> This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal.
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
Speech is not violence, guilt by association is undemocratic, and this hypothesis of de-platforming as a tactic to limit uncouth ideas was thoroughly tested over the last ~15 years and demonstrably shown to be false: Trump, Alex Jones, and many others were banned across platforms. One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.
> One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination. You could say they thought prices would go back down to 2016 levels, but that makes too much sense. If you look up what they actually think it's like "I voted for Trump because I want to protect abortion".
> It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.
Good evidence that it worked to do what? Limit his influence and popularity? This is false. His unbanning had little effect besides the right wing giving Musk brownie points, but the initial ban fueled grievance politics and became a huge rallying cry for the right. It was an extraordinary backfire.
> It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination.
I flatly disagree with this. Human beings are endlessly deep and complex. The extremes of the internet cause us to group people together and create 1-dimensional strawmen of them, but if you talk to any American voter -- offline and 1-on-1 -- you will find complexity, nuance, and surprise in their opinions. At least, that has been my experience, with a pretty decent sample size.
Edit: I've been loosely watching the score on these comments, and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down. For those that disagree, please leave a comment. IMO what I wrote is pretty common sense and moderate, so I'm interested in hearing disagreements.
> and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down.
I've noticed there are usually wild swings depending on the active timezone. It would be interesting to try to extract a rough sentiment of each longitude, by looking at the timing.
The novels, and movies to some extent hint heavily that industry/technology was used for evil far more than good, and in general the "forces of good" were more "attune with nature" than their opponents
Example - Saruman clear cutting a good portion of Fangorn forest in order to strip mine it and produce weapons.
'So it makes sense, then, that the chief exponents of technology in The Lord of the Rings are a demonic figure bent on world domination (Sauron) and a wizard (Saruman). Treebeard, the Ent or tree-shepherd, says of Saruman, "He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment." '
One of the important roles of the Palantir was that they were scrying devices. Sauron gained some influence over them warped the impressions of those who used them, by affecting what they could and couldn't see. It was part of the subtle misinformation he used to twist people into alliance with him.
it's at least a little funny to name your company in the business of secure communication products after a fictional communication device with a famous security flaw
C++ modules seem like one of those things worth staying far, far away from. I wish they worked well because it would be a huge boon to modernizing C++. But from what I've seen, it's a dumpster fire. The spec is too broad and ill-defined. The compilers have gone to herculean lengths to implement it regardless, and MSVC is the only compiler with full support (for a C++20 feature, mind you). [0]
Libraries aren't implementing it. There's no `cargo`-like tooling for installing modules (AFAIK).
Can the C++ committee revert or refine the modules spec? Has anything like that been done before?
In JS, modules were a massive improvement pretty much from day one. They were fairly quickly adoped and worked well. It's been a huge quality-of-life improvement, especially with the latter addition of import maps.
I just wish we'd get working, well-supported modules like that for C++. I tried them once, but support was abysmal and I won't touch them again until they work nicely everywhere.
To be fair, only thanks to JavaScript/TypeScript compilation and polyfills to AMD and CJS pseudo modules approach, only recently has nodejs supported ES6 modules without having to deal with switches.
I've been using modules in nodejs for a very long time. What sucked initially was that you had to use a command line flag at first, and it still sucks that you have to use the mjs extension. Still, those are minor issues compared to the issues modules face in C++. And in browsers, modules worked nicely almost from the start, and since import maps you don't even need to use any kind of build system amymore.
Likewise I have been using C++ modules for my C++ hobby coding since VS 2019 prototype introduction, despite all the warts.
Nowadays, with exception of header units, VC++ and clang alongside MSBuild and CMake/ninja are pretty much usable for anyone that is able to stick to a specific platform.
I don't consider still fighting with build tools options in 2025 to make a pleothora of npm dependencies happy to run under nodejs a minor issue.
The only extra work I had to do in this modules-only project was not related to modules at all, but rather when integrating some third-party libraries, for a diversity of reasons.
When people -- myself included -- say they have a problem with chemicals in food, they of course mean artificial chemicals: that is, compounds, preservatives, dyes, and flavors that are non-naturally present for that particular food item and were added for their shelf life, taste, aesthetic, or addictive properties.
Next time you visit your grocery store, go read the ingredients list of a few different boxed and frozen items. It's not uncommon to see three- or four- dozen ingredients on items that should have less than 10.
While all of these compounds may have FDA approval and studies verifying their safety for ingestion, please keep several things in mind:
1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
2. We have a massive obesity crisis in this country (and increasingly globally). Sedentary lifestyles and increased caloric intake is no doubt part of this, but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
>1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.
I don't get it, are you trying to imply there might be 0.0001% of people with negative side effects, they're not getting picked up, and for that reason those substances should have never been approved? If so what does that say about allergens? If the Colombian exchange happened today, should we ban peanuts on the basis that a few percent of people get side effects?
>but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.
How is it "blindingly obvious" that it's caused by artificial colors specifically though? Otherwise it's a leap to go from "there must be something in the food" to "we should ban artificial colors".
What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok? Presumably a little bit of study is required... So how much? How many interactions should be studied? Is there a benefit trade off (I'm actually struggling here, so if you think so, perhaps you can clarify what benefits would lead to a a higher risk of harm)?
>What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok?
Peanuts have very clear evidence of harm (at least to those who are allergic), and it's unclear what "benefits" it has besides "it tastes good". Why allow it?
3. Long term effects are very hard to study and tease out.
4. Interactions are even harder to establish, since the possible different cocktails and biologies combinatorially explode. This is the primary reason for a precautionary principle in introducing new compounds into our diets.
The type of people you’re replying to would wait until their experiment was done to agree to ban things that are obviously bad even if by the time they said “ok guys I agree to ban it I have the data now!” all of humanity is next to them in a dead pile. Prior to that they would argue ad infinitum that there’s no proof x y and z are bad. People do that on this very forum with ingestion of microplastics. I don’t have patience for people like this anymore.
Kent wanted to merge new features after the merge window had been closed (bundled with a bug fix) and Linus said no and since this was not the first time Kent tried to do something like that people got angry at him. And since Kent refused to apologize for repeatedly breaking the rules things got heated.
In Kent's opinion the features were important to maintaining greater data integrity and recovering from various problems. Nobody else agreed and Kent wasn't taking no for an answer even from Linus.
> I'm not convinced that convergent UI works either. The needs of desktop and mobile just differ too greatly.
For the record, I agree. But I've been playing with Apple's new Liquid Glass UI on macOS / iOS and I think they've done a pretty good job of defining platform-agnostic UI primitives and layouts with some platform-specific rules when needed.
It's a big redesign that covers desktop / mobile / tablet / TV. They did a pretty clever job of it, though the desktop experience suffers slightly (of course).
I've been seeing this myself since I use several Apple products, and while parts are done well…
> though the desktop experience suffers slightly (of course).
This is the part that makes it not work. The Liquid Glass transition isn't the only thing that's negatively impacted desktop UI in macOS, but also the several revisions of iOS-7-like flat designs since 10.10 Yosemite with a slow but constant march of papercuts. So even in the prior version (Sequoia), a great deal of damage had already been done. Tahoe's Liquid Glass compares less favorably against the much more "desktoppy" 10.9 Mavericks.
Trust me, I'm with you 100%. I weep for the Mac OS X we used to have.
I'm just trying to look at it from Apple's eyes. From their perspective, I think, they're trying to design a UI framework that exists beyond any particular device form factor. UI design in the abstract, where specific platforms are particular manifestations of their Platonic UI ideal.
So you have something of a broad convergence of macOS / iOS / iPadOS / visionOS / etc. design elements, like rounded application windows, UI widgets (button/toolbar/...), ecosystem stuff (app widgets, live activities), and Apple technologies (Control Center, Spotlight, Siri, notifications).
Layout is (mostly) grouped relative to display size, not interaction method (like touch v. mouse). Similar display sizes have similar application layouts. Large = (macOS, visionOS, tvOS, iPadOS), medium = (iOS, iPadOS [small devices], CarPlay), small = (Apple Watch). Large display layouts tend to have the menu bar, toolbars, and side bars.
I could go on but it's getting late. This might be a half-baked idea, but I'm pretty sure this is more-or-less how Apple is approaching their platforms now with the Liquid Glass redesign.
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.