I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms...
However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."
I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.
Free speech doesn't mean that we don't desire filters. Go check your gmail spam folder. Twitter would look identical to this with filters at all. What we really want is:
* transparency about the filters we have on our feeds
* the ability to tweak them if they're not working
* the ability to change providers without losing your entire social graph / reach
You are on to something but going the wrong path. It is all about personal decision making and not enforcement by goverment.
To put it:
"
* Government decides and approves about the filters we have on our feeds
* the government has the right and duty to tweak them if they're not working in the way a panel of experts decides
* no ability to change providers since there is only one that takes care of your entire social graph / reach
"
Historically, all speech was considered "intentional". And by speech here I am including two distinct things: the expression of opinion, and the publication of opinion by a magazine/newspaper owner.
I separate those two things because they are very different with respect to the scale of the dissemination of speech. Nevertheless, magazines and newspapers are free to publish opinion, though it is significant in my opinion that in those cases there is an accountable individual (the editor/publisher).
It strikes me as different when we have social media platforms that amplify speech to a massive scale without any accountability. Clearly, monetization fuels the large-scale amplification of some undesirable speech so that 1. it is not an opinion expressed in good faith and 2. there is no directly accountable individual, unless the poster can be considered accountable for FBs large-scale publication of their speech, which feels perverse to me. It's effectively "robo-published".
There are some conclusions which could be drawn here, and I'm not sure which should be drawn if any. But I think it's important to point out that the details do matter (libel laws and "malice" for example) and that the details change in significant ways as society and technology change.
IME most people calling themselves a “free speech absolutist” absolutely believe those who agree with them should be free to speak, and anyone that might affect them negatively or just disagree should be stopped from oppressing or endangering them. The term usually means as little as the “democratic” in DPRK.
A true free speech absolutist would not be concerned with paid speech being blocked, in fact they should really be against paid speech, at least in the sense being discussed here. The point of free speech is to be able to say what you want and saying something else because you are paid to, because you can't afford to turn down the payment to say what someone else wants instead, is anti-free-speech.
This has nothing to do with free speech but giving an incentive (money) for posting which ruined every social media platform in existence (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
> I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money
By recognizing that undesirable uses of free speech are the price society pays for having free speech, and by strongly believing that it is a price worth paying.
Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
The idea that free speech should probably be restricted if it turns out that free speech can lead to unpleasant consequences misses the whole point of free speech – in many cases deliberately, I think.
Free speech absolutists just don't defend their position because it devolves into absurdity immediately. It's just a dogwhistle of the far right or people that haven't put any thought into their beliefs.
It’s interesting how the idea that free speech is too important to sacrifice to any other cause, which was the position of Rousseau and other enlightenment luminaries, has supposedly turned from the foundation of humanism into a “dog whistle”.
The implication that if someone is unwilling to compromise on free speech, they must belong to the far right, is certainly revealing.
> Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
Car traffic is heavily regulated to reduce the harm being done by cars/drivers.
Don't forget that undesirable uses of free speech can be made less effective by more speech - as long as what you desire is actually in the interest of the people you want to influence. Like for example this article.
And of course in this case the root problem is not that people have free speech but that they are financially rewarded for using it in bad ways. Financial models that reward impressions are fundamentally bad for society.
Those who are making the undesirable speech can counter their opponent's speech with more speech of their own - and they can afford to outspeak their opponents at any opportunity because they are paid to speak and their opponents are not.
That would make most (if not all) of today's mainstream media speech (and not only) as "not free".
To add, in essence I agree with you, that's why I regard Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of the really few free thinkers out there, i.e. because he was aware that as soon as he was accepting to be paid for what he was writing then his speech would become "imprisoned".
I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, although I do believe a strong argument can be made here.
I think the idea that various mechanisms in modern society are subtly corroding free speech en masse with various nasty knock-on effects is an interesting one though.
I've talked to enough free speech absolutists to know they would defend this behavior because they believe all speech should be allowed. It's written in the name of their ideology!
> "Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet."
Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvested earnings into growth, while SpaceX is funding it's growth by taking on very significant levels of debt (which will take a big chunk of future earnings just to service). These aren't comparable from a risk perspective.
TBF, it was obvious for Uber too, but when that one decided to cash on the results of the growth, there wasn't much they could take. So it's not a certain thing by any means.
But anyway, it's also clear SpaceX isn't doing the same as Amazon.
I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies. I've seen this over and over again (the problem is that large organisations often prefer to go the slow and expensive route with the big consultancy companies for a complex variety of reasons). So it would be like an article saying "our small inhouse team using VS Code did a much better job than a big outsourced consultancy using MS Visual Studio - isn't VS Code awesome".
> I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies.
This assumes that small in-house teams are inherently effective/efficient, which is not necessarily true.
In this sense, the difference between proven engineering leads (as the article states/assumes) leading a small team versus AI is that the latter is entirely under their control, which minimizes the risk.
So AI vs. small teams is about controlling/guaranteeing effectiveness/efficiency.
EDIT: the leads are, in practice, managing a small team, although their exact technical background is unclear ("experienced practitioners who know how to design and deliver digital products", not clear if they're professional software engineers).
Or smoking a cigar in an oxygen rich spacecraft cabin, as per the opening scene of the original Planet of the Apes (released in Feb 1968, after the Apollo 1 fire in Jan 1967).
I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:
- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.
- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].
Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.
Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC.
> "The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good though."
In opening up a few ancient files to answer another question about formatting, I found some long forgotten notes on how to make my Epson LQ400 24 pin printer work at 360dpi rather 180dpi, which may have been the same for you: First you had to install it as a NEC 24-pin 360dpi printer rather than 180dpi printer. Then, because it used fonts of half the size, you needed to switch fonts. So I had two fonts disks, one with 180dpi installed fonts and one with 360dpi fonts, and used the ASSIGN.SYS file to switch between them. It also seems to have taken twice as long to print out at 360dpi, and used twice as much printer ribbon:-)
I remember some printers had a "draft" mode and a "fine" mode (and you could simulate the fine even on those that didn't by printing, and then carefully going back and printing again but off by a tiny, tiny bit vertically).
I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything preserved (unlike some later .doc files I have).
Yes. Just opened some files to check. There was one including a table which I thought at first was a little wonky, but then I realised the column that looked off had currency where I'd right aligned on the decimal point, so even that seems to have been preserved!
I think this is missing the point - it is a bit like saying "you only ever notice bad fraud, if the fraud is well done you never notice it" - the point is what it is, not whether you notice it or not. With AI in films at the moment there are still people behind, and reviewing, the AI output, so it is just another creative tool, which is fine. However, if someone were to generate an entire 90 minute film and put it online without even having the decency to spend 90 minutes of their own time watching it themselves first, that would not be fine. But that is happening with AI slop on the internet now. Whether it is any good or not is not the point - the point is that it is disrespectful of people's time and attention.
Thanks for the great feedback:-) This is what searchmysite.net is attempting to do - help make "surfing the web" a fun leisure activity once more. It is good to see more people seem to get that point now. When it was on HN nearly 3 years ago[0], many people saw a search box and thought it must be a Google replacement, but were disappointed to find it wasn't. And I guess now more than ever it is useful to have a way of finding content on the web which has been made by humans rather than AI.
However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."
I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.
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