“the US, in siding with Russia, may be betting on the wrong horse”
This is delusional. Russia would’ve bulldozed Ukraine without US support. What county is under US sanctions? What country is receiving US weapons? Which, to be sure, is the correct choice. And having public spars with Ukraine is not.
But the fact that someone just typed this out and posted it is just so delusional. The fact that people upvoted this is delusional.
On March 16, 2014, the President issued Executive Order
13661, which expanded the scope of the national emergency
declared in Executive Order 13660, and found that the actions
and policies of the Government of the Russian Federation with
respect to Ukraine undermine democratic processes and
institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security,
stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and
contribute to the misappropriation of its assets.
…Therefore… I [Trump]… am continuing… Execute Order 13660.
I don’t know why this pisses me off so much. Ostensibly we agree broadly. It’s just, HN really used to have such good nuanced and factual discussions, even outside tech. Now it’s all just raw anger.
“Government monopoly on violence” is a phrase that I see constantly see on the internet that makes less and less sense the more you think about. Of all the news I read of killings near where I live none are the government doing it, and certainly it’s a minority of homicides nationally done by active government employees. And outside the world of crime there’s plenty of violent sports, plenty of violent non-criminal activity happens. I’d bet most people I know have experienced non government violence.
> If credit dries up in a broader downturn, they are at risk of losing access even to those programs. Meanwhile, they may find that their reliance on these parallel lending methods, which only glancingly intersect with the conventional credit ecosystem, has hobbled their credit history at the worst possible time.
This is the only evidence I could find in the article for the title. Half the article is quoting influencers. Absolute click-bait.
> Mr. Balwani’s former business partner and ex-girlfriend, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, was sentenced last month to 11¼ years for four counts of criminal fraud tied to her now defunct blood-testing startup.
> U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw both trials, could choose to give Mr. Balwani more time in prison than Ms. Holmes because he was found guilty on additional counts, lawyers said. Judge Davila could find that investors suffered a larger loss due to Mr. Balwani’s fraud, or that Mr. Balwani recklessly put patients at risk of death or serious bodily injury, both of which could add years to his sentence.
> “VCs invest in very strange ways,” Judge Davila said.
While it's possible the US just has more tech companies, I think it should be pointed out the top fines here are to Amazon Inc, Meta Platforms Inc, Meta Platforms Inc, WhatsApp Inc (owned by Meta), Google LLC, Facebook Ireland Ltd, Google Ireland Ltd and Google.
Just because certain false statements were banned under the policy doesn’t mean true statements were not also banned. Twitter’s own examples are (obviously) self serving.
But as a matter of policy effectiveness, it would be useful to have examples of true statements which were banned, to see how effective the policy was, and see the types of misclassifications.
Did Twitter "originally [say] that telling people to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth"?
If so, when did it change, and why?
If not, then the answer to Khaine's question is "no".
Your reasoning is kind of like saying if Saudi really killed Khashoggi why didn’t they update their laws first to make dissident journalists executable without trial? You’re looking for evidence of wrongdoing in places where it’s obviously going to be absent. Changes in what information Twitter considers true does not require a public facing policy change.
> But as a matter of policy effectiveness, it would be useful to have examples of true statements which were banned, to see how effective the policy was, and see the types of misclassifications.
Show me the list of statements that twitter bans, with change history, and I can get you this info.
Until then, we are talking about an opaque censorship team that was coordinating with the government to (unlawfully) create mechanisms for the government to censor speech in the name of public health. There are plenty of examples of false statements being made by everyone from Biden on down to heads of CDC, mostly about vaccine effectiveness, but also about aspects of the virus itself. Claims that if you get the vaccine, you wont get the virus, then claims that if you get the vaccine, you might get the virus, but you are less likely to spread it, etc.
But as Twitter never published its official list of banable statements, you are asking for evidence that doesn't exist. If someone were to say "Twitter banned users for making statement X", you can respond with "prove to me that's why they were banned", and again Twitter has kept this information secret.
The idea of government agencies secretly censoring the public via twitter should be very concerning, and it certainly isn't justified by appealing to the needs of public health. Public health never requires censorship - if you think it does, you are doing public health the wrong way. Public health should work by earning people's trust and then publishing official recommendations that have a track record of accuracy and effectiveness, and thus are trusted by the public. Then, you don't need to censor people. Blaming the public for not trusting government pronouncements is exactly what you want to avoid, as now you are engaging in authoritarian behavior. The government exists to serve and listen to the public, not the other way around.
> Show me the list of statements that twitter bans, with change history, and I can get you this info.
I agree that evidence is important. Khaine made a specific claim. I don't believe it's supported. I want to see the evidence too. Otherwise I don't believe the claim is correct.
> to (unlawfully) create mechanisms for the government to censor speech in the name of public health.
What do you have against the First Amendment's right of free association?
There is nothing inherently illegal about a company applying a moderation policy. There is nothing inherently illegal about a company voluntarily coordinating with the government.
The Comics Code of The Comics Code Authority was not unconstitutional.
> you are asking for evidence that doesn't exist.
Quite the opposite. Khaine says there is evidence that Twitter used to ban statements saying "wear[ing] a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth."
I want evidence that that specific event existed.
> The idea of government agencies secretly censoring the public
While the idea of a company voluntarily exercising its right of free association, with a public description of the policy guidelines, is much less concerning.
You come to a programming conference I'm organizing and start presenting public health BS and I will ask you to stop speaking, under threat of expelling you from the conference. That is my Constitutional right.
Just because the BS topic happens to be public health (vs. another sorts of expellable BS) doesn't give the BS presenter special privileges.
On January 23, when the virus was starting to become important to Americans, The New York Times[1] asked the question, “do masks block Coronavirus?” No conclusive answer was offered, and it was just stressed that washing hands and general hygiene would be sufficient to block the virus. A similar perspective was also offered on January 24 by The Seattle Times[2] in saying, “public health officials say there’s no need to wear face masks in the United States.” Americans were told that masks do not help, and the number of cases in the U.S. was too few to justify the use of masks. In January, Americans understood that there was no need to use masks.
This continued in February when the numbers in the U.S. were just starting to go up, and COVID-19 was no longer just a problem in Asia and Europe. Using the words of Dr. Fauci, The US News and World Report[3] stated on February 17: “skip the masks unless you are contagious.”
Twitter's policy was not in place when the pandemic started, but after masks were mandated it came into effect. You would be blocked on twitter for repeating what was dogma only months before, that masks were not effective.
In the short history of the pandemic, Americans were never clearly told what Science[4] reported on March 28: That the benefit of the mask “comes not from shielding the mouths of the healthy but from covering the mouths of people already infected.” The unambiguous scientific message of communal responsibility never comes front and center in the media agenda.
> Twitter's policy was not in place when the pandemic started,
Which is exactly my point.
This is NOT "the policy that originally said that telling people to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth" because Twitter never did that.
You are free to conjecture hypotheticals, but it would be just that - conjecture.
This is very nit picky. The entire web works by severs “seeding” data to the client, so by your logic you can’t “put stuff” on the web. The difference with torrents and IPFS is you can have multiple servers seeding the same content, and not be dependent on any one.
I’m not making any predictions about how long Z library stays up, but the illegal seeding of movies and tv shows has remained very strong until today.
IPFS is actually worse to put stuff in than the web or torrents, in my experience.
Last time I tried it, the ipfs service used its own storage scheme. Meaning it's not like pointing Apache at a directory. You take your stuff, and upload it into ipfsd first, and it puts that data into its storage system.
So to do this from scratch (not mirroring somebody else's content) needs a minimum of >62TB -- 31TB of content, which ipfsd will then package into 31TB more + overhead in its storage area.
And of course if you're doing this, you're expecting other people to mirror this stuff, so count on hundreds of terabytes of traffic.
So this is easily ~$3K in hard disks alone, plus the NAS/server hardware, plus traffic, plus the willingness to risk the FBI coming and grabbing all of it.
IPFS isn't my favourite tool either but you are wrong.
> So to do this from scratch (not mirroring somebody else's content) needs a minimum of >62TB -- 31TB of content, which ipfsd will then package into 31TB more + overhead in its storage area.
IPFS has `nocopy` option for quite some time now, which avoids copying.
> And of course if you're doing this, you're expecting other people to mirror this stuff, so count on hundreds of terabytes of traffic.
Of course you are expecting other people to mirror this stuff, and naturally that will generate some traffic. How is this not a problem with web mirrors or torrents?
> IPFS has `nocopy` option for quite some time now, which avoids copying.
Oh, didn't find about that one. Thanks!
> Of course you are expecting other people to mirror this stuff, and naturally that will generate some traffic. How is this not a problem with web mirrors or torrents?
I mean, if I put a book archive on the web, I'd expect the vast majority of people to just grab whichever book they were interested in. Mirroring is a possibility, but a non-trivial thing to accomplish, and can be discouraged.
Meanwhile, on IPFS I'd expect a much higher likelihood of somebody trying to replicate the whole archive, so one would do well to keep that in mind and to be prepared for it.
Re #2: Perhaps that's true, but on the other hand, the load will be distributed across all seeders with IPFS whereas your web server will be the only one shouldering it.
If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses
There was genuine skepticism over the horseless carriage when it was first becoming available. Vaccines wouldn't be in widespread today use if significant money and resources weren't spent convincing people of their safety. Lots and lot of useful technological innovations requires advertising before people were convinced to use them.
You know, I often see this faster horses thing quoted to point at how dumb consumers are.
Wouldn't you agree, however, that a car which doesn't drive itself home after you've had a bit too many drinks at the local saloon is a downgrade? A car which doesn't graze its own food is a downgrade? A car which doesn't automatically make more cars is a downgrade?
Perhaps if someone had figured out 'faster horses' sooner we wouldn't have literally millions of people dead from car crashes. Perhaps we wouldn't have an atomized society with little social interaction.
It seems to me that once people know that something exists, which is possible through way more methods than the constant cognitive assault of our advertising-based culture, then they can do just fine at figuring out if the thing is useful to them.
But yeah, keep gloating about how dumb people are for not just wanting a better version of what works.
Horses are much more expensive to own than cars. You can't just leave them sitting in a lot for 20 out of 24 hours a day, they only feed themselves if you're living out in the middle of the prairie, and you can't just replace a broken leg.
If horses are more "pro-social" than cars, it's because the only people who could afford them are the very wealthy and people who made their living riding horses like cowboys and taxi drivers. Cars are "worse" than horses because they're too superior, which means the middle class all own personal cars and have stopped financing public transit and pedestrian-friendly city layout that the lower classes would coincidentally benefit from.
>Wouldn't you agree, however, that a car which doesn't drive itself home after you've had a bit too many drinks at the local saloon is a downgrade? A car which doesn't graze its own food is a downgrade? A car which doesn't automatically make more cars is a downgrade? Perhaps if someone had figured out 'faster horses' sooner we wouldn't have literally millions of people dead from car crashes. Perhaps we wouldn't have an atomized society with little social interaction.
You're only saying this because you don't know how much labor it takes to keep a horse in working shape.
Given the choice between a horse and a Model T it's a no brainer.
Oh and plenty of people died or suffered life altering injuries from riding horses or riding in carriages and nobody ever got maimed because they surprised a car.
Faster horses would still leave our streets full of horse manure. "Grazing their own food" doesn't work in a dense urban environment. You're cherry-picking the upsides of the old way, but there were some pretty significant downsides.
My car doesn't die if I don't attend to it for 2 weeks. If my car breaks its "leg" I can swap it out, I don't have to shoot the poor thing. My car can't get me in trouble for grazing in my neighbor's pasture. If horses traveled at car speeds, I doubt death counts would be any lower, and you'd have to figure in the number of horse deaths too.
If horses traveled at car speeds they would refuse to do so when it is unsafe. The same way you won't knowingly run full speed down a ice covered street.
Henry Ford wasn't saying that people are just too dumb to understand how great cars are, he's saying people become so uncomfortable with what already works they don't understand how much better the alternatives could be. Ford understood because he ran a car company.
You may be the exception in preferring horses (although you should note, some states don't look kindly to drunk driving horses), but when people had the choice they chose cars.
> Lots and lot of useful technological innovations requires advertising before people were convinced to use them.
Fortunately, we have had a parallel universe, called the Soviet Union, where advertising was more limited (but still present, of course), and as anyone who lived there will tell you, nobody there needed to be convinced by advertising that they wanted a car, or a fridge, or a color television.
There is a tremendous amount of pharmaceutical advertising.
I understand it's appealing, oh let's hate on the influencers. We DO see influencers advertise pharmaceuticals / health adjacent products, like with public health campaigns, that is a regulatory distinction and not a substantive one. When asked what was the one thing he wanted, Dr. Fauci said, 'Leonardo DiCaprio to encourage people to advocate for COVID measures.' They use ad inventory, they use ad techniques to reach their audience, they ARE ADS. Seemingly regulators have figured out a process for them.
Video games are really interesting too. For some people, they are medicine! For some people, they substitute alcohol!
This is delusional. Russia would’ve bulldozed Ukraine without US support. What county is under US sanctions? What country is receiving US weapons? Which, to be sure, is the correct choice. And having public spars with Ukraine is not.
But the fact that someone just typed this out and posted it is just so delusional. The fact that people upvoted this is delusional.
On March 16, 2014, the President issued Executive Order 13661, which expanded the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660, and found that the actions and policies of the Government of the Russian Federation with respect to Ukraine undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets.
…Therefore… I [Trump]… am continuing… Execute Order 13660.
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-03462.pdf
https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/trump-prolongs-sancti...
I don’t know why this pisses me off so much. Ostensibly we agree broadly. It’s just, HN really used to have such good nuanced and factual discussions, even outside tech. Now it’s all just raw anger.