>This appears to be the slippery slope of freedom of speech we spoke about when people on Twitter were clapping when various people got banned. Enjoy the bed you made for yourselves.
I don't know which people you are talking about specifically or who was clapping, but the slippery slope also goes the other way -- when moderators are afraid to ban people for potentially abusive language then it's very easy for the discourse to start slipping and become toxic. Even if you disagree with twitter's stance, please do your part to ensure that doesn't happen, we all deserve a place where we can be treated respectfully and have intellectually stimulating conversations.
>Something you say jokingly today is almost guaranteed to get you banned in 10 years time when political feelings change and context is removed.
I don't understand what the issue is here, if this is talking about twitter, you can just delete an old tweet if it's upsetting people later. The article even shows how twitter has a process to let you delete the tweet and restore your account.
> [..] when moderators are afraid to ban people for potentially abusive language then it's very easy for the discourse to start slipping and become toxic.
I think it really depends on what the purpose of your forum actually is. Perhaps that's the problem - people go to these platforms for different reasons. In my opinion, Twitter is not a place for intellectual discussion and debate, the format itself encourages quick and low-depth hot-takes. And don't get me started on the Tweet numbering...
> [..] we all deserve a place where we can be treated respectfully and have intellectually stimulating conversations.
I don't think we fundamentally do. It would of course be nice and it's something I personally want - but I don't think it's something I deserve. I accept that some things will offend me, and that's okay. If I don't want to see it, there are many options available.
> I don't understand what the issue is here, if this is talking about twitter, you can just delete an old tweet if it's upsetting people later.
In theory, but you have "cancel culture" where something is taken entirely out of context and judged with modern sentimentality, rather than in the context it was written. Also it should be okay to openly disagree with your past self and not have the re-write history, it shows personal progress.
> The article even shows how twitter has a process to let you delete the tweet and restore your account.
"Let you" - it didn't seem like there was much of a choice if the person wanted to continue using the service.
My original point about a better social media still stands anyway, I believe censorship should be opt-in. "I don't want to see X content" - sure, here's your wall with X content removed. "I don't want to talk to Y" - sure, here's everything with Y removed.
As usual with these posts, I don't really find this convincing, that joke is not obvious to someone who doesn't know this person. The tweet can very easily be misinterpreted by someone who does not get the joke. Please keep in mind that this is not just a Twitter thing, many decentralized communities may also not want to host jokes about self-harm or suicide.
I think it’s obvious to an everyday English speaking person, this is a take on a regular saying, like “costing an arm and a leg” or “sell my firstborn” or something. Though if I were this Twitter person, I would definitely avoid any metaphors involving things like this if they’ve been banned or whatever so many times.
Still, as an average person, it isn’t taken as anything but a riff on a saying.
Interesting - so from the perspective of a non-english speaker, would you say that a phrase like 'that cost an arm and a leg!' is likely to offend you?
I can't answer that question because I am a native English speaker, but I can say, I would probably not use that phrase around non-native English speakers. It's confusing and could be misinterpreted. Generally one would want to avoid using idioms like that when trying to cross a language barrier.
The problem with that is that the person's intent isn't to cross the language barrier.
Many languages have idioms involving body parts like this. In French it's couter les yeux de la tete, similar in Italian where it's costare un occhio della testa. One in Mandarin that means something different is 削足适履, about cutting your feet to fit your shoes.
I get that idioms don't always translate well (some actually do, especially literal ones that are less referential like cost an arm and a leg) but I'd be careful before invoking misunderstanding with theoretical groups of non-english speakers.
And yet, all of those could be misinterpreted by someone who is not familiar with that.
>I'd be careful before invoking misunderstanding with theoretical groups of non-english speakers.
If you're being cautious (as is common for a large website to do) then this is totally backwards -- you would actually need to be careful with invoking understanding when it comes to theoretical groups of non-english speakers. You can't start by assuming that everything that is said is going to be understood perfectly (Though I really wish that was possible, it would make it a lot easier to teach math, physics, history, etc).
that expression is an idiom. other languages have idioms that native english speakers would find weird.
as far as the tweet that started all this, it sounded too serious in my opinion.
kanye west (not sure if it was him who said it first) was correct with this one: adding an emoji would have sent a clearer message. blink blink smiley face or something.
Sure. Have you learned a new language recently? If you haven't, it's an illuminating experience -- usually you don't start with the idioms until you have a really strong grasp of the basics and of some other advanced forms.
I am not a native English speaker. In fact, I learned English very late in life. And I don't think you have to pretend you are talking to the whole world all the time and restrict yourself to simple English.
I don't understand, there's no pretending -- On Twitter, you are effectively talking to the whole world. Anyone in the world can click on your tweets and see what you're saying. If you want to have a broad reach, then minimizing the use of complicated words and language can absolutely help. That doesn't mean you can't discuss complex things, it just means being more deliberate in the way it's discussed.
So first, let's get the ad hominem out of the way. I speak 2 languages fluently in addition to my native language after living in 4 countries throughout my life, so don't patronize me.
Then, your argument is so silly that I wonder if you're just being contrarian for the sake of it. By your logic, anyone speaking language A should make sure to dumb it down as much as possible, make it extremely basic to make sure that anyone in the world who doesn't have a good grasp on language A can understand it unambiguously.
First of all, I don't owe you anything. If I decide to type a tweet in Italian, or Russian or whatever I don't have to accommodate you. If you don't understand the language, you're clearly not my target audience. Even though you can click on my tweet to read it doesn't mean that I need to make sure someone who doesn't understand the language can read it.
Second, this is a total disservice to people learning the language to not use idiom and common constructs. These are expressions people use in real life, if they are serious about wanting to learn a language they want to be exposed to them.
The joke is completely understandable to anybody that speaks Spanish too. In fact, many languages have idioms about exchanging body parts for something.
Please avoid making these type of snarky comments with (incorrect) assumptions about me. A better way to phrase it would be to ask which persons I know like this, to which I could give a pretty universal response: children. You wouldn't expect a child to understand an adult joke. Sure, some do, but many don't -- they have to learn just like you and I did about what people's attitudes are and when they are joking or not.
That's a special subset that are generally seen as competent enough to see and hear more adult material in order to better prepare for adult life. So actually, there's a real argument to let them see a twitter joke like this. They have less overall protections than a child under 13 for a reason.
I don't understand why you are saying that or what that has to do with the conversation. Please imagine a schoolteacher going into a classroom on the first day of school and saying with a straight face to students "I am going to show you a video on how to cut off your leg" or something like that and then not explaining that it's a joke. My original point is not if any given child is competent enough to see the joke or not, but that it could be misinterpreted.
> Please imagine a schoolteacher going into a classroom on the first day of school and saying with a straight face to students "I am going to show you a video on how to cut off your leg" or something like that and then not explaining that it's a joke.
You seem to be confused. Where does "a video on how to cut off your leg" come into this? The tweet was about willingness to give up a leg to be able to access the tutorials. A more appropriate equivalent would be imagining a schoolteacher going into a classroom on the first day of school and saying with a straight face to students "I am going to show you a video you would gladly give up your right leg to see."
There is no reason for random Twitter users to comport themselves as school teachers. All your comments are assuming some strict level of etiquette that most people don’t care about. Nor should those that care to present themselves that way relate to ban-able offenses.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, I don't think Twitter users need to comport themselves as school teachers. Twitter (and also Hacker News) requires you to conduct yourself to a certain level of etiquette in order to use the service, and some of that may be similar to the way a school teacher would behave -- in either case, you may be in the presence of 13 year olds that could be upset by your comments. I don't get why you are saying some people don't care about that etiquette -- that doesn't matter, agreeing to the etiquette is required to use the service, if you are using the service then it's agreed upon that you care about it.
Just from my own experiences on the net as a teen where jokes about self-harm and suicide were extremely common -- One of those reasons could be because social media is not doing enough to protect children from this type of toxic content. Obviously the deleted tweet here is on the "could be harmless" end of the spectrum of that though.
Saying you'd exchange a body part that you can technically live without for something is a pretty common metaphor to the point where I'd say it's not glorifying self harm.
That is obvious sarcasm. I really think that Twitter is trusting too much on NLP for automating those checks and not humans. Because machines are particularly bad at grasping sarcasm.
Its funny, because if you report obvious self harm or violence content in Spanish Twitter does nothing (like vaccines don't work, inject chlorine yourself, kill the president, organize a coup).
It may be obvious to you, but for someone not familiar with this person's type of humor, it might not be so obvious. Please consider that if you find yourself making sarcastic jokes in the presence of strangers and they are giving you funny looks. (It's happened to me more than once)
I'm sorry that happens on Spanish Twitter, that's really unfortunate and it sounds like not a fun place to discuss things.
Now, we should invent a new way to speak. Each of us needs something that removes ambiguity and includes only short, easy to pronounce words. We will find it easy not to accidently say the wrong thing. Such that the right things will flow almost unconciously. People will be more free knowing communication can happen without having to overthink it. Eutopia would be soon to follow. Anyway, just a thought. K
I understand what joke you are trying to make, but I would say the real problem here is the exact opposite: a lot of tweets that I see end up being more ambiguous because of the brevity and lack of context. So it seems what you describe is actually already happening and is one of the main problems with microblogging, and is probably what caused this person's tweet to get flagged.
> The tweet can very easily be misinterpreted by someone who does not get the joke. [...] [M]any decentralized communities may also not want to host jokes about self-harm or suicide.
The end effect of this is that it reduces speech to the lowest common denominator.
Software and mods who are given 5 seconds to pass judgement on something don't have the capacity to properly assess things so it's easier to just default to banning.
If Jonathan Swift were alive today, he's be permabanned from Twitter for promoting eating Irish babies.
When there's a range of possibilities I don't think it makes sense to automatically assume ill-intent. Especially if you're going to willfully ignore context that proves otherwise. That's like one step away from Twitter banning knife companies because their advertisements promote self-amputation
I think there is some confusion here, it's not that there is assumption of ill-intent. It's just the possibility that it could be interpreted that way. From the perspective of a moderator being on the safe side, I could see how they have to always assume that a reader will ignore context, not willfully but by accident.
Edit: Imagine you owned a knife company, would you use the contents of this tweet in an ad? I personally would not.
>If you don't want Gnome theming, don't use libadwaita
This is not accurate, the current plan seems to be for libadwaita to gain a new theming API. Additionally, apps can still load CSS themes on top of libadwaita.
That's generally the problem with theming, if some app does not support the theme (e.g. legacy apps that were not designed with theming in mind) then it will be in a broken state. Unfortunately not much can be done about it besides fixing the apps one by one.
I commented on this before, but GNOME is not preventing theming. The Solus developers have made their decisions based on missing and/or false information, and this article has unfortunately repeated that. See my longer comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548467
If you mean GTK3/4 supports system themes, then no, that's false, it has never really supported doing that. The theme was meant to only be changed by the app, users changing the theme was always consider unsupported. Of course you could previously attempt to override it by setting an environment variable but this could cause any number of things to break because of missing or incorrect CSS classes. These distros were warned about this issue a long time ago.
Just to clarify: The reason for this is not because GTK's CSS classes themselves are not stable (you are correct that they are stable). The issue is that a theme's CSS classes cannot possibly be stable with respect to any given app's CSS classes, unless the app has explicitly enabled that theme, which is not possible with the current API. If you are using the environment variable then apps do not even have a reliable way to check which theme is loaded.
The feeling with GTK4/5 seems to be that GTK itself should only supply some basic default styles and should not bother handling theming at all. Instead that should be handled by another library which knows more than GTK about which CSS to load and when. This is what is essentially being done with the libadwaita theming API.
How is there asymmetry of information? AFAIK there have been just as many tech advances in police accountability as well, such as the prevalence of body cams, or the ability to see these warrants as they are issued in real time on a police web site, etc. Of course there are other issues at play but I think you may have missed some things that are on the other side, it's very feasible for one person to track many police officers much in the same way that you describe. What would be questionable is if the police were trying to stop the public from doing so.
I'm just curious: What exactly is seen as being new or remarkable about the failure of some leaders during this pandemic? I share the frustration about these failures, but are your friends/family too young to know about other spectacular failures like Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or the Iraq War, etc? (I could go on)
Edit: I just realized my second question is somewhat US-centric so if you aren't from the US then I apologize, please disregard that comment.
In my circles, this is often the first time legislation (often not even that - often executive action, sometimes by unelected folks!) has had such an immediate, clear impact on people’s lives.
Many of my friends and family have had their closest interaction with the government be taxes & vehicle registration at the DMV - inconveniences, but not much more.
What you list are indeed spectacular failures, but they happened “over there” or “to other people”.
Suddenly, the government is telling _them_ they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert. Many in my circle have never felt the hand of government so directly.
That’s what’s new and remarkable for a lot of people.
That's really interesting, I feel like I've experienced the opposite, most people I know have had some kind of interaction with the "hand of government" in some way, if not themselves then second hand. At least in the US with our incarceration rates, statistically it's still more likely that any given person knows someone who is in prison than knowing someone who has died from COVID-19. And COVID-19 has killed a lot of people.
Also maybe you might want to help by explaining to them: it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc. The government can only enforce the will of the people, which in this case happens to be fear of an unprecedented attack by a deadly virus. It's totally understandable that this type of global pandemic would be new and remarkable for a lot of people.
>it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc.
The difference between my government's response to the virus and the Swedish government's response was not determined by covid's preferences. Humans made these policies.
>The government can only enforce the will of the people...
The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment. We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".
Yes, but my point is that those policies were only made in response to the virus. They were not made for no reason, and of course different groups of people will respond to the virus in different ways.
>The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment.
I don't understand what the difference here is supposed to be, anyone who seeks medical care in that country could be considered part of the medical establishment, or at least considered as having some kind of investment in the will of that medical establishment.
>We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".
I'm also confused by this complaint, how often do questions like these show up on a ballot? Usually ballot measures are not this specific.
There is no unified 'will of the people.' I would agree that, in many cases, governments were criminalizing behavior which communities had already curtailed, so to that extent they were following wills of many people. In this case, why not let those same people who chose the actions take the blame or appreciation for their actions, rather than saying it was government?
I've moved about a decent amount in Covid times (after community spread was a fact of life in all those places). While moving throughout places within particular Covid-rule jurisdictions and looking across spans of time, the people I encounter are far stronger predictors of e.g. mask-wearing behavior than recent executive orders. Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so when civil authorities said they weren't necessary and cases were low, and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans even when civil authorities ordered masks (with barely enough begrudging, targeted compliance to continue about their days) and cases were spiking.
I don't think this is a useful thing to say, it seems to suggest that a given group of people can't reach consensus, when this is not really the case.
>Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so [...] and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans
In my opinion that illustrates why I think any kind of reactions to this are a bit odd. It's very hard to enforce a mask mandate in every possible area in a jurisdiction. So the strategy has to be done by tackling big targets (enforcing the mandates only in densely populated areas, empowering private businesses/organizations to kick people out who endanger other people's safety, stopping people from mass spreading misinformation on social media, etc).
What I've seen is that people who were discreetly throwing parties and were being cautious about the virus didn't have any problems. But it's still risky and they still face penalties if they get get caught, because of course once someone causes a super-spreader event and people end up in the hospital, then it can easily be traced back there, and that's where I'd expect those people to be held liable. So in that sense, yeah you could say they could take blame for their actions after the fact, but that doesn't really help much either if it caused a large number of other people to get sick. We could very directly trace that back to deliberate actions taken by someone knowing full well that it could harm others.
That doesn't make any sense. There are so many government laws and regulations that affect our day-to-day lives, it would be impossible to list them all. You have to get a driver's license to drive a car and wear a seat belt while you're driving it, you can't drive if you've been drinking alcohol, you can't buy alcohol unless you're 21 and you can't do it between the hours of 12am and 8am or on Sundays, you must vaccinate your children before they reach school age, you must put your children in a car seat until age 7, you can't download that song you found for free on the internet, you can't run your own poker table at your house, you have to get a permit before you can make alterations to your house...
This is even ignoring the massive set of additional laws and regulations you have to comply with you if you own a business.
Yes, but these are all regulations already established. Most people were born into the world where they were already in place, and over their lifes to date, there were only altered in a minor way - a speed limit change here, a new mandatory vaccine there. Some classes of people, like business owners, may have experienced more pronounced regulatory churn - but it still feels mostly like tweaking stuff here and there.
COVID was the first in most people's experience when their government just went and upended their lives. Starting next week schools are closed. Two weeks from now, you can't go do anything other than work and shop. Stay away from other people or else. That includes babysitters. Oh, and your workplace is ordered to close indefinitely for now.
Whether justified or not, this is an entirely different category from the usual mucking around regulations at the edges, or playing cat and mouse game with white-collar fraudsters (which causes many, if not most, of the business-related law changes).
And sure, this is an emergency. But the point is, most people alive - at least in the West - never experienced a national-level emergency before.
Are most people born since 2005 or something? All of the new government regulations I can think of that have impacted me personally that didn't exist when I was born (1980):
* Seat belt laws
* Can't smoke in bars and restaurants
* Can't smoke within 50 feet of a door
* Unaccompanied children at a park being considered neglect
* Illegal to use a mobile phone while driving
* Mandatory emissions checks to register a car
* Legal mandates for chicken pox vaccine
* Taking your shoes off and going through a body scanner to get on an airplane
* Time of day/time of week restrictions on alcohol sale (existed when I was born, but not where I lived, so new to me when I moved to Texas)
* Restrictions on how much sudafed you can buy
* Restrictions on filling out of state prescriptions forcing me to pick up and mail medication to my wife when she was traveling
* Real ID laws forcing me to make an appointment 9 months in advance and show up with what felt like 18 different types of proof I lived where I said I did in order to be able to vote
* The State of Texas apparently just passed a law saying my block of 6 townhomes now needs to keep minutes and retain paper records and send all communications to each other via registered mail even though we live 20 feet from each other
* I guess it's now illegal to get an abortion here?
Granted, none of these ever happened all at once in response to an emergency. I guess your friends are just lucky to have never lived in a place that experienced an emergency before this? Living through the LA riots wasn't all that pleasant, either. Anyone who has ever lived through a hurricane has not only been told they have to close their business, but they have to abandon their homes completely and leave the city without any guarantee they'll ever be able to return.
Sure, a national level emergency hasn't happened since the 1940s, and almost nobody alive today experienced that, but it is weird to see the divergence in response. As far as I know, shared sacrifice and repurposing of private goods to public purposes in the 1940s had the exact opposite effect. Especially since the measures were far more drastic. We didn't confiscate property and force Chinese Americans into internment camps this time around.
Maybe it depends on age? For a lot of these activities it feels like it's always been that way (maybe not true if you're older?), so even if excessive you've had your whole life to get used to it. All of this covid stuff is new. I agree with mwint, don't have a home, not remodeling, no kids, and no business.
Public school has its influence. The asymmetrical power to focus large resources on ideological targets is a part of modern warfare that most high-school graduates are not going to grasp intuitively.
Oh sure, not relevant because government doesn't literally raise most of the children and there aren't really any government regulations in schools. /s
Watergate and Iran-Contra are about malicious intent but what I see is a rise of institutional incompetence and ineffectiveness which is rather different.
Consider the mistakes of the WHO. Failure to recommend and even decrying early border closures, failure to declare a pandemic until months after evident global spread, and saying masks positively do not work and then dragging their feet for months on the question.
Contrast that to how the WHO reacted to the first SARS, and we can observe a significant deterioration in competence. I could be mistaken, but it doesn't seem that it's just that we are hearing more about incompetence or have short memories.
I can only speculate on the reasons for this. Political polarization leading to affiliation over competence in hiring decisions, more corruption due to cronyism, diversity over competence in hiring decisions, or overly risk-averse decision making due to fear of social media mobs, are candidate explanations.
>It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.
I have heard this sentiment a lot and tried a lot of email clients and personally I still don't enjoy using any email client for this task. A properly designed forum software is always going to be easier to use for its express purpose than a mail client.
This is quite the negative and cynical comment and includes quite a bit of misinformation, I suggest taking a break from the net for a while. Your mental health is important.
I don't know which people you are talking about specifically or who was clapping, but the slippery slope also goes the other way -- when moderators are afraid to ban people for potentially abusive language then it's very easy for the discourse to start slipping and become toxic. Even if you disagree with twitter's stance, please do your part to ensure that doesn't happen, we all deserve a place where we can be treated respectfully and have intellectually stimulating conversations.
>Something you say jokingly today is almost guaranteed to get you banned in 10 years time when political feelings change and context is removed.
I don't understand what the issue is here, if this is talking about twitter, you can just delete an old tweet if it's upsetting people later. The article even shows how twitter has a process to let you delete the tweet and restore your account.