My criticism of there being a few corporate gatekeepers of communication that are bullied by the government to censor content it doesn’t like is valid. You’re free to believe whatever neocon libertarian nonsense you wish.
And what if the corporate gatekeepers censor themselves due to market forces instead? Like advertisers threatening to pull funding because they don’t think it’s a good look for them.
Outside of coercion from government, self-censorship is just an expression of personal liberty and freedom of association, isn't it?
You can't believe in free speech and also believe platforms should be forced to publish speech they don't want, or advertisers to associate themselves with it.
I believe that in a free democratic society people should be allowed to read a letter written by an Islamic fundamentalist who orchestrated the largest terrorist attack against the United States.
I believe people should be allowed to form their own opinions about his motives beyond what US government propagandists want the US public to believe.
Contrary to public belief, I don’t think they did it because they hate our freedom. And I think if you do believe that and you also see no problem with platform after platform trying to scrub the document from public view then you’ve got your head on backwards.
I think most would agree that writing shouldn't get banned like 1984 style, but tiktok picks and chooses random videos to shove in people's faces to watch, so it's not like users would have looked up this letter and were prevented from reading it, it sounds like they're trying to prevent videos about it from being shoved in people's faces who weren't looking for it, it's a bit different don't you think?
No. The US government should stay out of other countries business’. They should even stay out of NATO. But again, I’m sure you don’t have that level of consistency.
Right because only fiscal libertarians have any consistency.
TikTok as a communication platform should be regulated, but not censored. There should be democratic debate about communication platforms and their responsibilities but they should favor allowing communication even when it is unpopular. And they certainly shouldn’t be shutting down communication that the ruling class finds unfavorable or detrimental to their rule.
It’s not a simple yes or no answer despite what your beliefs might lead you to think.
Oh this is hilarious. Not only do you confirm that you wouldn't support them doing what they choose to with their service in the absence of government intervention, you would actively support the same government intervention you pretended to be against if it meant you could force them to do something you benefit from.
If you wanted to prove that consistency wasn't exclusive to me you've done a pretty poor job. Combing through someone's account to avoid a yes or no question is especially pathetic.
Since we recently asked you to stop repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and you've since done it many times, I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We've banned this account for using HN exclusively for ideological battle. Regardless of your ideology, that's not what HN is for, and it destroys what is for.
Normally I'd warn someone before banning, but (a) I couldn't find a single comment in your account history that wasn't like this, and (b) you've been breaking other site guidelines regularly as well, such as the ones against snark, name-calling, and so on.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Funny to see this make headlines here, where many people would gladly support using mass surveillance to fund the government. The same ones that support financial privacy restrictions are quick to play victim when the same violations are applied in ways that don’t benefit them.
That's how it works. People support policies that are beneficial and don't support policies that are harmful. Privacy is just one component of this evaluation. If we demand absolute privacy with no government oversight, even by warrants, the cost of increased crime will be larger than the marginal benefit from increased privacy. If we demand that nobody can hold somebody else's data, the cost to businesses that rely on their employees getting information from their company's logged communications will be larger than the marginal benefit of increased privacy.
It’s how it works for people that lack consistency. If you don’t want absolute privacy then you are also free to support an absolute lack of it. “I want privacy except when it stops me from getting at other people’s money” is not an acceptable option.
No, they're consistent on what matters. Privacy isn't the be-all and end-all of utility. It's merely one component. Being able to take back money stolen by a crook is something that most people value, and they are happy to pay the privacy cost to get it. A foolish consistency (insisting on absolute consistency for the wrong concept) is the hobgoblin of little minds.
You are free to sacrifice your own privacy. This discussion is about whether you have the right to forcefully sacrifice mine. You’re only consistent in doing what benefits you, even if that means your support for a policy depends on who is involved and not what it does.
Yes, I am free to sacrifice yours. That's how laws work. Try to proclaim yourself a sovereign citizen and tell a judge that warrants don't apply to you if you don't believe me. If you don't like laws, there are lawless places like Somalia for you to call home.
I support policies based on what they do. That includes weighing everything they do, not just their effect on privacy.
I presented a consistent idea. Net benefit. It's a consistency that actually makes sense instead of ending up with crooks taking money from everyone and people being unable to stop it because they couldn't understand the concept of laws.
> You will support privacy for one person but not another solely depending on how much money you think you could nab.
Yes, I support less privacy for people being investigated for crimes. Are you really unfamiliar with the concept of a warrant? Everything I've said is really basic stuff, and it's truly mind-boggling that I have to explain it at all.
Your question is nonsensical. A law makes sense if it is beneficial. If it isn't, it should be changed. While it is in force, it applies to everyone. This is something that first graders learn at around the same time they're introduced to the idea of democracy. Given the comment votes, it appears you're the only person who still doesn't understand.
It should be neither. Taxes should be a service fee proportional to your usage of a government service. Income shouldn’t even be part of the equation. The USPS charges more if you want to ship heavier packages, not if you get a raise. Personal vs corporate is irrelevant. Pay your fair share.
That works for things that only benefit the person directly using the service, and shipping packages would probably be one of those. It doesn't work if you get indirect benefits from other people using the service. For example, how would you quantify how much you use of, say, a government funded mental healthcare system when your neighbour uses it to get a handle on their life and stop flinging garbage over your fence every evening? Or of law enforcement apprehending a burglar a few blocks away who may or may not target your home next if they were left to their own devices?
That’s correct, you pay for what you use and don’t pay for what you don’t. It’s irrelevant as to how much something someone else chose to do benefitted me. My lemonade stand doesn’t owe the cinema you decided to open up next to me any money. The only case where you ever have a right to force me to pay you is if we both voluntarily entered an agreement to transact. The “indirect” talking point is something some people like to say so that they can arbitrarily increase someone else’s tax burden by claiming they benefited from an infinite list of things without needing to quantify anything. Simultaneously they can arbitrarily decrease their own tax burden by choosing a threshold of income above their own at which they decide these “indirect benefits” come into play. I’m not interested in that argument. Pay your fair share.
> My lemonade stand doesn’t owe the cinema you decided to open up next to me any money.
Generally, if a private cinema opens up and stays open, it's because they've determined that they profit enough from their direct patronage that it's worthwhile. Since there's already enough incentive in place for this cinema to exist, I don't think it's necessary to get surrounding businesses to fund them. Although in an ideal world, they should get something for indirect improvements to surrounding businesses, but the issue is that there's no way to actually quantify how much benefit you get from it. The current system works well enough in this case.
On the other hand, if you open up a cinema that operates at a loss while propping up surrounding businesses by bringing people in, then your lemonade stand definitely owes them. If you have two competing lemonade stands in the area that only exist because of that cinema and one of them decides to fund the cinema to keep it running, then it increases operational expenses for that one lemonade stand, allowing the other to outcompete. It's a prisoner's dilemma problem. Everyone paying means everyone wins, while if one person doesn't pay, then they win regardless of what everyone else does. Pay your fair share.
I find it hilarious that you decided to respond to a single sentence out of my comment, and then proceeded to say exactly what I claimed you would say in the rest of my comment. If you can quantify the "indirect benefits" I get from services you chose to use without my input, then you can quantify the indirect benefits a lemonade stand gets from the theatre that opened up next to it. Stop trying to have it both ways.
If AMC opens a theatre next to a kid's lemonade stand at a loss, indirectly benefiting the stand, do you believe he owes AMC money? I'm looking for a yes or no answer, or I'll answer for you. An essay that runs around the question is not an option. If you truly believe the fair share includes "indirect benefit" then your answer should be a yes.
> If you can quantify the "indirect benefits" I get from services you chose to use without my input, then you can quantify the indirect benefits a lemonade stand gets from the theatre that opened up next to it. Stop trying to have it both ways.
I don't see where I'm trying to have anything both ways. I said that you can't quantify this, and that's the entire problem with making people pay for exactly what they use.
> If AMC opens a theatre next to a kid's lemonade stand at a loss, indirectly benefiting the stand, do you believe he owes AMC money? I'm looking for a yes or no answer, or I'll answer for you. An essay that runs around the question is not an option. If you truly believe the fair share includes "indirect benefit" then your answer should be a yes.
Yes. If the two businesses coexisting means that everyone gains more in aggregate than if neither businesses were to exist, then we want incentives in place to encourage them to exist. There's no incentive for this AMC to exist if they gain nothing from it.
> The “indirect” talking point is something some people like to say so that they can arbitrarily increase someone else’s tax burden by claiming they benefited from an infinite list of things without needing to quantify anything. Simultaneously they can arbitrarily decrease their own tax burden by choosing a threshold of income above their own at which they decide these “indirect benefits” come into play.
I thought it would've been clear that my elaboration of your example is meant to address this point without having to quote it, but I guess it wasn't. Sure, that's a possible reason for holding this position, but the existence of short-sighted greedy people does not make the benefits to society any less valid. I presented you with an example of how the benefits can manifest. If you want to debate against this point, some questions you can answer include: Do you understand how this extrapolates to more complex settings like the society we currently live in? Do you agree that these benefits exist? If not, then why? Do you believe there are better ways to encourage this kind of outcome? If so, what are they? Saying "Yeah, but some people only want what's good for society because they benefit from it" is not a good argument against it because the entire point is for everyone to benefit from it. I hope that we can at least agree that we want to build a society with the incentives set up such that we all work together in achieving something that is greater than the sum of the parts, and that is capable of ensuring a minimum quality of life for everyone. If not, then the we just want different things from our society and the discussion is pointless.
In any case, to more directly address this point in case it wasn't clear enough, everyone gets indirect benefits regardless of how much income you have. So with that in mind, since we can't quantify the benefits, the most fair solution is to just have everyone pay the same amount. Now one of the services we want to exist is a social safety net, which means providing assistance to those in the lower end of the income range. We can have a system that has everyone pay into it equally, then pay out again based on need, but considering that the segment of the population that this directly serves are those who wouldn't be able to pay into it, you get the same end result (monetarily) whether you give them a bill they can't pay alongside money to pay said bill, or if you reduced their tax burdens. Then on the upper end of the income spectrum, you can afford to pay a lot more into these services without a significant negative impact on your quality of life, and in doing so, you could significantly increase that of many others. So it's consistent with the goals of increasing everyone's quality of life. It has nothing to do with how much indirect benefit you get from these services.
That said, we're now talking about merits of a progressive tax system. I didn't want to expand too much on this originally because it is completely tangential to the original discussion. As a reminder, I was telling you that a lot of services, if set up to be pay-per-use, would not work because you get a prisoners dilemma scenario. Would you like to refute this or provide alternate solutions?
Deportation orders in the United States are executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE agents are authorized to carry firearms such as handguns, rifles, and shotguns.
ok. Say we didn't have ICE. How will you now justify holding others at gunpoint to violate a contract you voluntarily signed while having the part that benefits you still enforced? Or is immigration the only thing you were thinking of when you asked for more laws?
This isn’t about more laws, but about fair enforcement of existing ones. Workers, regardless of their immigration status, should have the right to decent working conditions and fair wages. When any worker is exploited, it affects the labor market as a whole. The goal should be to create systems that uphold human rights and labor standards for everyone.
There you go. So to answer the question you avoided, yes you are the only one asking to literally threaten others at gunpoint to enforce laws that allow you to violate a contract you voluntarily signed. You do not believe that force is only justified in response to force, despite pretending to make that your position in your initial comment. Thanks for playing.
It’s amazing how bad the competition is. The A17 pro has 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The Google G3 has 9 cores of 3 different types, the fastest being slower than Apple’s performance cores, the most efficient being less efficient than apple’s efficiency cores. And it’s a phone so you don’t take advantage of the extra parallelism. You just get the worst of both worlds. no wonder these android phones have 50% more battery and 50% less battery life. Is it that hard to just copy the winning formula?
A big part of Apple's "winning formula" is taking their giant piles of money and negotiating exclusive contracts for whatever is scheduled to be the most advanced semiconductor node next year.
Anyone else literally cannot compete, they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise, so they'll have to wait until the exclusivity agreement expires.
> they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise
your parent comment's example is literally Google, world-class experts at burning money on developers producing a million dead-end products and abandoning them a year later.
if Google would get some sensible leadership, focus on a few core products, and stick with them for a decade, they'd have just as much money to spend. But "focus" and "Google" seem to have become opposites.
My point: the 'winning formula' of Apple is laser-sharp focus: have a few products, do them as well as anyone else or better, and only introduce a new product if it is mature-ish and very profitable. (We'll see how the vision headset fits in here)
> My point: the 'winning formula' of Apple is laser-sharp focus: have a few products, do them as well as anyone else or better, and only introduce a new product if it is mature-ish and very profitable. (We'll see how the vision headset fits in here)
They also aimed at markets that are ripe for disruption, because of weak competition: The MP3 player market before the iPod, the PDA-with-a-SIM-card market before the iPhone, etc. pp. all could be reasonably disrupted by just delivering a reasonably (but not even best-in-class, specs wise) product with better UX (not hard, in the cases mentioned) and massive marketing. You can't do that in a heavily competitive market that's already full of these products. VR headsets are probably closer to the "ripe for disruption" end of the spectrum, and I think the Vision will probably do well. But I doubt the "Apple Car" plans that have been floating around for 10 years now will ever lead to anything.
Well, they got into that position starting from a near bankrupt company, which couldn't negotiate anything exclusive, and which was for a long time at the mercy of Motorola and the Intel.
So it's something they took advantage of after they grew (well, which company at their scale wouldn't ask for the best wholesale deals?), but not what made them big in the first place.
What made them big in the first place were the iPod/iTunes/iPhone and the ludicrous revenues from the App Store.
The iPod's only notable hardware that wasn't just a random off the shelf part was the click wheel, the chips were all off-the-shelf (until old iPhone chips counted as that), and iPhones didn't get custom chips until the 4.
So I guess the other part of the winning formula is "use market dominance in one sector to subsidize expansion into the next". I guess that's indeed one area where Google could reasonably try to be less inept, but I think all the institutional inertia makes that impossible by now. They'll go the DEC route of just drowning in their own internal problems until someone buys them up.
>What made them big in the first place were the iPod/iTunes/iPhone and the ludicrous revenues from the App Store.
The iPod/iPhone yes, but "in the first place" the App Store was insignificant (the remenues at 2010 was < 2 billion dollars worldwide, so Apple's take was less than $600 million).
For comparison the iPod had that profit already in 2004, and around 3 billion in 2010 (when the iPhone had already started replacing it).
So, the App Store was hardly ludicrous revenue for its first 3-4 years, in fact less than 10% of Apple's revenue. The iTunes store even less so.
It's the iPod and then iPhone that made Apple's dominance. The big store profit came later (and the iTunes/Music profit never was that big).
The most notable hardware of the original iPods were they took a gamble during design on soon to be released high capacity 1.8 inch hard drives. Before that MP3 players were either low capacity flash based like the Rio (I remember having one with just 64MB!) or monstrous discman sized devices running 2.5 or 3.5 inch platters like the Nomad.
"Is it that hard to just copy the winning formula?"
yes it is, thanks to IP law. And back in the day Steve Jobs already wanted thermonuclear war on Samsung, because he felt their flagship at the time was too close to the IPhone.
To be fair, there was a moment when Samsung was in full copy mode. All the way down to having their own version of the dock connector and a retail box that closely mimicked Apple. In retrospect, a bit embarrassing for a company we know is capable of much more.
Steve Jobs wanted nuclear war with Google (not Samsung) because Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board of directors while the iPhone was being developed, so Jobs felt Schmidt was basically doing insider trading for google to develop Android.
It's not that simple though though. I have never got through an entire day with an iPhone (XR, 12, 13 Pro). I'm just hitting 2 days easily with my Pixel 7a with the same crap on it. My daughter just took an iPhone 15 back because it won't get through the day.
There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.
I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...
And like before, if you isolate the philosophy in their work, it’s useless. Philosophy by a mathematician is still philosophy. There is a clear distinction between rigorous proofs and blathering about how people think, or making up a bunch of axioms to prove god (Godel). You don’t get to take credit for contributions from other fields.
How do you isolate the philosophy without engaging in philosophy yourself?
My suspicion is that most people who don't like philosophy have lots of philosophical ideas - they are just really dogmatic about them and don't like to be challenged.
Philosophy is like maths. You can build a lot of bridges with a crummy understanding of maths. The Romans did it with the most pathological notation for numbers imaginable, and lacking all sorts of basic mathematical concepts. So you can say all that maths stuff is just nonsense and you can do it all by these seventeen-hundred ambiguous rules of thumb you really carefully follow. It's just you're not actually avoiding maths - you're just doing it in a really ad-hoc, inflexible, and inelegant manner. That's what people are doing when they say philosophy is a load of bunk but they still believe a whole load of things about the universe.
Criticizing philosophy is philosophy so it cannot be criticized, the classic philosopher get out of jail free card.
Philosophy is absolutely nothing like math. Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities. Changing how you interpret math doesn’t change the physical world. Philosophers do what is equivalent of arguing that prime numbers aren’t real because base 10 is arbitrary. Philosophers have proven nothing about the universe, those are the contributions of physics. The things philosophers discuss about the universe is more akin to religion and mythology. You, again, keep trying to take credit for the work of other fields.
> Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities.
That's just wildly wrong. I think you should probably just try to deepen your understanding of fields you're interested in, and leave your prejudices at the door.
All of the mathematicians I mentioned believed philosophy was relevant to their mathematical work, and that period of work on the foundations of mathematics was accompanied by extensive discussion of the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. Even if we pretend philosophy never involves rigorous proofs, mathematical theorems do not spring out of thin air, and saying "anything that isn't a formal, rigorous proof is useless to mathematics" is like saying "anything that isn't a finished house is useless to the process of building a house". https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236.pdf discusses this in more detail.
Here's a paper by Tarski, widely cited by both mathematicians and philosophers and containing both formal and informal reasoning: http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/R... I don't know how one could "remove the philosophy" from this work without making it far less useful to mathematicians. The entire reason the T-schema is used in model theory is because of Tarski's philosophical argument that it provides a meaningful definition of truth.
It doesn't matter what they believed. Philosophy never involves rigorous proofs. By adding them you would just end up doing math. A partially finished proof is still math and not equivalent to 20 pages of worthless babble about human understanding. Throwing darts at the page and putting equations where they land will not change that. Philosophers constantly pull from the same small bag of tricks - inserting "science" or "philosophy of <science>" or "meta<science>" into their titles, Sokaling in random disconnected bits of scientific terminology to sound more credible, and trying to claim criticizing philosophy is philosophy to avoid criticism. It's unconvincing and embarrassing to hear from the self declared intellectuals responsible for some of the biggest false beliefs about science in history.
If by "philosophy" you mean work that not only lacks a rigorous proof, but isn't even a step in the direction of a rigorous proof, you'll be happy to hear that many philosophers - sorry, mathematicians who mistakenly consider themselves philosophers - share your opinion of it. When I said "philosophy" I was referring to the academic field, which includes a lot of work that you consider math. While I think complete non-mathematician philosophers like Deleuze have value in their own way, I certainly wouldn't call them rigorous or useful to modern science.
I'm not clear on whether you think The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages falls into the "actually just mathematics" category or the "making up random equations" category. If the latter, I assure you that Tarski's proofs are sound. Here's a simple explanation of the most famous result from the paper in case you found the original proof inaccessible: https://qubd.github.io/files/TarskiUndefinability.pdf. A more general discussion of Tarski's work and other axiomatic theories of truth can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Mathematics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/
It doesn't matter what you consider yourself. Or who is doing to considering, despite your efforts to emphasize that.
The proofs are math. We've already established that math is sound. This discussion is not about the merits of math, we're talking about philosophy. Things like "The transfer of understanding from one person to another is not automatic. It is hard and tricky. Therefore, to analyze human understanding of mathematics, it is important to consider who understands what, and when." are philosophy. It's not difficult to separate, you're just trying to make it seem like it is to blur the lines between a pseudoscience and actual science. Again, disguising worthless philosophical ramblings with mathematics doesn't make your philosophy any more useful.
I am focusing on mathematics because I am more familiar with mathematics than philosophy and dislike seeing it misrepresented, particularly to use as a cudgel against a related field that I respect.
The passages that you describe as "worthless philosophical ramblings" are part of Tarski's results. He could not have left them out without obscuring the meaning of his proofs. Possibly model theory would not exist today had he done so. It would certainly have taken longer to develop.
Another instructive example is Per Martin-Lof's lectures On the Meanings of the Logical Constants and the Justifications of the Logical Laws: https://www.ae-info.org/attach/User/Martin-L%c3%b6f_Per/Othe.... Unlike Tarski's paper, this contains no formal proofs whatsoever; if the sentence you quote is worthless, then I imagine "There is no evidence outside our actual or possible experience of it. The notion of evidence is by its very nature subject related, relative to the knowing subject, that is, in Kantian terminology." is worse than worthless. Nevertheless these lectures have been of great importance in logic and computer science. You can see some of their impact in the citations here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2483744927635326348
You may be unable to find any useful meaning in this kind of writing, but most mathematicians do not share your difficulty. This is fortunate, since the field would be greatly impoverished if it purged itself of all philosophy and philosophy-adjacent work. I would normally encourage you to read https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-... on the role of non-rigorous big picture thinking in mathematics, but it deals entirely with human understanding of mathematics and is therefore only of interest to Terence Tao and other such pseudoscientists.
The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.
False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary?
Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.
We worry less about other people’s money from this side of the ocean. You lack the consistency to make a statement of support/opposition about all privacy, because like other Europeans, you feel the need to make exceptions for cases that benefit you.
