Hacker News: gambler

New comment by gambler in "Protocols, not platforms"

gambler — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 14:52:16 +0000

So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like them well enough to put links to them on your personal website.

New comment by gambler in "Protocols, not platforms"

gambler — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 14:40:50 +0000

When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile, you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will inevitably be taken advantage of.

New comment by gambler in "We should have Markdown-rendered websites"

gambler — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 18:21:00 +0000

>Many of us learned HTML and web technologies by reading the source code of websites

HTML is an extensible language. Markdown is not.

New comment by gambler in "Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation"

gambler — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 23:57:07 +0000

You didn't link to data, you linked to an opinion from Vice laundered through another outlet.

Here is some actual data, which (predictably) shows that conservatives are targeted significantly more for suspensions:

https://archive.ph/SDo33

But that's besides the point, because it's much simpler than that. You don't need elaborate analysis to see that people tired of Twitter "moderation" filled 4 other platforms: Gab, Parler, Minds and Truth Social. Literally all of them are characterized as right-wing by the same left-wing media outlets that claim that Twitter is impartial in moderation.

I'm tired of gaslighting around this issue. Just within replies to my above comment I've gotten two contradictory statements. One, that there is no bias in Twitter moderation, because conservatives are actually targeted less. Two, that there is no bias because conservatives are more likely to break rules, so they should be banned more often. We have two diametrically opposite descriptions of reality that nevertheless converge on the same conclusion. This is ideology-driven reasoning at its worst.

New comment by gambler in "Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation"

gambler — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 19:45:49 +0000

He is half-correct, but not in a good way. When people on the left say something that goes against new-left agenda, they get suppressed too. That is not a redeeming quality of the system or an indicator of fairness. It simply shows that the ideology driving moderation is even more narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent than most observers assume at first sight.

At the same time, it's trivial to demonstrate that YouTube and Twitter (easy examples) primarily target conservatives with their "moderation". Just look at who primarily uses major alternative platforms.

New comment by gambler in "Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation"

gambler — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:51:37 +0000

>No one argues that speech must have value to be allowed (c.f. shitposting).

>Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam.

The whole threads seems like it revolves around this line of reasoning, which strawmans what free speech advocates are actually arguing for. I've never heard of any of them, no matter how principled, fighting for the "right" of spammers to spam.

There is an obvious difference between spam moderation and content suppression. No recipient of spam wants to receive spam. On the other hand, labels like "harmful content" are most often used to stop communication between willing participants by a 3d party who doesn't like the conversation. They are fundamentally different scenarios, regardless of how much you agree or disagree with specific moderation decisions.

By ignoring the fact that communication always has two parties you construct a broken mental model of the whole problem space. The model will then lead you stray in analyzing a variety of scenarios.

In fact, this is a very old trick of pro-censorship activists. Focus on the speaker, ignore the listeners. This way when you ban, say, someone with millions of subscribers on YouTube you can disingenuously pretend that it's an action affecting only one person. You can then draw false equivalency between someone who actually has a million subscribers and a spammer who sent a message to million email addresses.

New comment by gambler in "Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation"

gambler — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:21:10 +0000

It's not a mistake. It's a PR strategy. Social media companies are training people to blame content and each other for the effects that are produced by design, algorithms and moderation. This reassigns blame away from things that those companies control (but don't want to change) to things that aren't considered "their fault".

New comment by gambler in "Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022"

gambler — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 16:30:00 +0000

Crazy conspiracy theories, eh? People running those companies routinely talk to one another. When it seems they act together, it's often because they actually do act together.

New comment by gambler in "More content by people, for people in Search"

gambler — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 12:34:30 +0000

This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked. Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about their prior gaslighting.

Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of a sudden?

It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the truth, but not admitting to the past lies.

New comment by gambler in "The fragmented nature of modern-day railways"

gambler — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 17:00:57 +0000

Hm, after reading the title I monetarily thought the article would talk about the implosion of Union Pacific and complications of switching to a different provider. FYI:

https://www.manufacturing.net/labor/news/13118134/union-paci...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/union-pacific-to-cut-nearly-3-0...

https://www.thepacker.com/news/transportation/union-pacific-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/sd9kqw/union_paci...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/s6c04a...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/los-angeles-...

https://www.cfindustries.com/newsroom/2022/union-pacific-shi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxp8lUXDz0

Meanwhile at the top:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_5jng3RYM

TLDR version. UP switched to some fancy "efficient" system several years ago, laid off thousands of employees. At the time many people predicted collapse of the company in a couple of years. Three years later it is plagued by rampant theft and trash on the tracks. This year it refused to ship fertilizer during planting season. It also refused to ship additives to diesel fuel earlier this year (amidst general truck shipping issues and skyrocketing fuel costs). Meanwhile the CEO is smiling like a Cheshire Cat and giving out Bloomberg interviews about efficient management.

New comment by gambler in "YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters"

gambler — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 19:06:54 +0000

There is a difference between "Google does not censor anti-war content" and "Google does censor anti-war content, but usually has an excuse I find acceptable".

When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over) behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic of such censorship.

>The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.

They've censored other things on behest of the Russian government for years[2]. Again, I cannot fathom how people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on mainstream websites.

---

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-john-lennon-war-is-over-wa...

[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/google-censors-search-results-after-...

New comment by gambler in "YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters"

gambler — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 17:07:20 +0000

https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/don-t-see-evil-148ae18bc9fe

https://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/google...

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-censors-war

New comment by gambler in "YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters"

gambler — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 15:46:55 +0000

Blatantly incorrect. Google engages in egregious political censorship all the time. Including censorship for Russian government and censorship of US anti-war voices.

https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-responds-to-cpac-censorshi...

https://reclaimthenet.org/google-expanded-its-censorship-of-...

https://reclaimthenet.org/russia-continues-to-order-google-t...

In US they pretend to "decide" to censor things "on their own" because 1st amendment prevents the government from officially demanding censorship.

New comment by gambler in "Deepfake Offensive Toolkit (real-time deepfakes for virtual cameras)"

gambler — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:55:23 +0000

Just because you think some issues is "inevitable" in the future doesn't mean you should spend academic resources to make it happen faster, while simultaneously making it easier to exploit.

New comment by gambler in "Deepfake Offensive Toolkit (real-time deepfakes for virtual cameras)"

gambler — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:45:13 +0000

The entirety of deep fake technology was developed mostly in mainstream academia using "raising awareness" as an excuse. Paper after paper, model after model, repository after repository. Every single time the excuse was "if we don't do it, someone else will". This was going on for years and the explanation is absolutely laughable. Without countless human-hours put into this by academia, it's pretty obvious that this technology would be nowhere near its current state. Maybe some select military research agencies could develop something analogous. Currently this is accessible to literally every crook and prankster with internet access.

Also, the notion that "raising awareness" is going to prevent deep fakes from being used in practice shows complete and utter disconnect from reality. Most people who are skeptical are already aware how imminently fakeable all the media really is. Most people who still are unaware will remain so, no matter how many GitHub repositories some dipshits will publish.

New comment by gambler in "Golang Diaries: Generics"

gambler — Sun, 15 May 2022 18:17:00 +0000

When I started using Go generics, they turned out to be completely useless for the use case I wanted to solve the most: functions to use in Go templates. Something is basic as adding two numbers is not solved by the core library and becomes a challenge with about a dozen numeric types. You can use a type switch and cast interface{}/any to float64 (which is a hack, but one that works in practice). What you can't do is use generics, because they require instantiation at compile time, which cannot happen in templates, because those are dynamic. Extremely disappointing.

Another disappointing thing is the fact that Go type inference is not good enough to have syntactically compact lambda functions. So now, even though it's possible to write code that does filter-map-reduce kind of stuff, it's verbose, slow to write and hard to read.

New comment by gambler in "Markdoc: Stripe's Markdown-based authoring framework"

gambler — Wed, 11 May 2022 19:15:51 +0000

https://technology.reclamation.institute/pages/cured-html

New comment by gambler in "Show HN: Radiopaper – Troll-resistant public conversations"

gambler — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:35:29 +0000

Have you tried Locals? Not a penny a post, but $5/month per board. Can't say there aren't any trolls, but it's definitely more "real" than most social media.

New comment by gambler in "Is everything falling apart?"

gambler — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 18:20:55 +0000

I think this kind of framing of the question is very close to being a sly form of gaslighting.

What people want to know is not whether the current state of things is "normal". After all, death, sickness, war, hunger, disease and crime are all perfectly normal. Everyone gets that at some level. What most people want to know is what the fuck happened with the metanarrative that we were fed for the last several decades. Is it defunct and debunked? If it is, that has obvious implications in terms of who we should trust and who we should empower.

New comment by gambler in "I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)"

gambler — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 02:35:22 +0000

For starters, there is no way to consume multiple return values of a function or method inline. This makes chaining extremely verbose and often results in having three lines of error handling per one line of "normal" logic.

Secondly, Go creates a silly dichotomy by introducing two completely different mechanisms for error processing: error values and panics. (Soon to be three, because people will start using generics.)

Thirdly, "errors are values" approach is extremely counterproductive when you have to create generic error handling (with logging, default behaviors on failur,e etc). Something as simple as printing why a web page panicked becomes an exercise in cleverness.

Go enthusiasts will probably say none of this matters if you follow some set of "good practices". However, even core language libraries often fail to handle errors consistently. (E.g. text/template.)