He's criticized as "on the right" because he disagrees with feminism, neoliberalism, and marxism (it's more cultural marxism, which he calls neomarxism). That is a reactionary label, and it doesn't fit, which is precisely the problem with modern politics.

A decade, maybe 15 years ago, Peterson would've been right in the middle of the liberal camp. So would people like Dave Rubin. Today though, the modern left is falling in line with these feminist and marxist ideas even though they fundamentally contradict his long held liberal principles. People like me who aren't in some extreme position are described as malicious by these ideologies. I know it's nonsense because I can actually see what's in my head, and what they claim is true about me and about an entire class of people based on gender or race, is utterly false. The obvious response is "that's nonsense", but of course we're talking about people who are throwing labels of "racist" and "sexist" at anyone who dares disagree, so that's not a good enough response. We must be defensive, yet the irony of saying someone is bad because they're male or because they're white and then using those labels seems to be a little out of reach.

Watch this interview. Nearly every response she makes to him "so you're saying" is trying to ascribe some feminist or marxist ideal of how the world works to what he's said, and he simply repeats what he says. He goes to great lengths to explain his issues with these ideologies in various lectures, but you can see it here as a prime example, condensed into a comical and pathetic 30 minute interview. Everything wrong with today's left. It's not liberal anymore, she tried so hard to make him look like the bad guy, like he has bad evil wrong thoughts.

It's no wonder the situation regarding diversity at Google is so precarious, and this Damore lawsuit is just one of many to come if this mentality continues. I like Peterson because he opposes it and for good reason, not just in such as simplistic manner as ridicule and memes as you see from the right.

This behavior makes sense for most people, those who don't know what they're doing, at the expense of rendering the tool useless in cases where advanced functionality is needed. Perhaps Google should have an advanced, AI lite version.

Let's say you're a shy/introverted engineer working at Google. You are going to a bunch of diversity events because it's an easy way to progress in your career. You find things you disagree with, or think are potentially illegal, but overall agree with the end goal: more women / PoC at Google, and so put forward an analysis that supports the same goal, even asserting that diversity is a good thing, but indicating that Google's methodology is problematic, and possibly illegal. You shop it around, including to HR, who rejects it, get lots of constructive criticism and feedback from peers, revise it, and continue hoping you eventually do cause a good change in your organization.

Someone then sees it, gets angry, and proceeds to leak it to the press. A few days later, nearly every mainstream news organization has an article calling you a woman-hating sexist, calling your memo a "screed" and treating you like some kind of Nazi. Peers you've never spoken to start sending you threatening and hateful messages, not having even read your work, instead relying on clearly defamatory claims made by "news" organizations, totally misquoting what you've said, and even putting words in your mouth. Then you're fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" when you've explicitly drawn a line in your work between societal expectations on gender expression and biological predisposition due to sex, that is, you're fired for something you didn't actually say or do, and it's final, there's no appeal.

You're this young guy here, with such negative publicity, and stuck in a part of the country that's 90% leftist or left-leaning, being called all sorts of horrible things by thousands of people you don't even know. You check Twitter and see your name is associated with some of the most hateful words you could imagine.

Now, in this situation, do you respond to CNN who has just printed their 17th hitpiece on you, and hope they'll be fair to you, because you're not assertive enough to deal with the confrontation required if they start putting words in your mouth or asking leading questions? Or do you seek to tell your side of the story from people who are already presenting the story in a more neutral way?

"Internet providers will be able to do X!"

Okay, so who can already choose what sites you see? Well there's your browser, Google could (and does) block sites, so could (and does) Microsoft. How do you find out about content on the internet? ISPs? No you probably find a link on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or by searching. Well those are all censored, they can literally decide what you do and don't see. Google's own CEO has even been quoted in video saying they're fine doing that.

What about at the infrastructure level? There are in reality two vectors to getting software on the most popular devices on the planet: phones. You've got to deal with Apple's store or Google's store. There're plenty of examples of apps being blocked for political reasons from both of these. They can literally choose what you're allowed to see, what software you're allowed to install ON A COMPUTER THAT YOU OWN. Google just killed a website, The Daily Stormer, by seizing the DNS, and any registrar can do this. Whatever you think about that website, we do have a fundamental freedom of speech in the US, where this site and Google operates, but that doesn't stop Google from just arbitrarily killing a site they disagree with. How about payment processors? There aren't many, they're mostly big companies, and they forbid you from using their systems to do certain things, most of which aren't criminal. They literally decide what you can and can't do at a business level, which indirectly impacts customers.

I could go with hundreds more examples just like this.

These things exist, they're abused, these aren't FUD, and the tech media turns a blind eye to much of it. Every single day.

This regulation is absurdly dubious in its value. The most common FUD are "but your ISP will be able to block what you see!" Maybe I want them to. Some person gets infected with malware, maybe I want that person's access to be restricted. Maybe I don't want to even be able to visit a machine known to be compromised. Google already does this in Chrome, to the benefit of most users.

How about "but they can shut down a competing service." No, no they can't. The citations where this has happened can mostly be explained by QoS, which is necessary to keep a network functioning properly, and is effectively illegal by NN. We have laws against anti-competitive behavior like this. Why do we need yet another? Those laws work. And if they are insufficient, maybe Congress should do something about it, and while they're at it deal with all those other examples of companies doing much worse.

At the end of the day, I'm so unconvinced that this is actually a concern, that I've started totally ignoring discussions about Net Neutrality. Is HN really so devoid of people who have ever operated a large network or dealt with issues of scale? I would expect that not to be the case, but requiring ISPs to overprovision and to bear the burden of infrastructural growth at whatever demand their customers make seems unreasonable at the very best. Don't cite AT&T and Comcast at me, fuck them, I don't care if they are shady shitty companies. What about new ISPs? What about the hundreds of small ISPs destroyed by NN, the ones you don't hear non-stop complaining about? What about the ISPs that can't exist because without hundreds of millions of dollars they can't afford to achieve a level of quality customers expect from hundred billion dollar ISP monopolies.

I want competition. I don't want my world to be ruled forever by Google, Apple, Comcast, and AT&T. I sure as hell don't want shitty rules in place that effectively ensure these largely unethical borderline sociopathic companies remain in their positions. I really don't want Net Neutrality, because it doesn't do what it says and fundamentally harms the internet in a way only hypothetically compared to the real evils these companies impart on us EVERY SINGLE DAY.

When you end all the abusive bullshit already happening on the internet, end the censorship, and break up these monopolies, when you put your effort into fixing problems we actually have rather than fighting fictional dragons, then and only then will I be again open to discussions about this topic.

Tim Pool recounted how his account got verified a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67nFNUPQaeI&t=1m25s.

TL;DW: His employer, VICE, instructed Twitter to verify him, and they did.

Ultimately that's what this badge comes down to: for most people it's a mark of being on the inside, knowing the right people. The right agency, the right employer, maybe just having a friend working at Twitter. There are some other certain criteria that aren't publicized, and they have in the past randomly given it out to "high profile" people on Twitter, even though that seems to be totally random as well.

This is a special club, Twitter has on and off said it means many things, but there's no consistency. Just like there's no consistency with how they enforce their rules, there's no consistency with this special privilege either.

Either they actually do basically rootkit the machine and break functionality, which is a huge "fuck you" to everyone and may actually require people manually enter exceptions in AV software, or they settle on the non-functional but "scary sounding" protections every other game uses.

This is a fight that has been long since over, not that people don't still try. I spent a lot of time working around anti-cheats in various games over a decade ago. PB was a fun one, C-D thought it was clever, there were jokes like CMN's "anti-cheat", and other games that had things like nProtect GG. Some went so far as to actually use packers, hilariously some used UPX while others used things like Themida. There was one of these things that actually injected a rootkit into every running process (and thus required administrative permission) to disallow you from killing the game's process or even accessing the memory of it. Of course this was hilarious when the game would hang as you expect with buggy software, and the only way to actually kill the process was to restart or do it from ring0. I thought that was a pretty fucked up thing. It was trivial to bypass though, and I forget the specifics, but you could actually start the game or anti-cheat with the main thread frozen and inject whatever code you wanted that then had privileged access before resuming it. I thought when I did that "I'm 15 years old and in 10 minutes I've bypassed what some team probably took months to build." I did get a bit frustrated with my lack of knowledge when much more capable packers were used, but some people did nothing but break these things (and would break new versions in minutes). It was pretty fun to debug, work around all the protections, find the real code, then reconstruct the executable so it would run without the protections, but handling VMs needed programmatic debugging which was a bit more than I was capable of dealing with back then.

As expected we eventually were gifted ring0 anti-cheats (though most remain ring3), so cheats went there too, and when I stopped caring as much about that scene, some really clever hooking methods were being devised as well as hypervisor based cheats. There's no winning this fight for the anti-cheats, so the real solution is to detect whatever behavior you don't want on the server, where they have no access. The client-side anti-cheat is more of a deterrent, and it turns out nobody really tries to make cheats very hard to detect in this manner, most players can visibly tell almost instantly if someone is cheating just by observing them briefly. Not to say that ring0 cheats were hard to detect, I made a proof of concept in about 20 minutes that detected all but 1 of the existing public ring0 cheats for CS at the time -- they all modified a specific struct in memory, and that modification was present even in ring3 cheats, so I generally wondered what those anti-cheat developers were doing most of the time.

I think nearly every version introduced some change that broke behavior and had to be worked around, usually fairly minor and arguably reasonable. Sometimes that's not the case, something would be completely broken and we'd file bugs against Chrome to get them fixed, and our codebase is now riddled with comments about workarounds citing Chrome bugs, some years old.

There was even a recent change to contenteditable that was a breaking change and is not spec compliant, which totally breaks HTML-based rich-text editing systems built on it that don't want to just have a ton of style tags and/or empty tags everywhere in their markup. This API is probably one of the worst I've ever seen (it needs to be extensible and modifiable, you can configure it somewhat but you're left actually taking the output and massaging it yourself if you want anything resembling a good product based on it), so I'd be in full support of a rewrite of the spec and a new version of contenteditable, but as terrible as this one is, it should remain spec compliant.

At one point I held Chrome in reverence for pushing the boundary and improving the QoL of web application developers, but shifting to maintaining anything of decent complexity has made me regret the decision based on how much extra work Google makes for us. They really need to cut out the breaking changes and do better regression testing. If our app detects errors in beta/canary and we report them and they STILL make it to live, I just don't even know what to say. I'm not even sure I agree that just because 0.1% of websites rely on certain behavior that it should be "breakable." With all this talk about progressive web apps, where are the progressive web browsers?

Article: mostly just attacking Trump's administration, entirely non-constructive.

I don't understand why this is on HN.

This seems like an unfair claim. Since you didn't provide a citation, I looked for one. I found plenty of articles insisting that Ajit Pai and through association that Trump are both out to harm privacy online, but this is typically an inference based on the fact that Ajit is blocking more regulations placed on ISPs. His reasoning has consistently been anything that makes it harder to compete (the context is in small-medium businesses, think tiny companies trying to upset Comcast or AT&T) is bad, and specifically in this case that extra regulations on ISPs that businesses (read: the entities that actually have virtually all of your data) are not required to follow is unnecessarily limiting to competition. That's really not the same as "Ajit Pai is stoked about this." I will thus consider this bullshit until someone actually asks him what he thinks about this and whether he supports it. I doubt he does, because I doubt anyone does, and because it appears it may already be illegal.

The DNS entry for this site is already gone, though I can't tell if it was an action by GoDaddy or if it was explicitly removed to hide the page. In either case, that kind of response indicates guilt to me, and unless the ISPs are explicitly informing people that this is happening, it may already be illegal. I'd expect a class action lawsuit to determine that, and legislation to make it illegal for ANY ENTITY, be it a business operating on the internet or an ISP, to do this without consent from the user, which is what we really need.

I've been very annoyed at businesses like Spokeo that operate entirely in the realm of selling information about people, and they're fueled by shit that Facebook, Google, and friends freely offer about people, and now worse what about cross-referencing what they already have (everything in this case plus things like residential history, criminal history, etc) with your entire credit history and SSN and more thanks to Equifax and even hashed passwords due to the dozens of leaks we get every year.

I don't think this belongs in the FCC's wheelhouse, this belongs in Congress, because this kind of shit is getting out of hand, and it's not just ISPs.

I want something like uBlock running in Chrome on Android. I can do it in CopperheadOS or with Firefox, but it blows my mind that Google recognizes these types of issues but won't deal with perhaps the most egregious one.

What the hell, Salesforce? This looks bad. There's either more to the story or this is just extreme knee jerk.

This title makes it sound like the FCC is advocating that speeds above those are unnecessary for anyone, as if they're coming for your network speed. I don't get the sensationalism here, this hardly even seems newsworthy.

It's unfair in the sense that this progressive or far left ideal is allowed to be pushed onto entire organizations and by the media as de facto "right" or "correct", which is inherently a political position and would likely offend anyone who disagrees with it. If these processes and programs should be publicly enacted on people who disagree with them, it's unfair then to disallow any discussion about them under an implicit threat of termination. Google just confirmed that threat is very real. I know many conservatives here (a classical liberal / libertarian mostly myself, which is far too "right leaning" for this area) who are actually scared of any political discussion due to this exact threat, even though those with the "correct" opinions can openly discuss them without any fear of repercussions. I don't think they should because inherently politics brings out discussion and debate, often vigorous forms of it, and that's not generally the best thing for the office, but because that discussion/debate is effectively banned here, it's completely fine to express leftist and socialist ideals publicly, even if in extremely poor taste.

Secondly, if you were to decide to bring up issues with these programs with a person responsible (for instance in Google's case, this VP of diversity) you'd get a predictable dismissal, or they'd silently drop whatever issue you raise, which means you have no actual means with which to present these viewpoints. She publicly dismissed the entire thing without actually refuting any argument that was made, with language that effectively sounded something like "this is wrong think, and Google doesn't agree with this wrong think." You could do it outside of work, but you lose the context and the specifics of the program, and more importantly the impact any such discussion could have on your immediate environment.

These discussions do need to be had, and where they're being had, the majority of even liberal minded people tend to agree with the author of this piece, but it's hard to know if that's a consensus (even at 500,000+ views for instance on each video on YouTube) or if it's just an echo chamber because even demanding rigor and evidence of the ideas behind diversity is taboo in far too many places. For instance tptacek can be found in these very comments essentially arguing that this topic of discussion isn't open because it's been decided. By whom? How can any discussion of highly debatable topics like this be had if people like him and Google are just going to say "it's not up for debate because I'm right" in order to shut down any discussion before it can even begin, hilariously in this case by likening this to discussing child labor or marital rape? It's nice to see logical fallacies are alive and very well with people who otherwise seem fairly intelligent.

I definitely don't want politically driven judgement calls made on my behalf as to whether or not that creator should even be allowed to have my money, when that person hasn't actually done anything illegal. It's my money, and no business has any business telling me who I can and can't give money to, or why, and to step into that position is to trivialize competition. It's a bad move on Patreon's part, and it's completely antithetical to the service they should be providing: making it easier to find content you like by creators you like and then fund it so there's more. They don't do the former, and the latter is more and more only for "Patreon approved" creators. What is it they do that makes them invaluable or irreplaceable, because I'm not seeing it.

I've given thousands through Patreon but I've stopped using it for many reasons. I feel pretty justified in that decision just looking at their behavior, both lately and in the past. They've allowed pages to remain up for people who are provably doing nothing but harassing others (and advertising that behavior as the "activism" their Patreon page is funding), but taken others down just because they run a service which on principle refuses to police discussion but which isn't breaking any law because Patreon dislikes what people on that service say/do. Now they've removed someone because they disagree with something that person has done unrelated to their content creation being funded through Patreon (again, not even illegal behavior), and it looks entirely politically motivated.

I don't support Lauren and never have, but this kind of moral grandstanding and virtue signaling from Patreon just isn't acceptable to me, and definitely not from what is a glorified payment processing web interface. Tim Pool as usual has a fairly solid take on it, and I mostly agree with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_yIp7eQO1c.

This piece looks like a pretty desperate PR move.

This will be interesting.

I'm just not sure it's fair to say that one side here is for content agnostic networks and the other is against them, but rather two different approaches to solving the problem where just about everyone agrees with content agnostic networks.

How many of us would hold steady in our own ethics and morals if someone routinely offered something like a $2,500,000 payday and we had no risk at all of being fired or jailed?