I like your site but you shouldn't implement a custom scrollbar, that's horrible usability wise.

When I scroll, I think something is off on because it doesn't behave like a normal site would.

True. You cannot expect the judicial to be apolitical if it is appointed by the other two highly political branches of government. But we pretend it is apolitical in Brazil and in the US.

There is a difference between political philosophy and being political.

A judge may be liberal or conservative but it doesn’t follow that they would represent a party platform.

Last time I visited Brazil some 5 years ago, the courts would ban Whatsapp every couple months. They were in bed with telecom companies that hated that Whatsapp made many of their services free.

That's a wildly uninformed accusation.

There's a lot of problems with telecoms there, but WhatsApp actually has partnerships to enjoy "unlimited" bandwidth privileges with all four mobile operators in Brazil. Just checked and all four have such plans: Claro, Vivo, TIM and Oi.

The bans were because the courts were trying to coerce WhatsApp into responding to subpoenas.

I'm not sure that was the case 4 years ago. They first tried to beat it before joining it.

The subpoenas were widely seen as a pretext among the population. It is Brazil: you have to read between the lines.

That's still sounds like a wild and unfounded accusation.

And that was partially already the case a few years ago:

TIM started free WhatsApp plans in 2014 [1].

Claro started in 2015 [2].

Oi started later, but it already had a similar plan in 2013 for Facebook Messenger, before WhatsApp acquisition [3].

Vivo seems to be the only holdout, starting in 2018, but that's far from proof that they were in bed with judges just to damage WhatsApp.

And frankly, "you have to read between the lines" sounds like code for unfounded conspiracy theories. Unfortunately something that is currently destroying the country.

[1] https://tecnoblog.net/170330/tim-controle-whatsapp-internet-...

[2] https://gizmodo.uol.com.br/claro-turbinada-detalhes/

[3] https://tecnoblog.net/131671/oi-facebook-messenger-de-graca/

You should try to remember the political scenario at the time. The Snowden leaks had generated an immense discomfort in Brazilian government regarding the fact that US based companies could just wiretap Brazilian communications. WhatsApp didn't have a subsidiary at Brazil, and Facebook Brazil used to say they didn't respond for WhatsApp matters. Since Brazilian justice didn't manage to get WhatsApp to answer subpoenas even for extremely low-profile cases, they tried to force their hand on them. The blocks were clearly a demonstration of force, trying to get companies providing services to Brazilians to obey Brazilian law at least to some extent.

This was not what happened. Whatsapp got banned by individual low-ranking-judges in low profile cases, which was unreasonable. Higher courts removed the ban pretty quick and made sure it won't happen again.

Brazilian here. Unfortunately I wouldn't call them independent. They simply represent the other side. Brazil is not as united behind Bolsonaro as the media makes out to be.

I'm originally from Turkey, and that's also the case with Erdoğan. I mean, they wouldn't be dictators if everyone agreed with them, no?

The big problem arising from the stark polarization is that there's no uncontaminated news sources anymore. Many argue that news should be political anyway but I really miss reading stuff that doesn't fit 100 percent to a single agenda.

Hold on, Bolsonaro is not a dictator. Federalism even recently screwed him over. He didn't act on COVID but individual states imposed their own measures and thankfully countered his opinion.

That's like saying Mussolini was not a dictator in 1922, because there were still so many factions competing against him in Italian politics. Possibly true, but it's also clear what direction he was heading. By 1925 he had largely consolidated his power.

Well I'm also super concerned that he has expressed dictatorial aspirations. But as of right now the constitution holds.

"Super concerned?" The guy wanted to celebrate the coup that started the last dictatorship. Stop splitting hairs.

http://www.iconnectblog.com/2019/04/bolsonaros-unconstitutio...

Note: Trump's call for postponing the election is exactly the same thing. Evidence they have no interest in constitutional democracy and will, at the earliest possible moment, impose total control on the country.

Read what I said. I said I'm super concerned about it :D

Polarization is exactly that, remove all gradients. Fascists like to make out everything is black-white. “Only siths deal in absolutes”

I’ve always thought that quote itself was curiously absolute. ‘Only’, Yoda?

That whole movie is about how the Jedi completely lost their way from millennia of stagnation to the point that they couldn't recognize the sith in their midsts anymore, and how their own well meaning influence contributed to their own downfall.

The Jedi were a death cult of religious fanatics who coerced child soldiers into fighting their wars of conquest.

Time for a Star Wars supercut with The Jedi Theme and Imperial March flipped to the other sides.

>I’ve always thought that quote itself was curiously absolute. ‘Only’, Yoda?

“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

I always took it as Yoda unwittingly revealing himself as a Sith Lord. I mean, how much do we really know about this little fella's shady past? :D

> I mean, they wouldn't be dictators if everyone agreed with them, no?

A dictator's enemies are deplatformed and powerless. They are certainly not allowed to sit in top courts.

There are 11 or 12 supreme court judges. While one or two may present some "tastes" here and there, overall, all of them together are doing a good job til now.

Gilmar Mendes sometimes free their rich pals from prison here and there, but in other matters hes not that bad.

Dias Toffoli also do some shady things here and there but some bad things he did got reverted back by the other judges.

I dont think is fair to say they "represent the other side", first because this gives a dichotomistic way to see things that are far too simplistic.

Also because as a Brazilian too, im very thankful for what the two other powers; judiciary and legislative, have being doing to put the executive at least in check.

The president is nuts, and the country is without any sort of leadership, and if it were only incompetence, but the problem is that this guy is trying by any means necessary to do a takeover move over the republic..

And if those other powers weren't in opposition, trying to defend the democratic institutions, we would be heading to some sort of Putin state.

So of course that nothing is perfect, but overall i've been positively surprised about what they have done so far.

They are free to not take the government side in all matters. So, how are they not independent?

Independence means something else. It means not beholden to certain interests.

Simply being in the pocket of the other party (opposition) does not make them independent.

(Disclaimer: I don't know if this is the case, simply commenting on the topic of independence)

previous EdTech founder here. can only agree. It is a weird business. I think it boils down to this: most students don't care about learning. They educate themselves for other reasons.

So if you make a good learning tool, it only will be liked by the small niche of high performance self learners / students.

The self learning market is completely disconnected from the formal parts of the market. There's very little substitution between them, in terms of money

I think the major question is not whether they will invent something else. they are reliant on Ads and will remain so as far as I can tell.

the real question is: is the ad model overvalued?

I think so for the following reasons: ad blockers, users getting desensitized to ads, diminishing returns of the amount of data one needs on a user to sell.

I think OP has the right conclusion but the wrong reasons.

what do you think?

I think the ads market risk is offset by the market potential of self-driving, cloud, AI (deepmind), and maybe other things, long term.

Shorting GOOG is betting not only that ads will decrease long term, but also that the other fields won't increase.

Yes, I realize even cloud has a long way to go, revenue wise, compared to ads. But on the other hands ads has a long way to fall. And public cloud (including Google's cloud) is still growing exponentially.

In other words: I have no reason to think I know better than the invisible hand of the market.

That's GOOG. FB I've not looked into as much.

>I have no reason to think I know better than the invisible hand of the market.

I don't understand how anyone can talk any more about the market having mystical powers after what we've seen in the past few months.

If the market was priced correctly in late February, and now that it's regained almost all it lost, how could it be priced correctly in late March at 1/3 lower? And if you swallow that, how is it that it went lower in a basically linear fashion over a month rather than instantly as whatever information was absorbed got out?

This really is bugging me as an "emperor's new clothes" situation, you can argue any which way on which is the right price, but how can you believe for an instant that they are all correct, reflecting all available information at all times?

why is it that all search engines still look like Google in the 90's. Can't the UI become fresher?

also I think SEO really ruined the search experience. do you have plans to use other ranking factors? Maybe social upvoting or so to improve ranking of actual good content as opposed to crappy listicles which is 50% of search results right now?

is the site down?

Looks like a page with fluffy clouds and nothing else over here.

that comment is even more useless than this one.

We even use Discord instead of Slack.

FWIW I find the apps are significantly snappier than Slack. Both built on Electron interestingly

Discord seems to have a huge focus on performance. On a number of their blogs they talk about monitoring the frame rate of the desktop and mobile apps for example... I'm not sure Slack goes that far.