Yup, Gnome Web loads it just fine! Man, it really is a great browser. I try to switch to it every 6 months, but then I remember that it doesn't support extensions at all. I could give up everything, but not 1Password. Nothing is worth copy/pasting credentials and losing passkeys entirely.
For what purpose? While it's a perfectly good password manager, when used with Gnome Web it also means copy/pasting passwords and losing passkeys. Doesn't it?
Wonderful. Allow an "unmonitored" extension from a random stranger on the Internet have access to "all data for all websites" just to support an image format for which Mozilla should have long built in native support...
That's not the reason, but the excuse. The reason Firefox doesn't have jxl is that it is funded by Google, and someone at Google decided that it has to die.
Also the parent comment was about that you really shouldn't just let a random Russian guy run any javascript on any website you visit, that's stupid.
Also also, am I missing something, or Firefox extensions are broken, there is no way to limit an extension to websites (allow or disallow), or even just to check the source code of an extension?
The link I posted shows that Jpeg-XL will come to Firefox, and that that same Google is the one making that possible by writing a secure implementation.
> That's not the reason, but the excuse. The reason firefox doesn't have jxl is that it is funded by Google, and someone at Google decided that it has to die.
So what, you think they were just lying when they said that they'll ship JXL when it has a Rust implementation? You think Mozilla devs were just bluffing when they were working directly with the JXL devs over the last year to make sure everything would work right?
Firefox Nightly v149 has added experimental support via Settings > Firefox Labs:
Webpage Display
Media: JPEG XL
With this feature enabled, Nightly supports the JPEG XL (JXL) format. This is an enhanced image file format that supports lossless transition from traditional JPEG files. See bug 1539075 for more details.
I'd argue that unspoken rules apply even more strongly in actual outdoors setting, because a good number of those norms actually have serious consequences when violated. Anybody seriously hiking or offroading gets to save a non-zero number of behinds of people who ignored those rules, every single year.
And they also know they need to rely on those rules, because they might get them out of trouble too. The outdoors is not always friendly.
The "No speakers" thing is just the "let's try not be an ass to the same person who might need to pull me out of a ravine next" part of the rules.
Of the three you mention, only one is the law in every public land place I've hiked.[1]
Staying on the trail is mostly a suggestion for your safety (and to preserve the area) - definitely not a law.
Ditto for loudspeakers. People often go into nature and throw concerts.
[1] OK - trails in state parks and perhaps some national parks likely have more rules. But trails in general public lands (BLM, forest, etc)? Not many.
This is willful misreading. They specifically also said “social norms”.
This “it’s not technically illegal so it’s not a problem” sentiment is unhealthy for civil societies. I for one would like basic social norms to be respected without law-enforcement being involved.
I was pointing out the pointlessness of invoking "laws" in this scenario. I'm not the one that brought it into the conversation.
As for social norms, one only has to read the comments to understand that there clearly isn't consensus on this point. People go to nature for many reasons - not all related to enjoying the sounds of nature. What dylan604 is pointing out is to be mindful of that.
> People go to nature for many reasons - not all related to enjoying the sounds of nature.
The issue that you seem to be (willfully?) ignoring is that in a shared space, there are actions that you can take that force others to "enjoy" the space in a way that's different than they'd like.
Someone wants to enjoy the space with music. Ok, they play music, so they're enjoying the space in the way they want. Great for them.
Someone else wants to enjoy the space more quietly, able to hear the sounds of nature around them. But the person above has decided for them that they are not permitted to enjoy the space that way.
This is the difference between "freedom to" and "freedom from". Unfortunately when you have the "freedom to" do whatever you want, you infringe on the "freedom from" of others. It's a balance, and I'm sad to see that it seems people are swinging that balance toward "freedom to" at the expense of others. When I was growing up, we used to call this "common courtesy", which seems to be much less common these days.
There are a lot of people who are loud about not wanting to follow social norms (which is expected when we're talking about people rudely being loud, I guess). It seems to be a point of pride. I don't get it but I've definitely seen it.
The common retort is that these don't exist any more, but in my experience they're all over. If you have kids you start seeing them everywhere, too. They're not as classically romantic as an ancient Greek agora, but there are plenty of spaces. During the summer I'm probably at a different space 5 days a week with the kids after school.
I think the real problem is that some people forget how to go places. It's so easy to do the routine of work -> dinner -> screen time -> sleep -> repeat that time vanishes from people.
Whenever I hear people, usually young and single, complain that their 8 hour job leaves 0 hours in the day to do anything and they're too tired on the weekends to go out, it's always this: Their time is disappearing into their screens, which makes it feel like their only waking hours go to work. I try to give gentle nudges to help give people ideas, but none of them really want to hear that it's something they can change. It's just so easy to believe that life has thrust this situation upon us and there's nothing we can do about it.
> The common retort is that these don't exist any more
Usually when I see the retort, its also with the understanding that 3rd places need to be free, or essentially free. If theres a significant expectation of money being spent in order to spend time there, its not really a “3rd place” by the intended definition. (Thats the argument I’ve seen)
Essentially free covers a LOT of places... Coffee shops, pubs, etc.
Though I do agree that the privatization of public spaces is a problem (in the US, not sure about globally). For example, the local "town center" is owned by a giant developer (BXP/Boston Properties) and bans photography. The layout is like a typical downtown business district - grid streets, mid-rise buildings with retail/commercial on ground level, office or apartments above, and a park on each end. And crawling with rent-a-cop losers who have nothing better to do than chase people who aren't actively shopping.
That has never really been part of the definition. If you look at that Wikipedia article a couple comments up, I only see two examples (i.e. stoops and parks) that are free, and I think parks are a stretch because conversation is not a primary reason for most people going there.
Also, people forgot how to find places. If you're driving a car, places speed by too fast to see or remember (and it's dangerous to spend too much time looking at them). On Google, places are actively hidden from you for the sake of making the map look "cleaner". Every time I go downtown (on transit, not by car) I notice new shit that just doesn't exist on the map unless you specifically type in the name to get Google to admit that it exists.
I noticed this the first time I took a walk by myself to the town center rather than letting my parents drive me there. You know the routine: drive to the mall parking lot, go and get the thing you're looking for, drive home. Well, I didn't have my own car and figured I could walk there (about an hour, so probably 2-3km, in a country that uses sidewalks). It's basically magical how much stuff you notice that you would just ignore when in the car, even as a passenger.
I wrote on my white board, "There goes today's hour." So if I'm walking by and I read it again, and I just spent some time on some mindless phone thing, I remember that I could find a better use of my free time tomorrow.
What happens when they try to go to that place, they go there, they are there alone and bored. There is no one to talk with. So they end up being on the phone and more depressed.
Our lopsided emphasis on individualism, our definition of economic efficiency that does not include the mental health value, these have been detrimental to our connections, roots, community, family etc.
We said, let the mom and pop stores die, their replacements provide the same value but more efficiently. Let community bonds die they intrude upon our individual destiny.
But we did not correctly account for the value provided by those that we chose to replace. So it is not surprising that we find ourselves here.
Could it have played out any other way ? I doubt it. Our world is an underdamped system, so we will keep swinging towards the extremes, till we figure out how to get a critically damped system. The other serious problem is that the feedback system is so laggy, that's a biggy in feedback control loops.
The world has become a much bigger place. You used to know who to avoid, the default was someone was acceptable. Now the ones to avoid move around and it's all too likely that a newcomer is such a person.
> Now the ones to avoid move around and it's all too likely that a newcomer is such a person.
This seems a wild generalization to make, though I guess "be suspicious of newcomers" is a little biologically hardwired. What's your epistemology for believing "newcomers" are "the ones to avoid"?
This reads like that pattern where people assign blame for all issues to whatever thing they happen to not like. The US is the least individualistic it has ever been, but there was much more community and less loneliness in the past. That make it pretty obvious that the issue here isn't "individualism".
I am not from the US but your observation, if correct, would offer a counterexample worth thinking about.
You are saying that in the past, more resources were spent supporting individuals than the resources spent supporting communities and yet communities were stronger. That sure would be an interesting thing to understand if true. My interest is certainly piqued, seems too good to be true though.
No it doesn't. I live in a planned neighborhood in the suburbs. I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood. And even if none of that existed, nothing has stopped me from being friends with my neighbors, or the parents of my kid's friends. The suburbs are a different model with tradeoffs, but they're also useful for periods and phases of life different from the ones served by urban settings.
A planned neighborhood is technically by definition not suburban sprawl, as sprawl requires a lack of planning. On the other hand, I'd argue if you can do all of that (and said walking distance is under a mile[0]) you're not even in a suburb, you're in a dense enough location to be a town or small city. Unfortunately thanks to American zoning and planning it can be very difficult to know what your home area is actually considered and it makes this type of anecdotal evidence not particularly useful[1].
[0] A mile is essentially the farthest the average person will comfortable walk versus driving a car for travel that does not require carrying anything back. Once you add in carrying things (e.g. groceries) it drops to half a mile. Anything less dense than that and people won't want to walk, anything more dense than that and you're into standard city planning.
[1] Assuming you're American of course and obviously I'm not about to ask you to dox yourself, considering this type of thing can vary right down to the neighbourhood level.
>I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood.
If you can walk to these things, you don't live in the areas the parent comment is talking about. "Suburban sprawl" doesn't mean all suburbs, it's specifically the ones which don't have facilities and community.
Sounds like you like in a “streetcar suburb”, not urban sprawl. I’ve been in real urban sprawl and you can’t walk to anything. Not that you’d want to, since there are no sidewalks. Drop a Google Maps pin anywhere in Texas not in the direct center of a major city to see what it’s really like.
That's my neighborhood you're "citing". It's a walking neighborhood--cars are useless with no parking next to stores. I talked to more strangers there than in any other place I've lived. My doctor would stop me on the street to look in my grocery bags.
I mean, the very first paragraph of your own link says: "However, subsequent investigations revealed that the extent of public apathy was exaggerated." and the second paragraph says, "Researchers have since uncovered major inaccuracies in the Times article, and police interviews revealed that some witnesses had attempted to contact authorities."
I live in probably the most walkable city in the world, but there are millions of lonely people here as well. From any of my observations, I can’t pinpoint to one single problem.
It might be a composite effect of different things contributing to the easiness of being alone. Cultural skill that overtime gets eroded, and as less time people spend among others, it becomes even harder to go back.
This. I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community. Community is a function of distance, broadly speaking.
Within KCLS, there are two public libraries that have maker spaces (AFAIK): Bellevue, Federal Way.
PS this is not meant to be confrontational, would love it if there were more maker spaces in libraries (when have asked in the past, the usual answer is that they do not have enough space for it).
I'm willing to bet that the libraries near the person you're talking to have all but maybe a cafe. I mean, I've never seen a library in the US that didn't have internet access and a place to meet and that weren't nonprofit.
Suburban sprawl is not going to be "fixed" in anyones lifetime. But it doesn't have to be limiting. I grew up in a very typical suburban style neighborhood in the 1970s. Tract homes, lots of cul-de-sac streets. But neighbors talked to one another, kids played together, there were summer gatherings in those cul-de-sacs on the 4th of July or Labor Day.
Don't think you have to live in some idealized fantasy land to go talk to your neighbors.
I live in a suburban neighborhood with a couple bag ends, our neighborhood is pretty social. couple of neighborhood bbqs a year, kids all playing together every day, dinners, etc. It is quiet and not a lot of traffic with long term residents. I am not 100% on what exactly the key is for a town is, I think style matters, but Ive been in walkable neighborhoods without a good community, and non-walkable neighborhoods with one.
I'll say that when I was a kid, the neighborhood was still as it was originally built, no sidewalks. Didn't stop anyone from socializing, didn't stop kids from biking around.
The city added sidewalks there in the '00s or so, but when I go back there I almost never see anyone using them.
I think the trend of isolation and loneliness is not really related to infrastructure or stuff like "walkability." Those things are pretty minor obstacles.
How big were the lots? How far of a walk was the closest bar, grocery store, cafe? Do you have to walk onto someone's property to talk to them if they are sitting on the porch?
I lived in a car dependent burb for 20+ years and would rarely, if ever, run into my neighbors out on the town. Living in a walkable neighborhood in a medium-low density city for under a year and I regularly run into my neighbors.
Standard 0.25 acre suburban lots. No markets, cafes, or anything like that it was a bog-standard subdivision. There was a small park sort of centrally located but that was really the only ammenity. Supermarket was a few miles away. Nobody walked there, cars to go anywhere. Neighbors still knew one another, at least on the same streets. Kids met at school, figured out where each other lived.
I knew cul de sac was french for bag end, or end of sack or whatever the translation was. One time reading lord of the rings after learning Tolkien explicitly avoided french loan words, I realized Bilbo living at Bag End is kind of a joke. Its just saying Bilbo lives in the cul de sac.
For what it's worth, many (most?) countries have most of their people living in places that are not sprawling suburbs. It's worst in the "Anglosphere" countries (US/Canada/Australia) within the last 50-70 years, but it's absolutely not a fantasy land. It's the way things were everywhere before 1940, and most places still are today.
I say that because it is fixable, if we let ourselves fix it...
Your point stands though, even in a fairly antisocial layout of a suburb, you can still usually make friends with a decent number of people nearby.
First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.
> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.
> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest.
Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
If that’s the ‘only’ thing he was canceled for, then how do you explain content of the comics he started making after he was called out, once the mask came off?
Do you think he was driven to that by cancel culture? Or do you think he just got tired of pretending to care, and started ‘telling it like it is?’
Being cancelled for saying "it's really scary that half of all black people don't agree it's ok to be white" would radicalize anyone. The fact itself radicalizes people, the hysterical reaction of the left radicalizes people even more.
But where does this self-indulgent excuse ends? You can argue BLM itself got radicalized into extreme positions by the radicalized mistreatment of black people, and so on.
At some point, if Scott Adams behaved like a bigot, we should stop making excuses for him. Becoming "radicalized" through life's hardships is not an excuse, unless we also grant this excuse to BLM et al. Otherwise it's selective slack-cutting.
But surely the history and treatment of black people in the US is at the root of it all, rather than "the radicalized left"?
Cop violence against black suspects because of violent crime by blacks seems a very suspect explanation. It ignores how the US got to that situation. Also, cops aren't in the same category as criminals (well, non-criminal cops anyway) and should be held to higher standards. They should de-escalate, not be another factor in violence.
It seems to me it's a spiral of violence in which the cops sometimes play a role in making it worse, and in any case, it makes the excuses for Scott Adams' views very weak in my opinion. So we should cut Scott Adams' some slack because he was "radicalized" by the "hysterical reaction of the left", but not acknowledge the reasons for BLM's existence or anything even before that?
> But surely the history and treatment of black people in the US is at the root of it all, rather than "the radicalized left"?
At some point people have to stop blaming whites from hundreds of years ago and start looking at the consequences current policies and individual choices. This cop violence problem is really only a thing in high-crime areas.
> It ignores how the US got to that situation
Yes, by very lenient with violent criminals.
> Also, cops aren't in the same category as criminals (well, non-criminal cops anyway) and should be held to higher standards. They should de-escalate, not be another factor in violence.
They try that. Suspects refuse to cooperate and results are predictable.
> So we should cut Scott Adams' some slack because he was "radicalized" by the "hysterical reaction of the left", but not acknowledge the reasons for BLM's existence or anything even before that?
There's nothing radical about peacefully disengaging with people who think your mere existance is a bad thing. BLM on the other hand is mostly an attempt to make crime worse by weakening police forces, which again, would mostly hurt black people.
> This cop violence problem is really only a thing in high-crime areas.
All around the world, and all through recorded history the same thing can be seen.
It's more of an interconnected feedback loop.
Distrusted minority areas are over-policed with excess force, more charges are laid (even if actual crime rates are on par with majority less policed areas), people that are over policed act up and push back, reported crime increases.
In the recent history of the USofA there are even examples of state munfactured crime - the CIA famously raised money for off book weapons to foreign fighters by buying cocaine and selling in bulk in minority parts of the USofA.
50% of murderers are black and most of their victims are other blacks. Pretending like the violent crime problem in minority areas is made up only hurts those communities.
As does a reductionist attitude that normalises over policing and it's knock on consequences reducing a complex issue created by social policy not of a communities making.
> At some point people have to stop blaming whites from hundreds of years ago
Why? And how is blaming "the hysterical reaction of the left" doing that?
It seems all you're doing is simply stopping at the point of analysis you find palatable, which is dishonest.
> [the US got to the current violent situation] by very lenient with violent criminals.
Bullshit. Your opinion lacks any depth or explanatory power. No serious analysis would stop here.
> [cops try to de-escalate]. Suspects refuse to cooperate and results are predictable.
Reality shows otherwise. There's reason there has been increasing backlash against police violence, and it's not "the hysterical left".
> There's nothing radical about peacefully disengaging with people who think your mere existance is a bad thing. BLM on the other hand is mostly an attempt to make crime worse by weakening police forces, which again, would mostly hurt black people.
This doesn't address what I said, ignores the original comment (that Scott Adams had become radicalized, not even the OP dismissed this) and is generally a dishonest comment.
All this shows is that you have right-wing views about policing, but explains nothing and ignores the reality of how we got there.
> Why? And how is blaming "the hysterical reaction of the left" doing that?
Leftists pushing the idea that all good aspects of western culture are white supremacy and must be dismantled would be a factor, yes.
> Bullshit. Your opinion lacks any depth or explanatory power. No serious analysis would stop here.
Crime rates in minority areas prove it.
> Reality shows otherwise. There's reason there has been increasing backlash against police violence, and it's not "the hysterical left".
The increased backlash responds to increased profitability. Just look at how much BLM leaders cash in. Most police shooting victims are white, yet there's not talk about it anywhere.
That's a Smithsonian museum, not some abode of radical leftism. That display from 2020 has been removed, and it any case it was listing aspects & assumptions of white culture in the US, not necessarily saying they are wrong. Through your ideological lens, you're predisposed to see everything in that list as something "the radical left" (or blacks, whatever) considers evil, but that's incorrect.
If anything, this display erred on the side of attributing too much to "white culture" which isn't a fair assessment of the contributions of other cultures. E.g. scientific thought, rationality, politeness, self-reliance are all good traits attributed exclusively to white culture, which is questionable.
The display didn't state these were things to dismantle; that's just your right-wing mindset assuming things. You're echoing the talking points of MAGA at this point...
> Leftists pushing the idea that all good aspects of western culture are white supremacy and must be dismantled would be a factor, yes.
Nah, "leftists" (people, really) are reacting to a pre-existing problem. Plus you built a strawman there, nobody said "all good aspects of western culture are white supremacy", unless you consider cop brutality "a good aspect".
> Crime rates in minority areas prove it.
Nah, crime rates in marginalized eras don't prove what you claim, and neither do they justify cop violence.
> The increased backlash responds to increased profitability. Just look at how much BLM leaders cash in.
No. You are just fixated on your favorite boogie man, while decrying cops and racism being singled out by "the radical left". The "BLM leaders" are irrelevant -- this is a decentralized rallying cry against police brutality, not a hierarchical organization -- what matters is the outcry on people who reacted to police brutality. You are grasping at straws anyway, anyone on HN can see that arguing about funding has nothing to do with whether protesting police brutality is a just cause.
> Most police shooting victims are white
Your stats show police shooting victims are NOT primarily white. I think you meant "blacks aren't the majority", but that's not the winning argument you think it is: nobody said cops are exclusively prejudiced against blacks. Also, shooting is not the only way the police exerts violence and discrimination.
Finally, your link supports the fact police brutality is a problem in the US.
> [Scott Adams] wasn't [radicalized]. That's just leftist hysteria and willfull character assassination.
The comment I was replying to argued Adams was radicalized, but blamed the hysterical left. It pays to read the conversation before jumping in.
> unless you consider cop brutality "a good aspect".
No, I was referring to cooperating with law enforcement authorities instead of antagonizing them at every possible chance. How many victims of police shootings could have avoided that fate by simply peacefully cooperating with the officers involved?
> Nah, crime rates in marginalized eras don't prove what you claim, and neither do they justify cop violence.
They do.
> No. You are just fixated on your favorite boogie man, while decrying cops and racism being singled out by "the radical left". The "BLM leaders" are irrelevant -- this is a decentralized rallying cry against police brutality, not a hierarchical organization -- what matters is the outcry on people who reacted to police brutality. You are grasping at straws anyway, anyone on HN can see that arguing about funding has nothing to do with whether protesting police brutality is a just cause.
Not all police shootings are police brutality. In fact, I'd argue most are perfectly justified by suspects refusing to follow orders.
> Your stats show police shooting victims are NOT primarily white. I think you meant "blacks aren't the majority", but that's not the winning argument you think it is: nobody said cops are exclusively prejudiced against blacks. Also, shooting is not the only way the police exerts violence and discrimination.
I prefer to rely on hard data than on paranoid conspiracy theories.
> Finally, your link supports the fact police brutality is a problem in the US.
More palatable to blame the cops than the suspects who needlesly refuse to cooperate.
> The comment I was replying to argued Adams was radicalized, but blamed the hysterical left. It pays to read the conversation before jumping in.
I read the comment. I disagree with the characterization.
> No, I was referring to cooperating with law enforcement authorities instead of antagonizing them at every possible chance.
That's not "a good aspect of Western culture". Non-Western culture also has law enforcement.
"Antagonizing" is the crux of the problem: with racial profiling and excessive policing of minorities, it's the police who's antagonizing. If you put people with guns and a predisposition against minorities in constant contact and friction will them, things will happen.
In any case, "antagonizing" law enforcement doesn't warrant execution or use of deadly force, at least not in a democracy.
> They do.
No, they don't.
> Not all police shootings are police brutality. In fact, I'd argue most are perfectly justified by suspects refusing to follow orders.
The link you provided specifically mentions police brutality, I guess you should have paid closer attention.
"Refusing to follow orders" seldom warrants shooting. Maybe in a dictatorship.
> I prefer to rely on hard data than on paranoid conspiracy theories.
You actually don't. The "hard data" you provided shows white people are NOT the primary victims of police shooting.
Also you're fixated on a conspiracy theory about BLM's leaders yadda yadda, when the reality is that this was a public outcry about police brutality. That's the hard data you ignore because your ideology is fixated on the "radical left" boogiemen.
> More palatable to blame the cops than the suspects who needlesly refuse to cooperate.
Non sequitur. Also, it's what your link states, I guess you should have paid closer attention.
> I read the comment. I disagree with the characterization.
Nah. I don't see your answer to that comment. I think you misread it, much like you misread the stats link you referenced.
> Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil.
> Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words.
> If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
The credibility of the claim is literally besides the point. It's about the information that was conveyed to contextualize the question in the survey! Does anyone have media literacy anymore?
They do. They understand you cited ADL in lieu of an argument. If it could stand on its own you wouldn't need the citation and guilt-by-association. They understand the culmination of all the surrounding context reduces to a schmittian friend-enemy distinction where you are placing yourself as enemy. Everything else is sophistry.
I read what you wrote and read it as sophistry. You reply by adding more.
"It's why you believe [...]" But you don't know what I believe.
"Scott Adams claimed [...] because of a response to a survey question [...]" But his statement is, if one applies some very basic "media literacy" (as you like to call it), clearly rhetorical, with the underlying message that there seems to be a lot of racial hatred from blacks towards whites in the United States in 2023, and that this racial hatred seems to be institutionally supported, and that as a white person of means he'll use his means to avoid this racial hatred and suggests others do the same. The cited survey is merely one data point he presents to support this belief. Arguing as if he arrived at this conclusion purely off of that alone is total sophistry.
I don't live in the US, so perhaps that will give you some reprieve. Scott Adams might well have been wrong. I don't claim to know here if he was, just that you haven't actually contended with his position at all despite writing a lot of angry words, and that this excess of sophistry justifies a dismissive response.
Wait, there are hundreds of cases of American citizens being deported? I've only heard of the one guy (whose name I have in a text file somewhere). Where's a good list of the others?
It seems that you're not very familiar with what actually happened. The phrase "It's okay to be white" had become associated with white supremacists, And black people's responses to the pole had nothing to do with their opinions of white people as a whole. You, as well as Scott Adams, decided to misinterpret it. Scott Adams took things a step further and decided that he wanted nothing to do with black people on the simple basis of this poll, which is absolutely wild.
I wonder who gets to decide when something is "associated" with something else in a way that makes any and all uses of that thing a cancelable offense.
I think my eyes just rolled out of my head. Firstly because you think “BLM” was a someone you can attribute an opinion to, and secondly, the mind-numbingly idiotic view you did ascribe to “them”.
>Firstly because you think “BLM” was a someone you can attribute an opinion to
three people coined the phrase and made a lot of money on it through donations, interviews, grants, books, media, etc.
Yes, BLM the movement and actions may be decentralized -- let's not pretend there weren't profiteering ringleaders at any given point[0], and they most definitely had vocal opinions.
None of those articles mentions any of them saying they hate white people and they all link to a BLM wiki article that contradicts your claim that they were ringleaders if the movement.
> three people coined the phrase and made a lot of money on it through donations, interviews, grants, books, media, etc.
And tons of people said it with no affiliation to those three people. What a ridiculous load of nonsense. Also, given the links you provided, I'm curious what, specifically, you think:
"Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement"
means? Would you like for me to define "decentralized" to you? Is there some other part of that completely unambiguous sentence that I can help with?
> let's not pretend there weren't profiteering ringleaders at any given point[0], and they most definitely had vocal opinions.
Great, what does that have to do with anything I said?
Y'all are so utterly boring and predictable.
'Someone, somewhere said something mean about white people, and I'm going to brainlessly attribute that to everyone I hate for not advocating for me, personally, enough!' is, paraphrasing your take, the lamest, most childish shit imaginable. Grow up.
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)
cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.
cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.
You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.
Blackballing, in Victorian English society, strictly meant to vote against a proposed member joining a club (above the working classes club memberships carried great weight wrt social standing).
It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.
It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.
Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.
If we are looking for synonyms with related effects we should include banished, excommunicated, shunned and interdicted.
They have all slightly different meaning, used in slightly different contexts, with a slight different effect on the individual and community. They can't be used interchangeable without loosing that distinction and creating slight misunderstandings (as well as originating from different cultures and religions). We might say that someone should be banished from polite society, but we can't say they should be interdicted from polite society.
> cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.
I won’t miss Scott Adams. I won’t shed a tear for anyone who is racist and misogynistic, no matter the size of their platform. We need less racists and in this case nature canceled him.
If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
>> If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
Just make sure the comic isn't "Dilbert Reborn", which Adams started after he lost his national syndication. Those are either unfunny, vile, or both. https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726
Are they, though? I only saw the linked four strips, and they're the typical right-wing depiction of leftist positions that say more about how people on the right think than about what leftists actually believe.
The first one is about Dilbert going to an anti-white-man protest, which might be how people on the right perceive something like a BLM event, but it's not what these events actually are. This is the kind of zero-sum thinking that conflates "my life should matter" with "your life should not matter." It's not what leftists actually believe.
The remarkable thing about "Dilbert Reborn" series is that it is a complete corruption and total betrayal of the original Dilbert comics.
The originals' core premise was universal workplace satire that criticized the office as a system: bureaucracy, incentives, incompetence, managerial nonsense... stuff that felt broadly true no matter one's politics. Even when it got cynical, it was still observational, in the sense of "here's how corporate life warps people." This depiction of what is essentially everyone's shared day-to-day struggles is the thing that gave it a place in mainstream culture.
In direct contrast, Dilbert Reborn is about Adams's personal grievances: his divorce and subsequent inability to find another partner, his fall from grace and full embrace of the alt-right movement, and his long-held beliefs about race, sex and other social issues that he quadrupled down on. Its core premise is "I was wronged; subscribe to the uncensored version; also here's the political/culture commentary bundle." It uses the recognizable characters and brand equity of the original comics to sell a fundamentally different product: paywalled, grievance-tinged, "spicier", creator-centric franchise built in the wake of his 2023 meltdown and institutional rejection.
There's actually quite a few conservative comedians and cartoonists I find funny. Adams was not one of them. The fundamental truth about successful humor is that you cannot make it about you and your own grievances. Adams totally failed at that.
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)
Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.
> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".
Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
I don't think this is true. "Cancel culture" is distinguished from normal social consequences by many things, including the perpetrators going to others outside of the perpetrators' and victim's social group to attack the victim.
If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference.
There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.
We don't have to accept or reject all manner of social consequence as a single unit. That would be absurd.
> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.
For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
I wouldn't agree with this change. And I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.
> But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it.
This is exactly what cancel culture is. It's pushing back on something (usually legal, but behavior we don't strongly don't agree with).
And its absurd to me how the right acts like cancel culture is a left movement. The right has used it too. Look at all the post Charlie Kirk canceling that happened, huge scale -- even the government got involved in the canceling there. Colin Kaepernick is probably one of the most high profile examples of canceling. The big difference is that the right has more problematic behaviors. Although more of it is being normalized. Jan 6 being normalized is crazy to me, but here we are.
So we agree that it's possible to reject a behavior without legislating against it.
You conveniently left out the part about mob mentality there. I don't think anyone was ever objecting to people expressing their disapproval of something in and of itself. Certainly I wasn't.
I'm not sure what partisan complaints are supposed to add to the discussion. I don't think it matters if one, both, or neither "team" are engaging in the behavior. The behavior is bad regardless.
> I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.
That's a boycott but I don't believe it qualifies as "cancelling". Identifying YC associated businesses and telling people not to patronize them due to the association might qualify. Trying to get people who continued to use HN after the policy change fired would qualify.
What if HN was a group about celebrating the abusing of kids, and the people who used HN were daycare workers? Would you just say that since it happens outside of work no one has the right to report it?
The right? I never questioned anyone's right to do anything. I objected to instigation of others. To mob mentality. I don't object to going about your life and dealing with things on an individual basis as they come up.
The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?
Taking you at (what I assume to be) your intended meaning. Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
And here's an example of something worse than cancel culture -- government officials using official state power to do what you disagree with ordinary citizens doing. I don't even consider this cancel culture, but the headline of the article shows that people conflate the two:
> The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?
Celebrating a crime isn't conspiracy to commit one.
> Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Why wouldn't it? You've just constructed your bar, and that's great. I'm glad you'd never want to react on scale based on someone or some organizations postings. If Google's CEO posted that he "personally" thought that selling information to governments was fine if you didn't get caught, you wouldn't suggest to your friends to not use Google because it was just his viewpoint?
At the end of the day the community will decide if an argument to boycott at scale makes sense. If I go around saying to boycott Google because a guy there doesn't like anime probably will make me look more a fool than anyone else.
Your example is off base again. If a rank and file employee gets a DUI and Google refuses to fire them over it yeah it's wrong to try to organize a lynch mob against Google for that.
I didn't construct some arbitrary personal bar. I simply acknowledged that edge cases exist that reasonable people might feel necessitate community action as a matter of self preservation. That doesn't undermine the general principle.
At the end of the day we're discussing social standards so there aren't going to be any airtight logical arguments and the edges will inevitably be blurry. If you adopt an extremist mindset you'll be able to rationalize just about anything. That doesn't mean you're actually in the right though.
My point isn't that edge cases exist or not. It's that what's an edge case to you may not be to others. The culture will dictate what is extreme or not. Now you can argue that this can result in some mob mentality taking down people who aren't deserving. True, but in society we see that we've tended to get better over time at making this determination, even if there are blips along the way. To quote Theodore Parker, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Now, it's our job, when we see the arc not bending the right way (or fast enough) to do something, but I think to avoid allowing the arc to have levers is not doing ourselves any favors.
And with all the talk of cancel culture (not government action, but just all private citizen action), I've actually seen very few examples of it resulting in something that I consider unacceptable. Note, I'd consider physical threats outside the bounds of cancel culture -- those are just physical threats.
Please don't hound people like this on HN. It's not acceptable to say “I remember you doing exactly that in many, many threads before” and “you're always trying to protect unsavory characters”. It's hyperbolic and unfalsifiable, and not the kind of discourse that HN is intended for. Commenters have the right to have their comments evaluated as they are in the thread, and not coloured by wild allegations of conduct in unspecified historical threads.
The purpose of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Plenty of users are doing a good job of discussing this difficult topic curiously. We want this to be a site where difficult topics can be discussed, and that can only happen if people are committed to curious conversation rather than ideological battle.
If you want to participate on HN, we need you, like everyone, to respect the guidelines, no matter how difficult and activating the topic is.
These lines from the guidelines are particularly relevant here:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
It's pretty simple to deal with cancel culture without limiting speech:
First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem.
Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.
> First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it.
Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture.
So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?
Because white supremacists are, from some abstract level, undesirable? And some have white supremacist tendencies, so there has to be some way of, at the very least, ignoring them and ensuring that its possible to ignore them.
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist
I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.
I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas.
Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.
I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).
Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.
Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.
If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.
We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.
> They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech.
I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.
I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
I've seen it in person once with a former coworker, everything created anxiety, everything was problematic, she spent her entire time looking for a reason to be offended (especially tenuously on behalf of someone else). It was exhausting trying to work with her. She took so much time off too, at very short notice, as she just couldn't cope with working that day.
Yeah I have come across it too, I have also met examples like the woman you describe. But we don't really have to rely on personal anecdotes. The rise of anxiety in young people over the last 20 years is well documented. Someone who's really determined to pick holes in this will say that doesn't prove causality, it could be multivariate or it could be other things completely, and they're right, we're probably not going to find a gold standard scientific study proving my point. But if someone thinks this increase in anxiety is not tied to how people react to speech, online and off, or if they try to handwave it away as unconnected to the broader social change I'm describing, they're being obstinate or they're trying to protect their sacred cows... for another example we have many many people of all political leanings (including apolitical) these days talking about how they've disappeared from public social media and retreated into private chat groups because the public discourse is just too dangerous. That is cancel culture. It is real. It has had precisely the deleterious effect on society which I described.
> The rise of anxiety in young people over the last 20 years is well documented
Sure - but I'd argue that's due to the overall unhealthy aspects of internet use and not specifically 'cancel culture'.
The internet has become a constant stream of something that is simultaneously designed to maintain your attention and engagement ( control you ), and sell you stuff ( control you ).
I think that's a far too strong. I can see how grievances can be exploited to promulgate these views, and unfair cancelling might be one of those, but I don't see that as the main driving grievance that has been exploited - what I see is the timeless 'times are hard and it's some other groups fault' grievance as the main engine.
I'd also argue that extreme right wing views are on the rise in many places in the world, and I'd argue most of them never got anywhere near the US level of cancel culture - and indeed things like positive discrimination are still just seen as discrimination.
I think it's unlikely to be one factor - but if I had to choose one, I'd say there is a better correlation between the relatively recent rise in day to day internet use and the rise in prominence of such views.
That doesn't mean we should accept that people censor themselves for fear of having their livelihood ruined because someone takes a statement out of context. I'd rather live in a world where people feel safe in being honest with their opinions so that we can work out differences before they become an issue.
I agree, but that's an issue of our economic system: financial precarity.
Capitalism operates on consumers right to vote with our feet and dollars. This takes the form of "a bad review" that signifies a bad investment. It's our only market-based defense against abuse.
I switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
Yes lidar has limitations, but so does machine vision. That’s why you want both if you can have it. LIDAR is more reliable at judging distance than stereo vision. Stereo vision requires there to be sufficient texture (features) to work. It can be thrown off by fog or glare. A white semi trailer can be a degenerate case. It can be fooled by optical illusions.
Yes, humans don’t have built in lidar. But humans do use tools to augment their capabilities. The car itself is one example. Birds don’t have jet engines, props, or rotors… should we not use those?
Wait, has MacOS finally figured out fractional scaling? Last I looked, Linux actually had better support. And now Linux support is pretty good. It’s really only older apps that don’t work.
Wow, I had no idea Android allowed a third party app to take over absolute control of all notifications. I assume you have to allow it somehow? It’s actually very cool that this is possible. Apple would never even consider allowing this.
It seems to me like a way to standardize what happens all the time anyway. Compilers are always looking for ways to optimize, and that generally means making assumptions. Specifying those assumptions in the code, instead of in flags to the compiler, seems like a win.
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