> it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.
I think there can be a difference between the literal and official meaning of a term, and what it most commonly means in practice - and that’s a descriptive claim about how words get used, not a prescriptive claim that anyone has some moral or legal obligation to do anything in particular
> And pretending that (in the United States of America of all places) teens can just walk up to their doctors super easily and get surgery done somehow.
It was about how the so called Dutch Protocol re: gender affirming care first came to the US, and how long-ish psychological evaluation times were often truncated because of how far patients had to travel in the US. Then the lid flew off when such care moved to California.
> Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy
Yikes. One doesn't usually expect people to use the actual language of McCarthy-ites.
> So who is Singal out there fighting for?
The kids? It's really not crazy to believe that the children, perhaps not given adequate care, could simply be wrong, or even socially influenced (like everything else in a teenager's life).
> He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
It's a new treatment and how it is practiced here in the US is the very Q he is examining. I'm not saying he's right, but I do feel better if there is someone with a critical eye looking at new treatment methods.
I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons. I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
> I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons.
Oh agreed. If, for no other reason, that is how the politics, even on the American Left, are now. A few years ago, people were talking about gender affirming care as a matter of right for the children. Singal, among others, changed that conversation.
> I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Agreed, but I think you may have misconstrued Singal's point. He's not saying it's too easy, he's saying there is not enough preliminary psychiatric care like the treatment protocol dictated in the Netherlands.
> Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
Um. Those professional circles like HN's professional circles need to be open to the air every now and then. Like -- what if we allowed Peter Thiel and his circle of founders, raised on Heinlein novels and sugary soda, to dictate tech policy in the US? Some people are just too weirdly close to a thing. We actually do need the wisdom that normies can offer.
Specifically, re: this topic, four European countries, who have a much more experience than Americans do with this care, have recently implemented more restrictive approaches to care. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/us-europe-transgend...
It should be a matter of right. My parents mutilated me as a child because they denied me healthcare. We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.
If you think it'd be wrong to force a cis kid to be trans, then it's also wrong to force a trans kid to be cis.
I think that's a fine point to make, but I also think it's unlikely to be politically feasible, any time soon, in the US. You may have been perfectly capable of making this decision, but, in the most common case, most parents know that teenage brains driving almost adult bodies sometimes make really terrible decisions. And lots of us imagine we were much smarter than we actually were in adolescence. Moreover -- parents can be just as profoundly stupid.
I'd imagine a teenage Melanie Griffith would say she was perfectly capable of consenting to the very adult relationship she had with Don Johnson, and to which, I believe, her parents consented, as well. In retrospect, I'm not sure adult Melanie Griffith would feel the same. Or at the very least she may not allow her daughter to do the same.
Perhaps that's why we should willing to accept some guidance from things that at least can pretend to be objective -- science and journalism. Especially views critical of our priors and intuitions. And we definitely shouldn't seek to silence or de-platform anyone simply because they disagree.
Please -- vote the bastards out of office who don't take your problems seriously, but also please don't silence journalists for suggesting that there is more to this question than two simple American Left and Right narratives. Some of us need that kind of help to understand the world.
> We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.
So instead we need to enable parents to allow healthcare to disfigure their young kids when they predictably get influenced from social media and their peers?
How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
It's a medical matter. If medical officials broadly agree that having a prosthetic limb gives someone better quality of life than having no limb, then yes, we should disfigure the human body by attaching a prosthetic.
Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
It's disgusting to try and use the law to force medical professionals to give sub-par care for no good reason.
> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
> Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
This is not really true any more at this point in history. European countries have either backed away from pediatric gender affirming care, or they never allowed it in the first place. It's increasingly the case that the US and Canada are the outliers in the broader consensus that the evidence for the benefits of endocrine interventions in children is too weak to justify routine prescription.
> I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
Are we really going to try and draw an equivalence between cosmetic dental braces and permanently-altering hormones? A wire pulling a kid's teeth into places is not comparable to chemically castrating the kid for a few years and giving them opposite-sex hormones in their mid-teens. The measured benefits to the latter have to be way higher to justify that level of invasiveness and permanent change.
These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
> These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
No, let’s be real, this isn’t a dominant narrative in public discourse outside this thread. You’re irritated that you can’t simply assert a de novo principle of pediatric ethics that bans gender-affirming care without absurd collateral damage.
This isn't a de novo principle. It's pretty basic evidence based medicine: if a treatment has negative side effects, there needs to be significant evidence of positive outcomes to justify this treatment.
What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
Talking with you is very difficult when you continue to conflate various claims and stances that are logically distinct.
OP said:
>>> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
Asserting this as an ethical principle leads to absurdities. That’s all that occurred here.
> What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
This is irrelevant to the point at hand (nobody here was discussing European medical policy), but this is not accurate. It’s strange, because you’ve correctly summarized what occurred elsewhere.
> Danish guidelines published in 2023 recommend the use of puberty blockers on transgender patients at either Tanner stage two or three, as a means of buying time for patients to consider their gender more fully before making a decision.[119]
> In 2020, Finland revised its guidelines to prioritise psychotherapy over medical transition.[120] However, these guidelines are a recommendation, not a mandate.[121][122] The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.[123][124]
> In 2023, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board, an independent non-governmental organization, issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.[148][149] The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board is not responsible for setting healthcare policy, and the Directorate, which is, has not implemented the recommendations, though they have said they are considering them.[148][146][125] Misinformation that Norway had banned gender affirming care proliferated on social media.[146]
Misinformation, by the way, that you continue to peddle in.
> While European health authorities aren’t instituting bans on treatment, currently minors in six European countries—Norway, U.K. Sweden, Denmark, France and Finland—can access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones only if they meet strict eligibility requirements, usually in the context of a tightly controlled research setting. (Italics in the original)
Read through your quotes carefully:
> The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.
And how many of such cases were granted? This could be a de facto ban, if no such cases are granted.
> issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.
Again, how many new patients are being put on blockers after this recommendation?
You're trying to spin this false narrative that patients with gender dysphoria are still being prescribed puberty blockers as normal treatment for GD. This is not the case. Even though the legislatures in these countries haven't banned the treatment, effectively nobody is getting puberty blockers for childhood GD in these countries.
Actions speak louder than words. You can split hairs about how "recommending" the discontinuation of puberty blocks is not ban. But at the end of the day, what unambiguously true is that the vast majority of patients who are prescribed blockers in the US would not be prescribed blockers in these countries. If you have actual stats on the number of new patients prescribed blockers in these countries in 2025, by all means share it.
I read a study that said a majority of trans kids grow up to be gay if they don't take puberty blockers. I think it's wrong to force a gay kid to be trans.
> he doesn't go out of his way to avoid these controversies.
Science journalist covering the science of perhaps the most salient social issue of our time?
Don't get me wrong -- there are other really important stories which aren't being covered as well as they should be, but Singal's beat would seem to be at least as important as... most anything linked from HN on a daily basis.
> People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him.
I totally agree. By turning Singal into a boogeyman he almost certainly isn't, people are only feeding his social and journalistic capital. Singal is just someone who disagrees with you (in that classically liberal 90s American sense). Efforts to cancel or ban him have made some look like they don't have actual arguments to contribute.
That's how Singal makes those with opposing views look ridiculous.
> However, as time has gone by, Bluesky’s traffic has declined (X’s has as well) and some of its users have become increasingly upset at its moderation decisions, including allowing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal to remain as users of the platform.
The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines.
Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking.
Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
It's worse than that, as the linked TC article links to an explanation of his ban-worthy views that, if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US. (Purposefully not referencing them here. The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream.)
Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
You'll need to explain this a little bit more, because the TC article seems to indicate the issue is that he is accused of targeted harassment. I doubt you could design a poll to make people vote 85% in favor of targeted harassment.
> Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
Yup.
As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.
To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.
Not to mention that it's unreasonable to levy that accusation even to someone who buys a Tesla today. Doing business with someone does not construe agreement with everything that person does. And while it's everyone's right to decide that they, personally, don't wish to buy a Tesla on the basis of Elon's beliefs, it's nobody's right to demand that everyone else must do so or else they're a Nazi.
The _actual_ trouble with Bluesky is that it's just a retread of Twitter with only a few minor tweaks, right down to the inevitable moderation and governance problems from shoving every user into a single shared social space and having a single centralized point of failure.
It's not 2012 anymore, and the modern mainstream social media ecosystem has turned into an utter disaster area. If you're going to do social media in the 2020's, you need something better, not the same tired ideas and empty promises about "We'll do it _right_ this time around, honest."
Mastodon, for all its faults, at the very least was truly and demonstrably decentralized.
A decentralized system would allow for that to happen tbh. That 85% can exist in their bubble but other actors who see them as dangerous and unsafe should have the means to mute/disconnect.
Even better: the only “evidence” of Singal’s “anti-trans” views are that his work has been quoted by anti-trans politicians and activists. This is an absolute ridiculous bar to have. Anyone who follows him would be hard-pressed to describe him as “anti-trans” unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement of self ID and medical transition interventions for minors is “anti-trans”.
Indeed, Singal is a journalist you go to when you want to read a thoughtful, data-driven analysis of a controversial issue.
He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex and highly polarized topics and picking them apart in a way that invites readers to consider different perspectives.
Unfortunately, that in itself is a polarizing approach, as many people just want their pre-existing beliefs reinforced.
Speaking of confirmation bias, do you disagree with Singal about anything in particular?
What about agreement?
Who else have you read on this 'controversial issue'? Why did you consider them less persuasive than a journalist with no particular expertise?
Why have you not named what the 'issue' is?
Are 'people' an 'issue' to be solved in general, or just in this case?
If we changed topics to 'what should be done about the "autism issue"', does your opinion change? If so, why? There are perfectly valid questions being brought up by heterodox thinkers all the time. We're not even certain that those people experience emotions, there's literally no way to tell, and we shouldn't shy away from hard questions and even harder truths, don't you think?
Do you believe that the executive branch of the federal government is best-suited to dealing with undesirable minorities generally? If so, what national-level 'solutions' currently being discussed in the halls of power are your favorites?
In the spirit of cooperation, I'll go first. Openly trial-ballooning the revocation of the second amendment for trans people is my favorite in terms of pure audacity.
I wanted to give you (and the website you linked) the benefit of the doubt since with all the accusations they make there is a link in there. I thought it was sources of Jesse actually doing any of this stuff (which he didn't but I am willing to be proven wrong) .. but no. Those links are all just internal info dumps and almost nothing of the accusations on the page is sourced .. at all.
Right, the website lists the accusations with links, but the links seem unrelated to the accusations.
For example, I'd expect "criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors" to link to some kind of article describing what Jesse Singal said about this topic and why it's incorrect, but instead it links to a general page about "healthcare providers serving gender diverse youth" that doesn't even mention anything about the accused person or their writings.
Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
Speaking to your broader point about the 'death' of a platform. The people that made bsky what it is now (good and ill) are precisely the people you are blaming for its downfall, which is weird. Normally when you run a business you want your users to remain so that you might profit.
Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I've seen bsky users chat casually about their rpe and death-threat ratio before and after leaving twitter, and for that alone, I would choose the 'threat lite' platform for as long as it remained so.
> "The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream."
I don't agree that this is the question, nor do I agree with the your unsupported number. This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal. Was the Gaza genocide not a genocide until the polls caught up with what we could all see was happening?
I don't even think you believe what your wrote. If the 'views' in question are truly shared by 85%!* of a population that never agrees on anything, then surely there's no problem with sharing them on this forum? A guarantee of 85% positive karma is awaiting you if you just speak your truth. It's the Trump era, and you can say the 'r-word' and the 't-slur' now. What was actually holding you back?
> This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal.
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
I haven't used FB in years but Twitter is very (stupidly and incoherently, but very actively) moderated. Unless you are being technical and saying that Twitter doesn't exist and so isn't moderated, and the moderated thing is X, but...
X then. By unmoderated I mean it's a cess-pool of pay-boosted groypers, crypto ad accounts, ai accounts, sex accounts, pure scams, ai generated underage girlfriends, and actual CSAM, that go mostly ignored if they shell out 8 USD.
I'm sure some actual humans manage to still get banned from time to time, but you can't be telling me that things haven't changed for the worse right? Do they even have a 'trust and safety' team anymore?
Do you have a source for any of this? I've never seen any of those.
Well, except the groypers, but that's a feature, not a bug, as they otherwise are not breaking the law or platfom rules and therefore deserve to be on the platform just as anyone else does.
> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago?
> It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies.
The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.
> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.
> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.
4chan has changed the way that discourse happens online, and it has definitely leaked to X at the very least. Incel lingo especially, you might even use it yourself being completely unaware. I'd call it as a style of reactionary discourse, where the most 'controversial/engaging' thing is elevated and 'ironic' nihilism is the default viewpoint. This is now fully automated, but it needn't be forever so. These companies would do well to learn how to enter the post-exponential phase of their life-cycle.
crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.
AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.
There was an article about this issue on techcrunch yesterday, and it linked to a long discussion on Bluesky about whether "clanker" was a slur that should be banned. JC. What a waste of time by some people.
There seem to be a lot of people on Bluesky who don’t think it’s wrong to post reply-spam about their favorite grievances even when it’s entirely off topic. Complaining about Singal is an example. It’s the sort of thing that would be downvoted to oblivion on Hacker News.
For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.
This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?
If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.
If you're talking about moot and kiwifarms that wasn't merely "user pressure" like large customers threatening to walk - it was a harassment campaign hitting up the legal department and cloudflare decided they didn't want to bother dying on that hill
I have been halfway following the Farm's status for the past couple years from null's telegram/forum posts, I didn't know he spoke about the situation at length anywhere.
But I guess users also expect that there's freedom of opinions on the platform within the set rules. If users are merely being banned based on their opinion, that doesn't sound like a healthy environment.
> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.
To answer your question: because truth is no defense. How many times have you seen some statement accused of being something-ist, instead of simply false? How often did in further arguing the factuality of the original statement not even come up?
> His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable.
Do you intend this to include his almost entirely uncritical coverage of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria”? How well do you believe he researched and fact-checked the claims of Lisa Littman? Was he simply misled that her retracted study was real science?
> Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
Perhaps his journalistic output reinforces your beliefs, but that’s no reason to overstate the quality of his journalism.
> Why do you believe that description applies to Singal? His work is well-researched, grounded and reasonable. Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of journalistic ethics.
Nobody has cast false aspersions on him, least of all the person that you are responding to. On the contrary, your comments on this post suggest to me that your defense of Signal and your description of him as "grounded and reasonable" has more to do with your approval of his beliefs rather than an honest assessment of his work.
I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.
The most comprehensive “Singal does bad journalism” montages come from the left-wing media outlets and leftist bloggers that he’s targeted over the years. The typical HN commenter is going to immediately gloss those accounts as partisan hyperbole. And why not? It’s purely academic for some of them, and internally worldview-challenging for others.
But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
> For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.
So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.
I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.
Couldn't it be possible that chemically altering minors isn't be best course of treatment? The UK, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all stopped routine prescription of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria on the grounds that their efficacy is not clear but the negative side effects are. It's extremely hard to claim the science is settled at this point.
The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.
I welcome any novel, high-quality scientific research on better treatments for gender dysphoric children.
But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.
What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.
Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.
Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.
Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.
The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.
And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.
I’m not interested paying to read your study. The bulk of your comment is a non sequitur that conflates “novel, high-quality scientific research” with a single N=58 study that may very well be high-quality, but in any case does not propose a novel course of treatment. It has always been the case that many gender dysphoric children do not receive puberty blockers.
You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that. “Not routinely prescribed” is logically distinct from “never prescribed.”
Finally, you misrepresent conversion therapy. “Exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body” is simply an inaccurate description of both conversion therapy as practiced in the past and “gender exploration therapy” as practiced today.
> Proponents of gender-exploratory therapy acknowledge that some consider it a form of conversion practice, paradoxically resenting the suggestion while opposing bans on conversion practices on account that it would prohibit their approach. As for critiques of gender-exploratory therapy, they are presented as evidence of trans health care’s ideological capture. Yet a close comparison of gender-exploratory therapy and conversion practices reveals many conceptual and narrative similarities. How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work. Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition.
Well, anyway. I cannot quote the entire article here.
> You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that.
No, it largely does not. Most European countries at this point, if they do permit blockers at all, only permit it as part of a clinical study, not as routine treatment for gender dysphoria. This excludes all but a slim minority of (if any) patients. Pointing out that it's still legal as part of experimental trials is a nuance that doesn't affect the
>99% of patients that aren't part of a trial, and thus cannot be prescribed these substances.
Your linked publication doesn't actually interview patients who've worked with clinicians or otherwise try and dig into real-world evidence about what this clinical practice does. It's just one author postulating her opinions as fact, with no effort to back up her claims with evidence.
> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed...
There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious they were, and how incurious they invited their readers to be. This blogger never acknowledge the potential they might be wrong. Even as a nodding feint to fallibility as something we simply expect of people writing about any complex topic.
I explicitly said it and every other example of the genre was biased, so I don’t know why you’re claiming otherwise. Thanks for confirming my priors on HN users.
> I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.
I've been a member of this site for fifteen years. I know that nearly any material - not abstract - defense of transgender rights will get downvoted into invisibility, as will any attempt to name transphobia, no matter how civilly presented or exhaustively-cited.
For that same reason, I also know that it's not a worthwhile use of time to delve into substantive "debate" on these topics in this thread, or any place where transphobia is being trafficked openly, for that matter (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508592).
> The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS.
Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
My understanding is their TOS was unclear and they clarified it after the outrage, but their moderation policy didn't actually change. They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
> They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.
Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.
> Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
Even by the loosest definition what Singal did was not doxxing?
For instance, Alejandra Caraballo, like it or not, is a public figure. A role, I would add, that she has chosen for herself. She testifies before Congress FFS. When she says something in public, including on Bluesky, I'm not sure she deserves some radical right to not have it heard anywhere else. No matter what vague term you can point to in the Bluesky guidelines or TOS.
Yeah they changed the policy on off-site behavior to specifically allow his posts.
For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal.
People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
> For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal.
This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky. I would not want to rely on any service to communicate that made it against the rules to post a screenshot of a public message from someone who blocked my account on their end.
> This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky.
That’s a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. The post you were responding to was not about the merits of the rule, it is about uneven enforcement of it.
That rule would be a reason to avoid BlueSky if you are not Jesse Singal, because you could get banned for breaking it. If you are Jesse Singal it is not a reason to avoid BlueSky, because that rule does not exist for you.
The strange thing about this is that Jay and the moderation team are sympathetic to your point. They don’t think that evading blocks (or doxxing) should always be grounds for taking action against an account. For at least one user they ignore all instances of it
> he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him
I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying, keeping me in a non-consensual information bubble. It is basically deception.
> I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying
That’s neither here nor there. The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works, and abiding by it/was part of the rules for users other than Jesse Singal.
The point I made is that other users that share your disagreement with the nuclear block would get suspended or banned for evading it, whereas Jesse Singal would not/does not. The message to other users was “if you don’t like it, tough”
I say is/was because I don’t read his posts. I stopped paying close attention to all that some time after it became clear that retroactive changes to the ToS to justify (lack of) actions is the baseline for how Jay and Aaron run the site.
> The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works
I don't use Bluesky, but it sounds insane. It sounds like the bank robber who openly robbed a bank, made no attempt to disguise himself, and when questioned by the police, said he didn't understand because he'd rubbed lemon juice on his face so the cameras couldn't see him. He was so certain that would work.
Or when the idiot Boris Johnson said to national newspapers that he'd negotiate with the EU by promising them something, but he'd get the drop on dirty Brussels and he'd stick up for the plucky UK by undermining that agreement later (playing to his safe space / audience of Daily Telegraph readers)... and then he'd turn up at the negotiating table and the EU say to him "er, you know we can read your newspapers, right?"
Having some site rule about how person X can't seen person Y's posts is a trifling irrelevance if person X is a public figure and there's a legitimate journalistic interest in what person Y is saying about person X, in public.
Here are some of the things I understand Bluesky users have said:
* "i think if we all tried hard enough we could get Jesse Singal to kill himself, but that's just me"
* "me and my friends would beat Jesse Singal to death with hammers i can tell you that much"
* "I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets"
* "Jesse singal get fucked and die stupid kiddy fucker piece of shit trash sub human bitch. Fuck I hope someone breaks every bone in your body and castrated you penis and balls then beat you to death stupid bitch."
* "Jesse Singal has said many times he enjoys getting punched in the face. I am in no way endorsing or inciting violence. I am simply asking the question why not punch Jesse Singal in the face as hard as you can? It's not wrong to ask questions after all."
Now, firstly do you think Bluesky users should be posting these messages at all? But if you do, do you think Bluesky should do its utmost to make sure the target of these threats never gets to see them, and should sanction him if any concerned citizens pass on these messages to him and he acknowledges on Twitter that he has seen them?
I'm not seeing how you could draw that conclusion. The more likely explanation is that they are telling people not to build apps around it (and I assume thus the apis aren't well designed for adoption by other apps).
> This repository is used by the Signal client apps (Android, iOS, and Desktop)
as well as server-side. Use outside of Signal is unsupported.
I don't see thousands of his comments posted here for outrage every day but that has been his job for decades. People step in when he said something mean and point fingers "see that's how he always is". It's kind of a symptom of our time tbh.
> this is gonna cause more pushback regarding the rust in the kernel movement.
Only among those that don't understand that, if this is a problem, then it is Canonical problem, not a Rust problem.
To give another example, Canonical includes ZFS in Ubuntu too. And, for a while, Canonical shipped a broken snapshot mechanism called zsys with Ubuntu too. Canonical ultimately ripped zsys out because it didn't work very well. zsys would choke on more than 4000 snapshots, etc. zsys was developed in Go, while other snapshot systems developed in Perl and Python did a little less and worked better.
Now, is zsys a Go problem? Of course not. It wasn't ready because Canonical sometimes ships broken stuff.
> Only among those that don't understand that, if this is a problem, then it is Canonical problem, not a Rust problem.
(This is hard to express in a careful way where I'm confident of not offending anyone. Please take me at my word that I'm not trying to take sides in this at all.)
The dominant narrative behind this pushback, as far as I can tell, is nothing to do with the Rust language itself (aside perhaps from a few fringe people who see the adoption of Rust as some kind of signal of non-programming-related politics, and who are counter-signaling). Rather, the opposition is to re-implementing "working" software (including in the sense that nobody seems to have noticed any memory-handling faults all this time) for the sake of seemingly nebulous benefits (like compiler-checked memory safety).
The Rust code will probably also be more maintainable by Rust developers than the C code currently is by C developers given the advantages of Rust's language design. (Unless it turns out that the C developers are just intrinsically better at programming and/or software engineering; I'm pretty skeptical of that.) But most long-time C users are probably not going to want to abandon their C expertise and learn Rust. And they seem to outnumber the new Rust developers by quite a bit, at least for now.
> Rather, the opposition is to re-implementing "working" software
I understand the argument, and its sounds good as far as most things go, but it misses an important fact: In OSS, you can and should find your own bliss. If you want to learn Rust, as I did, you can do it by reimplementing uutils' sort and ls, and fixing bugs in cp and mv, as I did. That was my bliss. OSS doesn't need to be useful to anyone. OSS can be a learning exercise or it can be simply for love of the game.
The fact that Canonical wants to ship it, right now, simply makes them a little silly. It doesn't say a thing about me, or Rust, or Rust culture.
> Some would really prefer to at least be able to get some attention (and perhaps a paid job) this way.
Not that I agree, but people seem to be giving uutils lots of attention right now? A. HN front page vs. B. obscure JS framework? I'll take door "A"?
I had someone contact me for a job simply because my Rust personal project had lots of stars on Github. You really don't know what people will find interesting.
> The dominant narrative behind this pushback, as far as I can tell, is nothing to do with the Rust language itself (aside perhaps from a few fringe people who see the adoption of Rust as some kind of signal of non-programming-related politics, and who are counter-signaling).
Difficult to say with certainty, because it's easy to dress "political" resistance in respectable preference for stability. (Scare quotes because it's an amalgam in which politics is just a part.) Besides, TFA is Phoronix, whose commentariat is not known for subtlety on this topic.
Replacing coreutils is risky because of the decades of refinement/stagnation (depending on your viewpoint) which will inevitably produce snags when component utilities interact in ways unforeseen by tests -- as has happened here. But without risk there's no reward. Of course, what's the reward here is subject to debate. IMO the self-evident advantage of a rewrite is that it's prima facie evidence of interest in using the language, which is significant if there's a dearth of maintainers for the originals. (The very vocal traditionalists are usually not in a hurry to contribute.)
Is there really a dearth of maintainers for the originals? They already work fine, no? To me it sounds a bit like: "Addition has become stagnant, so we need to re-implement it in higher category theory. Sure, 99% of even research mathematicians don't benefit from that re-implementation. But no risk no reward! If vocal traditionalists refuse to contribute to reinventing the wheel, maybe they're working on something that hasn't been refined/stagnated decades ago, but I won't take their perspective (that addition already works fine) seriously, unless they start re-implementing addition as well."
so why create Wayland when we had X? why create another linux distro when there are so many already? why create C if we already had assembly? why create new model cars every year? why architect new homes every year? What you are proposing is we stop making changes or progress.
Because X11 had a lot of issues that got papered over with half-baked extensions and weird interfaces to the kernel.
The problem is that Wayland didn't feel like doing the work to make fundamental things like screen sharing, IMEs, copy-paste, and pointer warping actually ... you know ... work.
The problem Wayland now has is that they're finally reaching something usable, but they took so long that the assumptions they made nearly 20 years ago are becoming as big a problem as the issues that were plaguing X11 when Wayland started. However, the sunk cost fallacy means that everybody going to keep pounding on Wayland rather than throwing it out and talking to graphics cards directly.
And client rendered decorations was always just a mind bogglingly stupid decision--but that's a Gnome problem rather than a Wayland issue.
Rust is trying to systemically improve safety and reliability of programs, so the degree to which it succeeds is Rust's problem.
OTOH we also have people interpreting it as if Rust was supposed to miraculously prevent all bugs, and they take any bug in any Rust program as a proof by contradiction that Rust doesn't work.
> Rust is trying to systemically improve safety and reliability of programs, so the degree to which it succeeds is Rust's problem.
GNU coreutils first shipped in what, the 1980s? It's so old that it would be very hard to find the first commit. Whereas uutils is still beta software which didn't ask to be representative of "Rust", at all. Moreover, GNU coreutils are still sometimes not compatible with their UNIX forebears. Even considering this first, more modest standard, it is ridiculous to hold this software to it, in particular.
You would not be able to find the first commit. The repositories for Fileutils, Shellutils, and Texutils do not exist, at least anywhere that I can find. They were merged as Coreutils in 2003 in a CVS repository. A few years later, it was migrated to git.
If anyone has original Fileutils, Shellutils, or Textutils archives (released before the ones currently on GNU's ftp server), I would be interested in looking at them. I looked into this recently for a commit [1].
In this case I agree. Small, short-running programs that don't need to change much are the easy case for C, and they had plenty of time to iron out bugs and handle edge cases. Any difficulties that C may have caused are a sunk cost. Rust's advantages on top of that get reduced to mostly nice-to-haves rather than fixing burning issues.
I don't mean to tell Rust uutils authors not to write a project they wanted, but I don't see why Canonical was so eager to switch, given that there are non-zero switching costs for others.
>OTOH we also have people interpreting it as if Rust was supposed to miraculously prevent all bugs, and they take any bug in any Rust program as a proof by contradiction that Rust doesn't work.
Yeah, that's such a tired take. If anything this shows how good Rust's guarantees are. We had a bunch of non-experts rewrite a sizable number of tools that had 40 years of bugfixes applied. And Canonical just pulled the rewritten versions in all at once and there are mostly a few performance regressions on edge cases.
I find this such a great confirmation of the Rust language design. I've seen a few rewrites in my career, and it rarely goes this smoothly.
It might be a bit of bad publicity for those who want to rewrite as much as possible in Rust. While Rust is not to blame, it shows that just rewriting something in Rust doesn't magically make it better (as some Rust hype might suggest). Maybe Ubuntu was a bit too eager in adopting the Rust Coreutils, caring more about that hype than about stability.
> OTOH we also have people interpreting it as if Rust was supposed to miraculously prevent all bugs
That is the narative that rust fanboys promote. AFAIK rust could be usefull for a particular kind of bugs (memory safety). Rust programs can also have coding errors or other bugs.
It's not about rust specifically, it's about replacing working software with rewrites and going from a code base written in a single language to one written in multiple.
Reminds me of Brendan Gregg's "CPU Utilization is Wrong" but this blog fails to discuss that blog's key point that CPU utilization is a measure of whether or not the CPU is busy, including whether the CPU is waiting [0]. That blog also explains that the IPC (instructions per cycle) metric actually measures useful work hidden within that busy state.
> Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date.
Your distro could very easily include bcachefs if it wishes? Although I think the ZFS + Linux situation is mostly Linux religiosity gone wild, that very particular problem doesn't exist re: bcachefs?
The problem with bcachefs is the problem with btrfs. It mostly still doesn't work to solve the problems ZFS already solves.
>> I can think of non-religious reasons to want to avoid legal fights with Oracle.
Oh, certainly, but that's really not the problem posed right now. Oracle's own lawyers have said they see no problem with the combination, and Ubuntu has shipped the Linux + ZFS combination for years without a lawsuit.[0][1]
In the 1990s, Microsoft/SCO, like you, would also fear monger about open source and lawsuits, and we in the OSS community mostly called this "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Whereas now, almost 10 years into this experiment, we know more about the ZFS + Linux combination, and what Oracle will do about it, than most other open questions in OSS, and the answer is that some in OSS community have chosen to instead participate in the same kind of FUD because of a very online, very uninformed internecine licensing debate.
> Although I think the ZFS + Linux situation is mostly Linux religiosity gone wild,
I think the Linux Kernel just doesn't want to be potentially in violation of Oracle's copyrights. That really doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, even if it feels pointless to you.
Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.