And half the garbage is from people "moderating"! You are literally rewarded points for doing moderating activities, so of course every post is flooded with BS edits, votes to close, etc.. Cobra effect and whatnot.
You get points for suggesting edits and badges for completing review activities (votes to close, triage, etc). I thought you got points for the latter as well but looks like that's not the case.
This is a common misperception about moderation on Stack Overflow. You'll often see people claim that people get rep for doing moderation tasks. And some people do pursue badges... though the gold review badge (1000 reviews) has only been awarded 47 times on Stack Overflow ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/81/steward ) ... and silver (250 reviews) 65 times ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/78/reviewer). ... so I would find it difficult to accept that badges are things that motivate people.
StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.
Instead of cultivating the pub, the owners demanded that the visitors be safe, boring and obedient witers of value. This killed the pub and with it the business.
The most visible aspect was the duplicate close. Duplicate closes scare away fresh patrons, blocking precisely the path that old timers took when they joined. And duplicates allow anyone with a grudge to take revenge. After all, there are no new questions, and you will always find a duplicate if you want to.
To create a new Stack Overlflow, create a pub where programmers enjoy drinking a virtual beer, and the value will appear by itself.
Another exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."
"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this".
The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes just letting a community do what it wants (within reasonable boundaries, of course) leads to a better and more successful product than actively trying to steer things in a certain direction.
Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.
hahaha, I almost forgot about that! "stop talking about edge cases and other things pertinent to this topic in comments about this topic!! reeeeeeeee!!!!"
>StackOverflow was a pub where programmers had fun while learning programming. The product of that fun was valuable.
I really like this description. I and others here who are talking about negative experiences there seem to decry how we enjoy programming (you see words like "fun" and "passion" used in these posts), and how SO decided to take this good faith and cheer and bludgeon users for often opaque reasons, just so they could power trip. As much as I have many reservations about LLMs, I can ask LLMs to be as emotionless (or even emotional but chipper/happy) as I want. On SO, you needed to prostrate yourself and self-criticize to even have the opportunity to be bludgeoned further by the moderators. Who tf would want to spend their time contributing there? Even if you contributed a decent or even great amount to the site, you would still get whacked over the head if you dared to ask a question of your own.
This is why people jumped to LLMs, even when they were far less capable than they are now. Most people (SO moderators don't view others as "people", as is apparent in this thread) would rather receive mid-tier answers from an LLM (though LLMs have now exceeded this level of quality) while still having fun, than get castigated and "closed as duped" on SO.
Agreed. In another part the dissent says: "The Copyright Act protects code that operates “in a computer in order to bring about a certain result” both “directly” (implementing code) and “indirectly” (declaring code)."
But a program that only declares functions never brings about a result.
Declaring code is just the recipe for how to invoke implementing code.
No, not generally. Congress is 545 different people, who definitely don't have a coherent collective intent. The only thing they did collectively was pass the text of the law.
So any coherent notion of "congressional intent" has to mean the intent a person reading the text would infer about a hypothetical coherent author. I don't know anything about this particular case, but it is not at all true in general that there are more ways for a reader to interpret the explicit meaning of the written words than there are ways for a reader to interpret the intent of the written words.
You can of course try to infer intent of individual drafters, or by looking at the transcripts of debates on the congressional floor, or by reading emails, or whatever. (I don't think this justified because these discussions aren't voted on, only the text of the law is, but I'm happy to put that aside as not everyone agrees with that perspective.) My point is that this needn't, and indeed generally isn't, a single coherent position, but rather is an incoherent mishmash of many competing interests. It will almost never be less ambiguous than the literal meaning of the words written on the paper, which is the claim I'm responding to. (You can certainly argue that it is better to follow this intent than the literal meaning, but that's different than the claim that the intent is less ambiguous.)
And to be clear: intent definitely can be in the raw text. If the whole text of a statute is trying to outlaw a certain kind of activity but one sentence undermines it all under a literal reading (e.g., by excluding all possible people it might apply to), that sentence will be re-interpretted to what it needs to mean for the law to be applied.
Except that wasn't Voltaire it was the economist Sir William Petty. In fact Voltaire made his fortune on the lottery. He found a exploit in the rules of the particular implementation of the lottery allowing him to guarantee a win and high pay out.
I've never had an urge to buy lottery tickets or gamble for money. Mathematically, I know the odds of me winning are highly unlikely so my non-urge turns further into complete disinterest, I can pass by lottery shops and rolls of scratch lottery cards in shops and not even notice them.
I've only been in one lottery and I was forced to enter against my wishes - that was the draft/conscription which, unfortunately, I did win - along with many others.
If I've an interest in lotteries/gambling then it's to question why I'm so disinterested in the subject compared to others. I've not been able to answer that adequately.
On the smaller but still “millions of virtual machines” end of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs and can give you instances in minutes.
Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their “Dedicated Server” offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72 hours to deliver to customers.
Or one of a thousand places to rent a rack and “DIY” with hardware from a vendor like Dell, HP, Supermicro, Lenovo, ZT, ...
Plenty of examples exist of sites which have spent years or even decades online despite being unpopular or illegal, e.g. The Pirate Bay.
In all the years I’ve been using them they’ve never hit 10 minutes for my orders. Usually > 4 hours and < 6 hours though on AX and other “standard specification” boxes.
On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration, more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed on a weekend).
Good luck getting your 100Gbps+ sustained (from their actual requirements) of bandwidth in a non-extradition country to your primary audience in the USA.
Can you link to that requirements doc? I find it hard to believe that Parler required 100Gbps to run and meet a reasonable SLA. Also you can leverage multiple non-extradition jurisdictions to help offload bandwidth requirements while providing a hot spare cell.
Sure, but frequently whole netblocks we blocked because spammers or IP ranges hosting + sending content undesired by the larger community.
Peering ISPs would frequently drop routes + messages from whole data centers that would blatantly ignore spam complaints, which would force their hand to kick the offending customers off their platforms that caused harm to their other non-offending customers.
If you still want to remain in the cloud? Shell game. Contract another company to setup and run everything on the cloud side and mask the traffic. Hiding the traffic can be as simple as front end proxies into a VPN to AWS. Or even just SSL traffic. AWS or what ever cloud provider would be none the wiser unless they are actively looking inside everyone's boxes. Which I highly doubt they are.
There are thousands of colo centers out there that will take your business. Sure you have to buy the hardware up front but in the long run it'll be less expensive. The scary part would be fiber/backbone providers denying you a connection.
Ultimately, this will come down to public vs. private rights. If infrastructure, no matter how vital, is privately funded, what rights are there vs infrastructure that is publicly funded. Further complications are infrastructure that is a mix of the two.
Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able to set their own rules and if it’s public, then the public sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to be a mix of the two.
The same thing that would happen in other situations. If you and I can’t come to terms, we part ways and don’t do business with each other. If one of us is affected because of that, then one of us needs to reconsider how best to remedy or work around that issue.
Investing in all the infrastructure to build a globally distributed architecture that is resilient? It's almost like we forgot that the web existed before the big cloud vendors.
Yeah, that is a great mental heuristic: the majority is always fair and right. I am sure the Jews thought that back in 1930’s Germany. And the Christians in Rome, the Kolacks in Russia, the intellectuals in Mao's China, the wealthy Cubans when Castro took over and blacks in the US before the civil rights movement.
You grant too much. The people who are making these deplatforming decisions do not represent a majority or anything close to it. Perhaps they believe they will when their cultural revolution is complete and the dust has settled, but that has yet to be seen.
The equivalence is not in the persecution but on the validity of an heuristic that that dictates you are an asshole if a powerful majority says you are.
Very few people are hand-wringing over the nonavailability of large child pornography sites and such. The problem is that not everyone has to believe you're horrible to get you booted off the internet - you just have to become sufficiently vile to a narrow, highly-polarized elite strata of society.
The NYT did not apologize for printing Tom Cotton's op-ed because it was outside of a broad Overton Window, but because it's a captured institution. A lot of tech firms face similar issues, whereby trying to hobble the speech channels of political enemies (even those with very broad support) is not only seen as acceptable but morally necessary.
Not everyone thinks they are horrible, and for the many that do they are relying on the media saying that they played a part in the Capitol riots. I haven't actually seen any data showing what was posted on Parler or what evidence was used to justify shutting them down.
Don't forget...just because everyone thinks something is good, doesn't mean that everyone isn't wrong. Hitler was Time magazine's man of the year...less than a year before he started WW2.
When I visited Japan over 10 years ago much of what I thought strange has since become normal. The exaggerated fear of criminals, even though Japan is very safe. Very low interest rates and lots of public debt. In the wealthier parts of Japan newspapers featured articles on flu, with maps and graphs charting its activity. Many people wore masks and if I coughed in public people would take a wide path around me and look at me as if I were a barbarian. Exactly like it is in Europe now.
In terms of having an old population Japan was more than 10 years ahead of Europe. So it makes sense Japan was the future Europe.
I've been using unique emails since 2000. It's been fun, for example when I got marketing e-mails for Viagra on the mail I use for my bank. At the time, I was surprised a bank would sell your e-mail!
Right now Apple ID includes this very concept. They give each site a unique email instead of your actual Apple e-mail.
Seems to me there's good value in bringing this to many people. Good luck!
Moderation was used by the insiders to keep new people out.