If algorithm output is protected by the 1st amendment then perhaps Section 230 [0] protections should no longer apply, and they should be liable for what they and their algorithms choose to show people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

That seems a hell of a lot better than repealing section 230 altogether. I also agree with the rest of this argument. Either the editorial choices made by an algorithm are a neutral platform or they're protected speech. They certainly aren't just whatever's convenient for a tech company in any given moment

What has that got to do with anything? Not at all related to the topic of research or algorithmic control. All that does is make companies potentially liable if somebody slanders somebody else on their site.

I don't get how that hasn't had an effect on prices.

There's not enough houses on the market (zoning, and people want to keep their low-rate mortgages), there's people worried they can't afford houses (prices inflated faster than wages, rates went up), and a large amount of housing transactions (someone quoted 29% of starter homes) are being paid for by institutional investors (who can pay cash).

Wouldn't these institutional investors buying houses be "marginal consumers", kind of like the marginal producers who set the price of inelastic commodities such as oil? Seems like 29% of transactions is even more than marginal.

I assume that sellers would need to come down in price to what non-institutional buyers could afford if institutional buyers were removed from the equation.

As an aside, I'd rather see supply increased, but maybe demographics over the next decade or two will fix that problem anyways.

Other western democracies go further than the U.S. with campaign restrictions, including restrictions to campaign financing. One might say they protect the functioning of their democracies more with these additional restrictions, protecting voters.

And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.

I'll swing wildly in the other direction with campaign financing and point out Bloomberg's run for president. He outspent everybody and won American Samoa. He wasn't unqualified, either. He was mayor of NYC.

Money matters on an s curve. The bigger the election the more you tend to spend, but it reaches a saturation point. This said in the average election this saturation point is a lot of money.

A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving!

I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.

Is a driver impaired if they are using their phone to stream music (or screen-off Youtube listening) to their car while driving?

Lots of cars now come with a WiFi hot spot as part of their offerings. There's no way to prevent the driver from also connecting to it and circumventing whatever ill conceived notion this is

Even connected to wifi a cell phone canstill use the wireless network. Even airplane more won't actually stop your phone from connecting anymore. GPS data can also be transmitted in the background over wifi back to apple/google and/or the device manufacturer.

If they really wanted to push this they could do it directly in the baseband chipset and bypass the OS entirely when deciding to lock down the device to some kind of "travel mode" with limited functionality (such as no texting or no browser)

Not that I'm advocating for that sort of thing, but it's good to keep in mind that we don't really own the cellular devices we pay for and that even in the rare case we have root we can't stop them from doing what they want to our devices as long as they control the closed hardware.

I mentioned buses and trains, and was thinking that only those mobile wifi hotspots would be permitted, whitelisted for 5g service. Hotspots in (human driven) cars would not. That might encourage some people to take the bus?

I agree with the other poster about this being more workable in a fictional society with different shared values.

I just bumped into the idea of "demographic diversity" versus "moral diversity" [1].

Demographic diversity speaks to the differences in sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. A nation of immigrants, for example.

Moral diversity speaks to the differences in culture, the rules a society follows. Erosion of those rules is what leads to a low trust society.

I thought this was a really interesting distinction to make.

It seems that the U.S. is not as high trust as it was 75+ years ago. The book I read used the example of neighbors disciplining children, which was more common in U.S. culture 75+ years ago. Today you'd worry about a parent calling the police for that. In general the idea of character has replaced with personality. Moral diversity. Live and let live.

But on the other hand 75+ years ago women and minorities were more limited. We now have more demographic diversity. Which is a good thing.

I would like to think that demographic diversity and a high trust society aren't mutually exclusive. Conflating the two doesn't help.

[1] The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, Chapter 8, The Felicity of Virtue

Haidt et al decompose moral foundations into several factors to explain how progressives and conservatives view morality differently by virtue of prioritizing different factors; cf. Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations https://fbaum.unc.edu/teaching/articles/JPSP-2009-Moral-Foun...

Moral diversity has always existed. What is new is that polarization between the two camps has been increasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization_in_the_...

I'm using openbsd on a several laptops at the moment, a dell x55, a thinkpad x230, and a thinkpad x270. Everything works on all of them - sleep, hibernate, wifi, touchpad, colume and brightness buttons, cpu throttling, etc.

On one of them I use a creative bt-w2 bluetooth dongle for audio output, openbsd removed software bluetooth support due to security concerns. The latest wifi standards are not supported on these models, which doesn't bother me. It's not the size of your network, it's what you do with it! I don't mind not having the latest flashy hardware - been there, done that.

I have to pay attention when I purchase hardware, and am happy to do so, because openbsd aligns much better with my priorities. For me that includes simplicity, security, documentation and especially stability through time - I don't want to have to rearrange my working configs every two years cuz of haphazard changes to things like audio, systemd, wayland, binary blobs, etc.

> we can all take in whatever is happening in public

People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?

This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.

Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.

    > People have the right to take in what is in public

You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree. I could imagine this could be treated differently in different cultures. As an example, Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info (including faces). Another common issue that is handled very differently in different cultures: How to control video recording in public places.

> Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info

I remember when this first launched in the UK, automated face-scrubbing was in place. It was about 90% accurate on scrubbing faces from pictures. One of its best screwups was showing people's faces as they were standing outside a branch of KFC but blurring out the Colonel.

>You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree.

It's more common sense than any real sense of law. If something is a public space, how do you stop people from "taking it in"?

Recording is a different matter, but people existing is what comprises the "public".

> how do you stop people from "taking it in"

Please take a moment to draw for us detailed faces of all the people you've "taken in" today while you were outside. Use a sketch artist if you need to. Now compare those results with what you'd have if you did the same with a photocamera. And for good measure, add in the amount of effort it took you to recall, and the effort it will take you to describe to every reader on HN who you saw today.

Do you really not see any difference between the human process and what a digital camera can do?

I think we're agreeing but our frequencies are mixed. I was just saying "you can't stop people from using their eyes in public".photography and recording laws are very different.

for more context, the chain started with this:

>People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?

and then the direct reply disagreed with this notion. I just wanted to distinguish between "taking in" and cameras, because it appears that user made a similar mistake.

I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.

Correct, as per the Social Media section on his How I Do My Computing page:

> I have a Mastodon account, @rms on mastodon.xyz, which mirrors the political notes of stallman.org. The person who set up the mirroring chose that site. [1]

The same document also says he has a similar Twitter account called rmspostcomments, that he doesn't use himself either.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I was curious if by "traction" you mean growth? Can people into cycling find each other? Or are there not enough of those people on Mastodon?

In your earlier up-thread comment you mentioned being tarred over certain things, like AI/LLM posts. Are situations like that avoidable in any fashion, like with twit-filters or finding friendlier groups?

Disclaimer: I'm tempted, but have never tried Mastadon, and wondered how some of these things played out, if the good can be found, the bad avoided, etc.

People want to get entertained and informed. Very few original content is available and sharing of content from other platforms will lead to harsh reactions from self-claimed activists. I got insulted from completely random people who don’t follow because I didn’t remove an UTM key from an URL I shared.

In general the tone went super harsh and cult like. While neo nazis dominate X, the authoritarian left dominates on Mastodon. People call to dispossess „the rich“, „fight capitalism, support my gofundme“, antisemitism and open support of Hamas and other BS.

If you dare to reply and ask for rationality, you will get attacked personally. It‘s a toxic service like Twitter but just the other way around, and way too few insightful or funny content to lure new users. „Run your own server“ is also BS because discoverabilty is very poor.

I ended up on OpenBSD, having gotten frustrated with Windows, Suse, Fedora, FreeBSD and a Chromebook.

I grew to appreciate stability, over time - I don't want to have to fix things after updates, including my tweaks and customizations. I want complete control of my computers. I appreciate a cohesive and well documented system. I want simple and consistent and secure. I don't want the OS to take up more of my time than it needs to.

Perhaps you should consider the BSDs to be like different linux distributions, having their own priorities, pros and cons. Some people don't care. Some do. It's all good, having more options.