The vaccine is now a political issue just like mask wearing and lockdowns or any other aspect of this pandemic. Rational discussions that deviate from the accepted narrative are attacked and suppressed even on HN. Apparently experimental mRNA vaccines, censorship, violation of civil liberties, and other transgressions are fair game during a “pandemic”.
Rational discussions are created by speaking only with calm rational arguments, instead of inflammatory discourse such as putting the word pandemic between quotes, implying that 4 million deaths by a virus are not enough to be considered a pandemic.
It’s crazy how we’re expected to cope with myocarditis, blood clots, other mystery symptoms and even death by participating in a large scale clinical trial for experimental gene therapy. The shot is usually free or cheap but god forbid you end up one of the unlucky ones with ruined health and expensive medical bills with no one to sue or take responsibility but yourself. You’ll most likely get censored on social media and gas lighted by health care providers if you speak out too. All this for the greater good of society?
I got pericarditis, I'm expected to make a full recovery and the gas lightning is probably the worst part of it. Lost a couple of friends to it, "maybe it's just anxiety".
EDIT: I've been diagnosed, all my doctors agree, still: "maybe it's just anxiety".
We have an environment of fear and denial about these adverse effects. Many people like you are afraid or weary of sharing experiences because of personal attacks, gaslighting, and censorship. There isn’t adequate informed consent.
Btw you might want to look into mitochondrial supplements, N -acetylcysteine (NAC), zinc, vit D, even ivermectin, etc. Look at the literature and make your own decisions. There are lots of good supplements that could help manage symptoms with safety.
The alternative is to participate in the more ad-hoc yet even larger-scale clinical trial for an objectively dangerous virus of unknown (possibly artificial) origin, with its own profile of unpleasant side effects and potential long term sequelae even if you survive.
No one is saying this is an ideal situation! The vaccine is merely the best of the options, all of them bad.
Don’t forget the supplement that begins with N. Not to mention government essentially denying their own research demonstrating the efficacy of these cheap and safe treatment options.
"We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society."
Yet they see no irony in being self-appointed arbiters of who gets to say what including heads of state. By their very own statement they are violating the human rights of others by censoring and deplatforming users are they not?
It would be ironic if they said that access to Twitter was an essential human right in modern society.
But their argument is that access to the internet in its entirety - whether Twitter or Mastodon or Hacker News or Stormfront or Substack or Zombo - is an essential human right, and a government should not block its people from any one site. Which is a fair statement. Twitter hosts who they want to host, Stormfront hosts who they want to host, and the government should get in the way of neither.
Twitter has never entirely prevented anybody from accessing it (afaik - I first encountered the platform in ~2010 so correct me if I'm wrong). Tweets and media from non-protected accounts can be viewed without needing an account at all, so everybody can see the discussion happening; the criticism of Twitter is over whether or not everybody can participate (and even then, even people with suspended accounts will often create new ones and jump back in).
On the other hand not only is my government actively trying to make it a criminal offence to participate in discussions on Twitter, they have already mobilised the ISPs to block actual access to the platform itself (some people are currently circumventing that with VPNs, but we all know that they (especially the free ones) are not bulletproof).
The abuse of state power should be obvious, especially to the people on here who claim to care about censorship, but they seem to be too caught up in scoring a petty point against a platform they don't like. As I've said elsewhere, I wonder if they think of us Nigerians as real people at all.
I've seen this exact sentiment expressed more times than I can remember. While I don't consider internet access to be an inalienable human right, the response from Twitter is obviously mealy mouthed. What they are actually saying is "Access to, and use of, Twitter, subject to our terms of service and content moderation policy, is an essential human right in modern society."
Exactly, they believe they are a supranational entity with the right to dictate what is and what isn't acceptable speech world-wide. I'm no fan of dictators or governments who violate their own constitutions, but that does not give Twitter the right to set the rules of speech world-wide.
So deliberate censorship of political groups, manipulating elections, suppression of dissenting opinions on experimental gene therapy aka covid vaccines, is all naivete?
This pandemic is pushing some people towards extremism and conspiracy theories because of the concerted effort to manipulate public opinion and censor dissenting views. It creeps people out.
Accounts get banned for sharing an adverse reaction to mRNA shots and next thing you know people are using code words (like v@xx, wax scene, etc.) and throwaway accounts to post anonymously, sowing even more distrust.
My mother in law went into cardiac arrest hours after her second shot, on May 21st. It was a rare, adverse event. (The vaccine is a net positive, and is safe for vast majority of people)
We eventually had to take her off life support on Tuesday. The medical team concluded it was likely caused by the vaccine, and reported it in the VAERS system.
My sister-in-law tried to talk about it in Facebook, and was threatened with account termination, a day after her mother died.
I had a Facebook account suspended for 7 days for correcting someones vaccine misinformation.
Of course I clicked the "I disagree" button on the notification that you're in Facebook jail. They replied with the "We're sorry we got this one wrong, your comment has been reinstated" message.
I thought I was ok until I logged in and suddenly found my account restricted for 30 days.
I got a strike. I protested and won. But I still got suspended for 30 days?
Yep. Why would Facebook not want to outsource fact-checking to a truly non-partisan entity led by a diverse set of bi-partisan and prominent people if they didn’t want to manipulate the world for their political aims.
Why not entirely abstract themselves from fact checking to the best they can?
Why not offer extreme transparency to people when they are banned. The exact details along with a multi-stage appeals process?
Imagine getting a health department violation that shuts down your business without any details or ability to appeal it. This is the stuff North Korea is made of.
How our tech community does not see this is startling. We are so blinded by hate, fear, and political power that we have become accepting of an authoritarian and corrupt overlord.
I suspect the majority of programmers who say this have internalized the core api features they depend on (function calls, syntax, common algorithms, etc.) that make them super productive. Whereas average programmers and below need all the help they can get from their editor to tame the wild goose chase of looking up common functions, scouring StackOverflow, and even looking for random snippets on long abandoned blogs, etc.
In other words his mastery greatly reduces his dependence on IDE/editor features so this makes perfect sense.
Watching Carmack live coding, he types with conviction and gets things done:
You just can't falsify a medical diagnosis and would you rather have a Prime Minister leading the country despite deteriorating health? Japan's COVID-19 situation is still way better than most countries. Whether it will hold is anyone's guess but he's not fit enough to make big decisions and at some point Japan might need another lock down.
I will say that I don't trust the LDP to rise above their internal bickering and backroom politics to choose someone capable of handling this pandemic but that is neither here nor there. We will find out soon.
There really isn't any stand out for LDP leadership post Abe and that's something that deeply concerns me.
I think Japan shows that political leadership, of all factors, has minimal impact on COVID-19 outcome. The Japanese government did almost nothing and got away with it.
They didn't have to, because much of their population already follows "COVID-safe" practices. A large fraction wears facemasks in public and especially on public transport. They bow instead of shaking hands. They don't kiss acquaintances on the face, unlike say the custom in parts of the middle east. They're very hygienic, even taking their shoes off when entering a home. Food workers wear masks and gloves. So do taxi and bus drivers. Etc, etc...
A full lockdown on top of this would have unnecessarily harmed their economy with little medical benefit.
Japanese don't all wear masks. They all had experience wearing them but it wasn't common to see more than 5% of people wearing them at any one time until Covid
Japan is not remotely hygienic. Most hospitals and doctor's offices would be shut down by the health inspectors in the USA. I've seen all kinds of disgustingly dirty beds, cabinets, shelves, tables, and equipment in my 14 years here. Most restaurants as well. It was only covid that finally got them to cover food items at bakeries and buffets. It's easy to lose your appetite when you see kids sneezing on all the food.
And for the last 2/2.5 months the country has seemed mostly not caring about Covid. People are partying at bars, restaurants, and coffee shops and their masks are off. Clubs are even open.
Something else must explain why Covid hasn't been bigger here but it is not hygiene
> Something else must explain why Covid hasn't been bigger here but it is not hygiene
For one, Japanese are significantly healthier on average, including many of the risk factors for COVID-19. Even a slight difference in average can make a huge difference at the tail ends, that is the number of people that actually die, as well as the people that develop no symptoms whatsoever.
I've spent an accumulated 3 months in Japan over the last three years, and I have eyes, so please don't gaslight me.
Their general use of masks and gloves before the pandemic in high density urban areas is instantly noticeable. It's not 5%, it is closer to 50%.
I saw punks. Literal goth punks, with the boots and the tats and the piercings and the black clothes and the mohawks wear masks.
Before the pandemic. Not during. Before.
In America you have Karens screaming in the face of shop attendants about their "rights" and how they have a "medical condition" that prevents them wearing a mask.
So, yeah. I don't think it's a mystery that Japan did better than the US.
I agree with this entirely. I've been to Japan and can confirm it isn't noticeably more clean than most rich cities and certainly not as clean as Singapore (for example)
I've dug into this in some depth and there is no convincing explanation. Even "luck" (which is a much underestimated factor in initial breakout dynamics) doesn't seem to explain it - unless they are persistently lucky somehow.
There's something else going on and no one really knows what it is. There is plenty of speculation, but nothing that is even close to an accepted explanation.
I happened to see a chart showing that among wealthy countries, the US is at the top for obesity and Japan is at the bottom. Just a correlated random fact that nobody knows the cause of either. Maybe something about fish consumption?
There are huge numbers of significant demographic differences between Japan and the US.
It's true that obesity is a factor in COVID death dates (as it is for most things) but there are plenty of places with lower levels of obesity with significantly higher death rates. Singapore and South Korea are better comparisons here and the death rate is significantly higher.
As for fish consumption - it's difficult to think of a reason why that would be significant for a respiritory disease like COVID. It wasn't for SARS.
Yeah, this post sounds fake and wrong and should be rejected. Japan is most likely the most hygienic country on earth (okay, Singapore may beat them). Sure you can find some backwater somewhere in Japan with worse hygiene than the USA, but the overwhelming majority of that nation has levels of hygiene which make even the cleanest parts of America look like a pig pen.
Are you serious about Singapore being hygienic? Ever been to hawker stands in Singapore? Ever visit Little India on a Sunday? Ever walk though the food section of Mustafas? Especially the eggs isle? And yes I know they are inspected.
These are all great post hoc arguments, but we could equally well list factors that point the other way. They have very dense cities and packed public transport. They have a culture of presenteeism that discourages sick leave and working from home. They have one of the most elderly-heavy populations in the world. Etc...
Regardless, it does seem like GP's point is correct. The political leadership isn't necessarily what makes a difference: it's all of the other factors.
He is the longest serving Prime Minister in the history of Japan just shy of 8 years. Before COVID-19 he was under constant attack for a school funding scandal, manipulating a cherry blossom party guest list hosted by the government, and his mishandling of COVID-19. He never got to revise the Japanese Constitution to reinstate a standing military force and all his economic gains were cancelled by COVID-19. I don't know how history will judge Abe but he did better than most.
I wish I understood the origin of all the pro-Abe PR narratives in the US. In Japan, he’s immensely unpopular and emblematic of the country’s corrupt, one-party democracy.
His supposed “revitalization” of the Japanese economy has done little more than further impoverish average people, so he can hand out tax benefits to the wealthy and his cronies. He’s dismantled press freedom in a way that other politicians on the far right only dream of, having fired or demoted several prominent journalists who voiced (by Western standards) mild criticism of him.
The origin seems pretty obvious to me — Abe is part of the old guard, a plutocrat and moral conservative, like his propagandist supporters in the US media. Doesn't take any squinting to see their interests align
Yes, it was inaccurate for me to question the origin. I should've said its surprising to me that otherwise educated people still fall for these narratives.
Blind idolization of Japan runs deeper than you might expect, especially in communities like the one we’re typing on.
When I lived there, I could never find anyone who liked him... but then again as a society it’s not quite like the west where political engagement is high.
Gates is scared people are passing bad information through encrypted platforms such as whatsapp. Next, he will require 24/7 monitoring of every private citizen to make sure we don’t call him mean names.
I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.
Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common.
Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.
Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done.
So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"
Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.
Are you sure you haven’t previously searched for window gates? Searching for things is so second nature by now that half the time we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.
Also, if your partner or anyone in your house searched for gates from the same IP, you will be getting ads for gates too, even if you never searched for them personally. That's a very common source of the "I never searched for something and now I'm getting ads for it" complaints.
Positive that I didn't search. I viewed the apartment, and several others, while my wife was in Taiwan with our baby. After I got home (existing apartment in SG) I text (on whatsapp) the agent about this specific apartment. I had not even raise the issue of the lack of gates with my wife yet. The ad's began about an hour after I messaged my agent.
couldn't have they added some kind of mechanidm to extract unusual words in the app itself to feed a separate stream of "interests" ?
It doesn't even have to be sent over the network. Could be a shared file on an app group that apps like facebook read and process.
IP address is one of many signals used to build a statistical profile.
It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.
If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.
I think this has started happening to me lately! I use pihole with the default block lists as well (in the US), which of course doesn’t get everything, but generally works pretty well.
So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop
Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.
That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.
So literally defeating the purpose of e2e encryption where the conversations are between me and the other person. Not parsed prior for advertising. In any case people should avoid WhatsApp as it’s clearly less secure now that Facebook owns it.
That in and of itself is a testament to how problematic our man-made legal system is.
Compare a nature made system to a man made system.
Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.
> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.
There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.
You can try for a student visa for Japanese language school for two years. If you're willing to pay for a plane ticket to a nearby Asian country, you could probably renew it in perpetuity every three months. There are also other visas like entertainment or modelling that you could try to obtain for three months. You can even teach English part time and try to get a visa that way.
As you make friends and build up a network you're certain to find a way to make it work.
In practice, visas are easier for people from Western developed countries. The only major risk of overstaying a visa is getting a random stop from police and at worst you just get deported. It's really not as restrictive as it seems. I've met plenty of people who visited Japan on a whim and ended up staying for years.
This is probably one of my favorite developments coming from the quarantine. Maciej Ceglowski is a keeper of the torch reminding us of what the web used to be: a weird place filled with weird people who were guided by curious intellects and a belief that the internet can and would liberate us in some strange and amazing way.
Before social media amplified celebrity worship and extreme positions, everyone's voice on the web was only given weight by the merit or personality of what was said. No matter how popular you were on the old internet your voice was never loud enough to silence another. People were mostly anonymous (in practice because governments were caught off guard) and anyone could start a quirky website that was suddenly the talk of the town.
I miss the old internet that inspired a lot of brilliant and all too idealistic people to code into the night and bring us these amazing innovations. In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
Thank you Maciej for the trip down memory lane. Some of us may cling to the past but I hope there's another version of you and the old guard of the internet waiting for us or our future generations when we are gone.
> In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
When I first got to use Facebook (after it had opened up to more than just users from particular US universities), I loved the fact that it had a cohesive look and feel. The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
But over time I kind of started missing actively visiting the 'page' of a friend, and especially the craziness in how they were able to modify their myspace/cu2/hyves.nl/etc. pages. Sure, it was often ugly as hell, filled with emoji, psychedelic backgrounds, and autoplaying music. but it was /them/ expressing themselves.
I think a lot of what's turned out to be problematic about Facebook (and perhaps the broader internet) is that most platforms have completely locked down people's ability to express themselves to comments and a tiny little profile picture next to it.
That customizability on MySpace was a security nightmare. My wife was the head of the security team back in the day and a lot of what they did to secure the site was duct tape and baling wire. It was kind of entertaining to log onto the hacker forums and see commentary on my wife's work for the day.
Seconded. I bet if we could get a pipe between someone using nuance dragon and an Amazon print as you go book service, we could sell a lot more of these extremely niche books / memoirs.
1. Users of site request and upvote requests for individual memoirs, and comment with their questions and prompts, which are also upvoted. Similar to an AMA. Upvotes are purchased with preorder deposits, and if the subject accepts, the funds will be transferred from users to site. Similar to Kickstarter.
2. Subject sees that their name is high up and accepts the memoir invitation. A tool allows them to select the questions and prompts they want to use.
3. An app plays the prompts using text to speech and records the conversation with the subject, performing a live transcription.
4. The transcript is sent to an editor, who fixes any transcription mistakes and adds some organization so the book has some sense of flow. Using a transcript and audio combination editor, the interview audio is recut to match the text.
5. The edited transcript is sent through a template and sent to Amazon's publishing service. Audio goes through similar process for corresponding audio book. Preordered copies are delivered to the users that upvoted the subject. Revenue is split between site and subject. If successful, subject releases a sequel written in a more traditional way and offers it to the same users.
I'd love an option, as a backer, to get the raw interview audio. Call me a skeptic on recuts preserving nuance.
But yeah, I'd set aside a monthly budget for backing such memoirs, even if I never listen to the results, simply getting them made about subjects I find interesting feels like a worthwhile use of a few bucks.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
The newsfeed was copied/acquired from FriendFeed. Messages was Beluga. Instagram and WhatsApp got on FB bandwagon too. FB just had the cold hard cash laying there and just had to put it in front of these people. Cold hard cash and no morality when it comes to selling people personal data, but, in their defence, we put that data there in the first place, it's the fuzzy binding contract that's made when one joins Facebook—look at all these social tools for you to share and connect, for the mere price of letting us exploit you and your data and enrich us and our investors while doing that. It's a power structure, really.
> At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
This is partly because Facebook introduced "the internet" to people who would otherwise never create anything on the web.
I agree that was what I originally disliked about Facebook. But I think a bigger problem (that definitely got worse over time) was the way everything gets swept away on FB. If you see something, it's very difficult to get back to it later. This is demoralizing for the writers too.
Most of the time, I'm here for the text. I really appreciate straight answers in legible fonts. They're a rarity in the age of SEO-optimised, engagement-obsessed websites.
In that sense, I'm happy with platforms that standardise the experience. It's just unfortunate when those platforms add their own layer of annoyances in the name of growth.
> At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
At first I liked the newsfeed but looking back I think that's the beginning of what killed Facebook for me. At one time the site was about you. When you logged in you went to your page. Now it's about other people almost exclusively.
Same cloth? Zukerburger was an asshole to begin with, based on the stories told so far. No he’s just behaving with impunity after selling his soul to the Drumpf.
I absolutely loved this when I found it. Delicious was just such a great place to find cool, esoteric stuff.
I love any sites with lists on it made by regular people. Rateyourmusic is the same. Find a band you love, find out who else has an album on their list, get digging.
I ran the full site for about two years after 2017, using the code I inherited from AVOS, but a lot of people assumed the site was dead because they tried to visit delicious.com. That was never part of the sale and has been kept for some unknown purpose.
The problem was that even years after making the site read-only, I couldn't cope with the level of spam traffic directed at delicious, and had constant problems keeping it online. Rewriting that read-only version so it's not a bloated layer cake of 20 services is my attempt at bringing it back online more sustainably.
At what stage in its existence was Facebook in any way open? It was a walled garded from its inception - initially restricting access to college students only. In fact I never did and still do not consider Facebook as "the web". There is the web and then there is Facebook. The two just use similar technologies but live apart.
My personal projects (all too elementary to talk about at this point) are intended to be just that. Not flashy, but functional, they respect your privacy and etc. They are what they are and there's no secret or desire to dump it if it doesn't make $ billion.
I was thinking a while ago of the old "web ring" idea where likeminded sites were all listed together in a ring and you could explore them.
It would be nice if there was a "simple, privacy oriented, sustainable" web ring out there of good projects doing good things for their customers.
> I was thinking a while ago of the old "web ring" idea where likeminded sites were all listed together in a ring and you could explore them.
I think you're right. The best we have now are the "awesome-*" lists. Here is an "aggregation" of the options on offer: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
> Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
I agree with this 100%. I'm old enough to remember when the internet worked fine without having advertising everywhere. Now we're supposed to be convinced that the whole thing would cease to exist if there weren't popover ads and auto playing videos. :/
> In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open.
"I" created Facebook in 1999. The commpany I worked for wanted a "networked solution for all and everyone." Not big enough market, bad timing etc. So there you have it; timing is _everything_.
To get to that point the trick was to build it as something else first, and then switch. Myspace was primarily a platform for bands, which are fun and cool, which contributed to its early success.
Jwz:
> Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
