and engage in the public square without censorship.

I also really like this option. But what about the default? I expect there would still be significant disagreement between different factions over what is censored / labeled / prioritized / deprioritized for those users that don't actively switch to the left or right or whatever other custom view.

For this, I wonder if this could be a feature of who you follow / engage with. When someone you engage with flags something, then you don't see it. And vice-versa on prioritization. You are more likely to see things that people you follow engage with.

The republicans want Twitter, Facebook, and Google to stop censoring (incl. down-ranking, labeling, etc.) mainstream right wing views. If they don't act more neutrally, the GOP will attempt force social media to behave as a common carrier, despite the implications that has for spam, real harassment, and so-called harassment, such as religious people tweeting their sincerely held views.

This issue really boils down to how you view social media's monopoly status. Are they a monopoly or not?

In republican's eyes, network effects make these companies a natural monopoly. Others think that's wrong because other sites are one click away. And, because Facebook displaced myspace, reddit displaced digg, etc.

Labor says no. Capital says yes. We mostly end up somewhere in the middle.

I can also recommend Deep C Secrets. For me, a lot of C didn't really click until I read that book. In particular, having mainly done Python and other very high level languages up until that point, this book's discussion of pointers and memory were what got C to finally click for me.

I am a person not a company, but I do often forget that twitter exists. And when I'm reminded it does exist, I have about as low an opinion of it as you describe.

Other people have mentioned a lot of good 2 player games that I like, particularly Dominion, Carcassonne, Hive, and Sagrada. But, I'll add the following recommendations that I haven't seen mentioned:

- Jaipur

- Century: Spice Road

- Race for the Galaxy

I think this would have the interesting effect of strongly incentivizing people to form a group with other people that share their political views. Kinda like a micro-party. And I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.