So majority of software we have now is unreliable piles of sh*t. Seems to check out, with how often I need to restart my browser to keep memory usage under control
This problem is a societal one, it mostly harms you indirectly by creating spaces for hateful ideas to spread, 4chan's harm is through the capacity to organize and strengthen hateful and harmful political movements. More socially conscious people not visiting the site only serves to create a stronger echo chamber.
Plainly to you, but not to me. What isn't obvious to everyone, isn't really obvious. You didn't care to explain what kind of stopping mechanisms are there, that make it not a slippery slope.
I'd say rather than there being *a risk* of descending too low on that slippery slope, we already have plenty of evidence this already happened. I'm from Poland and recently a party in ruling coalition proposed criminalizing hate speech on the Internet. Fortunately, precisely the slippery slope rhetoric, supported by evidence from countries like UK, seems to be enough of a backlash to stop politicians from following such ideas.
The fact you think some ideas are "harmful" is exactly why humanity needs sites like these. We don't trust people like you to determine which ideas are "harmful" and which aren't, which ideas are worth spreading and which aren't. We want to see for ourselves, thank you very much.
We are especially interested in the ideas that people deem offensive enough to suppress. Are they actually wrong or are they just socially unacceptable? Whatever the truth is, it can't be learned from a place that suppresses discussion of it. Declaring the matter as settled and suppressing any opposing viewpoint is the very definition of an echo chamber.
You're saying national socialism is not harmful? /pol/, /b/, and tons of other boards constantly spawn threads glorifying nazi germany and vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed.
Violent far-right groups use these threads as a pool for recruitment. These far-right groups cause real societal harm through violent crime and shifting the view on violent policies against minorities.
I am not using an abstract moral argument when I say these ideas cause harm, I'm arguing based on objectively observed effects that the loose ethical norms of a liberal democratic society would unambiguously deem harmful.
> You're saying national socialism is not harmful?
Everything with the word "socialism" in it is harmful.
> vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed
Unfiltered hate like that is a property of humanity itself. It is not at all exclusive to the so called internet hate machine. If you look closely, you'll find that plenty of "virtuous" people are capable of just as much hate, if not more. I've personally witnessed it.
If you're not answering the argument, that's fine. But let's acknowledge that you did not answer the argument and are now just spouting the rhetoric of the far-right movement I'm describing.
I won't acknowledge anything. Your argument was not convincing. It was actually the perfect example of an attempt to suppress socially unacceptable views.
You singled those people out as "harmful" because they call for the deaths of "other ethnicities and women". Implicit in your world view is the idea that these people wouldn't also do such things. The idea that these groups are the blameless and virtuous victims, deserving of special protection against these "harmful" words and ideas. That's the part of your argument that I chose to attack.
I chose to attack that idea because I've personally seen people from these "virtuous" groups post some of the most concentrated, unfiltered and unabashed hate speech I've ever seen. I witnessed them call for deaths of entire groups, including those I'm part of, with a clean conscience. I was there when they laughed at the very few people who tried to hold them accountable for it. Not only did they not suffer any consequences, people actually made excuses for such behavior and treated it as though it was justified. Their openly hateful behavior actually empowered them.
I will never forget that as long as I live. I straight up archived those social media threads to ensure the internet never forgets. I even posted those archives here years ago when people asked me for examples. If I cared enough I bet I could even dig up those archive links from my post history.
I didn't care to dig up those links because I've yet to see a single person get outraged by this sort of behavior when it comes from these groups. I have no reason to believe you will be the exception.
They post things like "KILL ALL MEN" verbatim and people make excuses for it. Well, I'm not interested in hearing excuses today. I decided to try and make you realize that hate is a normal human emotion instead. My argument to you is that hate is a perfectly normal human emotion. It's part of the human condition. It's not at all exclusive to 4chan's politics board, oh no. People hate. Everyone hates. Even people on this very site will hate and openly call for the deaths of other humans if presented with a juicy enough target. Don't doubt it, for I have seen it happen.
By the way, dang has rate limited my account to about 5 posts every 2 hours because I would get into too many arguments just like this one. He's actually right and when I contacted him about it I asked him to keep the account rate limited. So you will excuse me if I don't reply further to this thread.
I understand that this issue seems to create a strong emotional reaction in you. That does not excuse you from the consequences of those strong emotional reactions.
I feel like you have massively extrapolated the argument from what the original point was. My response was about how "avoiding 4chan" does not shield you from the effects that 4chan has (including harm).
I don't know which groups you belong to (because you don't mention them), but we clearly agree that violent rhetoric is bad, so why are we disagreeing? It seems you have the exact same point of view as me in the general case of hateful rhetoric, but simply feel that some groups are more important (because you belong to them, perhaps? this is the feeling I get).
Also, let's not kid ourselves, violent crime (including murder) and oppression towards women and minorities are well-documented and studied real-life issues. Violence towards men by "virtuous" groups (leftists?) does not even register on the scale when compared to them. The online violent rhetoric towards women is also at several orders of magnitude higher than violent rhetoric towards men. There is a clear disproportionate aspect to this issue that your emotional reaction is not taking into account.
Magnitudes do not matter. Right and wrong are not based on statistics. I will not excuse their behavior by citing statistics.
It's very simple. We have 4chan people. We have "virtuous" people: women and minorities. I have witnessed the virtuous express hate with complete impunity. Therefore Anonymous should not be punished for doing the same thing.
Nothing emotional about it. I'm simply incapable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept the idea that some people get to hate freely while others don't. It is easier to accept the idea that hate is a normal and universal human emotion which will manifest everywhere where humans are present.
There is Binance US and Binance the global version. I expect Binance US to be tailored to US laws and regulations, but are you implying the global version is also under tight US govt control?
May 2024: "The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) appointed Forensic Risk Alliance (FRA) to serve as the outside monitor over the crypto exchange Binance. Binance must undergo a monitorship of three years as part of its plea deal with the DOJ related to money laundering violations." https://www.theblock.co/post/293834/doj-taps-fra-over-sulliv...
Yes, global banks also fall under US control if they want to transact with anything in the US financial system. Less so if they don’t have American customers, but they still do have to follow American laws.
For example several very old Swiss banks have been shut down by US regulators because they were doing business in the US with US citizens and their secrecy was being used to break US law by Americans.
The decrease in the number of Swiss banks prior to the UBS-Credit Suisse merger was largely a product of Swiss bank consolidation in the 1990s, not the US shutting them down. UBS and Swiss Bank Corporation were the first and third largest Swiss banks when they merged in 1998. Credit Suisse was the second largest Swiss Bank when they acquired Switzerland's then fourth largest bank, Volksbank in 1993 and they had also acquired Switzerlands oldest bank, Bank Leu just a few years before that.
UBS paid a nearly $800M fine to the US, they didn't collapse because they could pay that. At least a couple of Swiss banks collapsed when they went through actual prosecution, but around 100 Swiss banks paid absolutely enormous fines to avoid prosecution in a political deal between the US and Switzerland with the implication that if they continued helping Americans hide assets they'd be prosecuted for all of it anyway. The fines were actually sized correctly for once, 20% to 50% of the total of assets Americans had hidden in them.
If I understand correctly, the issue is not even the citizenship of a clients. The issue is currency. If any two humans in any country wish to transact in the Swiss Franc then that transaction must go through Swiss clearing bank. If they wish to transact in the USD, then it must go through US clearing bank. In both cases client bank must comply with the clearing bank rules. Swiss banks can totally sever interaction with USA, but only if they will also never ever transact in USD.
AFAIK significant banks didn't really shut down over FATCA, some have paid fines or higher tax rates and most of them do the minimum for anyone who matches any of the criteria for persecuting a possible US person, within the limits of the institution's local laws, if any.
From a general government structure POV, I respected a Congress more than the prevalent US views, but I don't respect the US Congress any more.
These things are highly contextual and highly subjective. Culture is very different around the world.
There are highly manipulative and malevolent individuals who know how to behave the right way when it comes to political correctness but lack objective directness that actually improves the situation long term
This is absolutely true. It's also difficult to judge how much otherwise obnoxious developers take advantage of "niceness" from outside the zoo looking in. These situations were almost necessarily interpreted out of context without catching up on years of mailing list culture.
I worked for a Japanese company that employed some of the top engineers and scientists in the world.
The Japanese don't really like yelling and screaming, but I have watched managers reduce subordinates to tears, with a few firm words (literally).
Also, some of these top-shelf engineers could be "pithy." They didn't suffer fools, and had the attitude that if you were working directly with them, it was assumed that you were at a level that would not interfere with their work (like having to constantly stop and explain stuff).
Their end-product was really good, but it took a very strident culture to get there.
I assume that the Linux Kernel is just such a product. I can certainly understand the stress on making sure that anything that goes in there, needs to be absolutely top-notch. Not just in code Quality, but also in the mindset of the people submitting it.
I will also say that, if we want top be top performers, ourselves, we need to be willing to be in situations, where we could be yelled at, told our work is shite, etc.
It would be nice, if we were gentler than those than go before us, but this type of thing tends to self-regulate. If a top performer is so toxic that no one can work with them, they can get shown the door. That was not always the case, but I think it is increasingly so, these days.
But that doesn't mean that top performers are required to coddle; maybe just not outright abuse.
On a somewhat related note, I've been enjoying watching Slow Horses, and the Jackson Lamb character brings back memories.
That’s debatable. The end result is still potentially making your own content obsolete/unnecessary and these “open weight” models are still trained without the permission of creators (there are no true open source models at this point).
The people receiving the most value from these models are almost universally not the original content creators. The fact that I can use the model for my own purposes is potentially nice? But I’m not really interested in that and this doesn’t represent what I’d consider a reasonable exchange for using my work. It still drives people away from the source material.
From scratch is relative. To a python programmer, from scratch may mean starting with dictionaries but a non-programmer will have to learn what python dicts are first.
To someone who already knows excel, from scratch with excel sheets instead of python may work with them.
For the record, if you do not know what a dict actually is, and how it works, it is impossible to use it effectively.
Although if your claim is then that most programmers do not care about being effective, that I would tend to agree with given the 64 gigs of ram my basic text editors need these days.
>For the record, if you do not know what a dict actually is, and how it works, it is impossible to use it effectively.
While I agree it's good to know how your collections work. "Efficient key-value store" may be enough to use it effectively 80% of the time for somebody dabbling in Python.
Sadly I've met enough people that call themselves programmers that didn't even have such a surface level understanding of it.
Maybe it's just different learning styles. Some people, me included, like to start getting some immediate real world results to keep it relevant and form some kind of intuition, then start peeling back the layers to understand the underlying principles. With fastAI you are already doing this by the 3rd lecture.
Like driving a car, you don't need to understand what's under the hood you start driving, but eventually understanding it makes you a better driver.
For sure! In both cases I imagine it is a conscious choice where the teachers thought about the trade-offs of each option. Both have their merits. Whenever you write learning material you have to decide where to draw the line of how far you want to break down the subject matter. You have to think quite hard about exactly who you are writing for. It's really hard to do!
You seem to be implying that the top-down approach is a trade off that involves not breaking down the subject matter into as lower level details. I think the opposite is true - when you go top down you can keep teaching lower and lower layers all the way down to physics if you like!
It was interesting to see an outsider view to tech, especially his initial reaction to Python vs JS syntax, but sprinkling in the politics was unhelpful.
It is quite a leap there to associate JavaScript's syntax with its inventor's political views when they have nothing to do with each other.
Agreed. While it's a great shame that Eich is problematic, it shouldn't stop anyone from using the language any more than people should stop speaking German because... well, you know.
I.e. no discussion of C and where the brackets and semicolons come from.
Also, this person has no apparent notion that code may need to serve machine needs as in, try writing python with significant whitespace over a TTY or other linear stream...
