I discovered project euler as a novice programmer in high school around 15 years ago. I loved how solving a problem unlocks a secret forum only available to other solvers. I would spend hours reading through everyone's prior solutions and trying to understand them. One guy had tagged his profile as "haskell" but would always provide his solutions in ruby which threw child-me for quite a loop (I actually thought ruby and haskell were the same language for some time)!
"This is [sarcastic reference] coming from [personal reference] who [cherry-picked outrage bit]" is a trope that doesn't lead anywhere interesting. It ratchets up indignation, fries curiosity, and removes any semblance of ontopicness.
Also, I assume that's a skewed pseudo-quotation since no one would actually say that. Please don't play that internet game here either.
Agree that the snarky reply doesn't help, but the quotation isn't really skewed (though it is a paraphrase). It comes from an internal memo that leaked in 2018 that states:
Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.
This comment [1] linked to an article [2] with the leaked memo.
Thank you for this feedback. Definitely a failure on my part to follow my personal guideline of if I don't have anything thoughtful to post then it's better not to post at all, not to mention the actual posting guidelines that I violated.
Andrew Bosworth somehow short-circuits me though as he is responsible for so much bad in the world (I have multiple grandparents who have been totally captured by the Facebook infinite-scroll newsfeed -- his idea and for which he shows no shame). Like this sociopath can just get away with it all: multi-millionaire AND wannabe thought-leader? And I'm supposed to just scroll by and let his pontifications about moral philosophy get promoted on this site. That being said, I thought about posting something more significant in my OP but gave up because who am I convincing anyway. That should've been the trigger not to post at all.
Thanks for the call-out and for the compliment on my ant-post from back in the day.
That’s the beauty of it. It’s only a short stretch from the argument here to the end justifies the mean and I think that’s what is truly implied. “Obviously we are good people because we succeeded.”
That’s a reasoning which exonerates one from any moral failing. It’s also a significant departure from what Franklin actually believed.
I actually disagree; it would be far more convenient for a sociopathic entity like Facebook to claim good intentions to deflect from the actual consequences of their actions. "Good intentions" are the weapon of the sociopath, not "good consequences".
Meta's censorship policies reflect the ideology of their owner.
They have loosened hate speech restrictions in some areas to curry favour with Trump but declared that Zionism is a protected category while they have banned a ton of Palestinian voices:
As has been every attempt at censorship thus far, since everyone that attempts it has their own agenda. A tale as old as time, and nothing new under the sun. Also, the reason why censorship will never be the ideal solution to any problem.
> They have loosened hate speech restrictions in some areas to curry favour with Trump but declared that Zionism is a protected category while they have banned a ton of Palestinian voices
That’s crazy because the most explicit antisemitism I see now days is on Facebook. And I mean real antisemitism.
> That’s crazy because the most explicit antisemitism I see now days is on Facebook. And I mean real antisemitism.
I haven't seen that on Facebook but I guess it depends on context. I see the absolute worst racism of all types (antisemitism, Islamophobia, explicit white/Christian nationalism) on X though - with 10s of millions of views. It is a total cesspool and I think it is corrosive on society as a whole as it encourages tribalism as it raises voices of the most intolerant.
You are aware that when HRW is talking about the systematic censorship of Palestinian voices by Meta, they are not talking about jihadists. I encourage you to read the article rather than that just repeating prejudices:
> "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways."
I read the report and it actually made me realize how much of a propaganda campaign HRW was engaging in. It reminded me of PETA campaigns and how offputting many of them were (this is coming from someone who was vegan for 7 years in spite of them).
I know that organizations like HRW and SPLC have to draw attention to topics, but I found the bias and lack of nuance in the report very troubling. The report suffers from the same sort of bias that is so prevalent in most reporting these days, which has gotten to be tiresome.
If HRW reviewed over a thousand cases of censorship, why don't they provide the raw, unedited examples? Instead they include categories of examples, like stating the slogan "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" was frequently censored. For many that is seen as a call for a different type of genocide, one which HRW gives no indication of whatsoever, simply stating:
For instance, the words in each of these statements on their face do not constitute incitement to violence, discrimination, or hostility.
It's true that other slogans that were censored are neutral, such as "Ceasefire now" and "Stop the genocide." But lumping the first phrase in as if there were no legimate concerns with it is disingenuous at best.
That said, I'll still support HRW in much of its work, but I hate the tactics that mirror the broad cultural shift to inject more and more biased viewpoints. I really want to go back to the time where bias in the media and nonprofit organizations was much less pronounced in general.
> What is inconsistent between banning hate speech and banning advocacy for terrorism?
Two things, Meta has reduced controls for hate speech except in the areas relating to Israel and Zionism. That seems inconsistent - Meta hasn't just overall become more restrictive, it is very selective restrictions.
The HRW report I cited is not about Meta removing "advocacy for terrorism" posts, it is a human rights group after all. Here is a key quote from the report:
"Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways."
My takeaway is that they willingly ignore the moral dimension and encourage others to do the same, the coping mechanism being
1) choosing a core business metric
2) claiming it's not a core business metric
3) saying that increasing said metric is always good
What I found more chilling is:
> The work we will likely have to do in China some day.
They know if they expend to china, they will be tasked with profiling people based on their private communication and their connections and sending them to gulags. I mean reeducation camps.
And they don't give a fuck because they are just increasing a metric and they declared that's good.
This is a fair response. I googled "bosworth + terrorists will kill people" before I posted this to make sure I got the wording right but purposely didn't link to what I found because it's mostly clickbait stuff and anyways the real source is that I was an employee at facebook when he wrote "The Ugly".
Never good to be posting in anger but I truly can't stand this guy and I can't help but throw in something snide when I see him trying to smart-wash the fact that he's just Zuck's enshittification czar: Ads --> VR --> and now CTO
I asked because I didn't know who he was (didn't read his about page until after) but his blog had a search prompt and I couldn't find anything related.
Didn't mean my question as criticism but advice.
I've been in situations where I had to convince somebody well-liked by the majority was actually abusive to a selected minority.
And it's really hard.
People are not willing to expend effort in order to search for arguments in your favor. They will very often not even read then if you give them direct links. But at least a few will see it, which might lead to a discussion and others who are too lazy to click links will at least skim the discussion.
I love C#, but have actually found LLMs to be quite bad a producing idiomatic code because the language is changing so fast and often they don't even know about the latest language(/blazor) features. I constantly have to undo my initial prompt and rewrite it to tell them that we don't use Startup.cs any more, only Program.cs, and Program.cs is a flat file and not a class.
Completely agree. People lament the death of the RTS genre for all kinds of reasons but I think the biggest one was the early-2000s switch to 3D. Performance considerations meant you have way fewer units. The only exception was that Supreme Commander was somehow able to get around this, but suffered heavily from the second big problem with 3D RTSes: the tiny unit models are so much harder to tell apart in 3D compared to 2D.
The RTS switch to 3D was a mistake and I think RTSes will continue to fail until their developers realize what actually makes them fun is actively hindered by this technology.
I really enjoyed this essay. I'm just a cosmology bystander/hobbyist, but your takedown of the dark matter hypotheses was very appealing to me. I was shocked when I got to the section where you talk about all these macro-scale simulations using only dark matter. It's like an ouroboros of cosmological theories eating themselves, totally disconnected from reality. And relates to one of my favorite quotes that "simulations are doomed to succeed". I don't understand physics well enough to really understand black hole jets, but it feels like an elegant theory and I hope you're able to take it somewhere.
This was my first time hearing about the idea of universes producing children inside of black holes that may have slightly different physical properties. This is also really cool and interesting, but clearly a different level of theoretical compared to your first half about the black hole jets. I haven't had time to delve into any of your links, but it seems like you skipped over explaining how a universe would form inside a black hole in the first place. I saw in the comments on substack that someone pointed out the concept of "black hole electrons" and it's like, yeah, if we don't know what's going on inside black holes, then why couldn't they be their own universes? And if that's the case for black holes, then why not also electrons, or protons, or any other sufficiently dense and mysterious object? But then again why would we suppose that another universe would necessarily form inside those things? I'm curious if you could expand on what you think the mechanism would be for universe formation, as well as what you think the mechanism would be for variation/heredity in the child universes.
In college Intro to CS was taught with Racket (a lisp) and we even had to write code with pen and paper during our exams. Got really good at quickly visually matching parentheses which is still helpful to me today in non-lisps. (But given that the handwritten code would never be run, you could also just fudge it and write a bunch of )))))'s at the end and hope the TA grading it wouldn't count them either)
Worked at Facebook from 2016 - 2020. I couldn't handle how flippant the leadership was about profiting off of genocides, Trump, and the degradation of everyone's mental health.
Now I work for my county government as a computer programmer. I make 20% of what I would've been making at Facebook if I hadn't left (60k vs 300k) but I don't regret it at all. My work helps real people in my community instead of siphoning off bits of attention here and there from strangers all over the world.
Andrew Bosworth (FB's blathering sociopath-in-residence) said Trump ran “the best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen” and they even had marketing people embedded with the campaign to help them run more effective ads.
The final straw for me was in October of 2019 when Zuck had a closed door meeting with Trump and then "randomly" the next week announced that politicians are now allowed to lie in ads on facebook. Hmmm, I wonder who would disproportionately benefit from that policy change??
