We should have a peer-to-peer DNS driven by some consensus system like blockchain. Why do we allow critical pieces of internet infrastructure to be centralized?
There is no mandate to trust the root DNS servers. Someone like Google (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) could just start registering their own .org domain names and nobody could stop them.
The resulting shitstorm would be so enjoyable to watch.
Previously the CEO of Cloudflare has been against making 1.1.1.1 return anything non-standard, because even a single instance of that would ruin the integrity of DNS.
Given the headwinds the browser DNS-over-https efforts have run into, I wouldn't expect them to want to try it.
But I was pondering the merits of eg: a regional block of ISPs declaring they'd like to try, and seeing the effect that had on the value of the 'legacy operators'
What a shitfest this would be. How much money do you think some governments would be willing to spend to take over the entire DNS system? Don't you see what they did to Bitcoin?
In addition to government interference in free speech, all actions/words that offend have potentially life devastating consequences in this age of the digital permanent record. Suppose you slap someone in a moment of uncontrolled anger. If someone records that, posts it on the internet, and it goes viral, you then become the mad slapper in the eyes of the world. If someone googles your name, they will see you slapping someone. Even a single slap can potentially destroy your life. Not only do we have draconian laws, but also draconian self-regulation fueled by a vicious mob that demands political correctness.
People are angry. Everyone that steps out of line is now a target for that anger. It's a sad and scary state of affairs.
The behavior isn't new, just the reach and visibility.
Conformist social pressure has always been intense. Previously, it was just very local and not visible outside the social context in which it happened. People didn't notice it (or if they did, would tend to approve of it) unless it was focused on them.
Yes, there has always been a social layer to regulating behavior. In this sense, the world has almost become one village where you cannot escape your social offences, no matter where you go on earth. Also, a video or archive of a tweet doesn't fade. So I would say the visibility, reach, and permanence of one's offences is something new, or at least has reached a new unprecedented level.
We do have laws to limit free speech in good and specific ways. You can't slander a person who isn't famous, for example, or incite violence against specific people or groups. And most of the cries of free speech being violated aren't really about the first amendment. Most are just people being deplatformed, which is a reminder that YouTube is just Google. It's a company, not a public space.
Well, let's suppose it's 1900, and you live in a small town somewhere in the US. You slap someone in a moment of uncontrolled anger. How long would that follow you? The rest of your life, unless you leave town. That single slap could destroy your life.
So I think that the "digital permanent record" removes the anonymity of the big city, and returns us to small town rules.
I agree with the similarity but as you're saying there was always the possibility of leaving town. It wasn't a convenient solution, and you might very well repeat the same actions wherever you go, but at least you could get a chance to start over elsewhere. IMO that's quite a bit different than the current situation, where I feel you'd have to go and change your legal name, move to another location and get new accounts online to manage to shake off what is now attached to your real name, and _even then_ the paper trail would probably be found at some point and it would all come back to you.
So small town rules, yes, but practically speaking there's only one town left. Whether it's a good thing or not is a matter of opinion - and depends on the specific context as far as I'm concerned - but overall I feel like something of value has been lost in the transition. It might have been possible to make amends and/or show that whatever you did was a temporary lapse in judgement before, but doing that one the scale of the whole internet audience we have nowadays doesn't feel practical, or even possible really. =/
Violence was much more acceptable back then. Beating your wife, beating your kids, getting into drunk fights. That's just what everyone did. If slaps had destroyed people there would be no one left. If you slapped the wrong person however, yeah I could see that having consequences.
Actually I have friends who have slapped other friends while drunk and nothing at all came of it. They didn't get excluded. They also didn't do it again.
Not really. You can't be fired for religion. I wonder what would happen if someone (like Damore) said "I religiously believe that women shouldn't work".
You realize there are entire parts of the planet that operate this way, right?
> You can't be fired for religion
Therein lies the problem. Therein lies the problem. We've politicized religious speak. Who's the arbiter of what constitutes a religion and what religious views are tolerable in the workplace?
Some people want to take the rights of others to impose their preferred world view.
Maybe you shouldn't assault people if you don't want to be known for assault? Slap or not, hitting someone in a fit of anger is assault, full stop.
Even people which have been 'cancelled' for things that aren't assault still end up going on to have their career mostly unaffected unless they did something really henious.
People aren't perfect. I don't think anyone commits a crime after performing a full calculation of the consequences. I think you demonstrate an important trend with your comment. The desire to label things and ignore circumstances. It appears to me that people don't want to think about the nuances of things; they just want to simplify all thought to some label level where conclusions are easily made.
The scenario you shared was someone assaulting someone else because they were angry.
Just because you're angry and not able to understand the consequences of your action does not excuse you from them. I find it more disturbing that we're defending literal assault because somehow it's the result of PC culture gone mad and not the result of laws meant to discourage violence.
If you're trying to connect this to people saying something silly on Twitter and having that follow them, you chose a really poor initial example of someone committing an actual crime.
Do you see how labeling a slap with the larger class of physical violence, which encompasses all sorts grievous acts, makes the rather innocent crime seem much more severe? This is a huge problem. It's a slap. Not a vicious beat down. It's violence, but there are degrees of violence. Should those degrees of violence not be reflected in our perception of the act?
True. And "cancel culture" has always been the way things are. It's nothing new. It's just we used to "cancel" people for things like being gay or socialist. No one likes to be on the unpopular side of the social spectrum, but then again, no one is guaranteed a platform or an audience, only the right to speak to those who will listen willingly.
We were warned not to feed man to the machine, yet that's exactly what we did. I guess everyone that died fighting for this country did so to create a bunch of billionaires and slaves to serve them. Our nation was paid for by the blood of its people, but somehow this debt is always forgotten. The people, by the right of sacrifice, deserve better than this.
>The people, by the right of sacrifice, deserve better than this.
The people want their Echo Dots tomorrow, and they don't give a shit what it takes to make that happen. They want them yesterday.
And if you ask the people, many will state that Amazon's warehouse employees should be grateful for any work they get, and that they're always free to quit and find other work if they choose.
And most of the rest will just shrug their shoulders and say it's regretful but not actually do anything about it.
I wasn't making a claim that requires proof, but the attitude described can be found in many of the Amazon threads on this site, at least when wages are discussed.
Also, if Americans were unsatisfied with the way Amazon's employees are treated, the market would respond appropriately, and Amazon would be forced to change its practices to remain productive. As it is, the market doesn't appear to value the welfare of Amazon's employees over its current business practices.
Amazon's stock has fluctuated with political focus on the company. It dropped for a whole month this year I believe -- I don't have the figures on hand. You are right that many Americans have a greedy consumer mindset, but also many Americans don't feel like they have a choice. With 70% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, that doesn't leave room for wallet activism. While what you are saying is principled, I think the full circumstances of the economy and consumer conditions prevent them from expressing their sentiment in the market as you suggest.
By the right of sacrifice? Is this a veterans-only warehouse or something?
The US created a bunch of billionaires, but it also created the richest middle class. Let’s cut back the drama a bit and maybe discuss a law to improve safety?
Drama? What about the epidemic suicides and drug overdoses happening in this country? What about the absolute destruction of rural communities by monopolies emboldened by the lack of antitrust enforcement? The people of this country are being abused in so many ways and nothing is being done for them. Laws aren't going to help this situation, it's our stinking attitude that's the problem. It's our complete disregard for human life that's the problem.
I may be off base here but this sounds an awful lot like perfect being the enemy of the good. Or, framed another way, idealism being the enemy of the pragmatic.
Waxing poetic about everyday tragedy is all well and good as a rhetorical device. However, it doesn't really do anything except to sow the seeds of division now does it? Especially when you cap the whole bit with the idea that it is thought that is wrong and not action.
And your proposed solution to this is effectively a paradigm shift in the perception of human value?
I'm sure you're the type of person that thinks poems are written to solve some sort of problem. Not all human communication is about expressing some solution to a problem. We can communicate sentiment and points of view as well.
No, it's a sombre note that the state conscripted men and sent them to their deaths. To defend a free country. Which was especially free to the rich, it turns out.
I never even made it to pre-calc and I suck at Algebra but I'm teaching myself CS and functional programming. The title made me interested and the warning tells me I'm probably not ready for it.
But concentrated on the simpler tasks. Rosetta Code has examples for Gaussian Elimination, but no string to number conversion. It also has some really esoteric languages. It's really more of a Rosetta Stone, while Programming Idioms is more of a lookup for the typical but infrequent stuff you (well, I) tend to forget when working in multiple languages.
you want to be known as the one who invented the wheel, because it looks good as a resume item. That's why the wheel keeps getting reinvented again and again, and usually quite poorly.
Yes, but you have to admit, the news doesn't really serve its intended purpose of speaking out against power. It seems more like a conduit that's pretending it's not.
News' intended purpose isn't just about speaking out against power. It's about providing a means for people to obtain information about current events -- political, medical, whatever. It's supposed to help augment your education.
You know, the same education which is thoroughly gutted in America.
I quit social media and after a while I couldn't even make sense of why I was there to begin with. "There was no value lost... what the hell was I doing on there all this time?" I never had any "glowing" experience on social media, no memories, yet so much time wasted. People just aren't that interesting. It's all the same stuff over and over again. And if you do get into something interesting, you end up with an exchange of 20+ comments which just seems out of place... especially on FB.
It's just mind boggling how universal these concepts are and how they show up in surprising ways. As a recent example, I've been learning the basics of composing music in Haskell with Euterpea[1] and wanted to make a function which played several notes over a list of octaves to make chords. It turns out the applicative operator was exactly the function I need to do this! It would be hard to go into the details in just a little blurb here... but here is a piece I made with with it[2]. And here's the line of code with the applicative operator:
My favorite part about Haskell is how you can know literally nothing about the domain and make meaningful changes to programs regardless thanks to local reasoning.
That's really one power of functor/applicative/monad - if you understand their interfaces, you can work with new unfamiliar types that have these instances without much effort at all.
Although abstracting over this stuff isn't possible in any imperative language unless Scala or maybe advanced C++ template count. But that isn't due to their imperative nature exactly.
But local reasoning is very hard to count on in most other languages - that's for sure. It's easier to just run a VM in your head.
Amazing, thanks! It always amazes me how natural Haskell is for some people. Some seem to see the simplest solution with so little effort while I still struggle with almost embarrassingly simple things. I wish I would have picked up Haskell as my first language, instead my mind was poisoned by C...
I haven't figured out whether the C I learned was poison. I often wish I could intuit Haskell without translating everything to imperative in my head, because of how cleanly many complex things can be expressed. On the other hand, pretty much everything I program has some rough kind of performance constraint in practice and I appreciate how directly I can read the performance characteristics of an imperative program from its control flow.
Definitely learning Haskell as the first language can make it easier to get used to things, but I don't generally agree with C as "poisonous" to one's mind. My last big project written in C was writing a hypervisor, and honestly using C in this context is rather appropriate.
