> The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.
No they do not. Quote, from your own link:
> According to an April 2025 freedom of information report filed by The Times, over 12,000 people were arrested, including for social media posts, in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
Emphasis mine. "Including". Not exclusively, not only, including.
Now what does the law being cited actually say[1]?
> It is an offence under these sections to send messages of a “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing” character or persistently use a public electronic communications network to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.
With additional clarification[2]:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
> “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.
So you're deliberately spreading misinformation here, as was the original article by the Times and as is everyone else who keeps quoting this figure. Because by means of lying by omission they want to imply one very specific thing: "you will be arrested for criticizing the government on social media". But the actual crime statistic is about a much more common, much broader category of crime - namely: harassment. That 12,000 a year figure includes targeted harassment by almost any carriage medium, as well as crimes like "prank" calling emergency services. It means it includes death threats, stalking, domestic abuse and just about every other type of non-physical abuse or intimidation.
Of course you could've also figured out this is bullshit with a very simple litmus test: 12,000 people a year wouldn't be hard to find if the UK was mass-jailing people on public social media. But it's not what's happening.
> Ross, still filming with one hand, appears nearly fully clear of the SUV’s front path when he says “whoa” and shoots three times in rapid succession.
The author chooses to omit that when the SUV he was "nearly fully clear of" sped away, he was in fact hit by it, though it was a grazing hit (the video is short, I encourage you to watch it and make up your own mind). Other than the verbal exchange, the video doesn't really show anything new - it was about what I expected to see, based on the other videos. It's clear she wasn't aiming for him, but also clear she was driving recklessly towards pedestrians (to be precise - a single pedestrian, the ICE agent in question). And while we can watch videos from 3 different perspectives over and over again and debate, the ICE agent had 1 second or less to decide how to act, when the car started speeding towards him (but with the tires turned)
In my opinion he should have just jumped away. That kind of shooting should be saved for when there are others at risk, or one has other reasons to believe the driver is a deadly threat to others. But let's not pretend this was a cold-blooded execution either.
I would not be surprised to see the UK enact something like the Ottoman millet system, and grant semi-autonomy to its various ethnic and religious communities to run their own internal affairs. I don't think this would be a good move, but doesn't seem too unlikely at this stage.
The UK is best understood as a "managed democracy" where there are nominally elections, but the government decides who will constitute its voting population, what they are allowed to say, and now whether they will be allowed to acquit people the government decides it would prefer to punish.
I always chuckle (or squirm) when someone suggests “picking a random person to be the president” rather than our current broken campaigning system.
Far better than that option, would be for a random family to inherit that power forever, than for a different random family be chosen every 4 years. Because at least then the “royal” family has some accountability to govern for long-term success, lest their descendants be dragged into the street and hung by an unhappy mob with pitchforks.
He explicitly says he didn't write it in this article:
"NC: Credit for the article should be given to the actual author, Jeffrey Watumull, a fine mathematician-linguist-philosopher. The two listed co-authors were consultants, who agree with the article but did not write it."
Comments like this are against the HN guidelines as they are at odds with the site's purpose, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity. There are plenty of ways people can discuss ideas from Varoufakis, Marx and other writers/philosophers from all parts of the ideological landscape without resorting to simplistic barbs like this, and without wanting a society that remotely resembles North Korea or any other authoritarian state.
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.
> It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own.
This is also an interesting way to explain the self-immolating Whites, which nowadays is most of us. Any sort of White group identity or collective interest is absolute heresy which must be opposed, while all things in the collective interest of non-Whites must be celebrated, encouraged, and helped along at our own expense. There's a certain paternalistic arrogance to it, an ethnocentric assumption that other races can't get on without us. And it's much more common and pervasive than the caricature of the like shaved head neo-Nazi we are all expected to imagine exists in large numbers, somewhere.
Rayiner of 10 years ago started his arguments from axioms other than "the Republican Party is correct" as he does now. I miss old Rayiner. His arguments against the Democratic position on e.g. Citizens United and Bush v. Gore were persuasive back then. Nowadays virtually nothing he says is persuasive, because it's incredibly obvious that he's starting from the position that the Republican Party is correct and working backwards from there.
(He's also getting about as close as you can get to the "out-and-out racism" line as you can get without maybe technically crossing it. Though I think he did cross it when it comes to Irish Catholics.)
I take four pills a day and the primary side effect is weight gain. The earlier 1950s era treatment made me exhausted 24/7. There's a new trial that has a new target, and looks to solve the remaining symptoms of the disease, with effectively no side effects
The big problem is that it's a chronic blood cancer, so the pills have a list price of $180k/yr. Who knows if my insurance will cough up for a second big-money prescription/
Sure, but for every efficiently run company, there’s another with 80% of its engineers working on a “new vision” with zero customers, while the revenue-generating software sits idle or attended by one or two developers…
And maybe this is intentional, rational strategy - why not reinvest profits in R&D? But just because an organization is large does not mean that it’s efficient.
The idea that multiculturalism is incompatible with a harmonious society is empirically denied by the existence of basically utopias like Singapore. All citizens have to learn 4 languages and there is a huge amount of tourists which add to the already multicutral demographics of the country. Lowest crime in the world, best education in the world. Among the best public transit in the world, etc.
What it really is is that some minorities have shittier cultures than others, and some states have handled the integration and assimilation better than others.
Even the USA, for example, is blessed that nearly all of our illegals are Catholics (or more recently evangelical protestants...). Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them.
The mass rise of latino voters for trump indicates a very strong effort from America's latino minorities to "act white", to "integrate", and to "assimilate".
I am fine with a multicultural society, as long as it's good culture - and yes, it is quite easy to nearly objectively quantify if a culture or cultural practice is good or not. For example, Americans except for asian americans don't wash their asses with bidets after using the toilet. This leads to swampass/BO, increased toilet paper usage/resource consumption, and far more rectal related health problems. America objectively should change it's cultural practices around bathroom usage.
Unfortunately, cultural critique against bad culture has a tendency for folks to call you "racist", so we aren't allowed to have this conversations with more specificity...
As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the twenty-first century.
My grandparents used to fall for every scam phone call or email they received. It wasn't until I showed them a compilation[0] of the George Agdgdgwngo character from Fonejacker - and the rest of my extended family sat around laughing at the ridiculous scenarios - that my grandparents realised that giving their bank details to anyone claiming to be calling from Microsoft and then expecting the bank to refund them their money wasn't an acceptable way to handle their financial affairs. In the end, they disabled their Internet banking and now have to catch a bus to their nearest bank branch to do anything.
I'm sure there will be flurry of Americans along shortly to monotonously repeat that quote about not trading freedom for security. That's their political tradition, not ours. The people of Thetford in Norfolk don't give a flying fuck about the gold statue of Thomas Paine that the Federalist Society (or some other group, I'm not terribly interested in which it was) put up in their town, but they love the fact that a sitcom about the Second World War was filmed there.
Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago - stemmed from a particular interpretation of a law that required police forces to investigate all threats of violence made by post, that was enacted in the 1980s during a period of increased religiously-motivated terrorism. The following decade brought the negotiations that put an end to that terrorism; negotiations that were the culmination of nearly five centuries of religious conflict. It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
I shall leave it to others to make the usual accusations about who funded the aforementioned terrorism.
The Online Safety Act is vague and non-specific. Social media platforms differentiate themselves in the market on the bases of: with whom users can interact (people they know personally or the user base at large); and the ways in which they can interact (photos, videos, comments, likes, &c.). Each platform therefore poses its own unique set of risks to its user base, and so needs to have its own unique regulations. The Act acknowledges by empowering Ofcom to negotiate the specific policies that platforms will need to follow on a platform-by-platform basis. And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
You can't talk about the Forbidden Meatballs[1] on Reddit or HN. In the 90s, AOL users from Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from user forums for telling the community where they lived to help diagnose their connectivity issues. Americans have enforced - and continue to enforce - their cultural norms on the entire Anglophone web, and now the rest of the world has started to do the same. I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech (no matter how much I may object to their policies) than some foreign company.
For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is? 'Maximum effect for minimum effort and cost' has been the guiding principle of all government in Britain for decades - it's how Britain ruled its Empire, it's what drove the Thirteen Colonies to rebel, it's why the East India Company was allowed to rule a subcontinent, it's why many of the former colonies were given independence despite not wanting it, it's why the roads are so consistently bad, it's why the water companies are dumping sewage into rivers, it's why there aren't enough police officers.
To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not going to lead to any social changes of any sort at all. The Act requires protections for free speech, after all. When it's all finally implemented, it'll just be enforcement of social norms that no one finds controversial.
NB: I read through the Act to see whether an idea for a social media platform was still a viable business idea, and apart from sending policy documents to Ofcom, it wouldn't require the business to do anything that wasn't already in that idea. If you want to argue about what the Act requires, I will expect you to have read the Act[2].
I have written a lot of code in many languages, but most recently in Go and Rust. I had actually considered myself a Rust convert up until recently, and if you look at my comment history, you will find me calling out Go for being a poorly designed language on multiple occasions.
I have changed my mind.
Why? Well, I started writing Go again, so I had experience writing both Rust and Go within a close timeframe to each other. These are very different languages with very different strengths. I think choosing one over the other largely comes down to what you are writing. For deep, complex typed algo code esp. things that need to be very fast, I would likely still choose Rust, but Go really excels at writing infra code. Code that needs to be fast, but more importantly needs to be iterated quickly, and Go compiles MUCH faster than Rust.
Most of my objections to Go I find in the "programming language theory part of my brain". I am a language designer at heart, and by that, I mean I iterate on language designs and have a deep love for PLT. The issue I have found is that, while Rust is awesome in theory (and still one of my favorite languages), actually building things quickly is more satisfying to me, and I am finding I can build in Go about 2x the rate as in Rust. I didn't think this was the case until I actually started tracking my own iteration speed. Things like compile time DO matter, because you are always compiling at some level, even if just running tests. Also, every language feature is just a tiny bit of friction, and Go is so simple that friction is nearly non-existent.
Most of my Go language objectionss, such as nil pointers, lack of enums, multi return vs tuples are much less an issue in practice than they are in theory, and once you sit down and actually think on 'why' Go might have done what it did, it actually makes some sense. I had a few lightbulb moments I could expand on in a different post.
In summary, Go and Rust are very different languages. I really like both, but in different use cases. I am back to writing more Go than Rust, but I expect to write some of both going forward.
> so not really cross border except from a certain legalistic angle
Is this a joke? Of course it's cross-border, it crosses international borders. It works because the countries involved put in the work to make it easy. The fact that you can't use Pix in the US has no bearing.
uh. No. Rust unsafe gives rust behavior a lot like C. If you at all break the rather subtle rules, then essentially anything can and will happen.
So for example, there was recently a thread where someone had code that checked if a value was in range to safely coerce it directly to an enum then did so. But because of eager evaluation of an argument the unsafe cast happened first. From this the compiler reasoned that the variable was preconditionally range constrained to always be in range and it optimized out the in-range test (which itself was not unsafe code).
This is a classic C bug where someone implements an overflow check that itself can overflow, causing the branch for overflow to get optimized out. But at least in C the simpler syntax at least made it clear that the triggering code got executed first. The more complex rust syntax obscured that.
Rust has improved the situation by narrowing the cases where you can get into this trouble, but on the other hand it adds a lot of other complexity that contributes to faulty code (and a nearly mandatory packaging ecosystem which is a security nightmare-- it's the norm for even simple rust utilities to pull in a million lines of unauditable (just by bulk) third party code, including multiple HTTPS libraries).
As a result, I don't think it can be taken for granted that rust as a whole is an advancement in software integrity-- it may be, but it's something that ought to be formally studied. In some cases rust might be replacing memory safety bugs with an even greater number of other defects which, depending on the application, may be worse. (not everything is an internet exposed service where hacks are the only failure of consequence and where input really should be assumed to be intelligently adversarial.)
In any case, "break the rules and all bets are off" is an issue that likely will continue to exist in any performant language. Automatic code generation will generate stuff with awful performance unless an optimizer goes through and eliminates 'impossible cases', but optimization isn't possible unless the compiler can assume the rules are followed.
AWS used to be not only sane but elegant: every instance had an entirely-arbitrary internal/private IP address, some could optionally have a second public address, and which instances (including external IP addresses) could talk to which other instances was entirely and solely defined by security groups (as well as, of course, any OS-level firewalls that you'd generally disable), which were pretty much just flexible and reusable firewall rules where the concept of a "security group" replaced entirely the concept of a "subnet", which became an obsolete legacy concept.
They needed to support multiple adapters per instance, which they later added (maybe with a separate security group per adapter, which they might support now but I don't know off-hand); and they also needed hierarchical security group inheritance (the same way traditional subnets can nest into each other), which they didn't add but I guess you can now simulate them (though this sucks and I think is part of the downfall of the elegant stack) using multiple non-hierarchical security groups (which was not supported originally: security groups were permanently fixed in a one-to-one relationship with an instance).
This original elegant cloud-first model of instances and groups made network engineering pleasant for once... even fun! I remember thinking how great it was that all of my arcane physical networking and routing knowledge might soon be obsolete: that I could now think in terms of the abstractions of instances and how they talk to each other, drawing abstract circles around them without having to think about limited address spaces, and that they would assuredly fix the only two shortcomings of the original model...
...but then the network engineers showed up in force and ruined it all. There is simply no good reason for all of this VPC IP-address subnet focused insanity once you go cloud: they are just re-instating all of the frustrating limitations that come up when doing real world network engineering, presumably because they weren't willing to throw away their knowledge and realize all of that stuff is obsolete.
Like, seriously: we want to be able to replicate some enterprise network? That's madness, and it makes it all worse for everyone that this is even a supported goal. This is all virtualized networking: we don't need to be thinking in terms of subnets and gateways, we don't need to be manually configuring our egress... if you have a ton of hubs and routers and have to run cable all over the place, it makes sense, but this is the cloud!
And so now we all actually had to brush off all of that networking knowledge I was happy to give up as Amazon deprecated and fully removed "EC2 Classic" and have forced us all into this VPC insanity; and maybe if you never really tried to grok how AWS worked 15 years ago when it wasn't pretending to be a pile of legacy networking equipment you just shrug and accept that this somehow is all necessary, but it really isn't.
The anti-snitching culture within this community seems to rival that of even the mafia. Perhaps that's why it's been called "the gay mafia" in the past...
Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making this up.
Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex marriages in California against their consent. All of the google results have to do with marriage, not employment. Brendan, care to clarify?
DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses ...
Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.
A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”
Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
It's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right Incel GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.)
Edit: And do you acknowledge that Brendan wanted to cancel many same sex marriages in California? And do you agree or disagree with him that those marriages should have been canceled? Because he got what he paid for, Proposition 8 passed, and those marriages WERE canceled. Which is worse: canceling one job, or thousands of marriages?
Edit 2: It's pretty rich that Brendan would claim to be the one suffering from a hostile work environment, when he was the one who wanted to destroy the marriages of his co-workers and users. Was it too much for him to bear facing the dirty looks of his co-workers who he didn't believe deserved the same rights as he enjoyed? Bullies are always playing the victim.
Breaking apart other people's marriages sounds more like "destructive separation" to me.
Humans have a myriad of visible characteristics: height, weight, skin color, eye color and shape, hair color and type, shapes of facial features, and so on.
All these characteristics vary continuously.
If you see that data as points filling a high-dimensional cube, there's not going to be an empty space there.
Some areas are going to be denser than the others, but there are no gaps there.
What you try to do with "race" is you're trying to cluster this data.
But there really is only one cluster. Might as well call rand() a million times to get a bunch of points in 0..1, and cluster that.
Oh, but you've see black people! And white people!
Well yeah, but it's all those people filling the spaces in between any two points that make it impossible to draw the line.
The only way to draw the line is to make a call on where to draw it — that is, to make an arbitrary choice. Without it, your clustering algorithms would fail.
Yes, there are high-density peaks on this data, especially if you look at any single characteristic.
Yes, you can separate the peaks. But deciding on where to put the the threshold is choice — a social construct — that can leaves a lot of points without a "race" label (which race is Irish - Mexican?) and/or change which peaks make the cutoff (are Armenians a race, or noise in the dataset?).
>Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective
The scientists have two options:
A) Look at the original data which you used to assign the race label (skin color, hair type, etc), and see if there's any correlation of that data with diseases
B)Look at the data, cluster it using an arbitrary choice to be able to get more than one cluster, ignore a lot of people below the threshold, assign the labels, IGNORE THE RAW DATA, and then look for correlations between labels and diseases.
> But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies?
Depends on your definition. They may be rare if you only include self-identified Nazis. However, if you expand that to include members of the Far Right and general White Surpemacists then they're not only not fringe but they become as mainstream as Hannity, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and all of the Q-anon grifters.
White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days.
But if you mean people traipsing around in black SS uniforms then sure yeah those guys are rare, sure.
There was a scandal, yes, and then cablegate revealed rendition-flights via Sweden kept happening for years afterwards and the Swedish government kept it quiet when they discovered it.
It's not really a passive sentence, even though it has all the attributes the Army apparently deems necessary and sufficient to declare it as such in section e.
But a passive sentence is one where the subject is absent - but in this sentence, the subject is 'you'. 'Entitled to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year' is an adjectival phrase. The sentence makes an active statement about the recipient:
You are entitled to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year.
is no more passive than
You are a fine soldier.
A passive version of this sentence would be more like
You are being granted jump pay for the time you spent in training last year.
Consider, many useful primality tests are statistical in nature. It’s pure math, and exact answer is possible but it’s still useful to get a quick check to see if something is a waste of time.
Really, if a full solution takes 20 years you don’t want to actually spend 20 years without having a very good idea it’s going to work.
No they do not. Quote, from your own link:
> According to an April 2025 freedom of information report filed by The Times, over 12,000 people were arrested, including for social media posts, in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
Emphasis mine. "Including". Not exclusively, not only, including.
Now what does the law being cited actually say[1]?
> It is an offence under these sections to send messages of a “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing” character or persistently use a public electronic communications network to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.
With additional clarification[2]:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
> “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.
So you're deliberately spreading misinformation here, as was the original article by the Times and as is everyone else who keeps quoting this figure. Because by means of lying by omission they want to imply one very specific thing: "you will be arrested for criticizing the government on social media". But the actual crime statistic is about a much more common, much broader category of crime - namely: harassment. That 12,000 a year figure includes targeted harassment by almost any carriage medium, as well as crimes like "prank" calling emergency services. It means it includes death threats, stalking, domestic abuse and just about every other type of non-physical abuse or intimidation.
Of course you could've also figured out this is bullshit with a very simple litmus test: 12,000 people a year wouldn't be hard to find if the UK was mass-jailing people on public social media. But it's not what's happening.
The text of the law as well, for anyone interested: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...
[2] https://archive.md/bdEqK#selection-3009.0-3009.194:~:text=A%....