We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
It's close, though. Because of the network effect, it gets almost all the eyeballs. I'd love for something non-Google to emerge as a serious conpetitor, but it's an imperfect world.
You saying that Youtube has some "moral duty" to host videos with "controversial" themes
Yup, still saying that. They're big enough that they need to be as neutral as possible, host content as broadly as possible. It's only through discussion of controversial ideas that needless political violence is averted. And that's a moral duty.
we can talk about banks "moral duty" to have reasonable interest rates on credit cards
The interest rates that banks are allowed to charge in the US is in fact capped by law - usury is illegal. Once can argue about the actual numeric limit of course. Or, at least one can argue as long as you don't argue on YouTube. Banks buy ads, after all, don't want to be controversial.
Sony's "moral duty" to lower their prices on Playstation 4s.
Aren't they selling them below cost as is? Anyway, plenty of people feel drug companies have a moral duty to limit profits on medicine - I don't, as I like funding research, but I see how reasonable people can disagree. Just don't disagree to loudly on YouTube, since pharma is a big source of ad revenue!
It's not YouTube's job to make controversial opinions "discoverable".
Sure it is, it's both their moral duty and their duty to their stockholders (since "controversial" is another word for "clickbait").
For most of the world, that "walking on eggshells" you're talking about is known as "not being an asshole".
Way to entirely miss the point. Or maybe you think giving advice on how to make combat in a D&D session or interesting makes one an asshole? Maybe a review of replica Roman armor? I dunno with you, Ratzo. But anything that, taken out of context, might not be seen as family friendly has the channels I watch spooked right now.
'Atheist' is the closest descriptor you have to 'I believe in science',
That's a very childish view. Science and religion are largely orthogonal. Science makes statements about how the world is, religion makes statements about how to be in the world.
Only if you're a simple-minded literalist do you think the creation stories and whatnot are there as history. Most people understand they're there as archetypical stories about how to live.
You can both believe in the Big Bang, and believe e.g. in the moral lesson of the story of Cain and Abel (if your brother is sacrificing for the future, and is more successful than you, then maybe the fault is yours, not his, and not an unfair universe.)
Upvotes determine visibility. New people with controversial opinions won't be "discoverable" on YouTube. The existing crowd can probably get by with Patreon etc, but what about the next generation. Well, they won't be on YouTube, that's for sure.
Also, the chilling effect can be seen in a lot of the non-political YT channels I watch. They're walking on eggshells, trying to guess what might get them banned. "Uh-oh, I talked about weapons, will that be a strike against me?"
Google wants a muzzling of controversy! Not from political agenda, but simple short-sighted greed: advertisers don't like their ads to appear next to anything controversial.
But, of course, it's the controversy that gets the page views. With no controversy (and no porn), only cat videos will remain, and that's a small portion of YouTube's traffic. It's an idea so stupid only an MBA could have thought of it.
"Discrimination" is a normal word, mean roughly to choose according to some criteria. Discrimination about one's sexual partner is the most fundamental (and important, in the long term) kind of discrimination. And, BTW, almost everyone discriminates based n race when it comes to sexual partner.
There is nowhere any law that says you must accept sex from any person.
Yet, but it sure seems to be where we're headed. How long till it's a hate crime to refuse sex when you discover that woman you've been dating has a penis?
Heck, we've seen a case under the rules at university where a man was drunk to unconsciousness, or at least appeared so, and an nearly-as-drunk woman gave him a blow job. The man was tossed out of the school for sexual assault.
The rules imposed by the progressives won't make logical sense, or follow any tradition because the progressive left is founded on post-modernism, which explicitly rejects both logic and tradition as tools of the oppressor. It's all Calvinball.
It would obviously be legal for VidAngel to do this with books. Buy the book, white out any profanity, sell it on at a markup. Not sure what the beef is here.
Yet they don't respect creative freedom or intellectual property of others.
They in no way limit the ability of other to create. The creators get paid the same, either way. The "creators vision" of the show still exists. All is good.
Some viewers just want to see Han shoot first regardless what the creator wants, and that's their right.
Sure, but that's my point, isn't it. It's not about the particular words, it's about activating a neurolinguistic circuit, one predating man as a species, used to alert the group to predators, and the instinctual negative reaction to those words - whatever sound you use, it means "oh shit!".
Controlling your kids thought when they're young is the job of parents. If you're not doing that, you're not parenting. Teenagers are different, of course, but by then you've had your chance to set their trajectory.
Fun fact: profanity comes from a different neurological circuit than normal language - it's a linguistic circuit we share with monkeys. Monkeys use it for vocalizations that warn of predators, and perhaps other dangers. So, profanity uses the brain's "yikes, a predator has appeared" circuit.
I'm very OK with kids not developing that circuit before they're teens (at which point not only is it inevitable, they need it). There's enough to cope with when you're still trying to make sense of the world in basic ways, without adding fear of malevolence and literal predators.
Oh STFU. We're not talking about 'falling over dead from glyphosate poisoning' here, we're talking about strange chronic health problems that doctors can't figure out WHY you have them, but that started showing up in countries that use Roundup shortly after Roundup use started to skyrocket.
Sound just like the EM sickness and the anti-vaxxers. Oddly enough, those people can be found in clusters around Whole Foods locations. Clearly they know their market!
Not sure why you'd think they're the biggest - they're all quite large (well, Facebook is the smallest). It's hard to get a count of total engineers in these companies, but Microsoft, may still be the biggest employer of devs - over 100K for sure. Amazon will be there soon if they aren't already - at the rate they're growing they'll be the largest employer of devs by far in about 2 years (they're current building 1 skyscraper a year in Seattle).
Apple is the odd man out for not being "the cloud" as the other 4 are. The other 4 have fairly heavy interchange of devs between them now that the illegal recruiting agreements are gone.
Judging by UIDs I've been doing this a bit longer then you kids on my lawn. But I write real code, not some silly "web" fad stuff that will be replaced by APPS (or so Slashdot informs me).
So, you mean like the way commercial power is billed - pay for moment of peak usage?
An ISP does have "a GB reservoir" unless all it's customers hit peak use at the same time (which, admittedly, can happen). If the usage distribution is somewhat random, then your cost really is by GB.
The sad thing is, Stalin's regime shows that just about anything can be deemed after the fact to be anti-social and grounds for execution. The less there is on record about me, the better, even if the government never cares about me specifically.
Culture will happen regardless of whatever nonsense motivations you put behind it.
We were in a weird place for the past 20 years, where it wasn't clear how the artist could shed the corporate distribution, yet still make money - how to solve the logistical problem of payment, really. But now the evidence is mounting that Patreon and the like will really work for artists.
But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point. It's not clear that crowdfunding can work for those. However, I'm very hopeful for a surge of indie material once "good enough" 3D animation gets cheap enough. I think crowdfunding will work fine to get competent voice actors on a project.
They are certainly able to as they have more guns than Google. That's how you do threat modeling. They currently choose not to (perhaps because thNSA already has all the data? Hard to know.)
If we keep the sort of government we don't have to fear, then all is good. But if the government goes full totalitarian (and we're really not that far off), suddenly everything changes.
Microsoft isn't a panopticon. They don't mine your browsing habits, search history, email, phone location history, etc the way Google and Facebook do. Perhaps just lack of competence to do so.
Google knows your age, race, religion, where you live, where you work, you're sexual preference, your income, your political views, and so on. All in databases the government can take control of at their whim (the government doesn't need their own Muslim database).
It's a neat idea, but I think you'll find that older programmers are more likely to use tabs. Back in the day, we didn't have the tabs vs spaces war. Everybody just used tabs, and we liked it.
Kids these days. I'm my day, the keyboard didn't have a tab key, and no insert either! If you wanted to indent more you typed the line over again!
That's mostly true, BTW. I think there was a tab key, but it didn't do anything useful, and you had to do something really elaborate to shift a range of characters left or right. The bad old days of mainframe coding.
Slashdot Mirror
We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
Youtube is not a public utility
It's close, though. Because of the network effect, it gets almost all the eyeballs. I'd love for something non-Google to emerge as a serious conpetitor, but it's an imperfect world.
You saying that Youtube has some "moral duty" to host videos with "controversial" themes
Yup, still saying that. They're big enough that they need to be as neutral as possible, host content as broadly as possible. It's only through discussion of controversial ideas that needless political violence is averted. And that's a moral duty.
we can talk about banks "moral duty" to have reasonable interest rates on credit cards
The interest rates that banks are allowed to charge in the US is in fact capped by law - usury is illegal. Once can argue about the actual numeric limit of course. Or, at least one can argue as long as you don't argue on YouTube. Banks buy ads, after all, don't want to be controversial.
Sony's "moral duty" to lower their prices on Playstation 4s.
Aren't they selling them below cost as is? Anyway, plenty of people feel drug companies have a moral duty to limit profits on medicine - I don't, as I like funding research, but I see how reasonable people can disagree. Just don't disagree to loudly on YouTube, since pharma is a big source of ad revenue!
It's not YouTube's job to make controversial opinions "discoverable".
Sure it is, it's both their moral duty and their duty to their stockholders (since "controversial" is another word for "clickbait").
For most of the world, that "walking on eggshells" you're talking about is known as "not being an asshole".
Way to entirely miss the point. Or maybe you think giving advice on how to make combat in a D&D session or interesting makes one an asshole? Maybe a review of replica Roman armor? I dunno with you, Ratzo. But anything that, taken out of context, might not be seen as family friendly has the channels I watch spooked right now.
AC is for shitposting. If you want to discuss something, log in.
'Atheist' is the closest descriptor you have to 'I believe in science',
That's a very childish view. Science and religion are largely orthogonal. Science makes statements about how the world is, religion makes statements about how to be in the world.
Only if you're a simple-minded literalist do you think the creation stories and whatnot are there as history. Most people understand they're there as archetypical stories about how to live.
You can both believe in the Big Bang, and believe e.g. in the moral lesson of the story of Cain and Abel (if your brother is sacrificing for the future, and is more successful than you, then maybe the fault is yours, not his, and not an unfair universe.)
Upvotes determine visibility. New people with controversial opinions won't be "discoverable" on YouTube. The existing crowd can probably get by with Patreon etc, but what about the next generation. Well, they won't be on YouTube, that's for sure.
Also, the chilling effect can be seen in a lot of the non-political YT channels I watch. They're walking on eggshells, trying to guess what might get them banned. "Uh-oh, I talked about weapons, will that be a strike against me?"
Google wants a muzzling of controversy! Not from political agenda, but simple short-sighted greed: advertisers don't like their ads to appear next to anything controversial.
But, of course, it's the controversy that gets the page views. With no controversy (and no porn), only cat videos will remain, and that's a small portion of YouTube's traffic. It's an idea so stupid only an MBA could have thought of it.
"Discrimination" is a normal word, mean roughly to choose according to some criteria. Discrimination about one's sexual partner is the most fundamental (and important, in the long term) kind of discrimination. And, BTW, almost everyone discriminates based n race when it comes to sexual partner.
There is nowhere any law that says you must accept sex from any person.
Yet, but it sure seems to be where we're headed. How long till it's a hate crime to refuse sex when you discover that woman you've been dating has a penis?
Heck, we've seen a case under the rules at university where a man was drunk to unconsciousness, or at least appeared so, and an nearly-as-drunk woman gave him a blow job. The man was tossed out of the school for sexual assault.
The rules imposed by the progressives won't make logical sense, or follow any tradition because the progressive left is founded on post-modernism, which explicitly rejects both logic and tradition as tools of the oppressor. It's all Calvinball.
It would obviously be legal for VidAngel to do this with books. Buy the book, white out any profanity, sell it on at a markup. Not sure what the beef is here.
Yet they don't respect creative freedom or intellectual property of others.
They in no way limit the ability of other to create. The creators get paid the same, either way. The "creators vision" of the show still exists. All is good.
Some viewers just want to see Han shoot first regardless what the creator wants, and that's their right.
Sure, but that's my point, isn't it. It's not about the particular words, it's about activating a neurolinguistic circuit, one predating man as a species, used to alert the group to predators, and the instinctual negative reaction to those words - whatever sound you use, it means "oh shit!".
Controlling your kids thought when they're young is the job of parents. If you're not doing that, you're not parenting. Teenagers are different, of course, but by then you've had your chance to set their trajectory.
Fun fact: profanity comes from a different neurological circuit than normal language - it's a linguistic circuit we share with monkeys. Monkeys use it for vocalizations that warn of predators, and perhaps other dangers. So, profanity uses the brain's "yikes, a predator has appeared" circuit.
I'm very OK with kids not developing that circuit before they're teens (at which point not only is it inevitable, they need it). There's enough to cope with when you're still trying to make sense of the world in basic ways, without adding fear of malevolence and literal predators.
I'm sure it's physically possible to be allergic to wheat. At least it's not corn.
I have to avoid sugar, and it's not diabetes. Doctors don't have a clue.
Oh STFU. We're not talking about 'falling over dead from glyphosate poisoning' here, we're talking about strange chronic health problems that doctors can't figure out WHY you have them, but that started showing up in countries that use Roundup shortly after Roundup use started to skyrocket.
Sound just like the EM sickness and the anti-vaxxers. Oddly enough, those people can be found in clusters around Whole Foods locations. Clearly they know their market!
Not sure why you'd think they're the biggest - they're all quite large (well, Facebook is the smallest). It's hard to get a count of total engineers in these companies, but Microsoft, may still be the biggest employer of devs - over 100K for sure. Amazon will be there soon if they aren't already - at the rate they're growing they'll be the largest employer of devs by far in about 2 years (they're current building 1 skyscraper a year in Seattle).
Apple is the odd man out for not being "the cloud" as the other 4 are. The other 4 have fairly heavy interchange of devs between them now that the illegal recruiting agreements are gone.
Judging by UIDs I've been doing this a bit longer then you kids on my lawn. But I write real code, not some silly "web" fad stuff that will be replaced by APPS (or so Slashdot informs me).
Peak vs off-peak pricing is a thing, you know.
So, you mean like the way commercial power is billed - pay for moment of peak usage?
An ISP does have "a GB reservoir" unless all it's customers hit peak use at the same time (which, admittedly, can happen). If the usage distribution is somewhat random, then your cost really is by GB.
Believe "Steve Jackson" when it comes to gaming. :)
BTW, there's already a Jimquisition on this shit. NSFW-ish.
Banning mods on day one would have been a dick move, but letting them flourish, then banning them years later? That's No Man's Sky level asshattery.
The sad thing is, Stalin's regime shows that just about anything can be deemed after the fact to be anti-social and grounds for execution. The less there is on record about me, the better, even if the government never cares about me specifically.
Culture will happen regardless of whatever nonsense motivations you put behind it.
We were in a weird place for the past 20 years, where it wasn't clear how the artist could shed the corporate distribution, yet still make money - how to solve the logistical problem of payment, really. But now the evidence is mounting that Patreon and the like will really work for artists.
But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point. It's not clear that crowdfunding can work for those. However, I'm very hopeful for a surge of indie material once "good enough" 3D animation gets cheap enough. I think crowdfunding will work fine to get competent voice actors on a project.
I'd be happy to pay by the GB - no caps, no throttles, no BS. I pay for the rest of my utilities that way.
Ergo, they are not able to do so.
Could it happen? Sure.
You contradict yourself.
They are certainly able to as they have more guns than Google. That's how you do threat modeling. They currently choose not to (perhaps because thNSA already has all the data? Hard to know.)
If we keep the sort of government we don't have to fear, then all is good. But if the government goes full totalitarian (and we're really not that far off), suddenly everything changes.
Microsoft isn't a panopticon. They don't mine your browsing habits, search history, email, phone location history, etc the way Google and Facebook do. Perhaps just lack of competence to do so.
Google knows your age, race, religion, where you live, where you work, you're sexual preference, your income, your political views, and so on. All in databases the government can take control of at their whim (the government doesn't need their own Muslim database).
It's a neat idea, but I think you'll find that older programmers are more likely to use tabs. Back in the day, we didn't have the tabs vs spaces war. Everybody just used tabs, and we liked it.
Kids these days. I'm my day, the keyboard didn't have a tab key, and no insert either! If you wanted to indent more you typed the line over again!
That's mostly true, BTW. I think there was a tab key, but it didn't do anything useful, and you had to do something really elaborate to shift a range of characters left or right. The bad old days of mainframe coding.
Do they have a feature to automatically go "whoosh" too?
I'm sure EMACS does. I think it's quadrupal-buckey-shift-Q. No, wait, that's left bracket.