It feels very strange and perhaps kind of contradictory to be presented with an individual who is vehemently against the idea of censorship while also using "the majority of people also hold this view" as their primary justification why censorship in this case is wrong.
If the professor held a view that the minority if Americans supported, would there be more or less reason to support censorship in that case? Would the author had been so quick to defend the professor's beliefs if they had not aligned with the majority's (and, likely, the author's, if I am to judge based on the impassioned editorializing present in the article)?
I'm not certain this sort of appeal to the commons argument has a place in the discussion of ethics and clout-driven censorship--that would boil the entire issue down to a simple.tug.of war between which of the two sides can drum up more/louder supporters. That isn't a question of ethics at all.
Popularity absolutely does not impact the logical correctness of an argument: an argument is true by virtue of its own structure, if you say popularity somehow affects its correctness you've basically jettisoned logic in favour of subjective opinion.
At best popularity serves as a useful heuristic for when you don't have the means to carefully confirm the correctness yourself.
(There is a fairly uninteresting special case where the popularity of something comes in to the argument as a factual statement about the world.)
I think you are conflating popularity of an argument with popularity as part of an argument. For the former, it's easy to agree that it does not affect the correctness of the argument. But in the articles case, popularity is part of the argument: That it is especially worrying the speaker is uninvited for an opinion which is held by a majority of people, i.e is popular.
Another example of this would be if we were having an argument about what music to play at some event we are hosting. I might well use the popularity of some songs as an argument.
No, but something being expected is something else that is not inherently tied to the correctness of an argument.
As a concrete example: wikipedia has a long list of common but incorrect beliefs, all of which one should not be surprised to hear being said but will remain incorrect regardless.
The author clearly states that Abott's position was not relevant to the talk he was to present. Wether his position on admittance us congruent with progress in client science has yet to be adressed.
The popularity of the opinion was not being used to support the truth of that opinion, but to point out the absurdity of censoring an opinion that has that much popular support.
Ok I'll admit it. I'm the dingus who is still using https and login/password. It's how I learned to use it years ago and since I only ever access GitHub via cli it's all I've ever learned. I don't program anything complex and I've never put anything secure up on GitHub (it's public, after all, so i had the expectation that all info on there is insecure). I don't understand why this is being deprecated when it's the default suggestion GitHub provides you when you add a new repo to your profile so that you can connect your local git repo to it. For hosting my trivial personal projects it seems so silly to have to go onto github's web interface and click through a bunch of their ui to build a personal passkey(which is just a password with a different name afaict). Am I just not the intended audience for the change or am I missing something crucial that doesn't make this seem like a bunch of extra effort for no meaningful change?
You forgot about the part where you run `git push` later and realize it didn't save your passkey, so you have to make another one. This time you Google how to save it and copy the top answer on StackOverflow, which uses the git credentials store to save it in plain text in your ~/.gitconfig file. Now is the passkey more secure?
> it's public, after all, so i had the expectation that all info on there is insecure
I think it's a misconception.
Unless you just let everyone write anything in your repo, one would expect that what is there is what it says on the tin.
Every public software project takes measures to stay authentic and not let random and unreviewed, potentially malicious bits in. This is how they keep their users' trust.
Very roughly, "public" = read access is unrestricted, and "insecure" = write access is unrestricted.
I'm also a dingus and I am sometimes forced to clone private repos to new machines which doesn't have my keys. I know that ssh-agent is a thing which is sometimes set up but I still don't really know how it works, and sometimes it doesn't work at all with weird proxy servers and whatnot.
I wish there was some way of _manually_ identifying via a simple link or QR code or whatever.
> I don't understand why this is being deprecated when it's the default suggestion GitHub provides you when you add a new repo to your profile so that you can connect your local git repo to it.
It suggests SSH commands by default for me, I assume this depends whether you have added an SSH key to your account or not.
You can use a supporting Git Credential Manager (such as GCM Core: https://github.com/microsoft/Git-Credential-Manager-Core) to keep using HTTPS and login/password. Instead of typing in your username/password directly in the CLI, it pops up GitHub's login page where you input login/password and then does the dance for you to get an access token from that.
(Git for Windows default installs GCM Core. Some Linux distros do to. You may even already be using it. I think I've seen some confusion in comments here and elsewhere that they don't realize they are already typing in their username/password to a GCM dialog and that's going to keep working. This is about removing HTTPS Digest auth with direct password transmission over the wire.)
That sounds painful, and in having my own share of dumb corporate papercuts in my environment I sympathize. I'd also point out and echo the sibling comment that the few times I've had GCM problems, the GitHub Issues have helped me debug and fix it (either having an existing Issue with enough details to correct it myself or responding quickly when I've needed to post something).
Thank you for being humble and describing the ways you use GitHub!
I'm the same, and it's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one just using it as a free web host for personal projects.
Until starting a new job in January 2021, I "knew git" to the extent of git pull, git add, git commit -m, and git push. For everything else I just made a copy of the repo. Now I've learned a little more about branches and merge requests, but I still make a copy of the repo and copy my changes over when things go wrong. https://xkcd.com/1597/
Like you, I got some password-related warnings on GitHub, and honestly it's scaring me away. I know it'll take an hour or so to figure out what went wrong, regenerate a ton of SSH keys for every computer I own and link them to my account, disable 2FA because my phone number is in another country... I'd rather just upload a file, thanks.
The increased overhead means I'd rather just use FTP to upload some files to an HTTP server, but I don't think that such free FTP web hosts exist any more. At least, not ones with a domain that people recognise. That said, peterburk.github.com is no longer accessible, only peterburk.github.io, so maybe it is time for me to go looking for a free .com subdomain.
I'm grateful for GitHub hosting all the junk I decide to share, and I'm obviously not their target market if I'm not paying. I just wish there were a place I could drag & drop to upload content publicly.
> regenerate a ton of SSH keys for every computer I own and link them to my account
You could do a single one per computer. You could even do a shared single one across all computers (it’s recommended against but not strictly worse than a shared password)
> disable 2FA because my phone number is in another country
Don’t use SMS for 2FA. Use TOTP (Google Authenticator or similar app. There are alternatives that let you sync) or U2F (hardware key)
I was in the same boat until recently. There have even been a couple of projects I got invited to that I never could join because of this (since multi-factor doesn't work with terminal username/password).
I've tried setting up SSH keys many times and have somehow failed many times. The UX for security stuff just isn't there. I finally have gotten a workflow sort-of figured out and documented to remind myself in the future.
Key based auth is much more resistant to phishing. Its just one command to have openssh generate a key pair on your computer, and you're done. Password auth in general cannot go away fast enough.
Can you speak to the experience of coding on the iPad? I have been considering picking one up for personal reasons but the price seemed prohibitive when I thought it simply could not be used for portable work purposes at all.
It works well for me, but I have a personal preference for command line tools. I use emacs as my editor and am able to do everything I need on my Linux server (this is strictly for personal/hobby programming). There are a couple good source code aware (but not project aware) text editors for the iPad that work well with Working Copy, a really nice git client for iPad. On occasions when the Linux server was not enough, I set up Github Actions to respond to commits made through the use of Working Copy + an editor (Textastic in my case, though I'm not ecstatic about it, it does get the job done).
I'd prefer a real IDE on a few occasions (work is C# and Java). Trying to do some side projects to relearn or expand my knowledge of them and their libraries was infeasible on the iPad alone.
In the end, my conclusion is that if you don't need an IDE and can use a CLI or git-based workflow, then the iPad is a fine tool for programming and writing in general. I'm not even stymied by the relatively small screen, it's still better than the monitors I grew up with. The fullscreen and split screen modes also work well with my particular manner of maintaining focus on tasks (I use fullscreen/split screen on my MBP almost exclusively as well).
> > So, I felt [...] grateful to my parents for being there in the first place
> I'm going to say something controversial. Not everyone is grateful for their life. I've talked to multiple people who preferred to never be born. And event the best parents I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.
> > [...] and being decent at being parents as well.
> That's way more universally good reason for treating your parents well.
I can verify this. I very much wish I wasn't tasked with being alive. Depending on your metaphysical beliefs, I feel like I'm wasting another soul's place in the world. I don't want to be here, maybe if another soul was in this body then it would put it to better use and be happy and fulfilled and desire this life. I have people who want me to be here and for their sake I continue onwards, always wondering why, and always wishing I didn't have to. I used to make the mistake of thinking I could confide in them these feelings I have, but eventually I realized that I cannot. Rather, I should not. My parents wanted to be parents, and they began preparing for me as soon as they found out I was on my way. They kept me from falling off of tall things or licking wall sockets or drinking cleaning fluid as a baby. No matter how you word it, there's no way to explain that you don't want to exist that doesn't tell a parent "everything you defined yourself by for the last few decades is a farce, the thing that you made doesn't want to exist." I am not grateful my parents made me, but I don't hate them so much as to want to hurt them by telling them that.
Hey, in case you aren't aware, it sounds like you might be depressed. I highly recommend finding a therapist, or if you can't, consider what would need to change in your life for you to feel more active and engaged. Are you eating/sleeping/exercising too little or too much? Is your job/commute/locale draining you? Do you feel like you just need to find a direction/purpose? There's no other soul out there that would take your spot, and even if one could they'd face the same challenges as you.
There's such thing as dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder). About 1.5% of people have it. Treatment is supposedly as effective as treatment for depression (it's the same treatment). You have to feel like that for at least 2 years to get a diagnosis. Since it's not severely handicapping people suffering from it, it may go undiagnosed for decades and even after diagnosis people might choose to forgo treatment because of its hit and miss nature and side effects.
I disagree. It seems unreasonable to hold not-for-profits to such an extreme ethical standard. They're already doing charitable work, why must they also be expected to lead the charge on unrelated social matters besides the one they chose?
I agree that executives are paid too much, but I don't expect a Soup Kitchen to be posting on social media about how they are fighting against discrimination of purple elephantfolk in Norway.
Because not-for-profits, which have special legal and tax treatment on the theory they're doing good for society, are accountable for how they spend money in ways that for-profit companies aren't.
I also think it's hilarious that "don't overpay executives and instead spend the money on the good you're supposed to be doing" is an "extreme ethical standard". How did the Overton Window get moved all the way to the basement?
It's not just executives though. It's all staff. It's hard for a lot of people to take rather huge pay cuts to work at a non-profit.
Very few people at non-profits are "overpaid" when compared to salaries at a similar for profit company. Non-profits also have less tools available to pay their employees, such as stocks.
If their executives get paid above their level of competence then the nonprofit is no longer nonprofit, it just distributes the profits via executive salaries.
>highly paid execs, insane amount of money spent on marketing
I don't understand how not-for-profit orgs are supposed to succeed when they are constantly hampered by being expected to pay theirbwmployees low wages and not market themselves or spread the word because if they spend too much money doing these things then they are suddenly "bad" organizations. If not-for-profits are not allowed to compete in the market with for-profit organizations by offering competitive wages and utilizing competitive marketing budgets, then it's no wonder that charity is generally so ineffective. I suspect that the average armchair marketing executive might not be a good judge of what an "appropriate" marketing budget is.
It's awkward because people who are new to the city don't intuitively understand the necessary cadence of the swipe. Every time I bring a friend to the city for the first time and hand them a card, they struggle to get the machine to read their swipe. First, they swipe too slowly, I tell them to speed it up. They swipe again, too quickly this time, and I tell them to slow it down. They look at me, exasperated, and I take the card and swipe myself through to show them the rhythm. They usually mess it up one or two more times before they get it right.
Furthermore, I would argue that the cards are shaped incorrectly--the cut edge of the card is on the trailing edge of the swipe, which seems unintuitively for something meant to be pushed forwards.
I know I'm asking a question that is likely difficult to answer, but how do you make humor out of something so mundane as a cover letter for a job? Without knowing anything about the audience I can't imagine how to be funny on paper without coming off as inauthentic.
If you build a platform specifically to house/attract people who were banned from typical platforms because they had a tendency towards promoting violence, then I would argue that you are very much enabling (possibly even encouraging) their behavior. I believe that is a pretty logical sequence, and a clear line to draw.
There are very few people who earnestly want an unmoderated place of discourse, because those serve very little functional purpoae. Eventually most people will find something either irrelevant to their interests or personally repugnant presented to them and will go back to a place where there is some degree of moderation in place so that they can consistently find thing that interest and engage them. Why are you on HN and not one of these wholly unmoderated forums? Even curation of topics is a form of moderation, not to mention HN's strict approach to actually thoughtful commentary. The people who earnestly want a wholly unmoderated space are increasingly likely, depending on their desire for it, to be one of those people engaging in something so boorish that it got them removed from moderated spaces.
Furthermore, there is no small amount of irony in you saying you'd rather talk about free speech right after telling someone what they can or cannot claim.
> there is no small amount of irony in you saying you'd rather talk about free speech right after telling someone what they can or cannot claim.
You can't make those claims and expect people to take you seriously without backing them up.
> There are very few people who earnestly want an unmoderated place of discourse, because those serve very little functional purpoae.
Do you mean unmoderated or simply moderated to your specific standards?
Parler was never unmoderated.
You are defending deplatforming, while simultaneously telling people to go to different platforms if they want different standards of moderation. Do you see how this doesn't work?
If the professor held a view that the minority if Americans supported, would there be more or less reason to support censorship in that case? Would the author had been so quick to defend the professor's beliefs if they had not aligned with the majority's (and, likely, the author's, if I am to judge based on the impassioned editorializing present in the article)?
I'm not certain this sort of appeal to the commons argument has a place in the discussion of ethics and clout-driven censorship--that would boil the entire issue down to a simple.tug.of war between which of the two sides can drum up more/louder supporters. That isn't a question of ethics at all.