I'm sorry, but this is complete horse manure, albeit it's become a favorite fantasy/apologist/woe-is-me take on the right as the Trump disaster continues to unfold. But the opposition had NOTHING to do with Trump being chosen for POTUS. The Right had a perfectly decent choice: Nikki Haley. She had plenty right policies and no doubt would have made much of the left very upset, but she is also intelligent, sane, and cares to the normal degree about the country and basics of the constitution. She'd have been fine. She'd also have trivially creamed Democrats, and be holding Congress vastly better fwiw.

But out of the entirety of the US, only a single state (Vermont) voted against Trump. Every single last bit of the rest of the country chose Trump. There were no Democrats on the list for the Republican primary. Republicans could have sent Trump packing no problem, and then taken the WH and a bigger chunk of the House/Senate to boot. Trump being in the general and then WH was and forever will be 100% on the GOP.

Those costs are ALREADY passed on to everyone, that's the entire problem! Externalized costs are still costs, someone (or everyone) must still pay them. But when they're externalities instead of internalized, then they're hidden (which leads to gross inefficiency) and they're imposed on people who get no benefit and no choice (which is theft). Mass pollution is literally stealing money and life from a population and inefficiently funneling some of that back to the thief/thieves. It's as if transport companies were stealing 50% of the fuel they used to fill their trucks, and people came along saying "you need to pay for all the fuel you use", and then you argued against that saying "well who do we think those costs will be passed on to...."

When the costs are built into the price, then the direct participants pay, that filters out, and everyone can see exactly what they are and are appropriately incentivized to search for solutions to reduce them, same as every other cost that goes into a good or service. The Free Market is essentially a massively distributed constraint solver, and the "invisible hand of the market" is the cumulative billions of independent actions taken by participants in response to the system constraints and what they know. To function sustainably and efficiently, there has to be a high degree of information symmetry and cost internalization, or else decisions will obviously be distorted.

If one is worried about cost burdens, the best general place is direct unencumbered monetary payment to end consumers in need [0]. That is both very low administrative overhead, and still leaves them in a position to make the most efficient decisions for their own personal situation and fully reward producers who do a better job and reducing costs/improving quality.

----

0: Or arguably even better, a universal flat payment to the whole population, but the politics of that are harder.

Yes, that was a significant early argument I remember around the public benefits. The daily power spikes have always been a major challenge particularly when you don't have much commercial/industrial base. And even in the earliest period of the original 2000 home pilot they were surprised and pretty happy about how much load could be spread and the resulting savings. Note though that regulators were cautious and there was controversy around how well it'd actually work, you can find articles like this 2019 VT Digger one [0] from the era. Fortunately it did indeed work out, but easy to forget it was all pretty new at one point.

----

0: https://vtdigger.org/2019/09/05/state-calls-for-investigatio...

It also would have required constant testing and cost whether I used it or not, with no ROI whatsoever beyond power backup, a lot more noise/local pollution/size, storage of significant amounts of extra fuel (be it propane or diesel) with the resulting challenges, etc. Maybe the best bet and the one I was most strongly considering would be a PTO generator I could hook my tractor up to, then I'd get all the engine testing and fuel refreshing/storage "for free" on some level, in that I run the tractor anyway. But that still would have been dead cost most of the time, and on a basic but real human physical level, having to go out to the barn to hook things up and unhook them in the heart of winter wasn't a delightful prospect either. Propane doesn't go bad and maybe I could have finagled that into my heating system for a unified tank instead of multiple but that's still its own complexity, and place to house it and so on. And in retrospect that would have reduced the value of the heat pumps I've done since.

Batteries are nice. And I'm glad it wasn't only used for my needs. I like helping my neighbors, my town, and my state.

>It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.

I'm definitely sensitive to data collection, and full local control has always been something I've cared a lot about and is a significant consideration going forward. But I've got the PW isolated on its own VLAN going through my OPNsense router, and the granularity of its perspective is I think pretty course. Given what I'm running I just don't think there's a whole lot, if anything, it can glean the power company couldn't already, it's pretty out there on the master panel so it doesn't even see just the house, use from the barn and office and so on is all mixed into the signal. Taking into account what was on offer and far tighter finances at the time I think I did the best I could.

This is also a case where I think some level of regulated, low granularity population data may be pretty important in terms of infra planning our shift to only renewables and a smarter grid. I'll have to keep thinking about that though.

>They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to

I'd have to double check if my terms from back then are different then what they offer now, but ultimately the fact remains that across hundreds of outages and blips over 8-9 years with a couple of devastating floods and storms in the mix it has never been an issue even once. These aren't megacorps, utilities here are pretty tiny by national standards and pretty responsive (as well as regulated).

>The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.

GMP has I believe something like 10,000 miles of pole distribution lines for 265000 customers, but of course those customers are not evenly distributed, there are towns around here with literally double digits of people. And it's the biggest one, there are tons of smaller outfits and coops etc. "Reliable" doesn't mean "perfect" and never has, that's just not possible at the prices people can afford here.

I mean really, on some level everyone needs to be ready to contribute in general for life here sometimes. State is responsible for roads and such too, but if it's bad I and others get out our chainsaws (now electric! electric chainsaws are AWESOME) and winches and so on and get to work. State police provide coverage and will respond eventually, but it might be 30-120 minutes (or more sometimes). I've taken first responder courses, folks volunteer for fire departments and other roles, folks have guns. Others who can't do any of that can still bring people out clearing trees hot food and drinks and general support and that's a serious contribution and appreciated too. Dunno, not saying utilities shouldn't keep pushing hard and being pushed, nobody wants to be a floor mat, but I feel like they've been pretty solid and they really have been trying hard over the last few decades.

>It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative.

Some of your list feels like reasonable avenues for improvement, others feel totally unrealistic to a degree that it'd really end of restricting who could benefit. I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze there. But BYOB is an option with a self-consumption plan, where rather then supplying power back you instead basically get disconnected from the grid during peak events, see [0]. The terms and conditions aren't nothing, but power infrastructure is pretty serious business and I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect the utility not to want some pretty clear control and terms around it. And if you want out of it looks pretty reasonable, 30 days notice and you pay back a prorated portion of upfront incentives and that's that.

Also, "bandwidth", seriously? I'm looking at Netflow for the electric infra VLAN and it's like, 1.5-4 kbps, with occasional spikes to... 25 kbps for like a second. Yeah we're the boonies and progress is slow, but nice outfits like NEK Broadband [1] have been working hard and we've got fiber now, and of course Starlink is an option, sometimes even cellular. But even on crappy old 5/1 ADSL like I had to live with for 20 years it's not much. Come on. Rural America isn't that far back, we've gotten a ways beyond 14.4k modems.

----

0: https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-...

1: https://get.nekbroadband.org/

Sure, but we aren't yet, at least not remotely to the extent required. And we all individually have benefited from the externalized pollution that fossil fuels have been responsible for, this isn't just some nebulous other thing right? It's not unreasonable imo that yeah, we individually should try to pay for that damage we ourselves "profited" from, even while simultaneously trying to vote and organize towards broader solutions. But feeding money into getting off fossil fuel is both directly personally helpful and broadly helpful.

>70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.

I don't agree with you, and it's my money, my buildings and my call to make. I've gotten a plenty solid direct benefit in ROI over the last 8-9 years for the $3k it cost me one time only vs the $15k a couple of PowerWall 2s would have been upfront and then the rate shifting and minimal solar I was in a position for at the time, or alternatively the cost of a new generator and then all the fuel and ongoing maintenance required. The $12k in savings thanks to the utility is money I could put into other investments that have had their own ROI since then. I do think the math now for me and a lot of others is different in 2026 then 2017, there are lots and lots of competitive battery and solar and inverter solutions now at radically reduced prices and that seems to just be accelerating, with sodium based systems and other tech coming. But that wouldn't have offset a real chunk of 9 years of carbon equiv release by me. The batteries got far more usage as part of a system for society then just me, and I still did ok even if it didn't perfectly maximize the individual dollar savings.

>They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.

If you BYOB you do get that choice, though obviously if you let them take less they pay less. But it's not money for nothing, just a weighing of risk/benefit.

>That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free.

The battery cost per kWh has fallen enough and I think they've gotten comfortable enough with the landscape shift that I can see that making sense now, not early adopter territory anymore. The utility is also in a position to realize benefits like having a bit more leeway in how they dispatch linemen for repairs, if they know someone is covered for 20 hours and it's currently 15 below zero with whiteout conditions that'll clear in 2 hours maybe it's worth something to be able to not have that be an emergency (or instead to direct emergency efforts to someone else who isn't covered).

>Thanks for sharing your experience.

I'm glad it's come up on HN. It's one of the few real rays of hope I find in all this, that despite failure of collective action it's just getting so good that the economics and politics are tilting anyway. Won't be fast enough to avoid a lot of bad effects, but it can always get worse so the faster the better.

I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of

Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.

There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.

>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)

This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.

>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*

In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.

Nah, that'd be you, as well as a very insufferable asshole.

>The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.

And it clearly does, as I showed you. It's not even close, they're constrained on capabilities not demand right now. Starship total dev cost has been about $15 billion. Access to even a tiny piece of the global cellular market justifies that.

>Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.

Speaking of "lmao", now you're resorting to make believe.

>And for what it's worth

Nothing, in your case. I'm also being kind to you and only talking about the fundamental thing it does that fiber can never do, vs your hilarious suggestion that fiber will rollout worldwide to everyone on the planet in or even in the US in the foreseeable future. I don't think the US has even reached 50% fiber coverage yet.

The only thing that's "quite obvious" is that you're not merely incredibly, confidently ignorant, you're also so deeply uncurious you can't even be bothered to take 30 seconds to check your priors. Starlink's present annual revenue is $11.3 billion with $4.4 billion in income on that. The total global civil aviation (commercial airline) fleet size is over forty thousand aircraft [0]. Expand that to general aviation including business jets etc and it grows to something like half a million. Starlink actually publishes their general aviation plan pricing [1], which for CA is going to be one of the top two plans that don't have data limits and thus $12500 or $20000 per aircraft. From what I can find international flights account for something like 20-30% of all flights, and maybe 5-10% are intercontinental. But plans are per aircraft per month, and plenty of airliners use the same plane to fly across a continent and then also fly intercontiental, which would still need the highest plan. So using a 90/10 split that'd be an average of $13500/plane, for a TAM of $6.7 billion per year just for CA and maybe another $1-4 billion for GA (which is a lot more complicated to reason about). And the profit margins there are going to be high.

So JUST aviation, not even touching on maritime or everything else mobile, has the potential at present market size to approach the entire current revenue of Starlink by itself. And they have barely even gotten started with cellular, or doing other stuff like Earth sensing with the sats that bigger, higher power birds makes more feasible.

You claim it's "quite obvious" mobile applications don't justify Starlink. It's not any such thing.

>80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.

You need a lot more than 5x the residential plans at $55/month to approach $10-20k/month. Of course, some of those fixed points are business/enterprise customers on higher priced plans, but those customers are likely to be using Starlink already (as we are) as part of a redundancy plan alongside fiber, so your original argument about spreading fiber is perfectly irrelevant to those users anyway.

----

0: https://statbase.org/datasets/air-rail-and-water-transportat...

1: https://starlink.com/support/article/78b0428b-4546-0b7f-ea45...

Wow, that's so amazing estaerum, you've figured out how to get photonic-bandgap (hollow core) fiber to transoceanic airlines and ships, as well as drones, and satellites in orbit!? Would you mind sharing any hints on this great breakthrough you've made?

...or did you just sorta somehow completely ignore the whole "terminals can be mobile" aspect of Starlink, as well as latency of free space optical vs conventional fiber?

>F9 fits how many?

Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.

  # touch com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_FM_GenerativeModels
  # chflags schg com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_FM_GenerativeModels

Yes. US citizens have an absolute right of return to the US (at a land border anyway, they can be stopped from boarding a flight to the US while physically in another country). If there's an active warrant for arrest or they commit a crime right there or the like they can be arrested, but the process at that point plays out the same as an arrest anywhere in the country with the same standards. Property can be screened and denied, or potentially seized, but the person can than challenge that and it must be returned unless there is reason. This significantly changes the math as far as practical inconvenience to refusal to cooperate, though I don't want to downplay how much it could suck for most people to have expensive stuff taken for even a short period of time. But they can't keep someone from getting home and, in turn, back to financial, legal, political, and social support networks which can back them from there.

Visitors on the other hand have no right to entry at all and can be denied for any legal reason (which in practice amounts to near anything). They can be banned from future entry as well for a period of time or indefinitely. So they face different (and greater) pressure.

>In my home country I can just deny getting my devices searched. They might be allowed to seize and seal them, awaiting a court order for searching the device. Which I could appeal.

This sounds roughly the same as America then, depending on specifics. Here LEAs may not unfortunately need a court order to search the devices of an American "as best they can", but they can't compel cooperation either (and in fact generally cannot get a court order for that at all outside of a narrow exception due to the 5th Amendment). So if a device isn't encrypted, or if it is but they're able to break into it, or if (as in this case) the person in question simply goes ahead and unlocks it for them then that's at least for now allowed (hopefully SCOTUS overrules the 2C), but they can't legally force password entry.

>Basically the same process as anywhere else in the country, international borders are not some special place that gives the police superpowers.

You don't mention your country (and that's fine!) but I don't think there is a single nation anywhere that doesn't have "police superpowers" at international borders. It's sorta a core part and parcel with the basic idea of a "nation" at all, that it can if it wishes regulate its people/goods exchange with the rest of the world. When you travel within a typical free-ish country you can just stop at a store in town and buy stuff and then take it home and the police can't investigate it and demand receipts and that you pay additional taxes or just outright seize it or make you take it back. Right? That's just, normal, within a single polity everything is already under the same rules.

But a border between independent polities by definition means that there could be goods legal in one but illegal in the other, or that are subject to different standards, or different safety considerations, or where there is disagreement on whether/how externalities are accounted for, or just simply taxed differently for pure revenue purposes. In turn, what country doesn't give themselves the right to regulate import of physical stuff, even if internally there is total freedom of movement and goods? Genuinely curious?

The argument here though is that this isn't about regulation of imports, but a criminal investigation. And I agree with legal scholars like Orin Kerr that the Second Circuit got this one wrong. This was not an import power thing, trying to stop contraband or levy legal import taxes, this was a criminal case, and I think that should always be protected by the 4A.

You seem confused here? "Clean Room RE" is simply a descriptive result of copyright law in the US, and is well established. In the US there is no "sweat of the brow doctrine", pure facts simply cannot be copyrighted at all, nor underlying methods/ideas (that's patents). And as a direct result of the latter, again unlike patents, if two people truly independently write the same thing, both get separate copyright.

"Clean room reverse engineering" is just applying that to make any legal fight much cheaper or discourage it from every being bothered with in the first place. You have an RE "dirty" team that goes through copyrighted software and makes a specification that is purely factual, ie, "function 1 takes (int16)X input and does equation ABC on it, function 2 takes (long)X & (long)Y inputs and does LMN" etc. A factual/math spec like that cannot be copyrighted, so it breaks any derivation chain. They then give that, and only that with no other communications, to the clean team. If someone with no other exposure to the software being RE'd uses that spec to write a new piece of software themselves, then by definition the result cannot have any copyright of the original. It's a brand new work based off a list of uncopyrightable facts & math/ideas (though worth noting it could still get tripped up by abomination that is software patents).

There are other ways to argue against copyright infringement successfully, but they're much more subjective, which legally speaking reads "expensive, uncertain". CRRE simply trades that for two clear binary questions: was the spec copyrightable, and did the people writing a new piece of software from that spec have any previous exposure to the original? If the answers to that are no, then all arguments about function names being similar or whatever are no longer relevant.

On the subject of LLMs, one curious twist is that proprietary software might have less effective protection then open source depending on how it all goes. A coding LLM almost certain trained on all open source software available on the web. So there's at least some argument it's tainted. But proprietary software is proprietary. If the LLM has never had any of the source code in its training input, then isn't it clean in terms of producing anything derivative of that? That'll be kinda interesting, and might leave some companies with a bit of a conundrum (or I guess pushing the patent side even harder, but that has a much more sane 20 year expiration date vs copyright).

I think near any anti-fingerprinting efforts though presume some floor level of system security and stability. If some particular hardware exposure feature lets attackers run arbitrary low level timing and hardware testing code or crash the system or break the sandbox the game is likely over for most people.

An extra bit of entropy isn't meaningless sure, but at some point there should be some weighing of absolute attack surface against it right? Some features just seem inherently anti-privacy/anti-security and one might just have to try to deal with that via other approaches.

Can you clarify what your actual complaint is here? Putting aside for a second obvious implementation options, it's pretty standard that there can be a tradeoff between privacy and trust. Any of us are still perfectly free to upload images for fun to forums or social media or whatever that are private, or edited or whatever we like. But if there's something we [i]want[/i] to prove, this gives an extra option to do so. And in particular the set of cases where one cares the most about enhancing authenticity appears at first thought to be pretty much a union set with the cases where one will put their name (or at least the location and time of the picture in question) behind the image? Like, can you give examples of specific cases you are imagining where simultaneously the photo itself reveals no information about time and location [i]and[/i] it's something local/national/international-newsworthy where people would fear AI-alteration? Like, say you're photographing at a protest to document it including any violations of law. By definition, the images you take reveal the location and the time. That's the whole point of them. Having the location and timestamp signed wouldn't reveal anything extra as long as the photo was unaltered.

And actual legit journalism always has name(s) standing behind the reporting. Or for that matter, even if we're merely talking something like a review of a product, is it actually wrong to put a name or pseudonym behind that review if you expect readers to give you much credence? I mean, you'd be free in terms of law and tech to not bother. But even long before the current growing AI-slop age a lot of us have been starting to treat anonymous reviews with a lot of skepticism, or discounting them entirely for some product classes, for good reason.

Even in terms of maintaining privacy, remember we already have "tools" for that which this in turn could further help. You could privately report a tip to a reporter at a media organization, and then they could report on that without revealing you but be able to say "we verified the signature of the raw image and sensor data" alongside normal follow up. Then it's their name, but having a stronger chain behind it could still be helpful in places.

Finally getting back to "implementation options", there's no technical reason the image and multiple sets of metadata can't all be signed separately by the sensor stack such that you can pick & choose what to include and still have it all be signed, with readers giving greater or lesser weight to the trust based on your choices.

I agree that the new designs might just take awhile. They're definitely prettier, but right now since a lot of art hasn't been updated yet they stick out vs the older design style. I'm not sure they're as clear and readable either, though that's improved from the early redesigns, but even so I feel like the 3D-ish effects have caused a step back in contrast. That's a challenging line to walk with bulky pixel art. Still, the new terrain tiles are quite nice and general rejiggering there. I think overall once it's all updated it'll be a little slicker. Haven't seen any of the new enchants or the like yet, Prison/Caves felt mostly the same just a little more atmospheric. Troll quest was the same but his room was cooler.

One selfish thing I'd enjoy seeing as a player with [holy crap] hours into SPD over the years would be a sort of minor "trainer" mode, something that'd let you fix a few variables in a run while keeping the RNG otherwise. Basically having done near everything (though the occasional surprise is all the more delightful for that) when I go back for a game often I'm in the mood for something specific like a gardening/necromancer run or to try something silly as a build. Right now that can turn into a tiresome game of seed hunting though, you only get the right Old Mage quest 1/3 times for example and have to go through 7-9 levels each time first. And if you run it on vanilla to speed up the search, then play that seed, now you know a bunch of other info instead of just that it has the right potential, you don't go into the unknown again until the levels after. It'd be nice for vets if there was a way to just say "I want a game with Seed/Ember/Dust OM Quest" or "make the sad ghost drop a +1 whip" or "first crystal chest has a +0 corruption wand", that's it, just 1-2 seed variables overridden to be fixed but you still have no idea where they'll be or when, or know anything else about the run. Just that if you survive to find it it'll be there.

Edit: Ooh, the new rat king room is more appropriately majestic for the true ruler of the dungeon!

Wrong. HN is not "censoring" you at all, which requires engaging in violence (or threat of violence) against you to inhibit you from speaking in public. HN is literally engaging in Free Speech itself. Take arguably the most fundamental free speech activity in a democracy: advocating to your peers for the candidate you wish to vote for and have elected to represent you. You've researched and listened to Alice, Bob and Carol. You decide the best is Alice, and to show your support you do the quintessential thing and put out a Vote For Alice lawn sign on your lawn. That's obviously free speech right? Now what if instead some volunteer from Alice's election team comes by and asks you if they can put up a sign on your property, and you say yes. That too clearly involves your free speech rights, even if you didn't pay for the sign. Now say Bob & Carol's campaigns turn up, and they ask to put up signs on your lawn too. You don't support them and say no. Have you censored them? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Free speech isn't "everything is equal nothing matters", everyone is trying collectively to iterate towards truth and value by making their cases and listening, without general use of force. To say that "I think this idea/person/item is the best choice" by definition is exclusionary, it's also saying "I think all the other ideas/persons/items are NOT the best choice". It can also simply be "I wish to engage with these subjects, not those". You can make a forum dedicated to airplanes & cats, and ban anyone who starts threads on boats & lizards. You may have nothing whatsoever against boats or lizards, but that's not what you personally want to focus on on your own forum you're paying for.

Hacker News is the private property of its owners. They have their own free speech rights. Exercising those rights is not censorship.

Others in turn are free to use their property and/or their voice on public property to make their cases, and they can try to convince you and vice versa. And there can be social consequences, if someone really dislikes your speech maybe they don't invite you to dinner anymore and urge others to do the same, who might agree (or go the other way, or just ignore it). Humans can get passionate sometimes. But by keeping violence out of the whole thing outside of narrow exceptions that undermine the approach itself, room is preserved for minds to be changed and rifts mended years or even decades later, and for ideas to come back around if someone cares enough.

Government enforcing things though always involves violence, either directly or one or more orders removed. But a general monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a defining feature of government. If government doesn't like Alice, and tells you take down the sign, or else, that's fundamental infringement. They're closing down the whole cycle (if a private person did that it'd also be a bunch of other crimes AND infringement, because private persons are not allowed to use violence against others at all by default outside of narrow exceptions). And if government tells you "oh you can leave up the sign about Alice, but it's not fair you censor Bob & Carol, you must put up signs for them too. Or else." that'd be equally infringing censorship. If everyone has a sign, it's the same message as nobody having one. It's still suppressing "I think Alice is the best choice".

>For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions.

It is easier and cheaper than any point in human history to put up your own website, including your own forum to try to form a community around. You have no right to an audience though.

>Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host.

What? What restriction has government in the US imposed beyond the long standing and unchanged exceptions that prove the rule (which essentially boil down to threats of violence, comms integral to crime, defamation AFTER a court case to prove it, serious violations of personal self with zero public value like CSAM, and purely commercial speech engaging in fraud)?

>I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.

There is nothing to reinterpret. We've gotten it fine since the passage of Section 230. The problem are constant efforts to suppress what we've already got, in some cases coupled with completely orthogonal issues like failure to enforce ancient anti-trust legislation.

----

0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.