In the US, the government has control over the content too, it just so happens that it mostly concerns itself with combatting certain moral vices (from prostitution to bootleg fireworks) - although to be fair, it also lightly pressured big tech into combatting political "misinformation".

In China, the same mechanisms exist, except the controls on speech are much tighter and the punishments more severe. Every other tech company operating there has a story of officials showing up with demands or threatening employees. I worked at two places where this happened. In addition, most businesses operate as formal or quasi-formal public-private partnership, where the CCP has officials within the corporate management structure. Again, ask anyone who tried to start a foreign-owned business in China.

You can make a reasonable argument that having an oppressive and geopolitically adversarial foreign government effectively in control of the most popular youth social media platform in the country is not great. Or you can make a reasonable free-trade argument. Free trade works only if all participants follow the rules; if Western social media can't operate on their market, they don't get to operate on ours.

There are things to dislike about the US government, but I really don't get the contrarian takes on TikTok. China is objectively worse and its government's legitimacy and lasting power is built in the bodies of tens of millions of victims. We're not getting along right now. This doesn't require cynicism to explain.

In essence, you're just mildly glitching the display. It doesn't really alter the map or the spatial relationship of items. You'd need more fundamental game engine changes to really implement a different geometry.

The dilemma was quite different: if you don't do it, your enemy will beat you to it and will kill you and the people you love. It was a very utilitarian, wartime calculation.

The soft variant you're quoting is just a license to misbehave because others also misbehave - and I don't think that was Oppenheimer's qualm.

In this specific case, though, Sam Altman's narrative is that they created an existential risk to humanity and that the access to it needs to be restricted for others. So which is it?

And your framing is odd - can you only dislike one of these things? Graffiti or ads? There are successful movements to rid cities and scenic areas of ads, or to tone them down.

That said, just because they can doesn't mean they will. It's possible that they've grown complacent and underfunded these capabilities (instead relying on community moderators to weed out bad actors). Or it's possible that they're too focused on the short term to see the existential risks. If I recall correctly, they couldn't resist the temptation of selling user content for LLM training, same as Stack Overflow.

But in an internet overrun by spam LLMs, the future are curated, walled-garden communities, and Reddit could be the basis for that.

Video, where the result needs to be temporally coherent and make sense in 3D, can't be the easier one.

It's also a good example of how the metaphor this blog post is predicated on can fall apart. Your customers care about durability, but they make purchasing decisions based on cost and outward appearance. In a world like that, where you can't satisfy all requirements at once, you inevitably end up cutting corners on the things the customer cares about but can't measure. But is that right? That's how you end up with $200 furniture that lasts a year or two in a home with children or pets.

It's also easy to neglect cumulative costs. Back to software: does it matter if your app uses 100 MB of memory when it could be using 1 MB? On an individual basis, no, because RAM is cheap. Cumulatively, when every other app developer thinks the same, and when you multiply it by billions of devices, your decision might have actually cost lives if you consider the increased emissions and countless other distant externalities.

A milder version of the blog's claim is definitely true. You should pick your battles. But it's all about trade-offs, there are few problems that truly don't matter to anyone.

How many founders move to the Bay Area thinking "you know, what I really want to build is a small business?" And how many HN techies would enthusiastically join a project like that?

It's more about this idea of being an advocate for the downtrodden - a good person fighting the racists on behalf of those without a voice. And because you're fighting the good fight, it's of course OK to make the oppressors uncomfortable or to bully them into submission.

Depending on your priors, this is either messed up, or it's messed up not to act and accept the status quo. Pick your poison, I guess.

If you remember which one you signed up with, and it wasn't your work email from two jobs ago.

Other aspects of the hobby aged poorly too. The ham community (and the regulators) were slow to embrace use cases that might have been interesting to younger people in the 21th century - say, mesh networking. Instead, the kids were supposed to follow in the footsteps of the old-timers and get excited about slow-scan TV, RTTY, and collecting QSL postcards.

Frankly, I don't know of any other hobby with a comparable amount of gatekeeping. It sucks because the increasingly idle spectrum will eventually get auctioned off for commercial use.

But also consider that millions of deer are hunted and consumed in the US every year, and that hunters don't seem to be developing prion diseases at an elevated rate. We know relatively little about prions, but it seems likely that humans are fairly resilient to this, perhaps except for some predisposed individuals. Genetic factors are suspected, but there's no smoking gun. Acquired vCJD is exceedingly rare too.

By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place.

We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done.

In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?

This article is a response that can be summed up as "no, we're changing the environment faster than anything before, so it counts". It's framed not as a genuine debate, but as an attempt to dispel "myths".

"Why this matters" is left as an exercise for the reader...

There's no law that says "you can't send more than n packets per hour".

This is not exploitable by simply passively watching traffic, so even for client keys, if you're certain that they were used in a constrained way, you should be fine. The difficulty is knowing that for sure, so it's still prudent to rotate.