phatskat (u/phatskat)

phatskat commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship' npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring

refurb · 7 days ago

Hate speech is not a crime, at least not in the US (thank god).

My point was that you complain about about speech being suppressed, but ignore the same when it comes to things like hate speech and DEI.

Seems like the best approach is no speech restrictions rather than banning it based on the flavor of the week politics?

phatskat · 7 days ago

My mistake for confusing hate speech directly with hate crime. Hate speech can turn a crime into a “hate crime” and that’s my mistake for conflating the two. In my original post the thought behind it was hateful speech with an incitement towards violence - either way, I can agree that speech itself shouldn’t be illegal even if hateful, and I agree with where the law is that if it calls for violence against a group it can constitute a crime.

> My point was that you complain about about speech being suppressed, but ignore the same when it comes to things like hate speech and DEI.

I think it’s very clear - the government shouldn’t be infringing on speech. Hateful or not - so long as the speech doesn’t coincide with calls to action or other things that cause said speech to become part of a crime. And even then, it’s still less about the speech - that’s not the illegal part (as you correct earlier) - it’s about the actions that may rise to the level of a crime.

Overall I still don’t know how DEI works into any of this and I’d like for you to elaborate on that part.

phatskat commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship' npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring

refurb · 10 days ago

The irony is you accuse the administration of applying the label too broadly, but not the people who cry “hate speech” and “DEI”.

Why is that? We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”.

phatskat · 8 days ago

Hate speech is a crime - suggesting a group of people, defined by some characteristic like race or gender, should be subject to violence, has been agreed to be dangerous for hopefully obvious reasons. If hate speech laws didn’t exist and the government tried to stifle that speech, that would be in violation of free speech.

Not sure why you put DEI in as a free speech issue - unless you have some source to go along with the claim that it somehow violates free speech?

> We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”.

I think we can both agree that suggesting something like that isn’t hate speech, and I think if there was violent rhetoric against Asian people being “blamed” for covid you’d have a different case on your hands - again, there’s no context for your claim so we can’t really discuss it beyond hypotheticals can we?

> The irony is you accuse the administration of applying the label too broadly

My point is the same people who complain about “free speech” when private companies kick the likes of Alex jones off of their platforms are more than happy to wield the power of the federal government to silence dissent or to force companies and universities to make difficult decisions between keeping funding or standing by the lie principles.

phatskat commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship' npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring

inglor_cz · 10 days ago

IIRC the results of the "Did they deserve it?" polls among the European Muslim populations weren't particularly encouraging.

phatskat · 8 days ago

What polls?

phatskat commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship' npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring

refurb · 11 days ago

As far as I can tell from the Reuter’s article, the memo reads “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”.

To me that seems like a good thing?

But the very carefully placed quotes around censorship in the article makes it seem like it would be unfairly painting activities like fact checking as censorship?

Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?

phatskat · 11 days ago

> Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?

I’ll be curious to see this when it finally leaks too

> “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”. To me that seems like a good thing?

It seems like it until you remember that the current party in power considers things like a private business saying “we don’t tolerate hate speech” as infringing on free speech. At this point, the right uses “free speech” as a battle cry to shut down people who don’t agree with them. The government telling anyone they can’t have DEI practices, or forcing compliance with their views on what’s appropriate by withholding budget, or targeting citizens for their social media posts - these are actual free speech issues.

phatskat commented on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship' npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/seattle_spring

inglor_cz · 11 days ago

Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo weren't killed by capitalism or global climate change.

Personally, I consider the chilling effect of such events on freedom of speech and art quite a huge problem. This freedom was crucial to European prosperity.

phatskat · 11 days ago

But that attack wasn’t representative of any large population, it was the result of terrorists doing terrorist things.

phatskat commented on AI agents break rules under everyday pressure spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agen... · Posted by u/pseudolus

mikkupikku · 13 days ago

> the idea you can slap an applicance (thats sometimes its own LLM) onto another LLM and pray that this will prevent errors to be lunacy

It usually works though. There are no guarantees of course, but sanity checking an LLMs output with another instance of itself usually does work because LLMs usually aren't reliably wrong in the same way. For instance if you ask it something it doesn't know and it hallucinates a plausible answer, another instance of the same LLM is unlikely to hallucinate the same exact answer, it'll probably give you another answer, which is your heads up that probably both are wrong.

phatskat · 13 days ago

Sure, and then you can throw another LLM in and make them come to a consensus, of course that could be wrong too so have another three do the same and then compare, and then…

phatskat commented on Memories of .us computer.rip/2025-11-11-d... · Posted by u/sabas_ge

kbbgl87 · 18 days ago

> a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something.

Scortched Earth?

phatskat · 18 days ago

Scorched Earth was such a fun game! Many hours were lost at our small home LAN parties playing SE and Quake/2/3

phatskat commented on New layouts with CSS Subgrid joshwcomeau.com/css/subgr... · Posted by u/joshwcomeau

alwillis · 20 days ago

Another way to think about it: flexbox is for alignment of boxes in one dimension: horizontally or vertically.

CSS Grid is for two dimensional layout of rows and columns.

Back in the day, developers wanted page layout instead of the hacks on top of hacks with table-based layouts, floats and positioning to create layouts.

We’ve had CSS Grid designed for page layout on the web, in all browsers since 2017; as of 2022, only 12% of the top 1 million websites used CSS Grid, which to me is ridiculously low.

phatskat · 19 days ago

I think the grid syntax is really off-putting - it’s one of the few places of “typical” CSS I tend to avoid unless something really calls for it. In my experience, it feels like the people most familiar with grid display, the syntax, and using it, are more on the design side than the programming side - most of my frontend peers who use it tend to misuse it when flex would work fine and be less rigid for their goals

phatskat commented on A new bridge links the math of infinity to computer science quantamagazine.org/a-new-... · Posted by u/digital55

varenc · 20 days ago

Took me an embarrassingly long time to realize you're talking about a music event not a math lecture

phatskat · 20 days ago

Idk, mathrock gets pretty close in an applied level lol

phatskat commented on Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good kristofferbalintona.me/po... · Posted by u/harryday

rrix2 · 20 days ago

Specifically for org, and specifically for org-roam, it's pretty good, but not good enough. It's not as good as desktop emacs, and it's also somehow not as good as a 1st class android app.

the fdroid build of emacs doesn't really work very well with my org-roam, so i use a termux build,,, well nix-on-droid+emacs-overlay... and it's fine, for capture and recall. but i'm not authoring a lot of text with it. a custom extra-keys in the termux config so that your common emacs keybindings are on screen in a tool bar can get you close to a point-and-click interface... but you don't really have a good "swipe" input or voice input to input text efficiently, it's a character interface, a TUI, which is actually not what you want on a phone, you want a word-based interface. so when i want to do org-mode right now, i pull a unihertz titan 2 out of my pocket. without a sim card, the titan battery lasts for about three days unless i fire up an nix devShell & lsp server on it.

calc-mode is my default android calculator tho.

tbh don't listen to me, though: i've been teaching myself 8vim[1] and building a markdown document graph database in my free time. don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion with any authority, we all have found our own local minima, our opinions and advice usually aren't so useful to each other

I didn't know about modified-bar-mode, though, that's neat.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/inc.flide.vi8/

phatskat · 20 days ago

> don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion with any authority

As a vim user, I suppose it’s proper to say “I don’t” :p

Also as a vim user, no one should listen to mine with any authority

—

Jokes aside, 8vim looks pretty slick! I don’t have an android to play around with at the moment but if I remember this I’ll check it out when I do.

Text input on phones for anything beyond prose seems to be a space ripe for innovation - although, as an iPhone user, the amount of anything technical I want to do from my phone approaches zero quickly.