Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.

> are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” Ben-Gvir added while calling for the targeted killings of Palestinians in Gaza.

I often hear that members of the current Israeli govt say much more horrific things in Hebrew than what they say in English that gets picked up in Western media. Since this clip got shared widely I assumed that perhaps it was in English but after checking, I can see that it's not. I think it's getting increasingly trivial to translate media which might contribute to surfacing more of these quotes and a deepened collapse in global support for this current government.

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/3jxud3/exoper...

The best pure browser company in history was Opera, and they didn't fail because they weren't innovating. It is simply not a survivable model. People don't remember anything, but during Google's recent anti trust case, one floated "solution" was to spin Chrome off as a separate company, but that was regarded as unrealistic partly because such a company would not have a credible path to profitability separate from Google.

I happen to disagree, they could have collected a search licensing fee just like Firefox but that model is already being regarded as monopoly adjacent.

A funny argument to make because the thing that would make such a measure ridiculous as you rightly point out, is exactly what already makes the Manifest changes ridiculous in the first instance. They were making a rhetorical point and you elaborated on their point for them as if doing so expressed a disagreement.

Edit: found the quote, and frankly I agree wholeheartedly with Hofstadter who seems to have a much more sophisticated understanding of the capabilities of computers, perhaps owing to his encountering them in a later era.

"My book, despite owing a large debt to Nagel and Newman, does not agree with all of their philosophical conclusions, and here I would like to point out one key difference. In their “Concluding Reflections,” Nagel and Newman argue that from Godel’s discoveries it follows that computers—“calculating machines,” as they call them—are in principle incapable of reasoning as flexibly as we humans reason, a result that supposedly ensues from the fact that computers follow “a fixed set of directives” (i.e., a program).

To Nagel and Newman, this notion corresponds to a fixed set of axioms and rules of inference—and the computer’s behavior, as it executes its program, amounts to that of a machine systematically churning out proofs of theorems in a formal system. This mapping of computer onto formal system takes the term “calculating machine” very literally—that is, a machine built to deal.with numbers and arithmetical facts alone. The idea that such machines by their very nature should churn out sets of true statements about mathematics is seductive and certainly has a grain of truth to it, but it is far from the full vision of the power and versatility of computers.

Although computers, as their name implies, are built of rigidly arithmetic-respecting hardware, nothing in their design links them inseparably to mathematical truth. It is no harder to get a computer to print out scads of false calculations (“2 + 2 = 5; 0/0 = 43,” etc.) than to print out theorems in a formal system. A subtler challenge would be to devise “a fixed set of directives” by which a computer might explore the world of mathematical ideas (not just strings of mathematical symbols), guided by visual imagery, the associative patterns linking concepts, and the intuitive processes of guesswork, analogy, and esthetic choice that every mathematician uses.

When Nagel and Newman were composing Godel’s Proof, the goal of getting computers to think like people—in other words, artificial intelligence—was very new and its potential was unclear. The main thrust in those early days used computers as mechanical instantiations of axiomatic systems, and as such, they did nothing but churn out proofs of theorems. Now admittedly, if this approach represented the full scope of how computers might ever in principle be used to model cognition, then, indeed, Nagel and Newman would be wholly justified in arguing, based on Godel’s discoveries, that computers, no matter how rapid their calculations or how capacious their memories, are necessarily less flexible and insightful than the human mind.

But theorem-proving is among the least subtle of ways of trying to get computers to think[...]"

He goes on like this for a bit more, and fleshes out a deeper argument, but this is already long as quoted passages on hn go. But I think Hofstadter is exactly right and shows a much more sophisticated understanding of computers than Nagel and Newman in their celebrated introduction to Gödel. I would go so far as to say their philosophical conclusion is almost exactly wrong, and is as baffling as if Darwin's Origin of Species included a section of "conclusions" denying the possibility of ever developing effective vaccines in the future. Wrong to the point of being contrary to the spirit of the subject that was so exceptionally articulated up to that point. And it's in my opinion terribly damaging for a conclusion so backwards to be embedded in a text that's celebrated as the best explanation of the proof.

So I'm ready to believe it might have only been one. Although it naturally raises the question. You can't imagine they would volunteer data on additional harassment campaigns.

It looks like this one might not have actually been used and it seems like the biggest lesson that the example demonstrates is that it's just one of many tool sets in a sprawling surveillance ecosystem and there's a bunch of private companies that vie the business of police and other government institutions across China. That sprawl makes leaks like this one more possible.

Sometimes it said that "none of this is a surprise", but I think revealing details in specific ways turns it from a slogan into a concrete reality, and gives a sharper picture of the causality and the capabilities, which levels up our ability to understand in ways that aren't appreciated when it's just spoken about as a generality that we all assume to be the case.

The one thing I would personally flag is how frequently people were sarcastically dismissive of the idea that Tiktok was doing anything useful with this data. But given how extensive and opportunistic their aggregation of data is to profile foreigners, it's easy to see how, say, mapping out the global support networks of democratic activists sympathetic to (say) Taiwan, could bolster and empower them to act through their extradition partnerships and be part of the data that could potentially even support a hot war in Taiwan.

I use Tiktok as much as the next person, and go through cycles of installing and uninstalling it from my phone, but I didn't think but shared cultural exercise of young people from Western countries sarcastically bidding adieu to their Chinese spys was coming from a particularly well-informed place. And when the data is laid down in the concrete way it's harder to mentally inhabit the contradiction of (1) there's no surprise here and (2) there's nothing to worry about.

There was a time 20 or even 10 years ago where none of this would be controversial (that i,s the significance of reporting on a topic like this) but in 2026, at least in some spaces, it seems practically contrarian.

While it was definitely possible to use alternatives, it effectively became king of the mountain which gave it the power to deal a punishing blow to RSS once they pulled the plug.

I will just say it was a very different time and at the time I didn't regard Google as a place that didn't make credible commitments to new products. But big picture I think you're right.

Google Plus could have worked imo and the path to success would have involved smart stewardship of reader.