skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I'd argue that censoring a site because of censorship is like a society saying you must be do community service (or even be locked into a jail/prison)--as in, lose some of your rights--because you violated someone else's rights.
I feel like the title is misleading to make it seem like social media platforms are the bad guys here. The article is actually about threatening loss of Section 230 protections to compel sites that host user-generated content to censor speech the government would not allowed to censor under the constitution.

It’s an interesting argument but it seems like it’s not a good characterization of what’s happening unless we’re specifically talking about deplatforming Parler which is decidedly not “big tech.” The gov’t is allowed to compel companies to censor speech that is not protected by the 1st amendment and those companies, not burdened by the legal 1st amendment, are allowed to comply by casting a broader net than the gov’t would legally be allowed to.
Takes a bit of searching to find the hardware section (it's under products->appliances) https://www.netgate.com/products/appliances/
The US was the most instrumental country in defeating the Axis. Doesn't matter when they joined.

I'm not rewriting history. In fact, I suggested a correction to be more accurate/inclusive based on you clearly having an issue with my original statement. Everyone knows the US was not the only country that defeated the Nazis. I never tried to say they were. I'm not going to list every country involved when we're discussing a current event in the context of US affairs ONLY.

My point still remains in my comment. If you look at the history of the US and what is has accomplished, the recent Capitol issue is not a real problem for the US or the average American family.

You have no problem with the parent's post but a problem with my comment saying the US took down the Nazis and the Axis? A bunch of countries took down the Nazis. So what?

I wouldn't get all sensitive if someone from Russia was talking about them taking down the Nazis as an example of them overcoming something VASTLY more concerning than their current affairs.
AWS Cloudformation
Just as an example, was the 2016 election 'fair' in your eyes?

There were claims that Russians hacked the election, voting machine issues, voter fraud and suppression. Democratic leaders objected to the legitimacy of the election results. There were even protestors who interrupted the electoral vote counting [1].

Did the big tech companies miss a chance to censor those peddling theories of an unfair election in 2016? Or do we have a moving definition of what constitutes a fair election and is allowable for questioning depending on which side won?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/01/06/508562183/biden-to-democrats-...
Gay marriage not legal -> gay marriage legal. You may think it's right or wrong, but it's definitely social change, it's definitely in the left direction, and, from the perspective of 2000 (even more, 1950) it's quite extreme.
That's fair and it's a real problem I have with CNN, who I trust at this point slightly less than I trust MSNBC (who I trust not at all). But to take a counterexample: Tim Alberta, who wrote for The National Review, is very close to conservatives (his book _American Carnage_ is fantastic and incredibly well-sourced) is just as open about his personal opposition to this administration. This will sound glib, but a real problem we have in this moment is that there are two sides and one of them is simply correct.
I get that people tend to cluster into two main groups in the US, and that this seems to be strongly encouraged by the existing power structures.

I would also argue that there are a lot of folks (myself included) that see the curtailing of speech - regardless of "side", as a real long-term threat to productive and open communication. We need actual discourse and understanding, or all we're going to get is more us-vs-them polarization and ramping up of rhetoric and violence.

I strongly disagree with most of the opinions being voiced on the (far) right, but if they don't happen in the open they will fester into something grotesque and far more dangerous. Just because I'm disgusted by the opinions of a group of people doesn't it's a good idea for me to make the situation worse by silencing them. Not least of all because we will eventually reap what we've sowed once they grab power again.

I still can't help but shake the feeling that there are those with a real vested interest in a continuing and growing divide (and conquering) of the populace, regardless of the (externalized) cost.
Girondists? Aristocracy?! No way. There were many royalists in France, but none in the National Assembly.

The Girondists were considered right only because Jacobins were super left and ended up killing thousands of priests, what few nobles they could still find, tens of thousands of suspected royalists in mass executions, and eventually the Girondists themselves too for being too soft. The Girondists went to the guillotine singing The Marseilles! Certainly not the royalists that lot.

I recommend the “Revolutions” podcast - about 30 hours worth of the French Revolution is better than any movie.

Also the history of revolutions is very educational in this day and age. I for one hope we will never experience anything like it.
Why bit chute? Aren't they just a peertube alternative?
Researchers Find Covid Survivors Have Long-Lasting Immunity to Re-Infection
Propaganda doesn’t need to be explicit; it’s clear the intent of these messages, just like the veiled messaging in his incitement speech.

It’s clear that once something like a violent insurrection happens the companies previously giving a platform to the one who incited the insurrection are going to give a lot less leeway on anything he says.

Seems odd that this is seemingly hard to understand. If the violence didn’t happen, and he wrote those two tweets he’d still be on Twitter.

But it did happen and that’s changed the game
I see tribalism taking over as an inevitable consequence of the electoral college voting system, and I'm always startled when people tout vague calls for 'unity' as something worth doing, rather than implementing ranked-choice ballets or similar and just solving the problem.

I'm not accusing you of that, btw. Just saying it for me.
The Soviet Union cracked down on typewriters but couldn’t stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat. These people will undoubtedly find something similar. Actual suppression makes any conspiracy theory more credible.
An ideology is a story / model of the world. And all models are lies (and some models are useful).

There's a few ideologies / models going on here. Eg:

- A company is like a person, with all the rights of free expression and self governance. From that perspective, twitter and FB are free to have whatever systems of regulation (or be totally arbitrary and capricious). And its up to the market to replace twitter/FB.

- A monopolistic social media website is part of the public square. So facebook is more like the US federal government than it is like the burger shop down the road. As such, facebook/twitter should be held to the norms of a government, not the norms of a business. They should allow free speech by the participants in that space, in accordance with the laws of the land. The market should be free to work inside twitter/fb.

Both of these stories are internally consistent, and both stories are consistent with the broad ideas of "free speech" and "free markets".
You'd have a valid point here if all people were 100% rational actors with perfect knowledge and agency. Unfortunately, they aren't.
I completely agree. I would like to see some of the other replies here comment on how democracy can function if the citizens are incompetent/stupid. If they can't be trusted to be knowledgeable, then how can they make informed decisions, including voting? And of course, who decides which people hold legitimate positions and which people are ignorant?
> It is “axiomatic,” the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.

I don't buy this part exactly. The existence of Section 230 on its own doesn't require or induce them to censor any speech in particular. It's content-neutral.

But when public officials then make demands for censorship under threat of adverse regulatory changes, well, that's "induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish" then isn't it?
The game is missing systems and features that were promised. Can you count missing consequences or police AI as bugs? How about driving physics? No NPC schedules? Gun down a gang night club and the same faction doesn't care in another area. What are security cameras for? How about traffic AI...
I don't get it, how?
Folks, you can stop reading right here:

> That’s what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.

This is a factual distortion of what section 230 is, as noted in this article, submitted yesterday: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Just my opinion, but I think this may be most problematic quote from the speech:

"The radical left knows exactly what they're doing. They're ruthless, and it's time that somebody did something about it"

Seems like it would depend on exactly what the president intended that to mean.
Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc.

This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/giuliani-trump-black-lives-matter...

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=586745618696234
This is simply whataboutism.
Didn't BLM install gallows outside Jeff bezos house or something like that? Were they trying to overthrow Amazon?
You're pointing out that they may not be able to enforce the law against an entity that does not operate in the EU.

But even if a company doesn't operate in the EU today, it may want to in the future. Or it may want to be acquired by a company that does. The future is unknowable, so I'd imagine they were advised to follow the law, even if there would be no immediate consequences to breaking it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1372333/Gmail-hacked-Googl...

Not unheard of at Google, either.
They can’t “apply” to me if they don’t apply to me. The whole point of sovereignty is to say where laws apply. Politics and war are the negotiation of those questions.
> I do feel like part of the problem is they don't actually want to give me anything in writing.

That sounds like a reasonable guess to me.

If there is some personal animosity, or they have a friend who runs a potential competitor/lost on the purchase bid/etc, or somesuch other corrupt motivations ... then their only real power is to exhaust you.

Once you have a live permit application, you're in the system and the legal process takes over. They can still hit you hard on process and code conformity, but it takes greater coordination to do so.

Again, good luck. Petty corruption is sometimes the worst kind.
https://hereistheevidence.com/election-2020/stats/
Most lawsuits were dismissed without looking at the evidence.
You've changed the requirement. To prove a company hasn't been breached, you'd also have to prove that there hasn't been a breach that hasn't been detected (so breached, but not verified). Any given target might already be quietly owned by some state actor or corrupt insider with allies on the outside.
That's such a crude reductionist argument that I can smell the sent of arrogance and mockery, and I am not sure if response is warranted.

Especially since your simile has rather gaping holes in it.

Actually thinking about it... ironically your example is better description of fiat currency than btc.

Use low resource output to generate cheap tokens that will be loosely tracked by 'One True Government', and people agree that they have value. People can exchange it for goods and even can go back to the 'One True Government' to exchange their gold back token back to gold... oh wait... right we got rid of that whole gold backing while back...
Honest question: Is Facebook doing this out of genuine business interest? Or because they're concerned about legal and/or regulatory backlash?
The fears and warnings of the AI safety guys are real and closer than you think.

Machine superintelligence is a bit on the extreme side, but formulating safety protocols for autonomous machines is a real challenge. We do know that optimisation functions can indeed create harmful and outright dangerous results.

It's not an unknown that AI safety researchers fear, it's actual outcomes or real experiments extrapolated into the future. Optimisation algorithms are impartial to humans, their moral code and -survival.

Simple (and often quoted) example to illustrate this point: say we create an autonomous machine that we want to help us with our stamp collection. We run an optimising algorithm and naively use the amount of unique and rare stamps collected as our target function. The loss function is determined by time taken and money spent.

Possible outcomes: the algorithm figures that the most effective way of achieving this is to hack a number of bank accounts to quickly get enough money to buy a nice collection.

Now that's bad, but maybe something we can incorporate in our training procedure: only use the money given to you.

Another possible outcome: the machine creates a set of robots that roam the planet and steal all the stamps from all over the world.

Again, you'd have to consider that in your training method: no stealing.

But in the end, you cannot foresee every possible outcome, especially since you expect the machine to come up with an unconventional solution, since otherwise you wouldn't need it in the first place.

Restricting the space of possible solutions to safe and desired ones, is a very hard (and potentially undecidable) problem. This paper is just another reminder that we have to be very careful lest we accidentally end human civilisation by means of AI.
And the top thread on here is of Ubiquity network breach
I do not know of unbiased television networks. Who do you nominate?
Banned from Mastodon? MeToo
I think the problem with long term goals is not that your preferences may change but you don't update your goals. I think the problem is procrastination.

Consider this variation of your Scenario A: You make explicit goals to read 3 relevant books, take a sailing class, and save $10,000 for a boat. You find yourself in mid October having only read 1 book and saved up $2000. You end up not sailing until year 4 even though year 2 was certainly achievable.

A better variation of Scenario A: Breaking the big goal into smaller ones can prevent this type of procrastination. Instead of save $10000 by end of year, make 26 goals to save $385 every payday. Then make a goal to sign up for the sailing classes by June. Then based on that June date, decide to read book 1 by Feb 28, book two by April 30, and book 3 by June 30.

In the second variation, I assert you'd be much less likely to procrastinate to the point that your year end goal becomes unachievable.

Perhaps you assumed in Scenarios A and C would do that. Your post would make more sense that way. But I find most people do not do any breakdown. They'd just set the end of year results as the goal the reach a point where they realize it is impossible to achieve any of it.
> No, because most social media platforms don't freely allow the organization of violent mobs. Twitter, Facebook, etc will ban you for doing that. Even, as it turns out, if you're the POTUS.

I seem to remember just a few years back, social media platforms, and the darling media being quite proud of organising violent mobs - or as they preferred to call it, "freedom" - in a movement known as the "Arab Spring"[0]. It was touted as one of the "virtues" of such platforms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
Mass communication seems to be the culprit. Yellow journalism had a huge impact in the US in the past, Rwanda's problems were inflamed via Radio and now social media is hurting the US and the world.

Social media is the genie that's been let out of its cage. It's not going to go back in. I suspect the fix is to treat social media in the same way radio and TV are managed. They can't and should not be completely stopped but they can be managed by federal law.

People will complain that it's against freedom of speech but free speech does not mean reckless speech. Words have consequences and social media lets every one have a virtual loud speaker that amplifies ideas that are said without much thought behind them. You can't even know whether the person is serious of just trying to be funny. It's a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Waste_Recycling_Fee shows Some states in the USA have something like that.

The EU has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni.... It doesn’t pay consumers for returning items, but does make it easier. Larger shops _have_ to take in old equipment for free, for example (for smaller electronics even if you aren’t a customer)

In some (¿all?) EU countries, if you have an item (washing machine, television) delivered to your house, the deliverer must take in a similar item, working or not, for free. That makes recycling easier than disposing of the item yourself.
No it’s not. The post I’m responding to made a case for why censorship is fine in this case. That reason applies very very broadly.

If we are ok with that reason, then we are ok with that reason, and we must acknowledge what else is caught in that net.
That waterfall doesn't look like any sensible digital modulation to me, or at least if I were doing HFT, the spectrogram would look totally different.

I think the source is rather an unintentional radiator in this case.
If we had all listened to Aaron none of this would have happened. He was for truth and education and equality and freedom. Too many people have been marginalized by the #ImaginaryPropertyRegime, left and right, and this was exactly one of the things Aaron was worried about and fighting against.
This is bonkers, plainly so. You are really not expecting anyone to be able to demonstrate that?

There's thousands of sites, readily accessible today, with incredible images and posts containing all the most heinous things you can imagine. No firewall yet, although they have been chased off the more polite sections of the web. This is no different.

I'm confused by all the hyperventilating.
Setting aside for a moment the false dichotomy you are putting forward that somehow this company's business should be treated differently than any other company's business--which, FWIW, to me is a pretty ridiculous assertion--your frame here is kind of irrelevant to the question of whether there's irony to be had from censoring someone over censorship: as many others have pointed out in this thread, is nothing more than the well-known "paradox of tolerance".
I don't understand the question. There are statutes that both refer to conduct and delegate power to make rules. Enforcement of these statutes is the responsibility of law enforcement officers.
Is likely super intelligence will treat us less than ants as their goals and ours likely completely different. If to achieve their goals won’t harm us, it would be pure luck.
> Learning QM consists of learning to silence your objections to the fact that none of the things you're being asked to believe make any sense.

Yes, but the reason you're learning those things is that that is the way reality actually works. That's what happens when you actually do experiments. Richard Feynman once remarked: "quantum mechanics was not wished upon us by theorists". We have QM because physicists were dragged to it kicking and screaming by actual experiments that showed them that reality does not work the way classical physics describes. And the reason all those difficult mathematical tools have to be taught is that that's the only way physicists know how to build models that make correct predictions about what happens when you do those experiments.

In other words, yes, you can say QM doesn't make sense, but that's because reality doesn't make sense--at least not if "make sense" means "works the way my human intuitions, which never evolved to deal with quantum phenomena, say it should". Yes, reality doesn't work the way our human intuitions say it should. That means we have to retrain our intuitions--which is what a lot of learning QM is really about.
That happens all the time to head shops and sex shops.
> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward.

Why is that? In general, a slippery slope argument is a poor one.

> Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist

I can imagine a lot of things, I'm sure you can too. But what matters is, is it likely? If, let's say, Slack got taken down by this because it was found that sound rioters used it to coordinate, I would imagine there would be an absolutely huge backlash even today with a situation as dire as the capitol riots.

I can't answer your last question, and it is a good question. But I do agree with AWS and others: the answer is not to do nothing.
Transgenderism is not a sexual more, though.

Is the trend of human history on the scale of thousands of years old relevant? Is that no different than saying "It's pointless to worry about climate change because the sun will explode and then there will be the heat death of the universe?"

Surely there is some evidence that society and humanity is "stabilizing" to a certain plateau of morality and ethics not driven by religion but driven by humanism?

Lastly, "Particularly if someone believes that it's a religious issue dictated by a deity who takes an active interest in the world, then they'll definitely believe they're on the right side of history." is exactly why I ask!

Because the perspective of what is acceptable from these religious institutions is rapidly changing!

50 years ago a Christian church that is "gay-friendly" would be inconceivable. Today there are many. Of course there are those that would dismiss those out of hand, but by default the ethical positions of groups that supposedly represent eternal immortal deities is shifting - from evolution, to birth control, to homosexuality.

I'm genuinely wondering if people believe that transgender acceptance is somehow unique.
That's better than with Firefox, where I get a unique fingerprint