Strong disagree to both of these points. Nothing "insensitive", save your comment. Devices have audio controls, no need to repeat them in a video player-especially not one on a landing page for a product. Background music for promotional material is standard, and all too necessary.
> Devices have audio controls, no need to repeat them in a video player
You assume that the web page is the only source of audio happening on a device. If someone is listening to something on their machine while browsing articles and then needs to stop whatever is playing because the website is taking over the audio, that's very poor UX and is indeed insensitive to the user.
Suppose you have a screen reader and now you cannot hear it because a video is unnecessarily blaring music that you can't hide. 99.99% of all websites offer the user individual audio control over playing content -- for a reason.
and yet, the machine churns on. Just wanted to put a reminder here that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has not been able to audit the CIA for over 40 years [0]. Evil likes to be unaccountable, and it's gotten just that. How much more blood will we allow to spill as an American populace before we demand an end to the CIA? This list focuses mainly on foreign engagements by the agency. The domestic activities by the CIA are vast and unaccounted for, bordering on the unimaginable.
We (Americans) have been living in lies, living in shadows, living in death. There is no tangible difference between the acronyms USA and CIA. We have been sold to the devil, and we've made him our master.
Yes, I'm sure the fact that they are denying any public oversight wouldn't suggest any nefarious activities. Obviously it is not directly equatable, but to dismiss their history and pattern of actions as not continuing into the present day is ridiculous, frankly. To say that I'm being "needlessly" inflammatory. Are you kidding me?
The CIA has murdered and lied with reckless abandon for almost a century. They murdered at least one US president (JFK), and have controlled more (HW, Clinton,..). The CIA has infiltrations in major media, in our news, in our bestselling novels, the top tv shows and movies, the celebrity culture.
Their shape on the world is immense, and immensely evil. So I'm sorry if that is too far for you, but its not even close to far enough to account for the depths of darkness to the CIA.
The GAO being unable to audit the CIA, and the CIA still having the same incentives and structure as during an uninterrupted 60+ year spree of committing atrocities almost non-stop is a very good indicator that yes, they are still committing atrocities.
Which ones, we couldn't tell, that's kind of the point of the CIA. But in this case, the incentives are the same, the structure is the same, the unaccountability is the same, so past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour.
No, Cuba never intervened in the politics of other countries or engaged in assassination in other countries or sent mercenaries to other countries or exported their ideology to other countries. Only bad countries did that. That's right Cuba did not send 4,000 troops to Syria to fight against Israel in the Yom Kippur war. They also probably didn't send troops into Somalia nor support the MIR and FPMR to destabilize Chile.
>"Mr. President, I have three questions to you. Number one: did you know the nuclear warheads were there? Number two: if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of an U.S. attack that he use them? Number three: if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?"
He said, "Number one, I knew they were there. Number two, I would not have recommended to Khrushchev, I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used. Number three, 'What would have happened to Cuba?' It would have been totally destroyed." That's how close we were.
EM: And he was willing to accept that?
Yes, and he went on to say: "Mr. McNamara, if you and President Kennedy had been in a similar situation, that's what you would have done." I said, "Mr. President, I hope to God we would not have done it. Pull the temple down on our heads? My God!"
It's not even well kinda, Cuba absolutely did intervene heavily in Africa. The stereotype of some old south African mercenary that loves to kill communists is directly as a result of this war.
> It's not even well kinda, Cuba absolutely did intervene heavily in Africa.
As did the US - the CIA was instrumental in the arrest of Nelson Mandela while he was on the lam. A number of Vietnam vets went on to "fight communism" in African wars of independence.
African decolonisation and the cold war was a complex mix.On one side, you had a white settler minority ruling class, ostensibly on the side of Capitalism and western values. On the other side, you had the majority agitating for full democracy with voting rights extended beyond the minority, but found no help from the west when they requested it.
The same story played out in multiple countries, including Vietnam: they'd be rebuffed by the west, and these groups, in need of training and materiel, would look to the USSR, China and Cuba who were happy to help if the rebels/terrorists/freedom fighters could help make socialism global.
Also, one of the events on this list (The CIA's protection of "Baby Doc" Duvalier) was in no small due to the US's interest in defending off Cuban attempts at invading Haiti.
> 4,000 troops to Syria to fight against Israel in the Yom Kippur war
Supporting Arabs retaliating against an illegal land grab by Israel.
>They also probably didn't send troops into Somalia
Helping Ethiopia defend itself against aggression from Somalia, the issue of which was caused by western meddling and colonialism.
>nor support the MIR and FPMR to destabilize Chile.
Supporting forces revolting against the horrible Pinochet dictatorship.
Really, why list any of this when we are talking about unwanted CIA intervention, which usually backed murderous right wingers? Cuba's interventions were at least battling western imperialism and had the support of part of the local populations and not just the rich land owners.
Not every country has yielded control of their top-level of government to their intelligence wing(Bushes, Clinton, Obama and their teams all have ties), nor do other countries have the operational resources to conduct as far-reaching activities as the US.
No other country purposefully develops the types of technologies and techniques that we engage with to monitor and affect global power structures.
No other country develops propaganda networks (Radio Free ___) like we do, in order to corrode the trust of non-US citizens towards their governments. We literally have to invent stories of "Russian hacking" and "Russian interference" to try and conjure up some parity.
Don't try and make false equations. We are not like the world. We may possess the same apparatuses, but we use them as the devil would.
>We literally have to invent stories of "Russian hacking" and "Russian interference" to try and conjure up some parity.
Which of these stores, specifically, were invented?
State-sponsored "hacking" and "interference" (by any definition of those terms) on the part of the Russian government are as frequent as they are well-documented.
Couple of points you say "no other country" but Russia and China are definitely engaged in both.
Quite frankly it's probably only a matter of time until India develops them as well. The fact of the matter is all our history, doctrine, tactics, and studying come from living in a bi-polar world.
We aren't living in the 1940's or the Cold War, we are living in the early 1900's and we need to start studying that time to understand how to navigate and succeed in a multi-polar world (Russia, China, US, India?), or we will be fighting a trench war, while the enemy comes in with tanks and machine guns.
While other countries engage to some degree, I'm attempting to be hyperbolic to emphasize the sheer difference between US and them, which often (as it is now) gets downplayed and filtered out.
How, in the face of being presented with a list of evils the world over, are we all (us Americans) not prostrate in shame? Why do we search for some other vestige of evil to make rational our actions?
There is no rationality to the atrocities. There is no "other countries". There is US, and there is evil that must be admitted and atoned for.
> How, in the face of being presented with a list of evils the world over, are we all (us Americans) not prostrate in shame?
You're asking Americans to feel shame for the actions of an unelected agency that has subverted their democracy? And lied to them and hid those actions? Americans, as a whole, should be ashamed, not just the CIA?
Do you also demand Russians feel guilty for allowing Stalin to take power?
Yes, we should feel deep shame. We have benefitted from this for years, with lives of convenience, at the expense and exploit of millions of our brethren worldwide. It would only be naturally American to attempt to distance ourselves, to say its "just" the CIA, not us.
But it is our greed, our demand for cheaper and faster, our uncaring nature to the extractive business practices that push the CIA into action. We are complicit, every one of us, and it is only after we admit this that we can start to change. Its not about burying our heads in the sand in shame, but about understanding what we are benefitting from and having a heart for the millions pushed down to push you, as an American, up.
I don't care about the Russians. That's their problem. I'm an American. This is MY problem.
> But it is our greed, our demand for cheaper and faster, our uncaring nature to the extractive business practices that push the CIA into action.
Evocative rhetoric, that falls apart upon examination. Is it your claim that if only most Americans bought fair-trade coffee instead of the cheap stuff, the CIA would start to behave?
What about Americans that voted for politicians and presidents that promised fewer wars, or to clean up the deep state? Are they absolved of this guilt?
The CCP's tactic is to conflate criticism of the Party with criticism of the Chinese people and China itself, so that when the Party is attacked, the Chinese will also feel attacked, and rush to its defense. You are doing the same for the CIA.
As far as I know both the MSS and the FSB are pretty solidly subordinate to the rest of their government.
The US is not playing to suceed in a multipolar world. The US is playing to maintain hegemony, ie, a monopolar world. All US strategy I've seen so far, especially economic, is focused on creating two spheres of power with the US being at the helm of the dominant one.
What makes you think the CIA isn’t subordinate to the rest of the government? And moreover, what does being subordinate to the government mean when that government is a dictatorship?
The CIA has literally invaded another country by lying and deceiving the entire executive branch. That's clear cut evidence they aren't practically subordinate to the rest of the government.
Dictatorships might not be elected, they still have structure and procedure. If the Chinese MSS obeys the Politburo and doesn't withhold information from them, then they are subordinate to the government.
> The CIA has literally invaded another country by lying and deceiving the entire executive branch.
When?
> Dictatorships might not be elected, they still have structure and procedure. If the Chinese MSS obeys the Politburo and doesn't withhold information from them, then they are subordinate to the government.
I think you vastly overestimate the efficiency of authoritarian bureaucracies. Much has been written about this, there is a strong taboo directly against sharing information because sharing the wrong information can have lethal consequences. Authoritarian governments are marred from top to bottom by problems caused by friction in sharing information, and subsequent Balkanization.
You can criticize the efficiency of authoritarian governments. That doesn't have much to do with their structure. Sure, the MSS may have some issues with command, though there is no evidence for them so far, but they are still subordinate to their hierarchy.
Besides, we're in 2021 now, data issues are a lot easier to audit in these situations.
Bay of Pigs was before the Church committee, do you know the history of intelligence reform in the 1970s?
As for authoritarian governments, and their intelligence agencies, it’s not so much about “efficiency” in a technocratic sense so much as it is that I see no reason to believe that the government is in full control of them. How would we know if they weren’t? Authoritarians project an image of total control that often papers over a reality of internal disorder and dysfunction. We know, for example, that there was at least a brief coverup of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, just recently, to say nothing of the more famous examples, like Chernobyl.
The temporary coverup of the pandemic was done by a local branch of the CCP. The coverup of Tchernobyl was done by the CPSU itself. The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.
You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on. But as far as anyone can tell the opposite happened, and the Politburo got rid of Zhou Yongkang, the removal by Deng Xiaoping of Luo Qingchang, and so on, there is a clear pattern of heads of the MSS being removed and changed by the Politburo when they step out of line or don't follow the direction of the government, and so on.
This isn't unique to China, by the way. The French also keep a much tighter leach on their intelligence agencies, first by separating domestic activities from foreign activities, and then by putting them tightly in the control of the Ministry of the Interior for the first and the military for the second, affording them very little latitude.
The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes. There are credible reports that the Church committee even covered up the worst of it, see the reporting by Carl Bernstein.
And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
> The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.
This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.
> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.
I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.
There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
[citation needed]
I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.
>I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
Putin is KGB, yes, but he was only able to get power after the KGB dissolved, did he not? The KGB attempted to influence Soviet policy, but they were largely unsuccessful, which is why both times they had to use force and failed. From all the declassified documents since the fall of the USSR I can't see any evidence of control of the rest of the CPSU from the KGB.
>There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
Banning political assassinations is a good look, but we both know that's not going to do much at all.
>[citation needed]
>I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians.
Well, we know that the IC still got involved into domestic politics. The FBI for example surveilled leadership of BLM in 2014 and later, and leaked documents from 2017 showed that the FBI targeted organizations based on ideology even if they were not engaging or planning to engage in anything remotely criminal, nowadays using the excuse of left-wing domestic terrorists to do so [https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...] [https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...]
Many European intelligence agencies are as bad or even worse than the CIA, agreed. I was talking about the specific example of France, which still is not perfect, but is much better.
Putin wasn't put in power by the FSB. He was put in power by the oligarchs. Certainly during the unstable period between 1991 and 2006 more or less the FSB had considerable influence however, but that has since been resolved. Beforethen the KGB was not afforded much lattitude. The only time I can think of where the KGB attempted to go against the wishes of the government above them was in 1964, but even then they needed support from within the Politburo and still failed miserably.
Yeltsin had no choice but to collaborate with the KGB if he wanted them to execute his machinations. The rogue elements from the KGB were the reason why Yeltsin was in power to begin with. Without the KGB he would never have been able to illegally arrest Gorbachev and execute a coup.
> Without the KGB he would never have been able to illegally arrest Gorbachev and execute a coup.
I read many books on events 1990-1993. Even the two soldiers who were guarding the door when Yelzin was arresting his cabinet were hand picked through a very tight network of loyalists in the most extreme secrecy.
They had an order "see anybody resembling KGB? Fire at will"
It's a grandiose conspiracy theory of CPSU holdouts that "KGB subverted the Union!" I will believe more that Trump Donald was a communist spy, than KGB nibbling at hand that fed, and protected it from decimation at the hands everybody wanting to return the favour.
By 1991 a good portion of the CPSU had become ideologically aligned with Yeltsin. KGB officials saw the writing on the wall, and saved his ass.
He knew this very well. If he directly went against the part of the KGB that supported him he would die.
And yes, the KGB subverted the Soviet Union by removing Gorbachev. This is obvious to anyone that has any understanding of history. Removing Gorbachev could not have been anything less.
So yes, I will persist, the only reason why Yeltsin was able to gain power is because a significant faction of the KGB supported him - though not at the very highest level - while the leadership was against Gorbachev. That is to say, thanks to the KGB.
> We (Americans) have been living in lies, living in shadows, living in death. There is no tangible difference between the acronyms USA and CIA. We have been sold to the devil, and we've made him our master.
I'm curious if Notion has any plans to make the "type" property user-extensible. Given the current data-structure, which decouples the block data from the way its rendered through the type property, a user has to define only one template for rendering arrangements of UI components (boxes, bullets, etc), titles and children. Extension could operate even at the level of derivation, where users could extend current base types with custom styling (color, font, size, border, etc) and child layout. As a plus, derivation would allow for blocks to be shared, with a fallback default rendering if users don't share custom types. Given the multi-dimensional nature of the uses of Notion (for work, personal projects, life management, etc), having types that were specific to their domain (grocery list, monthly budget table, contact card) would be a useful tool to semantically separate blocks by their presentation.
I'm curious what you're using to build this. I've been playing around with a similar idea, and have been prototyping in Godot. Visually representing the connections/structures between items has been a sticking point, but I've settled on two main abstractions: stacks and surfaces, mapping to 1D and 2D arrangement. I've been hesitant to explore 3D, as it unlocks many novelties in the design of a micro-world; but I do think that a 3D space brings a lot of our instincts from the physical world into digital ones. Would be curious to hear how you're approaching the problem, if you feel like sharing.
For what i'm after, 3D is the only way to go. I'm building it in unity so you can store markdown, webpages, video and images within 3D space and relate them to each other. (so not really a tool for visualizing a production DB or anything)
I've thought about this for awhile, and I can only come up with two ideas: a) laziness or b) lack of imagination.
It's a bit of a harsh criticism, but we are spatial creatures who live in a world full of objects that are organized into different forms. The "list" is a very valuable organizational structure and convenient to implement digitally, but it is a rather simple structure, being a 1D-structure. We use "lists" (in the form of shelves and stacks) to store objects and give the collection order, but in order to interact with objects, we remove them from their list and interact with them in higher dimensions (spreading out on a desk, pinning to a wall, arranging in space, etc). The fact that we only have 1D structures in most software UIs may well be that higher-order structures are too complex to practically implement or are not viewed as necessary, but again, this is an argument out of "laziness", convenience to the developer who is implementing the UI. Or, designers and developers genuinely believe that we are most-suited to composing with 1D structures (eye-roll).
Interesting point, I do really enjoy the spatial aspect of graphs being incorporated into many knowledge tools now. I guess the valuable insight is that if 1D is bad and unwieldy, what’s a good alternative? Like a bulletin board?
(Note: I am in the early stages of developing out ideas for a similar tool, so feel free to answer with discretion.)
Part of my problem with the current software toolset is that almost all allow a single view over a document or a webpage.
In the physical world, I can have multiple books or papers open in front of me, drawing from a collection of sources concurrently rather than a single one serially. Additionally, if I open something between different apps, there is no integrated way to annotate at a layer above documents.
- What do you envision as a proper interface for digital exploration?
- Will it allow for digesting multiple sources at once?
- What will annotation, tagging and relations between documents look like?
There are references to "structured content" and the organic "building up [of] knowledge" in the Beam-ifesto. The most ready structure that I have been working with is a network of nodes, each representing a unit of digital data (a document), which can be found by file URL or by http URL. To relate these nodes, one could form "node structures" that abstract multiple nodes into a structure of some form (list, table, group, hierarchal links, etc). This offers abstraction and composability between digital concepts. While this may be private, I'm curious how you are picturing the "database" aspect of your product.
- Are you drawing at all from what we know about neural storage in your development of a "digital database"?
- How are you enumerating the possible relational structures for multiple objects?
I feel right there with you, a few years behind, but also feeling adrift post-graduation. It feels as if there's been a "junk foodification" of digital bytes (pun intended), with our relationship with digital content becoming more ephemeral. For all the miles we scroll and all the paths of URLs we travel, there is very little that allows us to create maps, way-markers or any form of bread-crumbs for us to follow later.
Because we don't have good ways to store away content for later, it sometimes feel like we are cursed to wander aimlessly, creating files and bookmarks here and there, with no real aim or purpose. On the one hand, the world of cyberspace is almost seductive for its incredible vastness and on the other, it is almost paralyzing to explore without a proper set of tools.
I am anxious for tools designed to assist in forging paths through digital ecosystems, establishing a map over digital landscapes that enable me to understand the land, and how to travel through it. Without these, it feels that whatever I do will radically fall short of what I could do.
I commented elsewhere, but look up "Insectothopter". Nefarious orgs like the CIA seem to love symbolism, so I'd imagine there's some connection between embedding themselves in public and private research and being "flies on the wall".
Yeah, I was thinking also that it could be related to some kind of "fly on the wall" symbolism. I am just wondering if it is somehow a more general level symbol in the context, not just for the CIA or in the US. Considering the CIA Labs for example, they probably do a lot more stuff than just develop dragonfly type drones, so why put the dragonfly in the logo. But maybe the "Insectothopter" project and similar ones have just been so significant projects for them in the past that they want them to be remembered.
“This is helping maintain US dominance, particularly from a technological perspective,” says Meyerriecks. “That’s really critical for national and economic security. It also democratizes the technology by making it available to the planet in a way that allows the level of the water to rise for all.”
Such a skeevy way to paint this picture -- it's not about global democratization to rise the water level, we know from history that the cia cares about the ability to impose controls through more powerful, more distributed tech.
