Speaking for myself, an awful lot of what makes me happy are things I am forced into doing. Work makes me happy, but if I didn't have to work I'm sure I wouldn't. If I had complete freedom my life might become quite lonely and sad.
Tangential, and very anecdotal, but I've been seeing more books on the BART. While almost everyone is hunched over their phones of course, it feels like there's a growing number reading a paperback. (Oddly? it's been a while since I saw a kindle.)
One of the things that I loved about Paris when I was there a couple of years ago was that everyone on the subway had books out (whether Kindles or paper) -- very few phones in sight.
That's right. In today's carriage to San Francisco my very unscientific observation it's: three reading books, thirty on their phones, ten resting with their thoughts.
I actually am more at odds with HN than many people might be because I think the lies surrounding covid and the censorship were absolutely wrong and platforms could genuinely after things like that lay claim to being unfairly directed, but you can tell Zuck doesn't actually care because he immediately started doing that
Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?
Sure this will slow down the personal injury lawyers finding clients but it won't stop them, meantime it is more ammunition for Facebook's enemies to use against it.
It is one thing to do shady business, it is another thing to incriminate yourself. If you were involved with weed and somebody sent you an email asking if they could come around and pick up a Q.P. next Saturday I'd expect you to give the person a correction in person that they shouldn't do that again.
Not to say you should be like Epstein but I mean he and the people he corresponded with had some sense so there is is very little evidence of criminal activity in millions of emails.
At Facebook on the other hand all the time people sent emails about things that could just as easily been left as "dark matter" unexplained and minimally documented decisions but no it is like that M.F. Doom song "Rapp Snitch Knishes", like a bunch of children or something with no common sense at all.
and maybe Zuck doesn't think he can do anything about it. There are different theories but i like this one:
-- originally you would put some imagination and elbow grease into using Facebook and get some intention which made it very attractive and interesting to people around 2010
-- then it found a business model which was dependent on your not being able to use imagination and elbow grease to get attention which made it less interesting in general but still somewhat interesting because now you could put cash into the slot machine and get cash out
-- over time they lowered the payout of the slot machine which made the game less interesting and more dependent on 100% profitable scams which could function no matter how bad the payout was; people lose trust in the platform and stop engaging with ads, real advertisers don't want to be seen next to scam ads (lest they be seen as scams) which further lowers the payout and makes the game less interesting over time
-- and now they won't even take your money... so who cares?
Within that order of magnitude. Picked Co60 particularly because it is common in commerce, even I used Co60 sources in my cond-mat theory trainee days.
I think it is more like radioactive decay than say, cheese going bad, but maybe I'm wrong. You can't smell the radioactive decay!
They both captured the early market (inconsistent page style of Myspace, slowness of Friendster, then they acquired Friendfeed) in an early internet - anyone who captures the early market will have THE network effect for decades (plus shadow profiles) as person x joins because person y is there because person z is there - which is still young to this day, and also they apparently used to censor links to their competition
The game is rigged, also Instagram and Whatsapp (yeah, companies get acquired. but WA's Acton was very explicit - "delete Facebook" (also, ever tried deleting FB? almost impossible. more network effects). he was pissed off at what happened)
... the other theory of Facebook's decline is that Eternal September gets you every time. I mean in the 1970s the CBGB and Mudd Club were really cool and they folded up and the scene moved on.
Once I started using the social features on my MQ3 I found it really was Zuck's worst nightmare. I met all these nice retirees who were fun to play Beat Saber with and who would go on cruises and post YouTube links to pano videos they take of the ship.
Yes, it's called being a billionaire. I'm sure if clinicians actually studied this group of people, they would find strains of delusions of grandeur, paranoia, extreme risk taking behavior, lack of self control and self awareness, inability to deal with adversity and setbacks without emotional outbursts, inability to contain and dismiss intrusive antisocial thoughts.
I feel probably that the emotional maturity of most billionaires is at the toddler level or below, and I mean that quite seriously and literally.
Reddit is the same way. Poke a few sacred cows and suddenly you're banned for something you did 6 months ago that we aren't going to tell you about and no we don't want to discuss it.
I believe we need to strengthen 230, but with the added caveat that affected platform owners must stop gaming the algorithms, that it must require user-driven curation. Let me curate my own feed, stop shoving shit in front of my eyes. When you do so, you're making heavy editorial decisions, and should be open to liability.
This is really the essence of it. Section 230 is critical to a healthy internet, but there is large grey area between editorial and platform. Places like youtube, meta, X, etc. are pretending to be platforms when really they are algorithmic editors, gatekeepers, and curators. They are much more like traditional media newspapers than say your ISP, and they need to be treated as such.
A few years ago this seemed a bit too extreme for me. Now, with the web mostly burned down anyway, I see little to lose and lots to gain in a section 230 repeal. My, how the Overton Window changes on some ideas. And when it's changing on some things it tends to accelerate on others too, like a social momentum on reconsidering past norms.
My compromise pitch, since the "You need ID from your users" ship has sailed:
Companies are not liable if they have proper ID of the person who submitted the content and can provide that to a plaintiff. If they have not made a good-faith effort to know who submitted this info (like taking ID, not just an email address) then they're taking responsibility for the submitted content.
Which means sites that have responsible moderation can still allow anonymous contributions.
The real problem is the inherent asymmetry of legal battles, where the wealthiest can fight forever with endless motions and have near-total impunity while a legal action would basically nuke a normal person's life. Not to mention the fact that an international border can often make this whole conversation moot.
> Which means sites that have responsible moderation can still allow anonymous contributions.
Anonymous contributions, up to the point of somebody compromising the service? With the quantity of password hash thefts, I suspect we'll see even more ID thefts this way.
I can't imagine using any service that asks for ID, except perhaps from the well-established giants, so an exception for identifiability would effectively be a gigantic moat granted to the largest internet companies to keep out competition. Anything like that would need to be paired with massive anti-trust changes, as well as perhaps government take-over of the giants as utilities, none of which sounds very appealing...
That said, don't take any of my rambling as discouragement, your type of thinking is exactly what we need, we need massive amounts of policy discussion and your suggestion is very innovative.
That's basically how things used to work in Germany. It used to be that if someone torrented movies on your internet connection, you were fined. No ifs, no buts, they monitored 100% of the public torrents and courts agreed with 100% of the fines. And they didn't care who did it - if they didn't know (which is almost always true) they fined the owner of the internet connection. It was a really really bad law. For 10-15 years after every other country had public wifi hotspots, Germany didn't because the owner would get fined for every torrent. After a very long time, they eventually passed a law saying public wifi operators didn't have to pay.
One of my issues is the lack of liability in practice. The poster is technically liable but they're anon, behind proxies, foreign, etc. and unaccountable. It results in people being harmed online without recourse.
These companies should have a duty to know who their users are.
The main problem with 230 is that the courts have decided to treat it as if it removes all legal liability from online platforms, rather than just publisher liability. The way the text was written seems to be intended to protect platform operators from publisher liability but still have them under distributor liability. For example, if you own a bookstore and carry a book that says something defamatory, you can be held liable if you don't remove the book after being informed about its contents. However, a court case soon after 230 passed created the precedent that it absolves online platforms of all forms of liability. This means that if a platform knows it hosts illegal or defamatory content and doesn't take it down, they aren't liable and any legal cases against them will get thrown out due to 230. One of the authors of section 230 later said that "the judge-made law has drifted away from the original purpose of the statute."
>For example, if you own a bookstore and carry a book that says something defamatory, you can be held liable if you don't remove the book after being informed about its contents.
I don't think you can in the US. Maybe elsewhere, but in the US AFAIK the author is responsible for the content they publish, not the bookstores carrying the books.
>This means that if a platform knows it hosts illegal or defamatory content and doesn't take it down, they aren't liable and any legal cases against them will get thrown out due to 230.
No it doesn't. Section 230 doesn't allow sites to host illegal content, of course only "legality" within the framework of US law matters.
All it says is that the liability for user posted content lies with the user posting the content, not the platform hosting it. Which to me seems appropriate.
I’m not a big poster at all, but ran into this precise issue.
They analyze the video posts on instagram. If they detect the video has even a small amount of commercial value, they classify it as branded content and you need to pay for it to get promoted.
_Human_ body weight. I grew up measuring everything in kilos apart from people, which has I guess what amounts to its own wholly idiosyncratic scale, the stone, that no one I've since met outside of the UK has heard of.
I don't know why really, it's just 14lb, why does the US/Canada just stick with very large numbers of pounds instead of breaking it up as with others?
Kilograms seem more and more common for human weight too though, largely driven by fitness apps & communities I think. I doubt children in school today are accustomed to stone; only pounds and ounces for birth weight perhaps, but even that is metric medically and converted for the parents' familiarity these days I believe.
No medical professional in Blighty weighs people using imperial measurements. The only people who really use them are the elderly and (bizarrely) the type of crappy slimming magazine seen at supermarket chekouts...... The kind satirised by Viz as titled "Less Cake, More Exercise".
It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
I recently bought the DVD of Trainspotting, after finding no legitimate way to watch it online. The DVD cost less than an online rental would have. A lost world of owning your own things, and we only lost it yesterday.
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