Huh, it is weird to think of smartphones as entrenched incumbents. Of course, they are. But it is weird (they are the first type of device where I was familiar with a world before them).
I was under the impression that information about how to build nukes was mostly well known by most countries, and it is just a matter of getting enough of the right type of uranium or whatever.
Engineers have a special place in society like doctors and lawyers. Working with management is part of the job, but engineers have a professional ethical obligation to say no if they are asked to something against the public good.
The split there isn’t in favor of doing stuff that’s fun and novel though; actually, the engineer should usually pick a boring proven solution if the public has a high stake in the outcome.
FWIW they have instructions for downloading the whole thing, which mention that it is also downloadable from BitTorrent. So I think it is functionally impossible to delete Wikipedia.
I’d be more worried about propaganda being inserted.
I'm not worried about the data, and even losing the servers would be a hiccup. But whatever site is at www.wikipedia.org is, in the minds of the general public, Wikipedia.
I imagine most traffic to Wikipedia is through search, so I imagine such a fate is in the hands of search engines. If a community-driven alternative appeared, we'd have to rely on Google indexing this alternative and ranking it higher than the usurped domain.
It's been called "wokepedia" (not to be confused with Wookieepedia, the star wars wiki) by Musk and others, telling people not to donate.
And also people have been denouncing Google's search results as biased, as being "woke".
I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word "woke" means, beyond the Ami/UK right using it as an insult, but I can't tell if it's generic or specific, critiquing something or just telling supporters when to boo and jeer. Does the Ami/UK left still use it to mean "being aware of systemic prejudice", or have they also shifted? I didn't notice at the time when "meme" stopped meaning shared online quiz.
> I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word "woke" means
In the context you're referring to it is essentially an accusation of certain ideological ulterior motives in communication.
Regarding your reference to Google's search results. I have no idea what the current behavior is. However a couple of years ago there were some remarkable differences for certain search terms between different geographical versions of the website. It certainly had the appearance of pushing an agenda at the time.
> I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word "woke" means, beyond the Ami/UK right using it as an insult, but I can't tell if it's generic or specific, critiquing something or just telling supporters when to boo and jeer. Does the Ami/UK left still use it to mean "being aware of systemic prejudice", or have they also shifted?
It is a mistake to think that negative uses of “woke” are an exclusively right-of-centre thing.
Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to this comment I posted a bit over a month back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695516 - in which I cite several unabashed Marxists using the word negatively (including Adolph L Reed Jr, and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International).
If you read Reed, he actually means something rather specific by “woke” - whereas classical/orthodox Marxism views non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as downstream consequences of class-based oppression, “wokeness” treats them as if they exist independently of class-based oppression, or as upstream of it, or as a higher priority than it
Just the other day, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was quoted as saying, regarding his own Democratic Party, that “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack” - https://www.politico.eu/article/us-senator-mark-warner-democ... - Warner may well be a moderate or centrist Democrat, but I don’t think it makes sense to label him as “conservative” or “right-wing”. He’s not a “conservative Democrat”, in the sense that there was such a thing a decade or two ago [edit: I made some comment here about him not being a member of the Blue Dog caucus, but I’ve removed it because what I was saying didn’t really make sense-the Blue Dog caucus is and was a House caucus, while Warner is a Senator]
I don’t think Warner’s definition of “woke” is as precise as Reed’s, but essentially what he means by it is a form of progressivism which prioritises ideological purity over winning the battle for the median voter’s heart and mind
I think our intelligence agencies have a self-consistent worldview, they are on one side, the other guys are an another side, and they are trying to beat the other side, so they try to gather intelligence while not letting the other side gather intelligence.
Like, in a war, one would never say “you keep shooting at me, but when I try to shoot back, you take cover—hypocrisy!” It’s just the nature of competition to try and make advantage for yourself.
(I happen to disagree with this worldview, not because it is hypocritical but because I think it is still bad to violate your own citizens privacy even if you have a good excuse).
This loaded most of the way down the page for me, with the little grid diagram thing at the top of the screen. Causing me to immediately scroll upwards (a non-intuitive direction) really exemplifying the point, haha.
I’d suggest the general solution: the machine can keep a list of the songs it has played, and bump the oldest entries off the list. The list length can be user configurable, 0 handles your truly random friend, 1 would be enough to just avoid immediate repeats, or it could be set to the size of the library. 100 could, I think, give you enough time to not notice any repeats I think, right?
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