Same, I use Playwright all the time, but haven't been able to make puppeteer work in quite some time. Playwright, while reliable in terms of features, just absolutely eats the heck out of context.
> This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
...then the rest of the world will see what the people of China and Russia already know: bans on VPNs cause them to explode in popularity and development pace.
There's a reason that the most sophisticated VPNs and tunneling tech are built to evade the GFW.
I recently visited a remote part of Siberia, and I was amazed at the ubiquity of VPNs. Grandmothers who grew up in shamanic traditions knew how to get around apparent traffic shaping (even on youtube!) to listen to their traditional music. It was quite inspiring.
I'm not saying bans are a good idea - I'd much rather the adults in the room read the writing on the wall and bring about peaceful dismantling of legacy states in favor of a censorship-resistant internet.
> Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity.
I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
But societies also need to be stronger than states, especially in an age of connection and sharing.
States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray for.
Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are closer to states than they are to algorithms.
But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized and less rent-seeking) web apps.
Exactly, societies need to be stronger than states too and really need to act early. States can become one person or party and it's game over for a long time. Actually, the American Constitution is pretty great at preventing this exact outcome and I still have a lot of faith in it.
but the constitution is just a piece of paper with some words written on it.
Without an active civic society protection what is enshrined in the document, it is all but powerless.
> They are closer to states than they are to algorithms
This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.
Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.
I agree with everything you've said with regard to the justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a free market at work in social media.
* So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
* Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic
* States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon
Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company?
> So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
Agree! let's get rid of these :)
> Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant
Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.
> States ... pick winners and losers
I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.
> social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time
There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.
Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.
I think you may have misunderstood my comment - or perhaps misunderstood the consequences of the censorship regime.
If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health.
I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place.
Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research.
The idea that real, serious scientific debate was stymied by social media platform policies doesn't pass the smell test for me. Facebook/twitter/et al were making good faith efforts to stop the flood of downright harmful misinformation, and government didn't force them to do it. None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. Those folks had the right wing press broadcasting their worst ideas to the world, the didn't even need social media when they could get on Fox News every day of the week.
It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.
> None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced.
...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored.
Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude!
Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship.
What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen.
Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology.
David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?!
All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go).
There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic.
And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative.
...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face.
A lot of people with credentials join the grift train, yes. Apparently it's quite profitable. Listing many of them isn't really an argument that the grift is true.
What a bizarre and reckless take. I thought this 'no true scotsman' nonsense was put to bed in 2022.
By this metric, who is _not_ a grifter? You have to be Scott Gottleib or Peter Daszak - shilling pseudoscience while sitting on the boards of corporations making billions from the pandemic - to _not_ be a grifter? Is that it?
> Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook!
These people got their stuff published in the British Medical Journal, so nobody in the scientific community had the slightest problem seeing it.
Facebook posted a fact check where the story was shared pointing out some problems with it. They didn’t “censor” anything. It was frankly entirely reasonable and the BMJ should have done better in the first place. Facebook did “combat bad speech with more speech”, the thing you’re supposed to do, and the cranks absolutely lost their minds.
In any case, the danger is over now and we can rest easy knowing that Facebook won’t lift a finger to prevent millions from being misled about vaccines causing autism. They’ll sell ads alongside the posts! phew
...let's get our facts straight here. I hope we can agree on this nutshell:
* During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious.
* The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them.
* The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report.
* In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits.
* Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation.
* All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing.
* Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House.
...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship".
Facebook 'reduced distribution,' they didn't block. And again, your original claim was that social media somehow blocked scientific debate, which is categorically false. All these claims are hand-waving away the fact that this was published in the BMJ from the outset.
Facebook could throw all their servers in a wood chipper today and it would have zero effect on scientific debate in the world.
All that a state does is convince people. States don't really exist. They're fictional constructs that sometimes convince a police officer to break into a murderer's home and kidnap him. And most of us agree that's a good thing. However sometimes they convince a police officer to break into a protestor's home and kidnap him. And some of us agree that's a bad thing. Other times they convince bomb makers to make bombs and convince aircraft mechanics to attach them to airplanes and convince pilots to fly over hospitals and press the release button. That's bad too - sadly not everyone agrees on that.
You've written this with a certain sardonic tone, seemingly in efforts to show the person to whom you're responding that their view necessarily leads to the particular brand of anarchism you're espousing.
And I must say, I find your argument and phraseology very convincing. I agree with everything you've said here; states are not imbued with any particular magic. They simply convince people to do things that, if people weren't filled with the mindset of exceptions that seem to come when engaging in public services, they'd never ever do.
I have a degree in political science, and I wish that the reading material required to get that degree displayed more of the technique you've used here.
I mean, it's good prose but it's just sort of hand-waving away all the history of how we ended up with modern states. States solve a lot of problems, they're not perfect but I'm pretty passionate about not living in walled cities because there are hordes of raiders who go around enslaving everyone.
I think you both may have misunderstood my comment. It's not about history. It's simply a rebuttal to the idea that something which "only convinces" is less influential than a state. States themselves also fall into that category, and therefore we can see that things in that category can be so influential they need forceful restraint.
This could be amended to "States have a monopoly legitimate on violence". Your comment seems to deny the existence of "legitimacy" as a concept. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force?
No, states can't do violence because they don't have hands, so they can't hold guns or bats. The violence is done on behalf of the state by some of the people it convinces, mostly police officers and soldiers.
If neither of the two major players can make an open, secure, _simple_, easy-to-understand, bloat-free OS, then we somehow need another player.
Presently (and I confess, my bias to seek non-state solutions may show here), it seems that a non-trivial part of the duopoly stems from regulatory capture insofar as the duopoly isn't merely software, but extends all the way to TSMC and Qualcomm, whose operations seem to be completely subject to state dictates, both economic/regulatory and of the darker surveillance/statecraft variety (and of those, presumably some are classified).
I'm reminded of the server market 20ish years ago, where, although there were more than two players, the array of simple, flexible linux distros that are dominant today were somewhere between poorly documented and unavailable. I remember my university still running windows servers in ~2008 or so.
What do we need to do to achieve the same evolution that the last 2-3 decades of server OS's have seen? Is there presently a mobile linux OS that's worth jumping on? Is there simple hardware to go with it?
One comment mentioned Jolla. Another currently available option is [FuriLabs](http://furilabs.com). It runs atop Hallium/etc but you are effectively still able to daily drive a mobile Linux shell and contribute to the ecosystem if you want to see it grow.
Now with that said: so much work has gone in to Android (and by extension, Graphene) to improve on power usage/security/etc that I'm not sure I'd bother to actually run a mobile Linux device. The juice just doesn't feel worth the squeeze.
Furilabs was just in the news here because they discontinued their device models from a few years ago, and released a new device for a big price bump with _significantly worse_ hardware.
I know I would love to give them a try, but a 720 screen is an absolute non starter for me. It would be hard for anyone to sell me on just a FullHD (1080) screen in the era of QHD (2K) being industry standard.
Additionally, I believe their FAQ even admits that their already low power devices only get a few hours of battery life.
Small company that deals with what hardware they can get their hands on. They're shipping a device when others are not. It's a pretty straightforward equation right now; people who want to advance the ecosystem should consider it if they want a device they can drive and build for.
Otherwise there's no real reason to not just run Graphene.
> If neither of the two major players can make an open, secure, _simple_, easy-to-understand, bloat-free OS, then we somehow need another player.
I really hoped that Huawei would go for a fork of AOSP (they could even pull the changes from Google :-) ), but they chose to go with their proprietary HarmonyOS.
It was discussed here when it was announced. I believe it was determined the hardware is an ultra-low-budget Aliexpress design that normally retails for ~$100 that they had custom built with a mic cutoff switch added to it (probably the cause of a large portion of the hardware price increase). I dont remember the specifics, but even thr most optimistic were pretty sure it won't get hardware vendor support for even a full year based on the specific processor it contains.
Replying to myself:
Apparently I was mixing up the new Furilabs FLX1s and new Jolla phone. The FLX1s that's a major downgrade from the prior FLX1 and some people were reporting are based on a design that's really cheap on Aliexpress and using very old hardware but with a custom spin to add some physical switches to it.
The new Jolla actually does look really good compared to all the other avaiaobale Linix phone hardware options.
WARNING: This is a Kickstarter device still, and needed funding to even create a proof of concept device last time it was discussed (extensively). It's a Flagship phone device and price, but with only the oldest of pans on how it's actually going to deliver some on of the promises.
* A web-of-trust social media, where I can instantly see, about any account, all of the chains of separation between us, in order to verify and validate the humanity and social connection of another person.
Presently, twitter (and even moreso, reddit) are just so overrun by bots whose job seems to be to muddy all waters with short-shrift, low-effort takes, but expressed in way more words than are necessary.
I don't mind (in fact, I love) long-form posts like were common in the old reddit, but that are thoughtful and perhaps radical (in the same of addressing the root of the subject). Today's reddit is almost as bad as twitter. I'm kinda ready to get off both of them, but I'd like to still have daily engagement on topics that challenge me / my worldviews.
I don't even know what this means today. What things are "non-political"? Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
> the art or science of government: as [that] concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy, ... [or] winning and holding control over a government; political actions, practices, policies, ... affairs or business
Broad sense:
> the total complex of relations between people living in society
In my experience, the question is almost always disingenuous. Topics being "political" is clearly the exception rather than the norm. The subtext of asking is something like "you are a bad person for objecting to my political statements (but I will still reserve the right to object to yours, should you decide that turnabout is fair play)".
> Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
There are all kinds of projects and activities that can be discussed without touching upon the relations between people in society, let alone matters of governmental policy or the quest for power.
There is nothing at all "stagnant" about a community focused on such things. OP is about the Free Software Foundation; focusing on discussion of the software has nothing to do with politics, and is generally improved by consciously avoiding politics.
The mere fact of existence of other political possibilities does not necessitate discussing those possibilities at every opportunity.
One thing I haven't seen brought up throughout the dialogue about Wikipedia and bias:
Since the entire edit history is available, isn't it possible / practical / probably not crazy hard w/ AI help to build a "dissentipedia", where the articles are built as if various edit wars had gone the other way?
I'd certainly read such a thing and compare / contrast it to WikiPedia (particularly when looking for cited primary sources).
It seems like a lot of us work in either "short context" (ie, tell the LLM to do a think real quick and then end the instance) practice or "long context" (big project, lot of brainstorming across context heaps).
If you, like me, prefer the latter, you might like this tool.
It watches the JSONL log files that claude code produces and saves them in a django app. You can browse them via a frontend, and your agent can access them through the MCP server.
When you start a new claude code instance, it can call the boostrap MCP function to "become itself" again. I can't imagine working with claude without it anymore.
> Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience.
For me, this comparatively benign explanation of his behavior became much less plausible when the details of the EcoHealth arrangement became public.
I'm not a big believer in the current so-called criminal justice system as a way to establish... well, justice, but I do think that a trial in open court for his crimes - even just the unambiguous perjury - was likely to be healing and perhaps restorative for our institutions of scientific research.
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