> London's Metropolitan Police chief warned that officials will not only be cracking down on British citizens for commentary on the riots in the U.K., but on American citizens as well.
> "We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told Sky News
> One key aspect that makes this apparent crackdown on social media particularly shocking to critics is that the British government is threatening to extradite American citizens from the U.S. to be jailed in the U.K. for violating their rules about political speech online.
redwoolf: as you’ll no doubt have noticed by now, the internet is awash with bots (or worse, people) pushing right-wing and/or blatant Russian propaganda. This is one of the standard lines: any pushback against verifiably criminal actions is “censorship”.
You and I know the legal difference between posting “I disagree with the government” and “You should get a gun and shoot somebody”. One is protected free speech, the other is incitement of violence - which does not matter if you incite in person or on an online forum.
Don’t worry about the trolls and Kremlin-lovers, they’re a dime a dozen these days and not worth the hassle.
1. I'm a real American who is very easy to find. I've been on HN for a decade. I'm the easiest person on earth to find.
2. If you bothered to look up my other social media, you'd see that I'm vocally anti-Russia. If I was the US president, Ukraine would have aircraft carriers, F35s, and a couple thermonuclear warheads by now.
3. As an American, who likes American things like free speech and blowing up Russians, I can also notice and object when traditional bastions of liberty like the UK turn into fascist states who arrest people for posting on Facebook.
The world isn't simple, and everyone you disagree with isn't a paid troll. Engage with other opinions and you may learn something.
I don't think it's humanly possible for me to verify my real-world identity any more clearly. There aren't any other bpodgursky's on or off the internet.
You edited your answer so I will comment on the last thing you wrote.
> Never mind. I’m wrong about everything as usual.
> How the fuck do I delete my account?
Admitting you said something incorrect takes courage and it never feels great. Everyone says something incorrect about something at some point. I would have no account if I deleted it every time I said something incorrect. God knows I make mistakes on a regular basis. Just because you said something incorrect now does not mean you will have nothing positive to contribute to another discussion. Just take it as an learning opportunity.
I don't think Popper was saying what you think he was.
"[Popper] does not however want us to silence or censor them, but to fight them back with reasonable arguments. He does however say we should have the right to be intolerant (even violently!) to them if they are not ready for a debate, as they may prevent "their followers [from listening] rational argument, because [they say] it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols." [0]
The Paradox of tolerance advocates violence against those that would prevent speech, not those with intolerant views, unless those be the same group.
Using the Paradox of tolerance the idea of censoring speech you do not agree with, especially when using government authority to do so (monopoly of violence and all that), would be an intolerant view point, and as it prevents debate, should not be tolerated in a tolerant society, and in the end should be met with violence.
We should also always keep in mind that he wrote this around 1945. When he wrote this he had Nazi Germany in mind where the Nazis used the SA to beat down their opposition.
This quote gets trotted out every single discussion. This quote dodges the most important question. Where do you draw the line? In that quote it even says that we should fight intolerance with tolerance for as long as possible and not just censor it immediately.
"In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."
The interesting and most important question remains. Where do you draw the line? That quote simply implies a limit exists. Which most people will agree with. You will only rarely find absolute free speech absolutist where everything goes.
We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799
I've seen this argument (if linking to wikipedia qualifies as one) so many times, and it always strikes me that those who cite it often have either not read, or completely miss the point Karl Popper was trying to make. He goes so far as to even say: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." I am quite sick of the usage of the paradox of tolerance being used as an attack against freedom of speech.
That's interesting because I find it to be one of the most ergonomic build tools I've ever worked with. It sits somewhere between make and autotools in terms of what it does and I find it far easier to use than either.
You've probably learned it more thoroughly than I have, or maybe we have different tastes. I find it just impossible to get into, it all rubs me the wrong way. It is so overcomplicated, and unlispy in the way that FORMAT and LOOP are unlispy, only much worse. I actually like FORMAT and LOOP but they're foreign implants amid the lispiness and that's how ASDF feels as well.
it's fukamachi-ware, guy has a bunch of own solutions in the web development space, i suspect driven by his specific needs. they are, fwiw, not as idiosyncratic as some of the artisanal common lisp one-man solutions can be, but they are distinctly and recognizably their own thing
I use his web stack in some of my projects. His stuff is pretty great, it's just that he basically doesn't write any documentation at all, and the small scraps of documentation he does write assume that you're intimately familiar with the details of his packages. So you need to figure a lot out on your own by digging through source code, which is very irritating when you're trying to be productive.
The middle class is the designation for the part of the population the owning class has duped into thinking they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen housing prices lately but most of the middle class are technically millionaires now, just of the “land rich, cash poor” variety.
I'm in partial agreement with you. But I don't think the middle class will shrink, I think it will disappear.
The real threat to humanity from AI is not a Skynet or a Matrix like intelligence. The threat is that Artificial Intelligence WILL make labor irrelevant. When human capital has no value, we will disappear.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that those who owns the means of production will stop to help. If they were interested in that, they'd be doing it now. There's enough money and food to feed everyone on the planet. People still starve.
Revolution against what? Should we act NOW to take out all the plausibly psychotic plutocrats, well before they can arm themselves?
Or do we wait until they actually create an army of armed drones? Of course, by then it'd be too late.
Or do we choose a time frame that's in-between, trusting that the politicians and the courts and the police departments will pass and enforce laws to protect us before the plutos can amass power via fully automated factories -- laws that will never actually come to pass, since plutocrat-interests-and-their-minions already own the current system?
Nah. We frogs will boil LONG before revolution is a viable option.
> before the plutos can amass power via fully automated factories
Fun science fiction but this idea that the rich could develop an entire self sustaining infrastructure to protect themselves from any leverage from the working class is completely infeasible.
Let's day a full automatic drone factory was built. Factories don't make their own tools and general parts, they don't mold their own screws and bolts, no, they source those. Even if they could, they'd need raw materials. So they'd need completely automated mines. Those mines would be on land that they'd own, but they'd have to physically defend it. So the scenario you're proposing is: fully automated mining, with fully automated defense measures, delivering raw materials to some fully automated smelter (all travel routes automatically defended against sabotage), this all to feed a factory that would churn out defense robots. It's completely circular and silly.
They don't need to do any of that. They'll just use AI analysis combined with mass surveillance to identify and crush any organized dissent before it can form into anything close to a threat. A very small group of goons is all that is required.
All that may be true in the large open democracies, but it's already false in Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and beyond... and based on the current propaganda-driven trends of mindless angst driving most democracies today, you could live most anywhere else and see a similar outcome in just a decade or two.
So in the next 20 years, which do you think will happen first: dictatorship by plutocrats elected to office, or by plutocrats who overthrow elections after they lose?
Sure but I was responding specifically to a scenario proposing that rich people would develop fully automated factories thereby cutting out their reliance on workers. Getting even halfway there still leaves plenty of room for revolution, I'm just responding to the 100% automated scenario as being unrealistic.
It is a major logistics problem. Trust me, you would be WAY more mad if billionaires tried to feed everyone. You'd call it 'naked neocolonalism' or similar because it would require conquest of all nonconforming regions.
isn't the issue that capitalism is amoral? you're saying the capitalists (should be) helping by now if they wanted to. They don't do it because capitalism isn't directly incentivizing it?
growing economic power is supposed to help "all of us" in proportion to our input value.
All this to say, i agree, but it means we need to augment capitalism - not speak to help and morality?
How can you call a system that disincentivizes collective care of one another "amoral"?
> but it means we need to augment capitalism
What a pithy phrase! You said yourself that capitalism doesn't incentivize those with to help those without. How do you augment capitalism to incentivize such behavior?
And to be clear, I'm not saying that the bourgeoisie should be helping. I'm just saying they don't. I think we should burn capitalism to the ground and build something better.
> How do you augment capitalism to incentivize such behavior?
By regulating it so that it serves the needs of the people living in it, and embedding those regulations in a system resilient against regulatory capture and nepotism.
As all economic systems, it’s ultimately only a means (efficient resource allocation) to an end (prosperity and growth for somebody).
Who that is, i.e. how the results of that growth are ultimately redistributed is not a question of economics but politics.
augment is the hopeful outcome. The alternatives seems quite bad to say the least. Maybe they lead to something good, something better. but there's a whole lotta bad in between for an unclear amount of time.
> How can you call a system that disincentivizes collective care of one another "amoral"?
It doesn't disincentivize collective care. It incentivizes resource allocation most optimally, whatever optimality is within applied bounds. Which leads to my next point:
> What a pithy phrase! You said yourself that capitalism doesn't incentivize those with to help those without. How do you augment capitalism to incentivize such behavior?
By applying regulation and laws to the system, the bounds. It's not like any of this exists in a vacuum and can't be, again, augmented to fit our needs better.
> And to be clear, I'm not saying that the bourgeoisie should be helping. I'm just saying they don't. I think we should burn capitalism to the ground and build something better.
That's cute. What's your proposition for replacing Capitalism? What guarantees your new system is better? And I can assume you're agreeing to pay the incredibly bloody tab destabilizing our society will have? Since I assume from your post you basically haven't known anything other then peace and stability and historically speaking great times, you're basically a larper.
Ideas like this always strike me as incredibly naive. Why not work to improve a system that has shown promise instead of the repeating the long trail of critical failures from other systems.
> It incentivizes resource allocation most optimally, whatever optimality is within applied bounds.
Exactly. And in the current bounds the optimal allocation is more into the control of fewer. Also, capitalism is a zero sum game, thus the disincentive to give what you've got.
> By applying regulation and laws to the system, the bounds.
Sure. But those regulations and laws are being repealed or revised to be toothless. And there are many places on earth where laws have no meaning.
> And I can assume you're agreeing to pay the incredibly bloody tab destabilizing our society will have?
And capitalism doesn't have an incredibly bloody tab? Take a global perspective to see the many useless wars in the 20th and 21st century that have been fought to extend the market for capital.
Or consider that our planet is fucked by global warming thanks to "optimal resource allocation" which takes no account for long-term consequences, but only short term gains. Do you think that when the oceans rise, the plants die, and the water is too acidic to drink society won't be destabilized?
> capitalism is a zero sum game, thus the disincentive to give what you've got.
Only in a zero growth environment. And in one, which economic or political system is not a zero sum game?
> consider that our planet is fucked by global warming thanks to "optimal resource allocation" which takes no account for long-term consequences
Pricing in long-term consequences and accounting for externalities is arguably not a contradiction to capitalism (and I think we should absolutely do much better there).
Ideally we’d even account for the effects of societal unrest due to massive wealth inequalities or areas becoming unlivable due to the climate, or just the immorality of poverty if nothing else.
But that’s a political decision (what do we value how much) in the end, not one of economic systems. Who gets to decide that is determined by the political system, not the economic one. And corruption of political power can exist in all systems.
I think this is the correct way to handle this. I don’t know how many times I’ve been stymied by integer arithmetic and precision loss by implicit conversion. How should this be handled? Should the int be converted to a double before the operation, should the double be converted to int before the operation, or should the result be converted to an int or a double? As someone who writes code in many languages in a day, these implicit conversion rules can be difficult to remember. It’s best to enforce the developer to be explicit about the intention.
> Should the int be converted to a double before the operation, should the double be converted to int before the operation, or should the result be converted to an int or a double?
Isn't it pretty evident that implicit conversions should only go from integer to floating point?
> precision loss by implicit conversion
That's a reasonable worry, but "Int" in general is only safe to store 32 bits, and 32 bit integers will losslessly convert to doubles.
This article is HN bait. This community is full of intellectual elitists who delude themselves into thinking that they are immune to the things that seduce common people. We’re all common people.
What a bunch of drivel. The way that the body processes sugar as an analogy for how the brain processes information is just wrong. This nonsense is the same kind of horseshit that’s been peddled for years about television and stinks like the work of Nicholas Carr who claims the internet is making us stupid.
So what if someone spends a ton of time consuming information you don’t think is useful? It doesn’t affect you. Get off your intellectual high horse and go for a walk.
Depends how you use it too. I have trained mine to only show me standup comedy skits. There is no live standup shows in my neck of the woods, but once or twice a month I do get entertainment value out of it that I would not get from other media.
Agreed. It’s easy (and very rarely helpful) to get polemical about the ways people spend their leisure time. This has been true for so much longer than social media (or even the New York Times!) has been around
You have to be delusional to think otherwise. Modern web absolutely makes us more stupid on average. I’m looking forward to studies in 10 years about long term exposure effects of junk platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts.
> So what if someone spends a ton of time consuming information you don’t think is useful?
Because we don’t live in a vacuum? I don’t want to be around erratic, constantly outraged and disinformation fed people. And before you say “well, you don’t have to”, keep in mind that those people hold as much voting power as you, possibly more, because hordes of fanatic will eat whatever shit their influencer overlords will tell them.
> Get off your intellectual high horse and go for a walk.
What exactly makes you so outraged about the article?
> Because we don’t live in a vacuum? I don’t want to be around erratic, constantly outraged and disinformation fed people. And before you say “well, you don’t have to”, keep in mind that those people hold as much voting power as you, possibly more, because hordes of fanatic will eat whatever shit their influencer overlords will tell them.
I would not rebut with “well, you don’t have to.” I know that we have to. But what is being complained about here is not a new problem enabled by the internet. Disinformation has been around as long as humanity has (see religion). This attitude that “those people” have as much voting power as I do is the kind of thinking that disenfranchised women and non white men. (As an aside, it’s funny that you think voting actually matters and that the populace has a say in anything that goes on in the halls of power).
This type of intellectual exercise is nothing more than mental masturbation: it serves only to make the writer feel good about himself. You can’t force others to value what you value. And you certainly can’t shame them into it by calling them intellectually obese.
> What exactly makes you so outraged about the article?
Don’t worry about me. I don’t feel called out by this article. I’m careful about what information I consume, don’t spend my time on socials or YouTube, and I’m comfortable with my choices. What irks me about this article is that it serves no purpose but to cut other people down for their choices that don’t harm others.
