Are you sure that article wasn't an interview with an author who wrote a book that took that stance? Having a conversation with someone who has arguably extremist views is very different from holding that extremist view.
Funny, I was told "if a Nazi sits down at a table of ten people, there are eleven Nazis at that table" for years (and in particular by NPR listeners), but suddenly there's now a use/mention distinction for platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it? Color me shocked at the hypocrisy.
Sorry, but exactly what point are you trying to make here? Are you suggesting that NPR has never interviewed - say - Christian fundamentalists (they have)? Are you suggesting that they should interview more of them? What, precisely, would make you happy here?
As I've been told for the last decade, "everything is political" therefore NPR can't provide unbiased or neutral coverage of anything, therefore there should be no federal funding of NPR or PBS. Ideologues and corpirations donate more than enough money to sustain both without the pretense of impartiality provided by federal funding.
If "everything is political", then eliminating federal funding from NPR and PBS doesn’t solve the problem - it guarantees that only corporate and ideological interests shape the narrative. Public funding exists not to claim perfect neutrality, but to create a space where journalism isn’t entirely driven by profit motives or partisan agendas. Strip that away, and you’re not removing bias - you’re institutionalizing it.
Journalism, and specifically NPR, is already driven entirely by corporate and ideological interests. Your supposition that federal funding helps remove bias is trivially disproven by the last decade of coverage of NPR, where I literally (literally!) have not been able to turn it on without race, gender, or Trump being mentioned within a minute (it became a game).
To be fair, there was one exception. and that was a replay of a David Foster Wallace interview from 2003. Which was immediately followed by a current interview with two women talking about white men's obsession with Infinite Jest and how their podcast was helping deconstruct toxic masculinity or something like that. The comparison in quality was stark.
The time for caring about and preserving civic-level notions of neutrality and objectivity was a decade ago. I don't care anymore. If wingnuts want to unduly influence Americans through broadcasting, they can do it like everyone else--without taxpayer dollars.
If your position is "I don't care anymore", then you're not making a principled argument - you're venting. That's fine, just don't pretend it's a policy stance.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." likewise isn't a policy stance, it's naked hypocrisy.
It's a free country so people are afforded the right to be hypocrites, but nobody is entitled to receive public funding when doing so.
You're not actually critiquing hypocrisy - you're just deciding whose version of it gets a microphone. Pulling public funding doesn't eliminate bias, it just ensures the only voices left are the ones with capital to shout the loudest.
Is it? Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.
Someone else in this thread posted a diffed view of the interview demonstrating how NPR reshaped the article a week after publication. Very, very instructive.
> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.
Steve Inskeep did 30 minutes with Steve Bannon this week. They did a piece with Chris Rufo yesterday (he's the guy that got right wing media to start freaking out about CRT, and then DEI). But please, do go on clutching your pearls about the WORST POSSIBLE THING EVER: PROPERTY DAMAGE!! Nope, not civil rights violations or gleefully platforming some of the most objectively harmful viewpoints on modern politics, nope, it's PROPERTY DAMAGE that is absolutely the most important possible thing to get upset about.
Perhaps someone with a better understanding of physics could provide an ELI5 but for a software engineer (ELISE)? Have they literally created a device that causes photons to travel into the past? It seems like this is something different.
>> Have they literally created a device that causes photons to travel into the past?
No. If you ever see a headline that gives you that impression, its just someone sensationalizing something much more mundane. I've seen several of these over the years and find it pretty annoying.
Suppose you're using Newtonian mechanics to model the behavior of a moving baseball that bounces off a brick wall. You write down some equations, do the experiment, the results match, yay science.
Now imagine your lazy coworker was supposed to do the same experiment, but he couldn't find any bricks, so instead of a wall he just built a tiny rocket engine inside the tennis ball that can exert exactly enough force to reverse its velocity. The ball's velocity changes in exactly the same way, except that it changes at a certain time (when your lazy coworker triggers it) rather than at a certain place (where the wall is). Would his results match yours?
For a single ball, yes. The behavior would be identical between these two scenarios. If you looked at a graph of the ball's location over time, you wouldn't be able to tell whether it had bounced off a wall or been "bounced" by a little rocket engine. Right?
Now consider a stream of baseballs. In your lab, your baseball cannon fires a stream of balls which all reverse velocity at a certain place in space, but your coworker is firing a stream of balls that all reverse velocity at a certain time. Would they also behave identically?
No, this time there are differences. For one example, the wall-balls would collide with each other (the ball that just hit the wall would run into the ball that's about to hit the wall) and the rocket-balls wouldn't (each ball reverses direction at the same time, so the spacing between the balls never changes). For another difference, they'd bounce back in a different order (the first wall-ball to be shot would be the first to return, whereas the last rocket-ball to leave the cannon would be the first to return).
That is more or less what this experiment is doing except they're using light rather than baseballs, and a substance with variable reflectiveness rather than tiny rockets. This might have repercussions for time symmetry, that's above my pay grade, but definitely doesn't involve time travel.
>"provide an ELI5 but for a software engineer (ELISE)? Have they literally created a device that causes photons to travel into the past?"
I spoke with the client and I still don't understand what they're getting at. Sales said that our requirements are to create a device that can reflect light through time.
Management: We've got a great new project that has all the features that our users have been asking for. We need it done as fast possible, it's the number one priority. How fast can we get it done?
Engineers: For all of it? At least a year, probably more. Even a subset of those features will take six months, minimum.
Management: That's too long. You can have all the resources you want, we need to have it done in 90 days.
Engineers: That cannot be done. No amount of effort or engineers will get it done in 90 days.
Tell them to rank the features by importance. Go down the list with individual ETA estimates and they can deduce the final ETA. For bonus points provide error bars for each item so they can see how it adds up...
I feel like drive and calendar go with e-mail fairly naturally. The play seems to be giving people willing to pay for a google alternative everything they'd want to replace. They can't give them everything but, encrypted storage feels like a fairly simple thing to provide and calendars are a well trod problem space.
Overall though, I agree with you. Proton seems like a solid company with good offerings and it would be a shame if they lost quality in their core offerings for the sake of adding features.
I can't speak to how prevalent it is in the industry, but something my team has started doing in our web services is building with GraalVM and deploying native images. The build time can be super long, but the benefit is incredibly fast start-up time, which really benefits horizontal scaling. We're using Quarkus (https://quarkus.io), which is largely built on Vertx which was mentioned elsewhere, but other frameworks (Micronaut (https://micronaut.io) comes to mind) make it easy and SpringBoot is also working on support. If your doing containers/kubernetes native images feel like the way to go.
