> You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.
Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.
but there is a solution to this problem: education.
and i don't mean propaganda, but teaching people not to be selfish, to care for others and consider others needs, to contribute to the betterment of society. to have compassion, remove prejudice, etc.
if these values were taught in schools, then the next generation would make better choices and they would know better and vote for better infrastructure.
Totally agree on this one. I am a free market proponent but when it comes to infrastructure projects, often its hard for even the free market to get it right and its often better for a central plan to work off of (roads, electrical transmission lines, etc)
It all comes down to the relationship between social media and freedom of expression.
If we view social media as simply a private service, then these companies have the right to do whatever they want. Businesses have the right to refuse service for any reason.
But if we view social media as a utility similar to telephones, then free expression should be protected. People can say whatever they want over phone and text.
I lean towards the latter. Social media has become the new public square/agora/forum. Yes, its still owned by private enterprise, but it's basically the new town hall at this point.
I do, as well, but I don't think that the companies that run Social media should be let off the hook (which they say they should).
Utilities are regulated monopolies. In exchange for a monopoly status, they need to abide by some pretty strict standards (like regulated pricing and service maintenance), and are forced to work with entities that they would normally avoid.
Things like open APIs, algorithm access (that could be classified, but should be accessible to folks that are accountable to the consumers, etc.).
Not a simple structure. What we have now, is pretty haphazard, and has grown organically. The current utility/public infrastructure setup is the result of hundreds of years of disasters, ripoffs, successes, and learning.
Not sure if we have to go through it all again, or if there is a possibility of taking learning from current municipal structure, and apply it here.
Depends. Someone needs to be held Accountable. It would reflect the government. If the government sucks, then social media is probably only one of many things that could be corrupted. It's a lot more likely that corrupting the legal system would be more destructive.
I think where we have to be careful with going toward the latter idea is that not all social media platforms are general purpose, and that free expression includes a lot of unwanted content (spam, scams, off-topic posts, etc).
Free expression isn’t something that can be realistically protected when a social media platform has an explicit purpose, code of conduct, and/or ideals.
For example, an LGBTQ social media network has to be able to ban anti-LGBTQ content and users. Hacker News needs to be able to remove non-tech industry-related off-topic posts. /r/pcgaming needs to be able to remove posts about mobile gaming. Spam and unwanted self-promotion is often removed by moderators of social media outlets. Moderation is key to a workable social media experience.
There’s also a lot of 100% legal free expression that platforms have to be able to choose not to host. Pornography is an common example.
The thing that makes this topic difficult is that social media isn’t really pure person-to-person speech (e.g. like a person on soapbox) and it also isn’t really pure curated media (e.g. a television channel or news website published by an editor). It’s like a hybrid of the concepts.
4chan exists. It's really the online "free speech zone" some people seem to be pining for.
I've moderated some large subreddits in the past, and am a strong free speech supporter, but I'm also actually perfectly happy not dealing with people spamming the n-word in every forum they can find because they're legally entitled to. "Congress shall make no law" really does mean congress. Unlike telephones, if the forums are open to the public, then so some decorum is needed.
I honestly think the worst thing we could do to social media is treat it like the telephone service.
Have people used telephones recently? The network is so infiltrated by scam artists (and the tooling to remove them from the network is so toothless) that it's functionally one giant attack vector against the most vulnerable telephone users these days. The fact that Google is trumpeting adding AI to a phone to detect when you are getting scammed is indicative of how badly the network has been poisoned by the lack of anyone's ability to regulate access.
We already know what an unfettered free-expression network looks like. It looks like telephone and email. It's a scammer's playground.
Yes. This is exactly the argument the EFF makes. Utility-style regulation involves the government picking winners who become unresponsive monopolies. Notice how OpenAI is eager to be regulated. They know that means they win. That's the opposite of what we need the FAANGS et al. to become. And personally, I don't want the government telling me how to moderate my network.
The EFF recommendation is anti-trust enforcement to insure these services don't hold American communications hostage. We must attack their moats to enable smaller competitors to have at more level playing field.
The problem is social media is inherently anti competitive. It relies on network effects, so you have to either limit their size or use utility style regulation.
Private enterprise is bounded by considerations of the common good. So it is reasonable to regulate private enterprise when it becomes an essential service or utility, or has a huge impact on the common good.
I don't see how any of this is difficult. Ban illegal content, period. Not that that's hard, it already is.
And leave the rest alone. Gore/graphic content -> filter with a toggle for those that want to view it. Bullying -> does it cross the line into an actual law being broken, if so, then ban it. Makes sensitive people nervous, uncomfortable and angry -> leave it be, but if you really wanna go far stick a sentiment analysis thingie on it and allow people to selectively filter it below their own threshold. There is so much that can be done simply, without breaching anyone's freedoms and without teetering into Orwellian 1984 conspiracy territory about wide-scale mind control and opinion shifting.
The problem comes when people naturally express themselves, it makes <insert group here> uncomfortable and it inconveniently bubbles up the rankings. E.g. I bet you right now that 20% of the entire american internet population simply doesn't like Biden and would mock him for his, probably innocent, old-age antics. But if that opinion were to "manifest" into some sort of catchy "Biden is old and sucks" hashtag or meme that needs reporting, well that's uncomfortable for TPTB, or the elites, or the media or whatever you wanna call it, and must be stopped. The internet is the ultimate direct-democracy tool we have right now, and it's being manipulated precisely because it breaks "representative" democracy.
Another uncomfortable topic: trans people in sports. It will absolutely blow up in one direction if people were organically allowed to organize and find others with similar viewpoints. Instead, they're banned, scared into shutting up, shadow-banned, or worse cancelled and doxxed.
I'm all for private ownership as I'm an Libertarian/AnCap. But long story short, we have a flawed world right now, and to make it better right now, we have to work within it and that means making a completely arbitrary line. One that optimizes freedom whilst balancing the abuse, because it's clear to everyone not drinking the koolaid that social media is being used to affect public opinion.
We've crossed the boundary of pure private ownership of anything many years ago. Heck, I don't even have private ownership of my own body, so a say in a highly influential component of our society is a small price to pay to keep the evil at bay.
> Another uncomfortable topic: trans people in sports. It will absolutely blow up in one direction if people were organically allowed to organize and find others with similar viewpoints. Instead, they're banned, scared into shutting up, shadow-banned, or worse cancelled and doxxed.
There is a huge amount of discussion of the problem of males in female sports on Twitter, plus also on smaller forums like Mumsnet and Ovarit. Some of it amongst leading athletes and sports science researchers. People of similar viewpoints are organising, despite the attempts to shut them down on other forums.
It's working too: various sports bodies have made changes within the past couple of years that walk back their previous broken policies of male inclusion. It does seem that the needle is slowly but surely moving back towards fairness for female athletes. Though there is still a lot of work to be done.
I do think the trans issue in general is a good example of this shadowboosting. It's a very niche thing that seems to be everywhere for some reason, and despite most people not giving a shit or not supporting it, the Internet gives off a wildly different impression of the world.
Nobody shares pronouns in daily life, yet most people I know working in an office have to use them in emails and such (and they use exactly what you would expect based on their name)
>> but it's basically the new town hall at this point. ... then free expression should be protected.
IF its the "new town hall" then were gonna have a fuck ton of rules. You're not "Free" to scream fire in a crowded building, you cant make up crisis actors and expect NOT to get sued to death....
The protection of freedom of expression exists. No one is stoping you from hosting your own platform based on what ever nonsense you make up. I dont have to give you a box to stand on, no one does. Thats not how it ever worked.
We already have setup NOSTR and the fediverse that interoperate with each other. Many of us have set very simple rules to comply with the first amendment and legal precedent around it which is say anything as long as it is not illegal such as directing imminent harm on someone.
>No one is stoping you from hosting your own platform based on what ever nonsense you make up.
They actually are. CloudFlare will block you, Visa will refuse payments, Google will delist you, Apple app store will delist your app, and you'll be subject to endless legal harassment from activists if your site allows people to communicate substantially out of line with the San Francisco progressive bloc.
> A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
When the government is colluding with private industry to suppress opposing views on social media, you really have to wonder if the word "violent" is even needed in this definition anymore.
It's the definition of a mixed economy (mixing socialism and capitalism), aka the basis of modern liberalism: an slowly but always expanding top down control of the market, while the rest of the market is generally free.
The US needs to adopt the healthcare model of Singapore. Universal coverage for everyone along with a strong private insurance market as well.
The problem is the current system is basically a giant jobs program. Healthcare spending is approximately 17% of US GDP. Politicians are terrified of rocking the boat on this, so the system will always remain broken.
There were proposals for Medicare for all, but unfortunately one of America’s scars from the Cold War is that any government program meant to help people is branded “socialism” which at that point you might as well have a Karl Marx tramp stamp.
> D in US is more right than other countries' left leaning parties
I don't think this is accurate. Maybe on healthcare and welfare, sure. But on many social issues, the Democrats are much further to the left than the European left. On issues such as abortion, gender/sexuality, migration, and race, the Democrats are more extreme compared to Labour in the UK, SPD in Germany, and the PSOE in Spain. Even the left in France isn't as socially extremist as the Democrats.
It's a boring take from more than 30 years ago that was kinda true in the Regan years when the dominant voting groups could pretend that elected officials and government didn't actually matter because they all voted similarly and discrimination against groups that disagreed had been publicly accepted for decades. Historical electoral maps were not usually competitive at all like they are now.
The both parties are the same is such a lazy take, except in super limited circumstances like this naked power grab in the article. Both are going to use it in wildly different ways
>Even the left in France isn't as socially extremist as the Democrats.
Depends which left which you are talking about. LFI is certainly on that level in their way, PS/Place Publique are not(given that "printemps républicain" was part of what killed popular support for the party).
For migration, sure, but it is very related to the history of the US (nearly everyone is a relatively recent immigrant so it feels wrong to refuse that others come in). For abortion and gender this is not correct though. It is not as hot a topic but positions are not that different between European left and democrats. There is also a very wide scale of opinions inside the Democrat party itself. Some people just focus on the very left of the party but plenty of democrats are much more similar to Macron than the French left when it comes to social issues.
I mean, those countries have other further left parties with held seats in their legislatures up to and including outright explicit communist parties.
Those parties you listed are known for being center to center left in Europe, sometimes explicitly escuing the left as UK Labour and SPD have done.
Excpet PSOE which is farther left than the Democrats, having all of the identity politics of the Democratic party while being explicitly and empathetically pro union. Heads would have rolled if PSOE had broken the rail workers strike that like Biden did. The also tried to legalize abortion in the Spanish constitution in the 1970s, and haven't wavered on their view of abortion since. They passed same sex marriage when they got their first chance to (and before the US did), and used the same opportunity to expand transgender rights.
What's the most useful "dialect" of SQL one should learn? I've only learned SQLite but there are just so many that it's heard to know which one is most in demand.
The one that you are currently using is the best one to learn. They're all different and they all work slightly differently. You need to learn generalities, not specifics, until you're working with a specific RDBMS.
SQLite is fine. The biggest issue to be aware of with SQLite is that SQLite's type affinity system is completely different from how other SQL RDBMSs function. The norm is for columns to have much more rigid data typing.
SQLite also ignores size restrictions on text columns; trying to get CHAR(2) to prevent the insertion of ILLINOIS instead of IL requires a trigger. Most other databases do not behave like this.
Other databases all had wonky left join syntax before the SQL92 standard - every attempt should be made to avoid archaic syntax if possible. SQLite itself lacked right join until recently.
Procedural SQL comes in two common varieties - ANSI SQL/PSM (strongly influenced by Oracle), and Transact-SQL (that is only found on Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server). Choose your investment here carefully.
> Procedural SQL [...] Choose your investment here carefully.
I think that the demand for procedual code has dropped drastically in the past decades as the "normal" SQL can solve so many more things with window functions, recursion, and so forth. So I'd say: Yes, choose your investment wisely and stay away from procedural SQL as long as possible.
There is still a case to embed business logic at the database layer, not the application layer, as databases tend not to change as much.
I have thousands of lines of PL/SQL that originated in the days of PowerBuilder that are now serviced by .NET; a decade from now could be totally different.
SQLite appears to use a (very small) subset of PSM for triggers.
This might work in the short term, but I don't recommend it as a general technique.
This sort of an approach often causes there to be hidden bugs, which do not generate errors now, but will cause some problem down the line.
It also has a tendency to lead to cargo cult programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming), which is less immediately problematic, but is still not great, especially for whoever needs to maintain that code.
I don't work a ton in SQL, but my experience with SQLite tends to carry me thru anything that requires some SQL without having to commit to fully learning another dialect. I just pick up what I need when they differ. Some sort of IDE works great if it understands the dialects and will red-squiggle anything that's off. (DataGrip works great for me)
The short answer is to write ANSI 92 SQL and understand the variances between different RDBMS based on which ones you encounter.
The longer answer is that some RBDMS adhere closer to the standard than others. Generally the more open source and more long lived a platform is, the closer to the standard it can be. However, even an RDBMS like MSSqlServer isn't that far off from it, and while it may have things it supports that are outside of that standard, it will still support ANSI SQL (i.e. `ISNULL` vs `COALESCE`)
If you're looking for learning SQL that you can likely use in a wide number of places, I'd steer away from Oracle and DB2. Both are fairly proprietary, in my experience, and feel like writing in a different language that looks like SQL, but has a different set of rules and constraints.
Any one in detail, but be aware of the sort of differences found in the others.
Which one should be your core one depends on what projects you wish to work on. My DayJob is an MS shop to SQL Server's TSQL is my area of expertise, but I know more-or-less what isn't supported or is handled differently in other common places (core postgres, mysql/mariadb, sqlite). In some places you may end up being more completely fluent in multiple rather than just one. The key is understanding the concepts (set based operations rather than thinking procedurally, recursive queries, window functions, how query planners commonly work so you can optimise for them) rather than specific syntax which is always easy to lookup.
SQLite isn't a bad one to know at all. It's pretty close to PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL prides itself as caring about the SQL standard.
I do think that, as general learning experience, working with PostgreSQL is a good starting place because of the good degree of SQL standard compliance. Get those basics down and the less standards compliant vendors become more accessible.
After that it depends what kinda of companies you'd want to work for. Enterprises deal much in MSSQL and Oracle. Start-uppy kinds of companies you're looking at PostgreSQL or MySQL... Or something not RDBMS at all. There are many generalizations that can be made but these are a few hand-wavy examples I would make.
One thing to keep in mind: the type system is extremely unusual even in simple cases compared to what I'd expect in a SQL-92 system.
It's clever, giving SQLite a lot of power in limited code, important in its conventional application in embedded use cases where fixed costs like code object size and starting database heap size are pretty constrained, and databases tend to be small...but, nevertheless, it's in its own world, there.
Honestly, you picked the right one. It's restricted, so what you learn will be widely applicable.
Do yourself a favor and pick up some books about SQL by Joe Celko's SQL Puzzles and Answers. If you follow it, you will learn how to accomplish various queries while having restrictions on dialects or whatever. It's a real mind-expander. I found myself doing in SQLite things I hadn't thought possible for that set of keywords.
I'm undecided on this. On the one hand, the idea of living in a city where everything is within 15 minutes is great for many reasons. It incentivizes walking, which is healthy. It reduces the need for cars, which is good from a pollution standpoint, infrastructure standpoint, and personal finance standpoint. 15-minute cities also make much better use of land and space. They can do more things with less land. And land is inherently valuable due to its limited supply as well as growing population (assuming a society doesn't conquer more land).
But on the other hand, having a car also has its benefits. Many anti-car people really underestimate the value of having your own means of transportation, going to and fro on your own time, and the inherent privacy being in your own car provides. I love driving because I can listen to a podcast/music or making a call without someone breathing down my neck or hitting me with their bag as often happens on the train/bus.
I'm sure there's probably some middle ground to be found here.
I think that the middle ground is actually what "the anti-car people" have been pushing lately. The anti-car people that I know (that includes me) don't want to take your car away and watch the world burn, they mostly want you to have only one car per family, better electric than ICE, reasonably sized, to keep it out of the city center and only use it for longer travel on routes that are inconvenient on public transport. That's a middle ground that makes a lot of sense to me (avid and competent driver, but stressed out and disillusioned road user and car owner).
>But on the other hand, having a car also has its benefits. Many anti-car people really underestimate the value of having your own means of transportation, going to and fro on your own time, and the inherent privacy being in your own car provides. I love driving because I can listen to a podcast/music or making a call without someone breathing down my neck or hitting me with their bag as often happens on the train/bus.
No one is underestimating the benefits of having a car. The problem with cars is that you receive the positive externalities like coming and going whenever you want, and all the negative externalities are given to other people.
A city that is good for driving is not going to be good for any other mode of transit. Your ability to drive directly takes from others ability to walk or ride a bike. The neighborhoods that need to get bulldozed to build the ever increasing road infrastructure are the cost of your ability to listen to a podcast without being near other people. The people who didn't get bulldozed then have to breath in the pollution from your car lowering their quality of life and life expectancy. Fast roads are terrible for walking, and motorists are killing pedestrians at an ever increasing rate.
I'm not anti-car. I own a car because it's very hard for Americans to get by without one, due to the car lobby. I'm pro-pedestrian and pro-transit.
>I'm sure there's probably some middle ground to be found here.
Low traffic neighborhoods are the middle ground. It's literally just diverting through motorists onto roads that are designed for through motorists.
Car culture is about entitlement. Anything that reduces motorists ability to drive as fast as possible absolutely everywhere they want is going to be seen as an attack in the wAr oN cArS!!!
Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.
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