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waterhouse commented on South Park creator’s 2007 digital ad revenue sharing clause   readtrung.com/p/south-par... · Posted by u/JustExAWS
not_your_vase · 10 days ago
It's very long, and seems to be stuffed with a copy of wikipedia, I ain't reading all that. What's that clause? Like Lucas had with Star Wars, they kept the monetization rights for some (at the time) dumb looking stuff, and they struck gold with it?
waterhouse · 10 days ago
Looks to be (1269 words into the article according to wc):

> [Parker and Stone]’s lawyer, Kevin Morris, insisted that any South Park revenue not derived specifically from broadcast on the cable channel would go into the pot for calculating the men’s share of back-end profits.

Though that might be a precursor to enabling this (400 words later):

> With negotiating leverage, Parker and Stone agreed to a 4-year $75 million deal and, separately, a 50/50 cut of advertising revenue for any digital property…in perpetuity.

waterhouse commented on Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England   news.sky.com/story/facial... · Posted by u/amarcheschi
cma · 11 days ago
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;

Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way to force. If he was only talking about force in response to force it wouldn't be considered a paradox I don't think. This quote hasn't dispeled popular characterizations of his stance for me, it seems in line with what most people say he's saying.

waterhouse · 11 days ago
As you say, it's because the speech may later give way to force. It does go farther than American free speech law permits: the latter draws the line at something like "threats of immediate criminal action", whereas this would attack "propagating ideologies that one thinks will eventually lead the followers to criminal action". There are certainly deep problems with potential implementation here: e.g. the main American political parties would probably both accuse each other's ideology of eventually leading the followers to criminal action. One would want high standards for that (of, say, what percentage engage in what magnitude of criminal action; as well as evidentiary standards), and want it to be established in a mega-trial, or by a supermajority of Congress declaring war on an ideology; and even that might not be enough. I'm not necessarily in favor of Popper's approach, except in emergencies.

However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.

I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.

waterhouse commented on Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England   news.sky.com/story/facial... · Posted by u/amarcheschi
pmarreck · 11 days ago
It still arguably complies with the Paradox of Tolerance.

Terrorists (as well as their supporters) are intolerant and non-pluralist. Therefore, for a pluralist society to survive, it must be intolerant of one thing- intolerance.

waterhouse · 11 days ago
To be sure, in the original context of Popper's writing, I believe "intolerant" meant something like "committing violence against others for disagreeing with you", and "tolerate" meant "refrain from intolerance". The full quote is below:

"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

waterhouse commented on StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/pabs3
dkiebd · 13 days ago
"words" is nothing but a list of words. It does not contain definitions for those words, which is what one expects from a dictionary.
waterhouse · 13 days ago
Hmm, you are correct.
waterhouse commented on StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/pabs3
CamouflagedKiwi · 13 days ago
> of course a dictionary program will include code to talk to dictionary-providing web sites.

I wouldn't say that is just a given, if I've apt-get installed a dictionary I might expect that is the whole thing on my machine. It's not like we haven't had dictionaries in physical books for centuries... It seems like stardict is very much an online thing, which I suppose could be legit, but the whole thing does seem like a trap.

waterhouse · 13 days ago

  ~> wc -cl /usr/share/dict/words
  235976 2493885 /usr/share/dict/words
One might even expect a program to use a common Unix preinstalled dictionary.

waterhouse commented on Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"    · Posted by u/bookofjoe
endtime · a month ago
IIRC that was a deliberate campaign to make the site unattractive to a spate of non-technical folks who had apparently all simultaneously discovered it.
waterhouse · a month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

"We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites [...] You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang [...]"

"Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without those we'll be fine."

Also some fun comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178

waterhouse commented on Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip   jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/ingve
waterhouse · 2 months ago
> Testing it out with my disk benchmarking script, I got up to 3 GB/sec in sequential reads.

To be sure... is the data compressible, or repeated? I have encountered an SSD that silently performed compression on the data I wrote to it (verified by counting its stats on blocks written). I don't know if there are SSDs that silently deduplicate the data.

(An obvious solution is to copy data from /dev/urandom. But beware of the CPU cost of /dev/urandom; on a recent machine, it takes 3 seconds to read 1GB from /dev/urandom, so that would be the bottleneck in a write test. But at least for a read test, it doesn't matter how long the data took to write.)

waterhouse commented on Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks   phoronix.com/review/firef... · Posted by u/mikece
const_cast · 2 months ago
Well there's multiple problems here, so one by one:

1. Mozilla didn't fire anyone. My understanding is they actually tried to keep him.

2. Public pressure, dollar voting, and boycotts is just the free market at work. The invisible hand is real but it seems to me as soon as the invisible hand starts pushing stuff we all get uncomfortable.

3. Nobody takes anyone seriously who says "woke". That word means absolutely nothing to anyone, it's just a dog whistle. A type of inverse virtue signal that you are not a serious person worth listening to.

waterhouse · 2 months ago
If you want a definition, a "woke" person is one who prioritizes waging identity-group conflict over other priorities. The more woke, the more things they sacrifice and trample upon to that end.
waterhouse commented on Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks   phoronix.com/review/firef... · Posted by u/mikece
c0nducktr · 2 months ago
What do you think about the answers to your question? Have you reflected on them at all?
waterhouse · 2 months ago
The principle of the separation of church and state may be cast as a principle that, in conflicts between religious groups, the state must remain neutral. This avoids the situation where, when one group gains control of the state, they get to use it to oppress the other group, and then the other group has a strong motive (and arguably a moral right) to revolt, violently if necessary.

Implementing this meant that people who worked for the state, and other neutral institutions, had to work with others who they honestly believed were heretics that would go to hell. Both they and the institution had to learn to keep their tribal conflicts—nominally religious and doctrinal, but in practice tribal—under control. This was difficult, but very valuable to all sides. The truce enabled mutually beneficial cooperation and the prosperity that entailed.

Centuries later, some tribes find themselves in control of certain institutions. The truce, the principle of neutrality, restricts them, and they see little benefit from it. "Why not violate it, and start a fight over this issue where we have the upper hand? We'll win!" Sometimes this takes the form of arguing tendentiously that the other side violated the truce first, and hence their attacks are in fact justified retaliation. Other times they seem ignorant of the value of having a truce, and are likely ignorant of its history (which is not taught well). So they start trampling on it.

Depending on what we imagine their motives to be, and how narrowly we consider them... On that issue in isolation—gay marriage—it's probably "rational". However, violating the truce makes it easier to do more of that, both for them and their opponents. On this issue they have the upper hand, and they'll win. On abortion, they have the advantage, but less so. On other issues (such as putting biological males in women's sports and women's prisons) they have minority support, and if they keep up their attitude of just fighting because "why not?" (subject to tactical considerations), they will provoke the opposition to fight back more and harder, and eventually they'll lose ground on the issues themselves—to say nothing of the costs of the fighting and the lost value due to the broken truce.

They are short-sighted, ignorant, aggressive little barbarians who start smashing the thing in front of them, unaware that it's a pillar holding up many things we and even they hold dear. They know not what they do. I guess this is where we see the deficiencies of current education.

waterhouse commented on Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks   phoronix.com/review/firef... · Posted by u/mikece
Moomoomoo309 · 2 months ago
Do you think those opinions would have made it more difficult to work with certain employees at Mozilla based on certain protected traits in the law? If so, I think the donation is a red herring, it's the opinion itself that's the problem.

Firing people for their opinions is actually fine - if you believe that certain types of people don't deserve rights, for example, and your company has those types of people in it, that's a problem. Freedom of opinion is not guaranteed.

waterhouse · 2 months ago
Does this approach ultimately lead to the conclusion that people on different sides of the abortion issue can't work in the same company?

u/waterhouse

KarmaCake day4300October 7, 2009View Original