“Next-gen frameworks [Marko, SolidStart, SvelteKit, Nuxt] deliver instant performance. […] The real performance story isn't splitting hairs over 3ms differences, it's the massive gap between next-gen and React/Angular.”
I was already fixing the error, and writing in my head the kind answer above. I hadn't seen this nasty comment.
Why the ad hominem?
I'm ranking governments — not individuals — according to international reports I've seen. Those classifications are debatable, of course. There might be bias, or nuances I'm missing. But why do you presume malice on my part?
> How on Earth is it relevant that I'm a Spaniard?
He probably can't trust you because _he's known too many Spaniards_. (Sorry for being off-topic, but I really could resist making that reference to the greatest movie of all time;-).)
More on topic:
> Hungary and Poland, are still immature barely-liberal regimes with more than a whiff of political repression
I don't know what reports you've read, but I don't think we have any "political repression" here in Poland. Mind you, we had a huge demonstration opposing the ruling party 2 weeks ago (and many more in earlier months/years), and I haven't heard about any nasty consequences for people taking part in them. Though there is a lot of propaganda, both in the country and abroad, painting the government (which, by the way, was more or less voted out two days in an election) as some kind of evil empire, but that is just that - propaganda.
That said, I understand that (almost) nobody has time to study politics of 50+ (or more) countries just to write a blog post or something, so it's not like I blame you.
I used these reports, which I already knew before writing this post:
• Both Poland and Hungary are classified as “flawed democracies” by The Economist. Only 24 countries are considered to be “full democracies” (and this is irrelevant, but Spain happens to be among them). https://pages.eiu.com/rs/753-RIQ-438/images/DI-final-version...
• Amnesty International on Poland: “Access to abortion was further limited. Criminal charges were used to curtail freedom of expression. The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. Freedom of peaceful assembly was restricted. Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.”https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...
• Amnesty International on Hungary: “Discrimination against LGBTI and Roma people persisted. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights suffered significant rollback. Teachers were denied the right to strike. Pushbacks of refugees and migrants continued in violation of EU law. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary had violated the ban on collective expulsions. Other judgments from the Court were not fully implemented. […] The European Parliament declared in September that Hungary could not be considered a full democracy.”https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...
They classify Hungary as a "flawed democracy" because people living in Hungary do not support Western values as much as they would like them to do. I would take those classifications with a pinch of salt. Both the Hungarian government and the Hungarian people are seeking to keep their cultural values, and/or traditions. Telling them to do this and that to undermine it is going to be responded to with criticism. Of course the West and especially the EU hates them. In fact, Hungary is being extremely hated for staying neutral with regarding to the Ukraine-Russia war, and refusing to send weapons or money for weapons to Ukraine. Yes, Hungary is hated because of its pacifist views. Now, would you ever take anyone seriously if they hated Hungary for not supporting and refusing to fuel the war? They think that Hungary is a flawed democracy because (and maybe for other reasons as well) the Hungarian people (!) keep voting for Orbán.
I'm not denying that bias or that animosity that you describe. It may well be that Hungary is despised in some circles because it's more conservative than most European countries.
That is still compatible with a dispassionate evaluation of the democratic quality of its political system.
Again, I'm not necessarily defending my sources here. But I'm not automatically discounting them, either.
The Economist classifies Hungary as a flawed democracy due to a very poor mark in "political participation", "functioning of government" and "civil liberties". Those sections look at measures such as "voter participation/turn-out for national elections", "the degree to which the judiciary is independent of government influence", "the degree to which citizens are treated equally under the law", "how pervasive is corruption", "is there an effective system of checks and balances on the exercise of government authority", etc.
Freedom House ranks Hungary poorly in aspects such as "are safeguards against official corruption strong and effective", "are there free and independent media", "is there freedom for nongovernmental organizations, particularly those that are engaged in human rights– and governance-related work", "is there an independent judiciary", etc.
If you have reports that put Hungary at the top on rankings of democratic health, freedom, civil rights, etc — please share them, and we can evaluate their merits. Otherwise, these reports are the most comprehensive I know of, so I have to use those.
Political corruption is definitely a huge, pervasive problem in Hungary, and there is a lot of favoritism/nepotism going on. I would also say that the media is not independent either.
> The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary.
This is highly debatable, though I do not claim to know enough about this issue to be able to say a lot.
> Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.
I'm not sure what exactly they mean, but I suspect this may be about so-called "same-sex marriage". The definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman is fortunately written into Polish constitution, which is quite difficult to change, so there's that. (Also, not calling a same-sex relationship a "marriage" does not really violate anyone's rights.)
> Access to abortion was further limited.
Which - given how abortion is basically killing innocent human beings - is a huge step towards freedom (more precisely, the right to live).
EDIT: also, I love how you mention Spain time and again. I can only assume you come from there, and if that's the case, I highly applaud your patriotism.
> "by the end of [2022], 79 Polish administrative units still declared themselves so-called 'LGBT-free zones'. [...] LGBTI rights defenders faced ongoing criminal and civil proceedings. [...] In January, during court proceedings brought by one activist who had been arbitrarily detained for 24 hours after the so-called Rainbow Night protest in 2020, the police officer who arrested him admitted: 'We were instructed to stop all persons displaying the colours of LGBT, regardless of how they behaved'".
> Given how abortion is basically killing innocent human beings - is a huge step towards freedom
I don't think that condemning a fetus with terrible congenital defects to be born against the will of its parents is a step towards freedom.
> I love how you mention Spain time and again. I can only assume you come from there, and if that's the case, I highly applaud your patriotism.
I don't know whether you're being honest, or sarcastic. In any case: I tongue-in-cheek "defended" Spain above just because @Radim said to me: "coming from a Spaniard? go fuck yourself" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914718 ), which I found baffling, irrelevant, and very nasty.
I am against all patriotism and nationalism. I am not "proud" or "ashamed" of privileges or defects that I got by chance, or traits over which I bear no responsibility or I can't control.
Assume I'm from North Korea. Or from Vanuatu. Let's discuss ideas, not individuals, please!
A reaction to the relentless anti-Polish & anti-Hungarian propaganda being spewed by the "mature fully-liberal regimes" of the EU. Enough.
You'd think the people of Poland and Hungary (who voted in their leaders, democratically, repeatedly) have horns and drink baby blood. This undermines your other valid points re/ privacy – who'd want to hitch their moral wagon to someone this naive?
The "Spaniard" part was in reference Spain being the bedrock of fascism (via Spaniards…), and remaining a dictatorship long after WW2. In stark contrast to the struggles of Poland's "immature" democratic republic during the same period. The irony was too sweet to pass up.
Persuasive writing is a skill. You lost my attention and I turned against your argument because of your "stylistic point". If it'd been written differently, I would have definitely agreed and supported the points I did read.
Yes, I know SSH tunnelling and compiling your own Android are tall orders for the average user. Here I'm just hinting at some examples that are well-known among us geeks, but there are easier to use alternatives to all that. I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail. VPNs are so easy to use nowadays. The UX on Signal isn't particularly challenging to the average user of WhatsApp.
There is a lot we techies can do to educate normies and respectfully push them in the right direction, but we keep on neglecting that responsibility under the excuses of bad usability, lack of features, or convenience for users.
On an earlier draft I also had a sentence like: “a big effort in usability and outreach is needed”. Definitely so.
My point is not that we can get all EU citizens to switch to SSH tunnelling and Purism, but that we IT professionals should spend more time and effort educating a fraction of the population to move the deal in the right direction and avert catastrophe.
> we keep on neglecting that responsibility under the excuses of bad
usability, lack of features, or convenience for users.
A value leverage point to look at is; why are these perceived to be in
tension in the first place?
Revising the concepts of "convenience" and "usability" to incorporate
not having your life, business and affairs ruined petty tyrants seems
the way to go.
It seems quite possible to design software such that it's more
difficult not to encrypt than it is to use insecure defaults.
That's more or less what happened with browsers vis a vis https by
default, no? I really have to go out of my way these days to view a
plain http site.
> I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail.
End-to-end encryption without a trusted server makes multi-device usage rather complicated within a number of contexts. Full-text search for example then requires all your e-mails to be indexed on each individual device you're using for accessing Protonmail, and you need to keep that index permanently unless you want to re-download all messages and re-index them again the next time you need to search something.
I don't very frequently use full-text search from my phone for example, but when I need it, I do need it, so neither proposition (permanently occupying valuable space on my mobile phone with a search index I only occasionally need, or else wasting a noticeable amount of time and data volume to re-index all mails every time I want to search something) sounds really enticing.
Catastrophe, you mean like thousands of radicalized people meeting securely in secret online to disrupt an objectively legitimate thing?
I would like more widespread penetration of critical thinking (such as teaching people to pattern-match on the most common fallacious techniques used by cults, conspiracy theorists, propagandists, modern snake-oil salesmen, and other ne'er-do-wells) before we deploy some "mass security recommendation" that would enable people to more comfortably plan things like firebombing vaccination centers based on secretly-exchanged nonsense. I mean, isn't that why "the authorities" (assuming they are good actors, which is of course an unknown) are nervous about pervasive, easily-accessible security?
Fortunately, it seems like most bad actors are idiots who have zero qualms about insecurely broadcasting their thoughts on social media leading up to their committing of despicable acts. But your efforts might make such "precognitive noise" "secure by default".
(In principle, I agree with you. This Martin Fowler piece on privacy, I consider seminal: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html I'm just saying that no single technology seems to be a universally-satisfying panacea.)
Privacy for everyone includes privacy for people you don't like. Having literally everyone know about ways to have secure and private communications would actually be a good thing.
Do the bad guys use these technologies? Yes, but so what? It's like saying that we shouldn't educate people about knives because some guy can use it to kill people.
This whole fear of educating people about privacy tools because some criminals will use it is so tired and irrational. Criminals do it already and have done it for a long time. It's inevitable that more people will use them in the future, including the "bad guys". How about we just accelerate it and instead think of why people commit crimes in the first place? Nah, too hard, let's try to ban math instead.
> Fortunately, it seems like most bad actors are idiots who have zero qualms about insecurely broadcasting their thoughts on social media leading up to their committing of despicable acts.
At some point they'll stop doing it and become more aware of their OPSEC. Or they do it intentionally because they want to get caught.
> There is a lot we techies can do to educate normies...
This isn’t something you’ll find universal agreement about. My own position is that we techies are seen as weirdos by most of the population, and what we should do is leave normal people alone. Definitely not try to “educate” them – think about how elitist that’s going to sound to many of them.
The phrasing of "educate" (not to mention "normies") definitely implies a patronizing and unhelpful approach. I don't think technical people should go around giving unsolicited lectures to people they perceive as lacking technical expertise. However, I don't think there's anything wrong with technical people sharing what we know in a respectful way to people who are actually interested in a way that accounts for their needs. For example, if a social group you're in is deciding what messaging app to use to coordinate meeting up, it would be appropriate to share what you know about the various options' end-to-end encryption. But going on a rant about the privacy issues of a social media app because a distant relative mentioned it offhandedly probably isn't productive.
By analogy, I wouldn't mind a friend with medical training sharing what they know about heatstroke prevention to a group of us before we embark on an hike. I would mind them giving me nutrition advice based solely on what I ordered at a restaurant.
I find the opposite. When I really sit down and lay out for my parents the implementation details of what goes on, yes, immediately the reaction is to the negative. They come back later though and ask for clarification. They ask more questions, and they more patiently listen to the answers.
Education has always been and always will be an uphill battle. No one likes to be taught. We do it anyway, because both are enriched in so doing.
I think this is a mistake. If you actually want to switch to FLOSS and control your own devices, you should abandon semi-proprietary technology relying on a huge corporation and switch to a GNU/Linux phone, like I did.
Where can I pay a monthly subscription to support a mobile OS that is free software, customisable, feature-rich, ad and spyware-free, and that uses open protocols and formats?
Not to minimise the seriousness of cyber-flashing, but sharing with the world intimate/sensitive data/media without the consent of the other party is reprehensible (too). I don't think that “but what they did was 10× worse!” makes this site defensible. I surely hope there are better strategies to deal with unsolicited naked pics.
Hm, I'm not sure you miss the point of the website. It says: "If you feel the urge to send a no-context jpeg of your junk, we’ll give it the audience you clearly think it deserves", so this website is for the people who want to share their intimate junk to the whole world, not for others to share other peoples intimate junk (which I'm pretty sure is illegal in most places)
No, I think you are the one missing the point. This is clearly for people to post unsolicited DP's that they have received from others. The sentence you quoted is tongue-in-cheek.
That's way too charitable a reading. See context (Twitter, coverage): it's clearly intended as a tool for victims of cyber-flashing, to be used _without_ the consent of the person sending the photo(s).
