Inspired by this post I threw together a new open source desktop app that has an annoying always on top window that has a flashing timer, this seems to accomplish the same thing. https://github.com/timsayshey/cringe-clock
"Conclusions: Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally."
One of the biggest ways I use iCloud Photos is as a screensaver on my Apple TV. As I am considering alternatives to Apple products due to privacy concerns, I am looking for something that has screensaver integrations with Android TV and/or Apple TV. It seems all open source Google Photos alternatives don't have a screensaver app for any TV platform.
You could excuse literally any punishment with that line of reasoning. It's nonsensical, designed to appeal to emotion instead of presenting a coherent, logical approach to sentencing.
At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.
> At some point we need to think pragmatically about what kind of society we want to create, rather than spending all of our time worrying about whether or not people are getting what they deserve.
To me, these two things are the same.
I want to live in a society where people are held responsible for their actions. If they commit a crime, they should be punished in proportion to their crime. This is a kind of humanism because it respects individuals' freedom of choice (i.e. you choose to commit a crime...or not).
To be concerned "whether or not people are getting what they deserve" is the definition of justice. And it goes both ways: if the punishment is too severe, too random, or inflicted on the innocent, that is also a problem.
Justice can't be separated from rehabilitation. If your punishment system predictably increases recidivism rates for crimes that have real-world consequences, then you basically are punishing innocent people for other people's actions.
Unless you plan to keep every prisoner in prison indefinitely, then the state that they are in when they leave prison matters. It doesn't just matter for them, it also matters for everybody else who lives alongside them in the future -- people who don't deserve to live in a worse, more dangerous society just because we determined that somebody else completely unrelated to them didn't suffer enough yet.
Prisoners who leave prison without being properly rehabilitated are a liability and a risk for everyone else outside of prison -- and even if you don't care about the prisoners, you should at least care about the other citizens who live around them.
> Justice can't be separated from rehabilitation. If your punishment system predictably increases recidivism rates for crimes that have real-world consequences, then you basically are punishing innocent people for other people's actions.
If we grant humans responsibility then this is not true. If we jail someone for knocking over a liquor store and then he gets out 5 years later and kills an old lady, the responsibility for those crimes is his. Not "society's," not "the criminal justice system's," only his.
My argument is that humans can make choices and therefore we are responsible for our actions. You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).
> Unless you plan to keep every prisoner in prison indefinitely, then the state that they are when they leave prison matters. It doesn't just matter for them, it also matters for everybody else who lives alongside them in the future -- people who don't deserve to live in a worse, more dangerous society just because we determined that somebody else completely unrelated to them didn't suffer enough yet.
> Prisoners who leave prison without being properly rehabilitated are a liability and a risk for everyone else outside of prison -- and even if you don't care about the prisoners, you should at least care about the other citizens who live around them.
Talking about "prisoners who haven't been properly rehabilitated" makes my skin crawl. Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims just because they broke the law. You only have a right to punish them in proportion to their crime, nothing more or less.
You believe that through empirical and rational reasoning you can "rehabilitate" criminals in order to reduce crime. I don't think this is true. I think your perspective is driven by emotion, a distaste for punishment, and a sense that the downtrodden are always right. But even if it is true, I'm against it on humanistic grounds.
A society where criminals are punished proportionally to their crimes is an end in itself.
> You argument is that humans cannot make choices, we are rag dolls tossed around by fate (or whichever system you feel like attacking).
We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and safer prison environments reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.
I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce automobile deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.
> Criminals are human beings and you don't have a right to mold them according to your whims
Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.
It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment to avoid changing their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.
And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where the math says that those prisoners are more likely to commit future crimes.
----
To add onto this, we already do have policies in prisons that are designed to mold prisoner minds, many of them really problematic -- we knock off jail time for prisoners that take on dangerous jobs (often for little to no pay), and the excuse we use is that it's good for them. We've put prisoners into extremely dangerous situations fighting wildfires in California even though many of those prisoners on release are not eligible to be firefighters because of their felony records. Less on the problematic side, we also regularly commute drug sentences if prisoners will enter rehab programs and do community service, a judicial policy that pretty much everyone thinks is a good idea.
So it's not like I'm proposing some kind of dangerous unprecedented idea here, we are already more than happy to talk about rehabilitation as an excuse for policy when it suits us. I'm not proposing a brand new unheard-of idea, I'm just arguing that giving access to books, educational materials, and entertainment will also very clearly make society safer -- and that whether or not you think it's anyone's responsibility to keep prisoners from re-offending, it is still kind of messed up to tell ordinary citizens, "we're going to have policies that make you less safe because we're worried somebody somewhere isn't suffering enough." As a citizen, even isolated from my beliefs about how justice actually works and how it's different from punishment, I still think it's pretty understandable and pretty logical to be upset about that.
> We can with a high degree of confidence say that a focus on rehabilitation, training, and prison environment reduces future crime rates, the same way that we can say that putting air bags in cars reduces automobile deaths. You can take from that what you will about free will, but there just is an obvious relationship here, I don't think anyone can dispute that.
Comparing social engineering to an air bag is silly. We can ram cars into walls in labs over and over. We can't fit society in a lab and so we can't model it very well. But even if we could reduce crime using these strategies, the strategies themselves fit my definition of a crime because they violate my definition of justice.
> I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that adding guard rails on a twisty road will reduce deaths. I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that areas with high job opportunities and housing rates tend to have less crime, and that investing in public infrastructure can lower crime rates. Similarly, I don't think I'm attacking the concept of free will if I say that prisoners being able to get a job after they leave prison is heavily correlated with recidivism rates.
You previously blamed the justice system for recidivism instead of the criminal (because it should have reformed him). That's quite different than "guard rails". What did I say that made you think I'm against "investing in public infrastructure" or "allowing ex-cons to get jobs"?
> Okay sure, but giving prisoners access to educational and recreational materials and programs isn't "molding them" against their will. They want this stuff too.
> It's not for a prisoner's benefit that jails are charging money to make phone calls to their family -- that's not a policy that's born out of our commitment not to accidentally mess with their minds against their will. We're not talking about "reeducating" people, we're looking at very obvious statistical data that says people who don't spend their entire prison sentence wasting their minds, who have training to get a job after they leave prison, who aren't regularly placed into dangerous situations that reinforce fight/flight responses while they're in prison, are less likely to hurt other people.
I said that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. I didn't say that prisoners should sit in their cells going insane. I didn't say the author here should not be able to have a chess board. It's reasonable to question whether a punishment is proportional to the crime, whether it is cruel and unusual, etc.
Overly cruel punishments (China executing drug users for example) are exactly as wrong as punishing criminals "for their own good". If you could prevent all theft by, say, cutting off the hands of thieves, would you be okay with that? (I wouldn't, because the punishment does not fit the crime).
> And you can look at that and say that it's distasteful, or that they don't deserve a job, or that you don't like the idea that environment and resources have an obvious statistical effect on crime rates; but if you do, then I think that you should also have to grapple with telling ordinary people who have committed no crimes that you're deliberately putting prisoners into situations where they're more likely to hurt them.
I never said ex-cons don't deserve a job. I don't think that ex-cons should have to announce themselves in job applications. That is exactly the kind of dehumanizing strategy that I'm arguing against. When you've done your time, you've paid your dues, the world is set right, and you should be able to go on your way.
Believe me, I know what you're proposing is not "brand new". It's very old. And you're correct to say that it already exerts a lot of influence.
My argument is that, as it gains more and more influence, the value of human beings will gradually be lost, because we will be treating people as means to some end (a better society, a safer society), rather than ends in themselves. Humans will be viewed as "products of their environment" rather that free-willing, free-acting agents. Anyway, this drama is not new, it's as old as time and I'm sure it will keep playing out for as long as there are people.
I understand you didn't write this, but this is the context my original comment was made in -- the context of a series of posters who were very explicitly denying the humanity and agency of the prisoners in question. Again, they weren't you, but still, understand that the context I'm talking about and the entry point I had into the discussion was people arguing that denying prisoners mental stimulation and leaving their brains to rot was a fair and just punishment.
My argument was that even if you didn't care about the inherent humanity of a prisoner, you should at least care about reducing recidivism rates, which mental stimulation and job training absolutely does.
And I understand now that you aren't arguing against that. You came into this conversation with a different perspective and you're annoyed that I'm treating it like the same perspective. I apologize for that. It's hard for me to context switch so quickly, but I should have made more of an effort.
But similarly, the perspective I have is not at all that we should treat human beings purely as a means to an end, and I don't think I said anything to that effect; my argument has consistently been that even if someone doesn't care about human beings as an end to themselves or as beings with basic human rights, at least they can care about the society surrounding them. Because that's the context that this thread started in: people literally arguing that making sure a victim was satisfied was the only goal that mattered.
I haven't advocated for any of the extreme positions you're talking about: I'm not saying that people don't have responsibility for their actions, I'm saying that in responding to those actions we as a society are capable of hurting more people than just the guilty, and we have some degree of moral duty to prevent innocent people from being unnecessarily hurt when it's possible and prudent to do so. In other words, if I know someone innocent is going to be hurt, and I can prevent it without taking away the rights or dehumanizing another person, and I refuse to do so, that isn't justice.
So for example, if a person drives drunk and crashes, I'm not saying that person isn't to blame or that they shouldn't be punished. But I do still want to put up some guard rails and possibly save their life and maybe even a few other drivers as well. If they hit into another driver or pedestrian while drunk and kill them -- that is itself an unjust outcome.
So if someone came to me and said, "why are you paying for taxis for drunk drivers, why are you putting up guard rails, why can't they accept responsibility", I wouldn't argue that drunk drivers aren't responsible for their actions. But I would argue that as a society we also have a responsibility to protect innocent people on the roads who didn't choose to drive drunk (again, to the extent that we can do so without unfairly targeting or taking away someone's rights). I'm not arguing the extreme, I'm not arguing that if someone gets pulled over driving drunk that they shouldn't be charged. I'm not arguing that we should just let everybody out of jail, or cut off their hands if they steal, or bribe criminals to stop committing crimes. I'm arguing what I think is a fairly standard, uncontroversial opinion in the context of a thread that said that we needed to keep murders from playing board games because of justice.
From your above comment, I kind of suspect that you don't actually disagree with me on that except in the extreme where it interferes with personal responsibility. In fact, it sounds like the two of us actually agree on a nontrivial number of actual policies (getting rid of felony boxes in job applications, giving prisoners mental stimulation, allowing them to talk to their families, even building out housing/public infrastructure in low-income areas). Aside from a concern that I'm going to lose control, completely abandon the idea of personal responsibility, justice, or human rights and go all Minority Report on the world (something that, again, I want to be clear I am not advocating for), what do we actually disagree on?
Can I extend an olive branch where we just agree that the original context of this thread (prisoners aren't being treated harshly enough by the current system) was a really bad take for both moral and pragmatic reasons?
Even were the victim alive, we are not a society that encourages the victim to dictate the punishment, nor allow the victim to carry out the punishment, so what would the victim's thoughts matter?
As much as it's presented otherwise, punishment western democracies is first and foremost a method of deterrence for the good of all, not for the satisfaction of those harmed.
It's not about him. It's about us, as a society. When we imprison someone, we take ownership and responsibility for their well-being.
To be clear, we can decide, as the responsibility holders over their well-being, that we believe they should be treated like garbage. Right or wrong, we have that ability and there is no higher authority than society itself to determine if that's right or wrong.
Although I have a strong opinion about what is or isn't an appropriate punishment, we absolutely should not be basing our decisions on the feelings of the victim. Putting aside that the victim is dead and can't express how they feel about it, this is no way to run a law-based society.
If I commit a crime, and someone else commits an identical crime, surely we can agree that the punishment -- whatever it may be -- should be the same (or at least equivalent). It shouldn't vary based on who the victim is or how the victim may feel about it.
If you are not sentencing someone to life in jail or the death penalty, then you can't treat a prisoner bad enough to cause lasting damage because they will rejoin society at some point.
This is irrespective of the victim's thoughts; if I get violently robbed and society + a judge has decided that's worth 10 years in jail, then that's what it is.
If you think prisoners deserve absolutely nothing to the point of causing psychological or physical harm then you are saying the crime they committed is worth life in prison or the death penalty.
I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug. That we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can't be sent, we should fight back - both politically through protest and technologically through software. - Aaron Swartz
Swartz never created a social media platform nor had to make decisions on how to moderate user generated content across millions of users. He made JSTOR articles freely available.
Swartz created a company called Infogami "that would help users build websites". That company merged with reddit, which had already raised $100K. Swartz didn't create a social media platform, and he never had to make decisions on how to moderate user generated content across millions of users.
It seems Gab banned anti-christian messages. So the 'freedom of speech' in this community is pretty much a dogwhistle for'freedom of alt-right speech'.
(Not sure dogwhistle is the right word here, but it's the often case of 'freedom of speech' actually meaning 'freedom of hate speech', like how often 'truth' is used to actually mean 'unscientific conspiracy theories'.)
I've been following Hacker News for over a decade and my sense of the community is that it has always been overwhelmingly pro free speech at any cost (even in the cases where it would protect something outright illegal). Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.
HN is what it is because it is not free speech absolutist. Posts get flagged. People get banned. This keeps spam and shills down to a level that signal can stand out from the noise.
So in theory, people here may be "free speech absolutists", but in practice, we enjoy the environment that the moderation here enables. At some level, we know via experience that free speech absolutism is not where we want to live.
And yet, the "censorship" has a pretty light touch. It doesn't censor for viewpoint (in the ideal), but for false or misleading comments, or for personal attacks. (Yes, I know, HN doesn't always live up to that ideal.)
It could be that HN's theory is coming around into alignment with it's practice. We're seeing in the wider world that free speech absolutism can cause problems, and that heavy-handed censorship also causes problems. Speaking broadly, what HN is realizing is that we want a wider world that is more HN-like.
I'd be fine with prison for phone spammers who ignore the "do not call" list. You could argue "free speech", but there's more to it than that - they're invading my space and time when I don't want them.
You can say anything you want, as long as you do not infringe on my rights, such as by consuming my resources (time, telecom services, fax paper, etc) when I explicitly said not to (via a Do Not Call listing, etc.)
It's similar to a No Trespassing sign; you can picket on public property (free speech), but doing that on private property (when marked with a sign that fit certain criteria, in most states) might get you arrested and charged with a crime.
In the U.S., the rights of the individual generally trump "public interest".
> No one will argue free speech for that, because you're now consuming someone else's resource (time, mobile minutes, etc) when they explicitly told you not to.
All of the arguments for “free speech” against platform content policies are exactly arguing for consuming someone else's reseources against their expressed direction, so it's provably false that that is sufficient to prevent people from arguing for entitlement based on “free speech”.
In that case, the rights of the (private) service provider are in tension with those of the (also private) individual, so it's a matter for legislation and the courts. Congress has passed laws protecting the speech of the individual within certain types of service providers, i.e. telecom/ISP/website publishers.
> Congress has passed laws protecting the speech of the individual within certain types of service providers, i.e. telecom/ISP/website publishers.
Telecoms, yes, ISPs and Websites, no. FCC adopted regulations under statutory authority it saw as allowing, but not requiring, thatnfor ISPs, but later retracted them. Websites have liability protection for hosts for user content specifically to encourage host moderation of user content, rather than creating an entitlement against such moderation.
Traditional unamplified speech is ok in all shapes, but I think the amplification power of social media has shown the damage hate speech can do at scale, and people have become more cautious about what’s ok to amplify.
Many individual beliefs are really tribe beliefs. If the tribe beliefs change then the individual beliefs will change too, because the individual was never really committed to them.
This happened recently in 2020 from Jan to May on the Coronavirus. The party of “no big deal” reoriented from left to right and many people reoriented with it.
Tribe beliefs on free speech have changed and those who align with those tribes have changed with it.
> Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.
Is this really an opinion espoused here (in non-greyed-out downvoted comments) or is this a straw man / exaggeration? This is an actual question, not meant as a flame.
I would suggest that HN broadly is in fact more accepting of the idea that platform holders should somehow moderate their content than it used to be, but HN also remains (broadly) very skeptical of the platform holders' ability or will to execute such policies well or fairly.
The truth is that platform holders have de-facto moderation - that is, their algorithmic feeds that decide what to amplify and what to bury in the name of generating ad revenue. It seems to me personally that these approaches are failing us all, a fact that has only become really obvious in recent years. I would say this development has now opened up a lot of room for discussion.
I don't feel the same sentiment here. But for the sake of argument, two things have happened:
- data driven manipulation by platforms reaching the majority of the population. Pushing the spiciest posts to the top to increase emotional interaction
- the emergence of new fascists under the guise of free speech. With the downfall of traditional gatekeepers in media, new gatekeepers have emerged - and they are not the benevolent kind.
I don’t think people are less pro free speech. I think people are grappling with it being a leaky abstraction. The binary framing doesn’t really help us figure out how to deal with nasty replies from randos in your notifications, or the implications of algorithm design which scores the discovery of information, or the simple fact that a motivated party can run propaganda campaigns using sockpuppets. Dealing with these things isn’t about censorship, it’s about maintaining a healthy community.
I dont see these conversations as being anti free speech so much as “agreed, but what next?”
People disdain the humanities here, so they learn some lessons the hard way.
The real question is if people actually want to live in a society with absolute free speech. I think that’s a no.
Hate speech is protected as long as it doesn’t involve violence, but in practice, hate speech almost always leads to violence.
Something people never talk about is how the founding fathers thought that virtue was a necessary quality for a democracy. If we lived in a society that held virtue in high esteem, there would be no limits to speech. But we don’t, our society values fame over everything, even money.
Plus, we live in a post truth era. People hate truth-tellers here.
Well...there was the small matter of a violent insurrection at the Capitol Building by people who variously: flew the Confederate flag, believed Democrats eat babies, refuse to believe the results of the election, all of which are nonsense beliefs or causes that were magnified on social media.
At some point people in general - and HN in particular - have to decide when to rein in bad actors crying wolf. Otherwise they take over - literally.
The size of the community has likely grown significantly over the years, and with it a change in the demographic of your average commenter. What started as place for tech entrepreneurs, entrepreneur hopefuls, and technologists with some years under their belt has changed into something that is more representative of the young tech worker population as a whole. The earlier demographic likely had a strongly libertarian bent, whereas the current demographic likely has a strongly progressive bent.
Every society that grows past the point where people are largely self-sufficient needs some way to settle on common truth if it is to remain stable. But it also needs a way to update what it considers to be true, because sometimes what it decided is true turns out to be wrong or later becomes wrong as circumstances change.
That update mechanism needs to have some friction, though, so that you don't make too many wrong updates.
Free speech is a mechanism that helps with the updates, and up until maybe 30 years ago we also had an effective form of friction on it.
That friction took the form of the cost of getting an audience. You could say or publish pretty much anything you wanted other than things that were outright illegal. But it cost money to get your speech to a wide audience. The bigger the audience, generally the more the cost.
If what you wanted to say was close to the current common truth, it was a lot cheaper. The farther from that you got, the harder it was to find someone who would pay to get you a large audience.
In those cases where what you wanted to say was far from the common truth and so you could not come up with the money to get a large audience, you'd have to resort to spreading your message on a small scale. You might even have to start out spreading it in person one on one or by writing letters to people one on one.
If what you were trying to spread was actually true, it would eventually overcome that friction. You'd slowly convince people, until you might have enough who would pay for your self-published book or subscribe to a newsletter. They might start spreading it. It might take a while but eventually you'll get there.
If what you were trying to promote was just flat out wrong and borderline insane, such as that California's large wildfires last summer were actually ignited by space lasers run by the jews, or that the elites are kidnapping children and drilling holes into their heads to harvest adrenochrome, you'd have a real hard time getting that message out. And if you did manage and it started to gain a little traction, debunkers would quickly get debunkings out which would spread faster, making it harder for your thing to spread.
With a lot of people getting almost all their information from social media, that form of friction has to a large extent gone away. It is a lot easier and cheaper to get a large audience.
Debunking takes time, and by the time a debunking is out there for the false stuff to have already taken root. On top of that, people are now exposed to a lot more information (both true and false), leaving much less time per item for evaluation. And it is much easier to create new false things than new true things. This means that even if a debunking of something does come around to your social media feed, you might miss it in the flood of new false stuff in there.
And on top of all that, its not just cranks and crackpots producing the false ideas now. First, you've got state sponsored entities doing it to try to harm rival states. Second, you've got content farms that make up sensationalistic stuff designed to generate clicks, so that they can run ads on it.
Free speech absolutionism is stupid. You can limit free speech without actually harming anyone (please don’t mention the slippery slope fallacy)
Some things just DONT need to be said. Racial slurs in the wrong context (attacks), holocaust denials, etc. these things have NO positive outcome. None. Nothing at all in the world will change if you ban these things.
We can have free speech while stopping extremism and getting rid of scum like Gab and parlor is the first step.
Just installed it. And had gmail running on it and Chrome at the same time. Firefox Nightly showed to be using significant power while Chrome was not. I think this still has a long way to go before I switch to Firefox both in terms of performance and dev tools.
This is an amazing project! Probably one of the most useful ways to actually find quality job listings. If only Craigslist would offer site-wide search natively.
Btw, you should open-source this on GitHub. You should also include a crypto/paypal donation option.
I've been doing keto for 2 years. This is actually pretty cool, I found a few things I want to try. You should add ratings and track clicks and use the data to add a way to sort by popularity.
