> I don't want my politicians deciding what is good or bad on the internet. I'm an adult, and I can decide for myself.
The issue isn't whether politicians are deciding what's good or bad.
The issue is that, in Europe, foreign actors with explicit ill intent are deciding a ton of the content your neighbours are watching/reading, day in day out, on the internet. AI has made this easier and even more scalable than before. This content is being used to influence or outright decide elections. Elections of more politicians that are "deciding what's good or bad", eh. Such as politicians deciding that Russia is good.
What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell? The whole "let them have critical thinking" doesn't work, we are under active war and citizens who don't know better are specifically targeted. And besides, we are not gonna take lessons from the country that yelled high and mighty for years they're the land of the free, and let itself fall into complete autocracy & dictatorship. In the US, those same citizens are the useful tools repeating state propaganda, two steps removed from "Just Following Orders".
And full context: I agree with Matt and support Cloudflare's stance here. But people can quit it with cheap retorts like "Freedom of speech for me, not for thee". It's not that simple.
into complete autocracy & dictatorship....ummm you mean a democratically elected president & government? Plus these hyperboles don't really resonate anymore as they've been used for every little thing people don't like.
It's still a democracy even if you don't like the outcome.
Goebbels himself remarked how stupid the institutions were for granting them freedom of speech:
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
That's a really misleading way to say it. Because they took charge of the entire structure aimed at stopping propaganda, and used it to amplify theirs.
The more laws and government agencies Germany had to fight propaganda, the easier time the Nazis would have had.
> Mussolini introduced women suffrage, I'm not joking.
No single person introduced women suffrage. It emerged through independent movements across different countries.
That said, it is generally accepted that New Zealand (1893) was the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote nationally. Key figure: Kate Sheppard.
Earlier partial or local suffrage: Sweden 1718 - 1772 (limited), US 1869 (Wyoming territory).
Key global leaders of women suffrage: UK - Emmeline Pankhurst, US - Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth C Stanton (results in 19th Amendment)
Global timeline: 1893 New Zealand, 1902 Australia (with racial exceptions), 1913 - 1918 Nordics, 1918 - 1920 UK and US, 1945-1960s Much of Asia, Africa, and Middle East, 1971 Switzerland!
> I feel like the tech user community has completely lost the plot sometimes.
You're mixing "badly implemented operating system", "UX patterns I disagree with", "dark patterns pushed by corporate greed", and "Turns out you need money in order to pay developer salaries even in an open source project".
I'll be polite as well and not elaborate further...
You make a fair point that my attempt at humor is a bit oversimplified.
But it's also the best-available solution. The problems described do not exist on the other side of the fence. Others have different criteria, but we are happy with ours and wonder if y'all might be too.
However, like with many of these obscure features, I am not so sure it works well in practice. I have the Windows 11 laptop I'm viewing that SVG from set with support enabled for english, french and russian, and I'm getting, among most of the English tags, a few stray "Psychique" and "Привидение" types in the svg. I have no idea how it chooses which one to show, there.
Just a wild guess, but perhaps the order of the translations vary across cells. Perhaps the browser just picks the first one that matches your supported locales.
I started watching YouTuber Evan Edinger recently and it’s been a breath of fresh air because he’s been saying things I understood to be true a long time ago, but never quite verified until now.
One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right.
Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it.
You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do.
Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.
There is no such thing, and has never been. Europeans are different people with different cultures. No matter how much hackers and global projects want to exterminate those cultures and those people.
The equivalent would be to talk about "Mercosul culture" or "NAFTA culture". Or why not "NATO culture", or "BRICS culture"?
As someone who's lived in 7 different european countries throughout my life, I feel like I can confidently speak on the matter and yes, there is an EU culture. This does not mean there isn't also cultures individual to the countries, just like the latter doesn't mean there aren't cultures individual to regions or cities.
(You'd think this last part is obvious, and yet it seems it has to be spelled out for some, who'd rather pick random acronyms to strawman a culture question onto, than use common sense.)
PS- For the sake of your mental health, work on popping that bubble of yours you seem to live inside of.
There's something of a common European culture, which has existed for centuries. Note: "European", not "EU". The EU is a steel tariffs union which has grown in scope to become an attempt of making member countries states in a federation.
The common European culture is foremost christianity, and secondly renaissance values, as well as nationalism. The latter mostly in domestic matters, such as welfare. But those values aren't exclusively European.
> For the sake of your mental health
Are you proud of expressing yourself in this way? Probably you're blowing off steam online anonymously, but if you rage and insult like this in real life whenever somebody doesn't agree with your opinions, you're not going to have fruitful interactions with other people.
There is no rage in my comments — I have better things to do than get upset at things online. I took a look at your own comment history however and it is … scary. Hence the “for the sake of your mental health”.
And yes there is an EU culture as well; just like there is a US culture not just a North American culture.
As someone that lived in 4 different European countries, I can tell you, you only talk nonsense.
Go tell a Spanish or an Italian, that is normal for the authorities to go and investigate him and put him in jail for calling someone fat.
It's fascinating the amount of bullocks that comes out of your keyboard with an aura of self-righteous intellectuality, as if you are preaching some universal acepted gospel.
Buddy all you’re trying to do with all the screeching in this thread is pick an online fight with someone who doesn’t care about you. You haven’t answered any of the other people who contradicted you. Go tell someone else on a noisier forum they’re self-righteous if you want to elicit a reaction, cause I’m not interested.
> You're linking a US media website, one famous for having its head way up the american exceptionalism hole.
Oh, I didn’t notice we are already in the censorship phase and we can’t even link Fox News. It’s a factual news (but you are free to contest it) and if Fox is the only one willing to publish it, it says more about European descent into madness than you think.
> Also, didn't you vote to not call yourself European or something-something?
What are you even talking about? You people are insane. You need to be stopped before you destroy us all.
If Fox is the only one willing to publish it, it says a lot about the news story itself.... Whilst they may time to time have some journalism I'm sure, it's not a respectable news organisation in the same way as AP or Reuters and such. If it was a decent story it would be picked up on and re-reported by other outlets. There is not some conspiracy where all other journalists refuse to publish the 'truth'...
As I said above: Fox is not reputable, and if they’re the only one willing to run a story, that’s not someone speaking truth to power — it’s the equivalent to a wacko conspiracy theorist being the only person agreeing with you. Not a good sign, and not one that will get you taken seriously.
Whether the story has legs can be evaluated independently, and others have done so (it is indeed a non-story that was simply used as rage bait, which you and the other guy are falling for hard). But a lot of time can be saved simply dismissing fox as a sole source, because they have this reputation, and it’s earned.
Fox News does not have a reputation of reporting on facts, which seems to be your only claim here that this is “factual”. If it were, you’d find this in a neutral source. It’s a waste of time to even argue with you as I had predicted.
1. German authorities demanded GAB to disclosure the real identity of a user that called - a morbidly obese - politician, fat, so that they can persecute him.
Now, you can go on with your little show, pretending to be in your high horse where news that shows from Fox News don't count, so that you don't have to actually address the facts.
In Germany, Beleidigung has been a criminal offense for decades. Courts (not "authorities") can compel platforms to identify users after due process. No one is being "persecuted", no one is going to a "gulag", and weight is irrelevant.
If you want to argue that criminal defamation laws are bad, do that. But stop dressing an old legal reality up as dystopia.
This is a lot of pearl-clutching for someone who opened with an insult and then ran out of substance. If you have an actual counterargument, try that. Otherwise, spare us the theatrics.
The world is full of people who, like you, seek any reason to not listen or read interesting things in favour of doing just about anything else. You don’t win a prize for being part of that group — at best, you saved as much time as it took you to write that comment. In exchange you are likely poorer for it intellectually because Patrick’s writing has an exceptionally high signal to noise ratio, and that signal is one most are not privy to.
At no point did the article claim AARP was in the wrong for running those ads. But had you kept reading you’d maybe have understood that wasn’t the point nor the premise in the first place.
In case it wasn't clear: I don't care what you do, I care that other people don't miss out on a good article because you flaunt your anti-intellectualism on HN.
It’s a classic issue that you give access to superpowers to the general population and most will use them in the most boring ways.
The internet is an amazing technology, yet its biggest consumption is a mix of ads, porn and brain rot.
We all have cameras in our pockets yet most people use them for selfies.
But if you look closely enough, the incredible value that comes from these examples more than makes up for all the people using them in a “boring” way.
It's google's b2b offering (suite of tools including gmail, google docs, drive etc). It's an Office 365 competitor and changed name more times than I can remember. GSuite, Google Apps, Google Apps for Work, Google Apps for Business...
Their point is that Siri is not consistent with these things. If you've never had these issues yourself then good for you, not everyone is as lucky.
I have had the same issues myself. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle for my phone is set to on, yet it still often refuses to do stuff like turning my home lights on/off, giving the reason that I need to unlock my phone.
And I've also had the location issue they gave an example of, where asking "what is the weather in Berlin" does not need it to know where you are because you've told it the location you're asking about, so the answer is the same regardless of whether you're asking while in Berlin or Tokyo, yet it still sometimes gets stuck believing it needs location access.
Edit: oops the issue of having said a location in the request wasn't in the comment you replied to, but another reply to it. But the overall point of Siri being annoyingly inconsistent still stands.
I wouldn't be so sure of that assertion regarding attention span. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance granted, it's about opinion rather than capability but the same bias would explain such a reflexive judgment, and such a judgment will have negative consequences if it is false. (Consensus can be shaped, as can the perception of consensus be.)
The issue isn't whether politicians are deciding what's good or bad.
The issue is that, in Europe, foreign actors with explicit ill intent are deciding a ton of the content your neighbours are watching/reading, day in day out, on the internet. AI has made this easier and even more scalable than before. This content is being used to influence or outright decide elections. Elections of more politicians that are "deciding what's good or bad", eh. Such as politicians deciding that Russia is good.
What the actual fuck do we do to defend ourselves, pray tell? The whole "let them have critical thinking" doesn't work, we are under active war and citizens who don't know better are specifically targeted. And besides, we are not gonna take lessons from the country that yelled high and mighty for years they're the land of the free, and let itself fall into complete autocracy & dictatorship. In the US, those same citizens are the useful tools repeating state propaganda, two steps removed from "Just Following Orders".
And full context: I agree with Matt and support Cloudflare's stance here. But people can quit it with cheap retorts like "Freedom of speech for me, not for thee". It's not that simple.