Hacker News: jevoten

New comment by jevoten in "Facebook Messenger and Meta Pay are used to buy child sexual abuse material"

jevoten — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 18:44:01 +0000

I thought The Guardian was against fascism, yet here they are pushing for corporations to act like the police. Or even more like the police, beyond keeping IP logs, message histories, transaction histories, and employing 15,000 workers to monitor their users.

New comment by jevoten in "[dead]"

jevoten — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:50:44 +0000

> It's also sad that pretty much any sort of defense is illegal in Toronto

Could you elaborate on this?

New comment by jevoten in "EFF to Ninth Circuit: No Software Exception to Traditional Copyright Limits"

jevoten — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:48:33 +0000

Does it in fact "rely" on it, or does that merely expand its scope? Even if its claims of what is "derivative" were diminished to exclude linking/API calls, the GPL would survive, albeit as slightly less viral.

New comment by jevoten in "Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies"

jevoten — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 22:29:34 +0000

Being mad about this is like being mad the thief who stole your belongings then pawned them. The crime was spying on you in the first place. Automakers should not have any data, to share or sell or give to law enforcement with a subpoena.

New comment by jevoten in "Bluesky starts letting users pick their own moderation filters"

jevoten — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 04:15:47 +0000

Yes it is a broad thing, and yes government and private censorship are not the same, but they are both censorship, at least according to the wikipedia and ACLU definitions [1,2].

And given the volume of posts censored and users banned by social media, where most public debate happens these days, most censorship is now by private companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

[2] https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship

New comment by jevoten in "Bluesky starts letting users pick their own moderation filters"

jevoten — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 03:00:11 +0000

Thank you for the clarification.

> our censorship (if we're really going to call it that)

With the possible exception of spam filtering, yes, we should call it that. I'm sure I would agree with many of those censorship decisions, such as e.g. YCombinators decision to censor things harming intellectual curiosity, but just because we agree with some censorship, doesn't make it not censorship. It's important to keep language free of little lies like using milder terms when we want to present something in a better light, because these little lies add up and become habits of both speech and thought.

New comment by jevoten in "Bluesky starts letting users pick their own moderation filters"

jevoten — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 02:41:54 +0000

Title is misleading - users can pick additional filters, but can't opt out of any of Bluesky's own censorship without going to a third-party server entirely.

New comment by jevoten in "Airlines Colluded to Ensure Onboard Food Would Be Awful"

jevoten — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:40:16 +0000

Charge $100 more for a ticket to get a slightly better sandwich, then claim the consumer chose the worse sandwich.

New comment by jevoten in "Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country"

jevoten — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:41:49 +0000

People are perhaps not so enthusiastic about giving away their countries just so multinational companies with no loyalty to them don't leave. On the other hand, China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all manage to have highly-successful tech industries (tech, not ads and social media) with near-zero immigration.

New comment by jevoten in "MSFT engineer warns Copilot creates violent images, ignores copyrights"

jevoten — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:25:01 +0000

You can also create violent and copyrighted images in MS Paint. Why should our tools police us? And what is the alternative - teach AI to perform a fair-use test on any output that touches copyrighted material?

New comment by jevoten in "EU aims to shift European arms industry to 'war economy mode'"

jevoten — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:15:27 +0000

> Will you move your whole social life with you

A small price compared to dying in war. I'm not saying it's the right choice, but if you have no attachment to your country and people beyond it being a comfortable place to live, that's the choice most will make.

New comment by jevoten in "EU aims to shift European arms industry to 'war economy mode'"

jevoten — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:57:30 +0000

Point taken. But what about in Germany over Canada? Or Italy? Or Spain, or Australia, or the US, or New Zealand, or UK, or Iceland, or Taiwan, or Japan or... there are lots of mostly free countries (so long as you don't engage in the growing category of hate-speech) one can run to, once freed from the concepts of homeland and nation.

New comment by jevoten in "EU aims to shift European arms industry to 'war economy mode'"

jevoten — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:37:40 +0000

> cultivating the mentality that lying in the trenches for your country/culture/values might be necessary.

That would mean cultivating the mentality that a country is more than just an economic platform, because that's not something anyone is willing to die for. It means cultivating the dreaded nationalism.

New comment by jevoten in "Google Demands That We Censor Our Content"

jevoten — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 13:59:07 +0000

> There's other ways to find websites, like HN and word-of-mouth;

The problem is that, to get traffic to your site (i.e. have your speech heard), it doesn't help if you use these other ways to find websites. You need others to use these ways. And 99% of them won't. I'm all for advocating widespread change of these habits, but that's a society-wide effort, not something a single website can do, much less one de-listed by Google.

New comment by jevoten in "We 'messed up' with black Nazi blunder, Google co-founder admits"

jevoten — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 10:23:43 +0000

The mistake is they got caught. It will be more subtle next time.

New comment by jevoten in "Commerce Department Proposes Imposing "Know Your Customer" on IaaS Providers"

jevoten — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 10:14:37 +0000

Easy way to bypass the 4th amendment - force private business to pre-emptively surveil everyone.

New comment by jevoten in "I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18"

jevoten — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 20:44:36 +0000

> hilarious because unlike the social media case, I dont think these faux pauxs have important real world consequences

Which is exactly why people mock this being referred to as "safety". Keep in mind the group mocking this PR bubble-wrapping of AI is largely opposed to the media professionals writing panicked editorials about how they were able to trick an AI into saying racism is good.

New comment by jevoten in "Nevada AG Asks Court to Ban Meta from Providing End-to-End Encryption to Minors"

jevoten — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 18:27:05 +0000

I have an idea - why doesn't Nevada install a bug on every minor's device, achieving the same effect, without Facebook's cooperation?

I know why! Because then the surveillance, privacy infringement, and gross overreach are obvious and in your face, and the culprit is clear! But they want to keep it discreet, like it's just a happy accident that you have no privacy left.

New comment by jevoten in "ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood"

jevoten — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 10:52:44 +0000

Putting aside how easy it is to compensate for this (e.g. report gunshots per area under surveillance), I'm curious how much crime estimates based on ShotSpotter or general policing differ from the frequency with which dead bodies are produced by an area. This latter measure mostly immune to overpolicing bias.

New comment by jevoten in "Algorithmic Thinking (2nd Edition)"

jevoten — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 10:45:22 +0000

> The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation;

How were pointers handled before?