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vonwoodson commented on Other People’s Problems   seths.blog/2024/04/other-... · Posted by u/pmzy
atoav · 2 years ago
I am aware that the US is not one monolithic block. To assume otherwise is a very US-thing to do. The rest of the world literally drowns in news about the US internal conflicts.

But maybe I sould give an example: guns. I grew up in an European region where the percentage of gun owners is close to US levels, yet our last school rampage was a decade ago. The rural town I grew up in is famous for it's traditional gunsmiths and home of a Glock factory, so not what some in the US would call big city liberals. The reason gun crime is low here is because we have commons sense gun laws of the type most gun owners in the US supporr as well. Yet you have US politicians claiming "it is a slippery slope" and it "can't possibly work".

Yeah, look at the numbers, it works, it also works in comparable regions to mine with totally different social and cultural circumstances. Of course if you'd like to you could also implement it in a way so it doesn't work, but that would be evil on a comic book villain level right?

The problem in the US is that corporations are really damn effective there to trick a sizable amount of the population into believing all kind of excuses that fall apart the second you look elsewhere.

E.g. given our gun laws many US citizens would say our freedom has been taken away, yet somehow 10 year old me managed to go shooting on empty cans with my hunter grandfather. We had a god damn shooting range in the cellar of our school. It is just that our guns are stored safely and people who shouldn't have guns don't have them. E.g. because they issue threats, have a history of violence, drug abuse, mental illness, or showed otherwise that they act irresponsible with the lives of their neighbours.

But maybe you know more about why the world I live in can't work and have a good explaination that for some reason keeps benefiting certain corporations, while it kills the kids of your population.

vonwoodson · 2 years ago
You, sir, are an idiot. Keep playing victim, though; I'm sure that'll work out for you.
vonwoodson commented on Pixiv Blocks Adult Content, but Only for US and UK Users   404media.co/pixiv-manga-s... · Posted by u/kradeelav
kelipso · 2 years ago
It's pretty obvious the tiktok ban was due to the Israel-Palestine conflict and thus is about restricting US users. It literally got passed in the same bill as Israel funding too.
vonwoodson · 2 years ago
No. The Tiktok ban is because the PRC is using it to track US (and other country's') citizens. This is fundamentally no different than what Facebook has been doing for years, but China doesn't have a free market, so every piece of data is available to the PRC intelligence.

This should not be a surprise, but you folks are idiots who think only The Big Bad United States are (somehow) the only ones interested in spying.

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vonwoodson commented on Other People’s Problems   seths.blog/2024/04/other-... · Posted by u/pmzy
yetihehe · 2 years ago
Tip: when your solution contains "just (do something)", it's never that simple.
vonwoodson · 2 years ago
YES! "just" means hours and hours and hours [...] and hours of work!
vonwoodson commented on Other People’s Problems   seths.blog/2024/04/other-... · Posted by u/pmzy
vonwoodson · 2 years ago
Aww! Cute picture! Look at those Cargo pants/shorts... wait...

Why does home-boy have a f-ing machete?!

vonwoodson commented on Other People’s Problems   seths.blog/2024/04/other-... · Posted by u/pmzy
bryanrasmussen · 2 years ago
My general experience is often people think problems are easy to solve from the outside because they just don't understand the problem.

Thus you can often find communities of people with disabilities who understand the problems and the people from the outside who offer insulting and simple solutions to the problems.

As soon as someone falls from group B into group A the problems stop becoming simple and easily soluble though.

vonwoodson · 2 years ago
"""people think problems are easy to solve from the outside because they just don't understand the problem"""

This is called [The Dunning–Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect).

vonwoodson commented on Other People’s Problems   seths.blog/2024/04/other-... · Posted by u/pmzy
atoav · 2 years ago
Yeah, sure. You cannot translate what works in Sweden one to one to the US and expect the same success. But here is what you could do: realize that the cultural differences between Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan, Finland, UK, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Belgium and so on are very likely not less than the difference between the US to all of these countries. And yet, some things US citizens claim can't ever work do so in very different cultures, under various right or left wing governments and in different climate zones.

But keep on telling yourself the story that the US is so exceptional that reasonable conservative policies that work everywhere else can't work. This is likely just going to work out great in the long run.

vonwoodson · 2 years ago
The difference between California, Texas, South Dakota, Maine, Ohio are as different as Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan... It's a really foolish opinion or disregard the immense diversity of 350,000,000 people, and (unfortunately) it's made all over the internet.

"Why don't you just do X", totally papers over the extent of what just needs to happen.

"Everyone should just do Y" is always bad policy. Just look at what happened with something as simple as wearing masks.

vonwoodson commented on Pixiv Blocks Adult Content, but Only for US and UK Users   404media.co/pixiv-manga-s... · Posted by u/kradeelav
schoen · 2 years ago
People have said for decades that governments can't control Internet content because people will help each other circumvent the restrictions by technical means. I've found that very inspiring and have personally tried to join in.

But I notice (maybe especially on this day of the TikTok ban) that lots of people at least sometimes sympathize with the idea that the governments have good reasons to restrict information. And not that many people anywhere have ever used censorship circumvention technologies.

So you might say "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" or something, but the cultural will and momentum to work around Internet-balkanizing measures is ... not that massive and not that universal.

I don't mean to say that people working around geographic blocking doesn't happen ... it does to some noticeable extent at least for licensed streaming, for gambling, and for porn. But I guess significant majorities typically say "oh well!" and accept restrictions as the new normal.

vonwoodson · 2 years ago
Yeah, the TikTok ban isn't about restricting content for US users, it's about restricting the data vacuum that is the PRC. TikTok has already been banned for Govmnt employees for years. And, for good reason.

Sometimes, we have to remind ourselves that our government is not the bad guy. The bad guys are the bad guys; and those bad guys aren't often bad to their own kind.

vonwoodson commented on Meta Horizon OS   meta.com/blog/quest/meta-... · Posted by u/ahiknsr
vonwoodson · 2 years ago
I remember when Facebook released an "OS" for the phone (it was really just a skin for Android). While I'm really happy to see that FB is making another stab into the field with the Quest, and I'm very happy that we're finally getting some real development in VR, I'm even more skeptical of them now as I was then: I just don't trust FB with my data.

Part of what makes me so skeptical is how "cheap" the Quest 3 is. There's no way they're not loosing [literally billions](https://fortune.com/2023/10/27/mark-zuckerberg-net-worth-met...) of dollars developing VR tech and, given their track record, only have one way they know to make that money back.

vonwoodson commented on The case of a leaky goroutine   brainbaking.com/post/2024... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
pdimitar · 2 years ago
We can't go from X% error rate to 0% error rate, sadly, even though we want to.

But if we can go to (X/2)% error rate then that's still a win.

I wouldn't mind if we replace Golang and Rust in 10-ish years or so. For now they are definitely doing better than C++, especially having in mind that the old guard is gradually retiring and the newer generation are not as good with it.

You seem disappointed that we haven't found the one true universal language yet. I am as well, but no need to trash-talk the current iterative improvements. Apparently that's how we'll get to that ultimate thing.

vonwoodson · 2 years ago
You have to squint pretty hard to think that I'm "trash talking" anything in my post.

u/vonwoodson

KarmaCake day374July 14, 2020View Original