Politics is indeed toxic to pure curiosity about pure things. I feel that too, viscerally.
However. Culture war tropes get posted in even the most abstract discussion, so banning top-level posts won't keep it out.
Furthermore, technology is inherently political to the degree that it is transformative. The Facebook algorithm was always political, it just took time for that to become apparent. I'm trying to illustrate another kind of toxicity, that of engineering archetypes refusing to consider the political impact of their engineering decisions. Technologists in transformative fields should not be putting their heads in the sand. I don't want HN to devolve to red/green political rage, but there are political discussions that belong here.
Lastly, social sciences may well be dismal, but they can still illuminate, and politics is a valid subject of study. This site is predicated on curiosity, and areas of politics are on topic for that. Humanity is a system that bears analysis and can even be engineered.
No, ignoring the political consequences of science and technology is what is extremely toxic and psychopathic.
The very American trend to avoid anything political is self-defeating anyway, as it contributes to the social rot and the worsening of politics even further. Do you think the garden will become cleaner if you stop tending it? That your child will become nicer if you stop taking care of it? That your projects will sort themselves out if you don't track them?
You are well on your way to becoming like Russians: more and more detached from political matters because it is not safe or pleasant... until they are sent to the frontlines.
Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years...
HN (and ycombinator) has implicitly enabled, dogwhistled, or pretended to ignore all sorts of hateful and violent rhetoric. Sometimes it hides behind a veneer of "curious conversation" but other times its disgustingly blatant - last article I saw about sama was filled with horrific racism.
I come here because there are sometimes good posts, but this stuff has been here the entire time. Now its your guy getting the hate you are acting like its the worst thing in the world?
Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful.
> Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years
The world I have lived in for longer than 10 years is HN. I'm gut-wrenchingly familiar with the worst things that people post here—probably more than anyone, simply because it's my job.
If you can dig up a single example of a thread this bad that we knew about and didn't do anything about, I'd be shocked, because it would go against everything I believe and feel. Perhaps you can, nonetheless? If so, let's see it.
Here's what I mean by "this bad", if you want to calibrate:
The number of people who feel that anything at all is justified if it reinforces their feelings—particularly their angriest and most vicious feelings—is so large that it's clear that it is human nature in action, and that makes me yearn for a cool and heavy rock to crawl under, with moist earth to sink into.
There was horrific racism on display right here. Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you .. but at the time, some of those posts felt just as bad as calls to violence or worse.
But to compose something more substantial .. its probably all to much to neatly tie up in a single reply to a thread.
> Well I'm not saying they don't get moderated eventually
I'm going to interpret that as meaning that we do our job ok, just not instantenously—which would make sense, given that we're human and that would be humanly impossible.
> There was horrific racism on display right here
If there were any cases of that which we didn't do anything about, it would be because we didn't see them. I can't read everything that gets posted to Hacker News any more than you can; see "humanly impossible" above. But I'd like to see specific links.
> Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you
It does not "seem like part of the background noise" to me. What it "seems like" is wrenching my intenstines into an agonizing state on a regular basis and then driving a spike through them.
But you are doing things about the bad comments in this thread too.
Why is "well we removed that stuff" a defense in other contexts but not here? In both cases the issue is this community writing stuff you deem objectionable.
Consider some more examples: trump or that other conservative figure getting shot. Or the ceo of the health company getting shot.
Both of those people condone(d), support, amplify and drive horrific violence.
A common liberal reaction to those incidents - "oh no violence isn't okay!!" - well where were you for all the other horrific things they did and said? Yes in some ideal world there perhaps wouldn't be violence - but I can understand people feeling like they had it coming. It's the boy who cried wolf. It's the bully getting their comeuppance. It can be hard to feel bad.
Sama also talks about wanting ai to be the future, its pushed everywhere and the feeling is its going to take peoples jobs and disrupt everything. But there's no discussion about how we are going to look after everyone in that future. Current capitalistic (american) society doesn't seem built for that ... that lack of care already exists for a lot of people too who are homeless, poor etc.
Being upset about samas front gate getting firebombed while they probably also had plenty of security .. well idk.
> Both of those people condone(d), support, amplify and drive horrific violence.
This seems to be the point of contention. What constitutes "violence"?
A lot of people seem to define violence as a purely physical act: a missile strike during a war, a fist hitting a face, a molotov cocktail thrown over a property line.
What has become clear to me, especially when I saw the discourse around Luigi Mangione and the public opinion polling on it, is that a lot – a lot – of people define it much more broadly: a health insurance denial, a job lost as a result of some CEO's careless ambition, or mere words.
The problem with a very broad definition of violence is that it permits a pretty barbaric worldview. If I cut someone off in traffic, or if a careless administrative action on my part costs someone money that then puts them in a financial pickle that month, is that violence? Do I then deserve to be tracked and assaulted? What about the doctor who is complicit in the refused treatment because the insurance company won't pay a bill?
"I understand the insurance company isn't paying the bill but you are still going to treat me, and to not do so is a violent act."
The list goes on. Can society function if the default action at real or perceived injustice is to just kill?
To write that, you must have missed what I was upset about. What upset me was the community response to the violence (which in physical terms was inconsequential, and certainly doesn't compare to the worst things going on in this world): piling on and egging each other into escalating rage towards the target of the violence, while obviously feeling good about it. In other words, a mob. I don't like mobs.
The mob dynamic is the same whether the target is a rich person who many people happen to dislike, or a much weaker person. The idea that "it's ok if the target is $so-and-so" is abhorrent—a self-deception that allows us to deny, excuse, and enjoy our share of the violence we all partake in as human beings, while projecting it onto (and into) other people whom we call bad and evil.
Even though I know that this is human nature it upsets me when it shows up in a community that I'm responsible for, and it was showing up badly in this thread when I first saw it last night.
Have you not seen similar troll comments outright celebrating the actual deaths of ICE's victims, Iranians, Oct 7th victims, etc? I certainly have.
Hell, at the last protest I went to there were people driving by cavalierly playing "Bomb Iran" (written in 1980, and trotted back out every time the topic is back in the zeitgeist). It seems like the only real difference there is abstraction. Supporting violence is [unfortunately] deeply embedded in our culture.
Perhaps the popularity of this thread is causing you to preemptively seek out more terrible comments, rather than letting flagging do its thing?
Maybe try looping over popular divisive threads, and reading the flagged short comments that didn't get many upvotes. There is a lot of fucking hate in the world.
(and certainly a hat tip to you for making it your job to sort through it so we don't have to see much of it. But if this is hitting you differently (personally) than the usual flood does, perhaps you need to take a step back?)
I wouldn't hold it against anyone wishing my great grandfather shouldn't have existed for playing a minor role in Nazi Germany. Altman is in cahoots with a government that just a few days ago threatened to end a whole civilization. So no, I don't understand where you are coming from or why you're disgusted at the comments you linked.
LinkedIn is far from the only actor doing this. Browser extension fingerprinting is not new. LinkedIn‘s size, scope, network effects make this especially concerning.
They have! It's these developers either not knowing or not caring about it which is the issue!
I did a blog post about this a while back showing how they do it, and how you can get around it, it's not very complex for the devs.
> Chrome have fortunately recently released a "extension side panel" mode, and since only DOM changes can be easily identified, using the chrome extension side panel would be virtually un-detectable however this is far less intuitive to use and requires the user to perform some action to open the sidepanel every time they want to use the extension.
As an end user I could not find an option to open the side panel
Yeah I mean it's not very commonly used by extensions. I quite like it as it's completely isolated and not detectable.
I built my first extension which uses it as the primary interface yesterday: https://github.com/Am-I-Being-Pwned/PGP-Tools
Yeah I agree. All new extensions should have this for their web_accessible_resources.
With that said, the chrome web store ecosystem has bigger problems infront of them. For example, loads of extensions outright just send every URL you visit (inc query params) over to their servers.
Things like this just shouldn't happen, imagine you installed an extension from a few years back and you forgot about it, that's what happened to me with WhatRuns, which also scraped my AI chats.
I'm working on a tool to let people scan their extensions (https://amibeingpwned.com/) and I've found some utterly outrageous vulnerabilities, widespread affiliate fraud and widespread tracking.
There's nothing to patch, scanning is not possible.
It's either the extension's choice to become detectable ("externally_connectable" is off by default) or it makes unique changes to websites that allow for its detection.
If it were just a matter of detecting changes to the DOM then this could only detect extensions that alter the LinkedIn website itself. I agree that would be much harder to make undetectable, but this seems like it goes beyond that.
As mentioned, there's a way to expose your extension to the web even without making changes. The other way is a key called "web_accessible_resources".
All of these are opt-in by the extensions and MV3 actually force you to specify which domains can access your extension. So, again, each extension must explicitly allow the web to find it.
Seems like it. Which is serious but far from what I thought when I read the title. I suspect 90% of LinkedIn users don't even have a single browser extension installed.
I would debate that. Most work computers have some extensions installed by default. That's millions of laptops. Ex. Snow Inventory Agent, ad blockers etc.
GrapheneOS is Android's last hope. They're making great progress with deals with smartphone manufacturers. However, the threat of remote attestation looms eternal. I have essential apps that I cannot afford to lose and if they refuse to work on a non-Google phone the usefulness of GrapheneOS is severely degraded.
If attestation ever became ubiquitous the difference between iOS and Android would cease to exist for me. I'd need a black box that lived in a desk drawer for interfacing with specific services and otherwise I'd cart around a camera in my pocket that happened to double as a linux tablet.
No, the solution is having a linux micro-computer. You buy an iPhone shitphone to do banking and whatnot, and never touch it, then just do everything you need off a retroconsole since it runs literally 120% of the other apps a phone would.
Yeah, some bits (parts of the GUI & some of the default apps) are still closed.
But I think there is a good chance they will finally open those now - never really made any sense to keep them closed and preventing the community from contributing. Rumors had it it was due to non-cooperative investors.
Not Jolla is finally independent again, so at least in theory they can finally do the right thing. :)
So if we pretend a list is a function from an index to an entry for the moment
```
Enum.take(list , 2)
```
Is more like
```
Enum.take(list, [1,2])
```
So if you apply that to a list of length 1 or zero, you just get either list[1], or []
The difference is that Enum is maybe a total function - the domain of the function is always well defined, while Map take is trying to be dressed up as a total function but its really something thats only partial.
So the type system needs a way to describe a map that has "at least these keys" a bit like the enum case. So that requires some polymorphism.
Further being "apolotical" means supporting the current status quo.
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