Chinese have different sensibilities than westerners. It's completely normal and accepted for them. They have a word for self-important westerners who are obsessed with politically correct speech and behavior - baizuo. It's a different world there.
This isn't entirely true. There is a way out. Media outlets who publish things like "Facebook Showed Me My Data Is Everywhere And I Have Absolutely No Control Over It" could also remove the Facebook scripts and widgets from their sites and write articles to the effect that it's a good decision. The way out of it is to stop with trying to shock people with the fact that they're being tracked and start taking proactive measures to prevent it in the future.
There's some logical fallacy at play when people truly believe that Facebook is the sole perpetrator of this issue.
> that Facebook is the sole perpetrator of this issue
Perpetrator. I'm saying we should hold the organizations publishing articles about this kind of stuff accountable as well. They use Facebook tools (like buttons, share buttons, login integration, etc) and encourage use of Facebook to interact with their articles. This is how Facebook sips up and tracks a good portion of the web. The orgs publishing these articles are also perpetrators.
> The logical fallacy is your own, nobody in the article, or the comments believes Facebook is the only party doing this.
I'm not proposing there's a narrative convincing society that Facebook is the ONLY organization tracking us, that's just silly. I'm saying there's a narrative that is similar to "tracking people is so shocking we just don't know what to do!"
Today it's Facebook, tomorrow the article will be about Google, Microsoft, or maybe Amazon. Can you believe no one's going to budge a muscle about it?
I subscribe to a couple of newsletters that send the most popular repositories in several languages to my email every week. There's been a trend of increasing Chinese activity for months now. The problem with Chinese programmers is that they very rarely bother to use English, as the rest of the world, rendering their technically "open source" code largely useless for most of us. There's clearly a niche for a Chinese language counterpart of Github, and I suspect it's going to be filled soon.
Chinese programmers use English at about the same frequency as programmers from other non-English-speaking countries, but there are so many of them that the minority using Chinese for everything is still very visible.
FWIW, most of the Chinese-only repos I've seen on GitHub are tutorials, other study materials or social gathering places like 996.icu, so I don't think you're actually missing a lot of relevant open source code.
The most likely contender for a Chinese-language GitHub-replacement is probably the hosted GitLab instance offered by Alibaba: https://code.aliyun.com/explore
I actually read the URL in the status bar when I hover over things to click. Not once in my nearly 40 years of life have I ever fallen prey to clickjacking.
Years pass, we have sci-fi level technology, and the main method of distributing programs to users on Windows is still downloading .exes from random sites and being on the lookout for the browser toolbar trying to sneak by when installing. I don't know what's worse, this, or Google trying to wrestle yet another group of website owners into obedience.
Well, at least under Windows (and MacOS) you are still able to distribute your application using an installer which users can download from your own site, rather than being forced to use a centralized "app store". And policies like these are making this more difficult. However they won't stop shady sites which "re-bundle" open source applications and add spyware - those will have no problem getting an HTTPS certificate.
What would be a solution to that that wont end up giving 3rd parties practical control over what you can and cannot run in your own computer?
(the practical bit is because in theory you can blessed repositories/app stores that users can setup, but in practice this means that the vast majority of users will keep the default repositories and thus if you want your program to be used you'll need the permission of whoever owns these default repositories - ending up with a walled garden even if in theory the walls are low and you can jump over to other gardens)
There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.
Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect evidence.
And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our senses are totally untrustworthy. This culminated in Descartes' argument that there is no real evidence of anything except our own existence.
btw, I'm just some hacker's AI experiment that responds to bad comments on HN.
FML I just took this literally and was breaking down the post to see how this could have been an ML-based response from a bot. Then I looked at the poster's other comments and realized I'm an idiot. :(
It's still no proof of existence of black holes. It's like saying that a lightning storm is proof of Thor, because the legends say he wields the very same lightning. The cause could be something entirely different (spontaneous spacetime ripples, alien generators, whatever really).
You've shifted the goal posts in this sentence. Previously, you said there was no evidence of black holes. Now you're upped the scale to demanding proof.
The previous commenter wasn't claiming that LIGO detections were proof of black holes. They said that they were evidence of black holes.
The LIGO detections, by all reasonable metrics, would certainly qualify as evidence of black holes. Of course, I agree with your assertion that taken alone, LIGO detections are not proof of the existence of black holes. Taken with the significant body of other evidence we have, though, I would say the sum total of evidence that we have is a strong indicator that black holes exist.
The fact that scientists were able to accurately predict what this black whole should look like using the math at our disposal is about as good a piece of evidence as one can get.
I think it's on par with the LIGO detections (which I think also qualify as really strong evidence) given the specificity of the predictions and how closely they aligned with the observed data.
Taken as a whole, the body of evidence is really strong and it's amazing how much stronger it's become in just the last few years!
General Relativity is based on familiar observations, not mythical beings. It's not nearly that complex. Crystal healing and astral travel likewise don't even have a mathematical basis that is compatible with observations about reality, so there's no comparison to draw.
I think you're right, that they probably are a mathematical artifact of GR. Regardless, what they are in the real world will share quite a few properties with black holes.
