skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Ouch! This isn't my area and you're right I haven't researched this topic in any depth (though I did look at Diaspora), so I'm not surprised it shows.

Thanks for responding.

I'm glad you understood (at least I hope you did) my comment wasn't meant as an attack on you. Far from it, it was just my honest assessment. And I do appreciate the discussion.

>Decentralized platforms like Diaspora may be viable alternatives someday, but my possibly ill-informed pragmatic gut tells me they won't be viable alternatives for many years to come.

Network effects[0] give platforms like Facebook and Twitter their power and influence.

Creating (and more importantly, using) decentralized alternatives is, IMHO, the only reasonable way to counteract that advantage.

Which is why I made the suggestions WRT APIs (to level the playing field and give alternatives a chance), ISP upload speeds (to make self-hosting viable), content licenses (to give control back to the creators of content, rather than the aggregators) and tracking/advertising opt-ins (to reduce the money making power and incentives to track/spy/collect data of the big guys).

Your pragmatic gut is pretty spot on. Without at least some of the above, alternative platforms will have a hard time gaining traction (although they do exist and are viable in a number of areas) in the social media space.

I'd say that the success of decentralized alternatives rests on the willingness of people like you and me to use and advocate for those alternatives.

Perhaps it's time to install a Diaspora pod[1] or Mastodon instance[2]?

>Thanks for your patience and persistence. It was interesting!

Likewise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

[1] https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation

[2] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/
Can Parler still be installed from a direct download or is this at the O.S. level?
I'm confused as I didn't think I was arguing for a "what if" of history. I was just trying to say that not only are we criminally liable for the outcomes we cause but also the intentions we have and just because something doesn't have an illegal outcome doesn't mean it didn't have an illegal intention, e.g., murder vs. attempted murder.
> Meanwhile, as a student of Hume I cannot hope to describe what “ought to happen”.

shakes head

Well then, frankly, you're autistic. The idea that morality doesn't play a role in Civil Rights, or police violence towards blacks, or BLM/Antifa violence towards basically everyone, or Twitter deplatforming people.... is nonsense.

Even the people at Twitter don't believe that quite frankly. Their angry SJW petitions to deplatform weren't laden with "so we can make more money" arguments.
> I think these companies have been causing lots of ethical issues

Pro tip: you can safely assume that any of the stuff you read online in terms of ethics in those companies exists solely for people to feel "woke" and for you to click on, and is highly biased. Do not take what you read online as the common viewpoint about those companies.

Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google has had way more positive impact on society that surpasses any negative things that they have done. The negative things should be ignored, but require proper contextualization and accuracy to really understand what the overall impact is.
I don't believe that is correct. Congress has the power to reject electors and has done so on several occasions.

There are established procedures for this process: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/explaining-how-congress-...
Apple shouldn't be obliged to host bile, but they have cornered themselves by being the only way to install apps.
Trump likely doesn't have time (or the ability without congress) and it doesn't seem likely that congress and Biden would go after Apple for this.
> big tech claims to be an impartial platform

I don’t think they claim any such thing. Read the Twitter TOS, guidelines, rules, etc. There are pages and pages of restrictions. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies

I suspect Twitter doesn’t use a moderation policy like Parler’s specifically because they don’t want to be a cesspool like Parler, with the correspondingly tiny user-base.
There are already calls in congress for similar measures against OANN, Newsmax and Fox News and also calls for action by lower-level providers such as AWS.

It doesn't take much thought to see the US is going for the next few years.
He's questioning the claim that 50% of the political spectrum is being de-platformed.

Most conservatives, like most liberals, never run afoul of the content rules of the major platforms.
Said business is cozying up to the party taking control of the house, senate, and presidency.

It has nothing to do with any market.
If you want to see all the calls for violence, they are streaming minute by minute on the donald site. Some even worse things today (I had to stop reading it because it's getting to the point of super illegal).
I think of his description of “facade of cleanliness” for hotels and restaurants frequently.
i am waiting for AMZN to launch a dating app.

why not?
Nope, you’re spot on. Diversions are critical for folks who might be on the path to radicalization, who can be reasoned with, who can critically think, and who can be brought back from the edge. Not everyone is a lost cause, and the effort must be put forth collectively.
Free speech has limits, does it not? The US Supreme Court has ruled that one cannot, for example, falsely scream fire in a crowded theater.

I would assume that calls for the violent overthrow of the US government in order to overturn an election at the very least should be considered as equally dangerous as screaming fire in a crowded theater.
The real dilemma to me sounds like what we define as freedom of speech in the first place?

If we say let anyone say anything, we end up with someone encouraging discrimination or even genocide.

From the other side if we introduce restrictions on what's allowed to say and what's not, who decides black and white?

Even if we build a trustworthy system for decisions, what about gray areas? E.g. antivaxxers. Their efforts might make people die. Indirectly. But it can happen. If antivaxxers are banned, should we do the same for flatearthers?
Yes, elders thoughts are valuable, but only if they come out in the interview. A more useful context than not being dead might come from questions with the potential to elevate, like these from David Brooks [1]:

What crossroads are you at? What commitments have you made that you no longer believe in? Who do you feel most grateful to have in your life? What problem did you use to have but now have licked? In what ways are you sliding backward? What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/nine-nonobvious-w...
Inciting violence should not be defended as free speech. In fact it’s not considered free speech. Let alone the fact the usage being blocked violates the very clear terms of service.
In the case of social media, there's a difference between censorship and blocking hate speech/incitement to violence. The former is about quelling ideas and latter is about fomenting violence against "others".

Conflating the two is disingenuous at best.

As for "ideas", look at what Fox News has done to political discourse in America and tell me that's a good thing. I'm against outright censorship but they really push the limits of "free speech". From my point of view, they engage in stochastic terrorism and do not engage in good faith.
Ah! But Parler started after they bought their phone. How could they possibly know something they would want would be banned?
Agree with the beer.

I prefer this -

https://every.sdf.org
It was not dismissive, it was refuting the specific contention that something scarce and of limited supply is ipso facto valuable.
Not sure why this was dead, or why Apple seems to get a pass on this walled-garden behavior. If Microsoft were to require Windows apps to be installed from the store, people would be outraged. When it's done on mobile (how the majority of the world accesses computing these days), it's seen as a valid "security measure".
Sure, I'd love to build my own phone. Where do I start?

It'd have to support the apps, though, otherwise mine would have none.
I don't agree that there is the feedback loop that exists in the OP's post. Deplatforming is not some inescapable negative feedback loop that these people can't get out of. It is the result of criminal behavior. If the criminal behavior stops, the deplatforming stops.

We already have processes in our society to reduce and hopefully eliminate criminal actors.
Why is the choice between government control and supporting censorship by tech companies?

One can be against government control out of fear that government will use that to do something unintended, and at the same time condemn the destructive behaviour of these business owners.

The situation with freedom of speech is remarkably similar to the situation with religious freedom in England of 1600s. Like they have learned to not bring their sacral beliefs into everyday life, because that causes the society to fail, we need to learn that escalating the political fight too much is dangerous, and universal freedom of speech is game theoretically the right strategy.
Then please help normalize it, instead of worrying about hurting the illiterate feelings of those who find it unacceptable.
That "Flat illustration" lossy AVIF case seems to have subtle but noticeable color shift on large pure color areas where webP doesn't have (check the background of the second row, third col figure). What causes this?
Signal server has never and will never be open source, that is where the backdoors live
« The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism »
Do not search for it. Do not mention it or allude to it
I'm all for censorship when it's hate and lies.
> hopefully this move pushes the government to force Apple to ...

While I strongly oppose Apple's decision, I even more strongly oppose government involvement as a solution. The government should not be able to compel association, it is essential to maintain freedom of association.
If you think Trump incited violence, that is a crime which should be decided in a courtroom, and not in Mark Zuckerberg’s office.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think what Trump said was incitement, or even close to it. Irresponsible? Yes. Incitement? No.
For iOS, theoretically possible via re-signing a IPA and sideloading via a paid iOS developer account.

Otherwise iOS won't run unsigned code without a jailbreak.
Aircraft carriers are very difficult to build, it makes sense they would have a hard time mastering it - only a few nations can even attempt to build them. They'll have four or five operational aircraft carriers this decade. They fully understand how to build them now. Their next step is catching up to the US aircraft carrier standard and being able to field a comprehensive blue-water navy (which is what they're reaching for by beginning to arrange naval bases around the globe).

The problem with China is straight-forward: time is on their side in all cases. They're a rising global power with expanding resources and capabilities (and a moral flexibility to do whatever they want, anytime they want), while the US can no longer afford its positioning militarily around the world (and that context will be far worse in another ten years). The US has already lost Asia to China, its bureaucrats are just too arrogant - still swimming in the past - to realize it (and I say that both as an American and as someone who thinks that outcome is bad for the world). China will rule Asia in terms of power balance before another 10-15 years passes by and the US will be forced to cede more of its post WW2 positioning there.

Have you seen what's going on in the US over the last few years? Of course you have, everyone has. That's not Trump, that's not blah blah blah (insert the fake excuses thrown around by pop media & 'journalists'). It's an eroding standard of living problem (that crashed off a cliff as the facade fell off with the 2009 crash) and everyone knows exactly what I'm talking about (healthcare, education, jobs, demographics, wages, household wealth, opioids, suicides, life expectancy, social chaos and strife that comes with many tens of millions of people being left adrift with no hope and they're all getting more angry and violent by the day on all political sides). The extraordinary mismanagement of the US by the clowns in DC over the last 20 years has tipped it over into shrink and recede mode (and that's just basic extrapolation, takes 30 seconds to calculate that forced outcome); the demands of the domestic population for social welfare improvement is getting violently loud and will get far louder this decade, which forces an eventual either or (this or that) decision for the politicians (this is how you get so many Republicans supporting $2,000 stimulus checks (an incomprehensible thing for that political side just 20 years ago), even some of them sense what's happening). In the short-term the US will print magic fiat (eat its wealth by debasing its currency) to pay for the costs of being a badly over-extended superpower, in the longer-term it has to recede because its finances are in an accelerating death spiral (Japan scenario). China doesn't have to do anything, it's pushing outward, and Asia is its backyard (whereas it's extremely expensive for the US to be positioned across Asia and put up a defensive front against China there).
It's certainly not illegal or violates site guidelines if you can put forward a reasonably argued position.

I personally think a future where China annexes Taiwan would bring about a more stable and peaceful geopolitical relationship between China and the US because of three reasons.

1. The US is not threatened by China. The Pacific prevents any invasion of the America's, and China cannot blockade the US given its two coastlines and world class navy.

2. China is threatened by the US. It's ringed by US military bases and depends on oil shipping through the Indian Ocean.

3. China has no ideology of global expansion and conversion like the USSR, nor does it need more land and resources like the much smaller Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Taiwan (and frankly all of China's other disputes) are limited goals of a nationalist ideology from the 1940s and losing Taiwan won't trigger a dominoe effect of China annexing the rest of the world and threatening America or Europe.

In a future where Taiwan was annexed and the US has pulled it's bases back to Guam or Hawaii, I can't see any future flash points between the two nations. Rather, a much healthier and respectful relationship between two powerhouses that mind their own affairs instead of sticking weapons and provocations in each other's faces.

However, this line of reasoning requires accepting that the US should not act as a global defender of democracy worldwide regardless of cost or strategy, and that encouraging a democracy to spring up in the path of a unsettled conflict wasn't the wisest of choices.

Still, minority positions tend to be unpopular unless reality proves them to be true.
I was looking for datasets. Thanks for this. Not sure why anyone downvoted a data source.
Interesting, can you elaborate on this?
Pompeo lifts US-Taiwan restrictions
The real problem is not so much that they can do this, which is of course entirely legal, but that a few companies have such concentrated market power. People seem to regard Twitter as some kind of essential service, but it's just fucking Twitter. In the days when there were dozens of book publishers just in New York, if one turned you down, you could go somewhere else. Now there's four.

I mean, it's actually kind of nuts to consider that Twitter has somehow 'silenced' President [expletive deleted], when he still has a whole press corps at his disposal and could call a press conference at any moment.
The copy hypothesis also doesn't explain the difference between warm and cold start performance, at least for the "random read" case.

For warm start, the speed for read vs mmap is 3 GB/s vs 6 GB/s (i.e. mmap is 2x faster).
For cold start, that changes to 0.05 GB/s vs 0.25 GB/s (i.e. mmap is 5x faster).

If the only significant difference between read() and mmap() is how data is copied, then shouldn't the performance gap get much smaller in the cold start scenario? After all, you're adding the identical (and pretty large) overhead of reading from disk. Instead, the gap gets much larger. That's strange. (The sequential read case looks more reasonable.)

So there must be something else going on besides more efficient copying with mmap.
So why haven't they banned twitter for hosting Chinese government accounts?
> We’ll see how fond the left is when a new set of “counter terrorism” laws, corporate censorship, and the free market when it gets used on the next round of BLM protestors, to pick an example at random.

That has been happening?
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...

Pretty much has been happening forever too. Many voices "on the left" have always been under surveillance since we started surveiling our citizens, and were often economically blackballed on the free market as well.

Also this seems like false equivalences between people saying we should change how policing works vs we should overturn the results of our election through force.

We have actual armed insurrectionists on one hand storming the capitol with zip cuffs and illegally carried firearms. You are asking how we would feel if we treated BLM, the people who want their tax dollars to go to alternatives to policing, like we treated those people inciting the capitol riot. Honestly it would probably be an improvement.
It’s hilarious to see all these alt right folks clamor about free speech. Always thought they were big defenders of free markets and corporate friendly policy.
You believe Trump was making some kind of insurrection suggestion with his invitation to a rally in the capital. I don't. You think there's something between the lines of his words, but that's just speculation. If you're going to make a claim so grand as the sitting president was inciting insurrection, you need more than speculation.

My honest opinion is that Trump wanted a BIG rally to demonstrate that he had a lot of support to make the idea that he lost to Biden seem absurd. He used this reasoning over and over again, even in his call with the GA SoS.

Occam's Razor makes that far easier to believe than that he wanted people to take over the capitol building. Beyond just sounding like crazed conspiracy, it doesn't even make any sense to do. What is he gonna do with a building? Like, what if they managed to take congresspeople or senators hostage? How in the world would that lead to maintaining his hold on power?

Sorry, it just sounds like a bunch of conspiratorial claptrap to me, along the lines of the stuff I hear from the right with their Q and Lin Wood nonsense. The crazy thing is that it's become institutionalized on the left in the MSM. It's bonkers.
EFF's response to social media companies' decisions to block Trump’s accounts
Indeed, just like when US were standing with Hong Kong people in 2019 and turned down most of the asylum request when those people really need them.

Action speaks louder than words.
If parler defined their API in an open format, that anyone could implement, could a generic client app be allowed on the app store?
Oh, thank you. But most of the credit must go to tree v1.8.0 and markdown. I was simply lazy enough not to want to code html...
If I had a dollar for every time someone made this point...

The issue isn’t whether they have the right to deplatform. The issue is whether they _should_.
I don't think that's the case. I think many people (myself included) were taught only that "they" is plural, not that it explicitly cannot be singular. The distinction there may be too subtle to matter for some people, though.

Either way, clinging to a frozen-in-time interpretation of a living, changing language is foolish for anyone who would like to easily understand and be easily understood. And not waste time in our too-short lives on pointless language nitpickery like we're doing here.
I heard they are about to get banned from AWS. Rumor is that Amazon has also demanded full moderation. I know they are getting pressure from Amazon employees and AWS customers.
Why would raymarching and VR be different from anything else and VR? What is the overhead of webgl you are talking about?

Raymarching is heavily shader dependent which shouldn't be bottlenecked by webgl at all.
I’m not saying it will be impossible to access, just harder for Average Joe who doesn’t understand App Store versus WWW.

It’s fascinating, if somewhat terrifying, watching communication channels breakdown for millions of people.
The positions are hypocritical because they're post-hoc. The starting point is a visceral hatred of the opposing tribe, e.g. Trump/MAGA, and a desire to beat them - not a desire to be rationally consistent or fair.
Strawman. Who is calling for violent overthrow of the US government? Even one person? And on Parler or on Twitter?
I didn’t sign up to anything other than buy an iPhone and while I’m not sad I can’t have a Nazi app on my phone if suddenly they say I can’t have Twitter I will be. It seems weird to have a computer and for the manufacture tell me what I can do with it.
Mindustry is such a great game. I bought it for like $4 when it was on sale on steam, and played it for >200hrs.

Can definitely recommend, it beeing open source is really just the cherry on top.
I've often heard people claiming that twitter/facebook/etc. can be considered public forums .. and as much of a stretch as it is, I'm inclined to agree. This is where people get their news. It is kind of like to taking a TV station off the air due to their political leanings. Tbh I've tuned out the news in the last few months for my own sanity so I might not have all the info to hold a strong opinion. Always good to default to freedom of speech though, the most sacred thing we have.

Looking back on the last few years, the most disappointing thing in society is the intolerance and tribalism. I bet if people were to state their own opinions, without any outside influence, we would all be at each other's throats given the current state of affairs. You don't agree with me on X so fuck you, where X >= petty. I have friends with varying political leanings but we seem to be the exception -- when did the slightest differences in political opinion become devastating deal breakers? You don't support BLM? You're an awful person. You want to ban guns? Burn in hell. These could otherwise be nice people that you could be friendly with. Has it always been this bad or has the internet underscored the black-and-white nature of politics?
Let’s say Trump wants to send a message to the country using the internet right now.

How does he do it?

Think about it, and then tell me that these corporations don’t have power over our speech.
> Their BATNA is Android, which allows sideloading

Android is not an alternate for iPhone. They are not interchangeable. I don't know why people keep saying this.

Maybe for some people they are interchangeable, but they are sufficiently different that they are not true substitutes.
Absolutely. I have no problem with them not wanting the app in the app store, but they should allow side loading or alternative app stores. We should have the same situation on ios that we have on macos.
My money is on urbit becoming a haven for these people. If you're constantly getting de-platformed, Urbit has a lot going for you. Decentralized, unregulated, unmoderated chat that’s hard to get into and fully anonymous, with a "burn it down" attitude throughout. I've been in there, they already welcome similar types. Symbolic imagery in the form of "sigils" already is a way to show support for certain concepts/places/people in a highly reproducible but obscure way. It really feels like it's only a matter of time.

You're already seeing it with tweets like this from within the community: https://twitter.com/default_friend/status/134769644628863386...