most democratic countries cosplay as democracies. just like most communist countries cosplayed as communist.

ideology in its purest form. After the death of God, you need something to fill that unapproachable void. So you inject ideals- civil service, egalitarianism, tolerance, justice, etc – values that are virtuous and aspirational, but ultimately are just shiny veneers over a darker truth. it functions as scaffolding for systems that serve the interests of raw power. it is theater. performance. spectacle. underneath, the mechanisms of control, inequality, and corruption remain unchanged.

don’t make the mistake of believing that India is somehow unique here

I really need to figure out how to get a single work app to work on Linux reliably

what work app?

I use it for like 99% of my work, so a virtual machine is kind of useless

i mean, it depends on your computer (like if your cpu & motherboard supports virtualization) but you can in theory get a VM with pretty decent performance

on my m1 macbook i have a windows VM that runs very smoothly and i can effortlessly use a gesture on the touchpad to switch between them. it’s pretty cool

on linux it’s a little harder to set up (i had to pay like $100 for the software on the mac) but it’s doable

it’s pretty dangerous not to be getting security updates. probably for regular users won’t be a big deal. i have a feeling really bad vulnerabilities will be patched even if you don’t pay for it just out of a potential PR issue. but i would almost definitely pay this if I were a business who didn’t plan on switching to Win 11 soon

on a personal level i don’t understand why anyone continues to use windows these days

Daily use of Linux & MacOS is virtually identical. Same terminal commands. Similar file system standards. You have homebrew as a package manager on MacOS. You use whatever comes with your distro on Linux (dnf, apt-get, I forget the arch Linux one. Yaort? Yum?)

Really I see no reason for anyone to stay on Windows. You can play 99% of games on Linux these days. I’m not exaggerating, it’s very specific multi-player games that don’t work.

Maybe if you use specific software for a niche industry or purpose then it’s worth having Linux. But even in those cases, you can just use a VM.

That’s what I do on my MacBook pro. I have a VM with windows just to run a specific program a couple times a week.

On my desktop at home I just use Linux and have for the last 10 years or so

The only titles that don’t work in Linux are the ones with invasive anti-cheat, some multi-player titles.

Virtually all single players game work. I’ve had games that don’t work on Windows due to crashes / performance but run on Linux.

The courts have repeatedly ruled that freedom of speech comes with freedom of association.

Montana tried banning TikTok and a judge blocked it for that reason - it infringes upon free speech. I think Bytedance will likely sue federal government under similar grounds. The government cannot arbritarily control what you want to say, who you want to say it to, or where you want to say it.

The Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, assembly, and petition logically extends to include a “freedom of association."

It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech. Of course, it is immaterial whether the beliefs sought to be advanced by association pertain to political, economic, religious or cultural matters, and state action which may have the effect of curtailing the freedom to associate is subject to the closest scrutiny.

It appears from the Court’s opinions that the right of association is derivative from the First Amendment guarantees of speech, assembly, and petition,2 although it has at times been referred to as an independent freedom protected by the First Amendment.

There’s always a back and forth between a government respecting personal freedoms and their responsibility to protect it’s people.

There are justified limitations on personal freedoms and unjustified ones. For the classic example, yelling fire in a movie theater. That is a crime because it can cause people to get harmed. It is only a minor infringement on speech, therefore the benefits outweigh the infringement.

Every single time we infringe on personal freedoms, we need to do this calculation.

So there are 3 main justifications for this TikTok ban.

A) stop Chinese data collection. I think this is just misdirection. You say it’s conspiracy, but just like the PATRIOT Act had nothing to do with patriotism or protecting children and the Iraqi war had nothing to do with WMD… the government often misleads or outright lies.

Much of our data is for sale to anyone who wants to buy it. In fact, our law enforcement loves buying data instead of going through the process for a warrant.

There are so many apps out there with less than scrupulous devs who are more than willing to scrape for as much data as possible and sell that off. China can easily acquire massive amounts of data regardless.

2. stop Chinese influence on Americans. I think this one makes more sense than the first one. China is able to quietly suppress or encourage certain points of views - subtly pushing the 170 million Americans into directions that are beneficial for China’s interests. For example, perhaps media discouraging support for Taiwan.

3. connected to 2, by banning TikTok the US leaves only the main tech companies which have a proven track record of cooperating with the federal government. Not only in criminal cases but suppressing and amplifying specific types of media.

So what are benefits? US has better control of the digital media landscape. Cost? Americans are being restricting from accessing media they would otherwise access.

I don’t see this as a worthwhile exchange. I think federal government should stay out of the media space. I believe this because we are a free society.

You are right that we don’t always live up to that term, and never really have. But we get a hell of a lot closer than China or Russia. We shouldn’t be moving towards them in ideological terms, but away from them.

As for the young people, there are 170 million people on the app and it skews younger. A large portion of these people use Tiktok as their primary social media. A lot of these will be pushed towards anti-establishment and radical ideologies. Tiktok already leans leftist (and not neoliberal left).

What does everyone think about the TikTok ban?

Personally I think it’s absurd. What happened to freedom of speech? Freedom of association? Free market capitalism?

If an American citizen wants to use a Chinese platform, why don’t they have the right to?

I think the data collection stuff is a red herring. Real reason is that war is coming and they’re preparing the online information space so they can more easily manipulate it. Sort of how they did a test run with covid. Banning misinformation and such.

They don’t have such a friendly relationship with TikTok as they do with Google and Facebook, for example. Behind the scenes, the feds work with them to amplify or suppress certain types of speech.

If the sale doesn’t go through, I don’t see how this will eliminate whatever little bit of credibility the federal government has among the younger generations. 18~25 or so

It’s sort of like how YouTube ran at a loss for a long time. The idea is to get ingrained in the market and make up the money later.

Right now Meta has the best VR / AR that is easily accessible. If some new idea or technology catapults VR into a more popular position, then Meta is in a prime position to take advantage.

Will that happen? I don’t know, but Meta seems to think so.

Then you have black Nazis and Native American Texas Rangers. It doesn’t work.

sure, but why do these accidents caused by AI drivers get on the news consistently and yet we rarely see news about human-caused accidents? it’s because news reports what is most interesting - not exactly accurate or representative of the real problems of the country

You have legal recourse against the owner of the car, presumably the company that is profiting from the taxi service.

You see these all the time in San Francisco. I’d imagine the vast majority of the time, there are no issues. It’s just going to be big headlines whenever some accident does happen.

Nobody seems to care about the nearly 50,000 people dying every year from human-caused car accidents

I think it’s a short-sighted move by Universal. Granted, maybe they know something we don’t (Tiktok getting banned soon), but the benefit in TikTok for artists isn’t necessarily the revenue but the promotion of their songs. They are short clips, usually no more than 15~20 seconds long. Lots of people use the songs in their videos, lots more people listen to a clip and want to listen to the full thing -> they go to youtube or apple music or whatever where Universal presumably would make a much larger share of the revenue.

I don’t think it’s obvious at all. Both legally speaking - there is no consensus around this issue - and ethically speaking because AIs fundamentally function the same way humans do.

We take in input, some of which is bound to be copyrighted work, and we mesh them all together to create new things. This is essentially how art works. Someone’s “style” cannot be copyrighted, only specific works.

The government announced an inquiry recently into the copyright questions surrounding AI. They are going to make recommendations to congress about potential legislation, if any, they think would be a good idea. I believe there’s a period of public comment until mid October, if anyone wants to write a comment.

Some of the best relationships in ny life have been with people I’ve worked with. It’s the one thing I miss a lot since we started working from home.

Still not worth going into the office, lol. The freedom is too good. But working from home does sort of mess up the work/life balance. I’m basically always on call these days and don’t have a set routine.

Sometimes that means not working much for a day or two and then working until 11pm on others. Whereas at the office I typically left at a quarter to 5 and turned work off in my brain until tomorrow 9:30am after the first coffee at work.

Having said all that, I encourage people to try and be friendly with their coworkers. Networking and friendships are valuable things. Both for your career and also just fulfillment. I found that the consistently best way to get raises and promotions in a company is simply to have most people you interact with like you.

And that really isn’t hard to do, just takes a bit of authentic conversation and positive vibes. Seriously. If you want to make more money and advance your career - be likeable. It will get you a magnitude more than hard work alone. (Although of course hard work doesn’t hurt)

If they wanna do crazy tracking they don’t need you in the office. They can just force you to install Spyware on your computer and send you a Logitech Webcam that needs to stay on.

I’m glad I’ve always worked for sane companies. At the end of the day, you gotta treat the employees like adults. If you feel they aren’t doing enough, fire them. Don’t try and micromanage. But megacorps probably do see some minor bonuses to productivity otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

It’s just not worth the headache for regular companies, I think.

Here’s the article in it’s entirety. I didn’t pay for an account, I just have this browser extension. Just seems like an advertisement for an iOS feature. Maybe it’s useful, I don’t know. Article doesn’t have any substance though.

After nearly two years of lockdowns, remote working and learning, and general phone-scrolling boredom, many made a New Year’s resolution to spend less time on their smartphones in 2022. Studies show that Americans spend an average of about four hours on their phones each day. That’s 60 days a year—one-fourth of a life awake. That should provoke at least a bit of existential terror.

The iPhone’s Screen Time app helps users at least feel guilty about the wasted time, but there’s an easy trick to make a smartphone impeccably dull.

It’s called grayscale. With a few clicks in the “accessibility” tab on MacBooks and iPhones or a few taps in the settings of an Android or PC, a phone or computer can become as interesting as a black-and-white television.

It isn’t only push notifications and vibrations that cause our addiction to smartphones: Colors draw our attention, and certain ones can cause a dopamine release. The blue themes of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, not to mention the blue Apple uses for iMessages, entrance us.

Humans really like looking at blue, which makes sense, because the sky is light blue on clear days. Until I set all my digital devices to grayscale, I never realized that compared with the sky, iMessage’s blue looks sickeningly artificial. In grayscale, meanwhile, photos and videos have the same intrigue as C-Span at midnight.

A boring phone will likely cause greater use of a laptop to watch videos and look at social media in full color. I recommend grayscaling laptops and monitors too. Many people are colorblind, so most applications are designed to function without color. In theory, most people who work on a computer could perform their tasks in grayscale, as I do.

If you’re at all worried about your excessive smartphone use, make your digital life look like Dorothy’s Kansas, and let the real world be stunning as Oz.