The part you left out was he was calling for censorship... a slippery slope that assists totalitarians in this inverted totalitarian oligarchy. Do not agree at all. Also he claims those places are publishers and not platforms, but there is plenty of debate on that front to be had.
Don't get me wrong, I love his work, but I don't really understand why what he has to say about tech is any more relevant than any other celebrity. It's not like he has some deeper insider knowledge of the subject.
He gets into the relevant details in his speech at below timestamp [1]:
> "Just imagine what Goebbels [2] could have done with Facebook"
I think the bottom line is he is good at social engineering, and he recognizes the signs of manipulation at scale. Beyond that, he is smart enough to consume the literature.
Note: Video is his award speech from ADL. But has sensitive wording and is NSFW. I found it to be pretty well put together - maybe reaching a bit in parts.
> Sacha Baron Cohen is the well-deserved recipient of ADL’s International Leadership Award, which goes to exceptional individuals who combine professional success with a profound personal commitment to community involvement and to crossing borders and barriers with a message of diversity and equal opportunity.
He’s a smart, successful person who has spent some time thinking about it. It’s as useful as anyone else’s opinion. People who are ‘experts’ in these areas also tend to have biases. Nobody that works for any of those companies is going to give you a straight answer.
You don't have to work for one of those companies to be an expect on tech, business and capitalism. But I expect some expertise in those subject to be able to properly evaluate the impact of these company.
The point is, there's a lot of misinformation trying to sway people to one side or the other, and unless you are someone who has spent a lot of time researching the subject, I'll assume you are just parroting some headline that told you "X is bad".
I think SBC's diagnosis is right, but his prescription is wrong. I applaud SBC for calling out the problem (and I agree it is a problem) and for raising awareness, but I think we need to keep shopping for a better solution.
He's effectively making the same arguments that FOSTA-SESTA made (which led to the closing of personals sections of Craigslist among other liability-transferring impacts), but for all of social media. His call was for all internet companies to pre-vet every single user-generated-content before anyone else sees it or be held liable for user-submitted content. It likely does solve the problem, but it swings the pendulum _very_ _far_ in the other direction towards corporate censorship and over-censorship to prevent any possibility of liability.
This is late-stage capitalism in action. Companies in the {social media, advertising, sales} space all have utility functions centered around attacking the weaknesses of the human mind. It just so happens that governments and political parties are in the same industry using the same tactics.
I just don't see SBC's prescription working in a country with a constitutionally mandated Freedom of Speech (where the jurisprudence only disallows speech if it is a direct and specific call to action of violence). And it it does, Newspeak will be the only language supported on the platform.
We here on HN know a lot about how Facebook was built, that doesn't tell you shit about its societal effects. Comedians on the other hand, and Sasha Baron Cohen in particular, know a lot about societal effects. Sometimes the jester was the only one clever enough to get away with speaking the truth in the king's presence.
Cohen's comedies were hugely offensive. He starts off by making fun of young lower class people in britain, then gay people, then a specific eastern european country, etc etc.
He would not be successful in the world he now demands, and he is not a social expert hes a 'funny' man who spends his time on business deals and movies.
I'm jewish, I don't want him speaking for me. I'd rather sasha cohen be allowed to make offensive films and everyone else too.
He's no more expert than joe rogan or any other comedian.
He's just the one the ADL decided to use as a mouth piece for censorship, and as a jewish person I don't appreciate their pretending to have my best interests in mind while hurting the basic freedoms and ability for self expression of everyone in the country.
He's not brave and there's no king. he was celebrated for his comments. The things he's saying are only the words of a jester because he's a clown, not because they're wise.
I don't think you're getting the point of the article. It is talking about dereferencing the STATE and the VALUE portions of a RESTful API. Not what's the most secure way of sending a credit card number over TCP/IP.
That's a very good point and I understand that. But webhat's comment makes it seem like the whole article is invalid or the example is not correct. I definitely would not consider this as an 'obvious error' with the example. Maybe bad practice. Would you say the copy/paste issue is solved if the author just does a mass replace from 'http' to 'https' on his articel?
I would say yes, I've also advised the author of this mistake and he declined to modify it. This is the less that friendly reply I got:
> You missed the absence of Content-Length in some of my examples? If you're going to be on this internet, friend, you've got to step up your pedantry game.
In an ideal world of BeWifi everyone will be a member and the internet will be shared between all the members. Does this mean if we all downgraded our connections to the basic offering of our choice ISP we could still get a decent connection and in return force ISPs to lower their prices for higher connections? Seems like a never ending cycle.
Thanks everyone. I came into the comments to learn what everyone thinks of their usage of Redis as a database and how their stack is set up. Now I know what's the correct way of typing Perl...
No but seriously if this goes viral, they could lose several million users. At an LTV of $75/user right now that can be between $100m-$200M. Better buy these guys for $50M. :)
