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I dunno, this whole idea of "hate speech" or even "hate" being something prohibited feels like a sleight of hand. I'm sure it's been said before many times, but it's so easy to subvert and weaponise this against a society - including those it was meant to protect.

Is it not my right to not like something? Or even to hate it? If it is not, then we're policing thought crime through the only visible evidence - what is said. Whatever this is a cure for, it's worse than the disease. The cynic in me suspects it not intended as a cure though. It's intended to control.


It isn't hating it that's illegal, it's inciting violence against it via speech that's illegal.

It's already a crime to incite violence in many countries, with a spectrum of definitions. Including the USA


> It isn't hating it that's illegal, it's inciting violence against it via speech that's illegal.

The laws differ by country, but you'll find most EU countries don't require inciting violence to make it a crime - hate is enough by itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country


Even that's a slippery slope. If I was to say publicly "death to all agile practitioners", it's up to interpretation whether I'm serious or not. I deserve the benefit of the doubt, which is traditionally how it's been handled. Perhaps if I was successful in inciting violence, I could be held accountable for my success. That would make a lot more sense.

I'd say that it depends on how threatened the targets feel - I'd guess that "agile practitioners" as a group wouldn't take it seriously as a threat, but instead as a joke.

However, if there's often rallies and protests against "agile practitioners" and cases of violence against them, then it should count as "hate speech".

In some ways, I see this as similar to "assault" laws where it depends on the specifics of the situation and whether the target is in fear of their safety. e.g. someone holding a knife and backing away from the victim would not be assault, but holding a knife and advancing towards them in a threatening manner most likely would be assault.


Is that not a rather pernicious idea? That I may or may not be punished based on how the recipient of my speech "feels"?

Why can't the rallies be permitted while policing the violence if and when it erupts? Banning the rallies themselves preemptively sounds like a great tool for an authoritarian dictator.


It's all fun and games until pogroms are commonplace

There are plenty of situations where the meaning of something depends entirely on what is in the mind of the recipient. If I approach someone in a bar and say "Hi, that outfit looks very nice on you!" If the recipient is into me, then I'm flirting. If the recipient is not into me, then I'm being creepy. One needs awareness of how likely it is for their words to be interpreted one way or the other, and act accordingly.

> Is that not a rather pernicious idea? That I may or may not be punished based on how the recipient of my speech "feels"?

I'd consider this more the issue of "consequences". If you think that your speech should be entirely consequence-free, then I completely disagree with you (c.f. shouting "fire" in a crowded cinema). It's not like there's typically any confusion around what "hate speech" sounds like.

> Why can't the rallies be permitted while policing the violence if and when it erupts?

That would be one way to deal with issues, but I'd liken it to a doctor that only treats symptoms and never pre-emptive medication (e.g. medication to lower high blood pressure, but not providing exercise/diet advice that could prevent it). There's also the issue of allowing the extremely dangerous types that motivate crowds to go and commit violence whilst never involving themselves - that would seem like a recipe for disaster.


> c.f. shouting "fire" in a crowded cinema

In the US this example derives from Justice Holmes dicta in Schenck v. US:

"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree."

The background of this case is that Charles Schenck and others were distributing leaflets urging the resistance to the military draft during WW1. The Supreme Court upheld this conviction. This case was later overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio which set a new standard, imminent lawless action, as a limit on free speech.

So strictly speaking what you said is protected. You can absolutely have a play where a character shouts "fire" during the course of the script with a full theater watching. If someone knowingly shouted "fire" with the intent of causing a panic then that can venture into unprotected speech.

Hate speech, in the US, is not a thing that exists in the legal landscape. This has been tested in the courts numerous times, e.g. Snyder v. Phelps, Virginia v. Black, R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, etc. It's important to note that in the US hate crime laws are a thing and while speech is quite nearly unlimited, actions are not.

The issue I see with those advocating for hate speech laws is that their time horizon for its use is too short. All governments throughout history have gone through phases from formation to internal civil strife to revolutions and ultimately the death of the government itself. While hate speech laws can limit hateful rhetoric in the short term - from the perspective of supporters - the long term application of these laws can take on a completely different goal as societies evolve over time. I would rather suffer hateful rhetoric with some limits at the extremes - imminent lawless action - than entrust the government with such a power over long time spans.


The theatre thing ought to be contingent on harm being done as a result of yelling "fire". This is a natural consequence and there isn't a law against the speech itself because none is needed.

Otherwise it's the same as the "consequences" of disappearing because you criticised the government.


> The theatre thing ought to be contingent on harm being done as a result of yelling "fire". This is a natural consequence and there isn't a law against the speech itself because none is needed.

I don't follow you - what law would be used to prosecute someone that maliciously yelled "fire" in a crowded cinema? As I understand it, the injuries sustained by people would not be attributable directly to the person yelling, but would just be indirect.

Similarly, a person inciting violence amongst a crowd wouldn't be directly responsible for the violence, but would be indirectly responsible. There's a clear need for a law to prevent that kind of harmful behaviour.


Precedent are already happening. Islamists in the UK spout the most ridiculous stuff on the internet and continue to do so. Meanwhile people saying "go home" are behind bars. I expect this to happen with those new laws as well. Hard rules and seemingly random application of them when it suits someone in power.

> people saying "go home" are behind bars

Who has been arrested for saying "go home"? I can't find any example of this.

Or what is "the most ridiculous stuff" Islamists are spouting for that matter?


A bus driver in Ireland was arrested and convicted for telling a Gambian "You should go back to where you came from". However this was later overturned on appeal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country#Ir...


> Islamists in the UK spout the most ridiculous stuff on the internet

Can you provide some specific examples of this please?

> Meanwhile people saying "go home" are behind bars

Have you some specific examples that are not due to violent behaviour or inciting violence?


[flagged]


It's getting like it's not even safe to encourage lynching non-whites anymore!

Where will this madness end?

/s


Point #2: Say nothing behind another's back you'd be unwilling to say, in exactly the same tone and language, to his face.

This has essentially been shut down in the modern corporate workplace, at least in the Anglosphere. The overpolite "be nice, be respectful" culture punishes anything that can be construed as "not nice", forcing it to go unsaid or at least pushing it underground. We talk in code and euphemisms about these things. You are justified in avoiding any kind of negativity entirely to protect your income. The net result is everybody loses a little.


It's less than I'd like to play at, but wasn't the point that it is great for something running on laptop hardware with integrated graphics? The implication is it would have been similar on native windows on comparable hardware.


The article reiterates the facts about the notions of race and essentialism. The context is that the far right are leaning on historically harmful, scientifically inaccurate, and honestly, kind of absurd ideas about "race".

Having said that, is this not what the entire world has been doing recently? Does BLM not fall for exactly the same fallacy? Is "person of colour" not an egregiously bad phrase to define a person? As if we are white, unless somehow tainted? Is this not something that should concern us all whether it is done with good intentions or not?


I reckon if this is really a big concern for anybody, then they are probably writing way too much YAML to begin with. If you're being caught out by things like this and need to debug it, then it maps very cleanly to types in most high level languages and you can generate your YAML from that instead.


Sadly you usually realize you've been writing too much YAML way past the turning point, and it will be a pain to move a single file to JSON for instance when you have a whole process and system that otherwise ingest YAML, including keeping track of why this specific part of JSON and not YAML.

So people work around the little paper cuts, while still hitting the traps from time to time as they forget them.

> generate YAML

I've a hard time finding a situation where I'd want to do that. Usually YAML is chosen for human readability, but here we're already in a higher level language first. JSON sounds a more appropriate target most of the time ?


Isn’t yaml a strict superset of JSON? Any compliant YAML parser should be able to ingest a JSON document.



> I have been pressured multiple times by Brian Ingerson (one of the authors of the YAML specification) to remove this paragraph, despite him acknowledging that the actual incompatibilities exist. As I was personally bitten by this "JSON is YAML" lie, I refused and said I will continue to educate people about these issues, so others do not run into the same problem again and again. After this, Brian called me a (quote)complete and worthless idiot(unquote).

> In my opinion, instead of pressuring and insulting people who actually clarify issues with YAML and the wrong statements of some of its proponents, I would kindly suggest reading the JSON spec (which is not that difficult or long) and finally make YAML compatible to it, and educating users about the changes, instead of spreading lies about the real compatibility for many years and trying to silence people who point out that it isn't true.

> Addendum/2009: the YAML 1.2 spec is still incompatible with JSON, even though the incompatibilities have been documented (and are known to Brian) for many years and the spec makes explicit claims that YAML is a superset of JSON. It would be so easy to fix, but apparently, bullying people and corrupting userdata is so much easier.

Well that’s disappointing.


This explains some things on, like, a mythic level, that I’ve felt about yaml practically since the first time I saw it.

I guess software are human texts after all.


Are there no cases where well-formed JSON could be subject to the problems covered in the article, when parsed by a compliant YAML parser? I'm asking because I know nothing about YAML and not much more about JSON.


Not that I know. JSON requires strings to be quoted which is basically the problem here. Of course it’s not a great human writable configuration format (no comments being a huge problem).

I’m just pointing out that it should be very simple to swap a YAML file for a JSON file in any system that accepts YAML


JSON is stricter than YAML so that class of issues is avoided.


Yes. Rewriting a YAML file into strict JSON won't have any impact on the ingestion or the processing of it.


There are probably two use cases.

Configuration files for programs. These tend to be short.

DSLs which are large manifests for things like cloud infrastructure. These tend to be long, they grow over time.

My pet hypothesis is these DSLs exist mostly for neutrality - the vendor can't assume you have Python or something present. But as a user, you can assume just that and gain a lot by authoring in a proper language and generating YAML.

See https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere for a great example for AWS CloudFormation.


> Configuration files for programs. These tend to be short.

This is where I use YAML and it shines there. IMO easier to read and write by hand than JSON, and short sweet config files don't have the various problems people run into with YAML. It's great.


I can't run the examples right now, but looking at the last "print(template.to_json())" line, looks like the main use case is JSON ?

On cloud infra, yes, having one or two layers of languages is a natural situation. GCP and AWS both accepting (encouraging?) JSON as a subset of YAML makes it a simpler choice when choosing an auto generating target.

You mention people wanting to author the generated files, I think in other situations tweaking the auto-generated files will be seen as riskier with potential overwriting issues, so lower readability will be seen as a positive.


That's the point really, you can generate JSON or YAML and it doesn't really matter. If you want to include 100 similar objects in that output, you can use a for loop. You can't do that in plain JSON/YAML.


True. YAML is an intermediate representation between my intention expressed in Dhall and what runs in production.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes


Perhaps it is not ideal, and you carry some expense and risk to yourself and the business by doing so, but in some organisations the constraints are so absurd that the competitive advantage you get by doing this and breaking the rules highly incentivises this. If the cyber security departments involved had any skin the game, or any sense of proportionality, then it would not be difficult to have a company issued laptop that also provides adequate security. But they don't, so developers like me end up having to make a tough decision. Break the rules, or work somewhere else.


OP actually says it's the best laptop, not the computer, or even laptop, with the most powerful compute.


I dont see the word 'best' is not in their post at all, stop paraphrasing as it looses the original meaning. These are the quotes since you seem to keep mis reading them:

> the devices are now actually far superior

> Apple buyers are now people who just want a bloody powerful laptop

> The power buyers

And my point is that its not the laptop with the most powerful compute, which is true. so what are you getting at?


You are correct that the word "best" doesn't appear, but this was their meaning. These laptops are superior - you cannot buy anything better from another vendor at any price, period. The gap will likely close, but it's a fair comment to make today.


> These laptops are superior - you cannot buy anything better from another vendor at any price, period

And so the Apple marketing magic has worked on you too.

'Good' is subjective, however I assure you there are faster and more powerful laptops on the market.


I use an Android phone by preference. There are faster and more powerful laptops on the market, but they are not better, and calling some of them laptops at all is a bit of a stretch. Apple have a vertical that is very difficult to compete with when it comes to overall quality. People aren't just buying them because they've all been hoodwinked by clever marketing.


> And my point is that its not the laptop with the most powerful compute, which is true. so what are you getting at?

You don't see that the point which you are arguing ("that its not the laptop with the most powerful compute") is not actually in conflict with any of those quotes?


I hope that the OP is so very grateful for you coming to their aid in making sure that their post doesnt get misunderstood. You are very valliantly continuing to push to make sure I see clearly the error of my misunderstandings.


This is all well and good, except we all know the current zeitgeist is to go to any length necessary to frame absolutely everything in terms of race. As a reader, it's hard to distinguish between that and genuine academic interest. I now tend to close the tab the moment race is mentioned. I'm glad I don't live in the USA, it must be awful.


One of the core concepts used to push anti-marijuana campaigns was that marijuana would enable black men to seduce innocent young white woman, and create a mixed race.

That message was being pushed at a time where the US Senate, controlled by Jim Crow southerners, killed legislation making lynching a federal crime for 50 years. A common pretext for lynching was for a black man to be accused of having sex with, or talking to, a white woman.


I go the other way, it's absolutely their fault. Their historical business model of monopolizing the enterprise while outsourcing security is at the root of all this. The same thing could happen with Crowdstrike on other platforms, but it's only on Windows where these suites are considered essential.


>but it's only on Windows where these suites are considered essential.

They're "considered essential" for all corporate machines for compliance and CYA reasons. If you're the CISO/CTO and a hack occurred on your watch, do you really want to be the one telling the board that you didn't need EDR on your linux machines because linux is secure?


It's a culture that has grown up around a dominant platform that had little or no security built in. Where I work, Windows is heavily locked down with all sorts of security junk on it, but iOS gets by with minimal MDM.


I have long felt that DevOps was always a philosophy, not a methodology. It simply meant folding all that operations stuff into the SDLC. It was always about making Ops part of Dev, not the other way around, and especially not as a standalone discipline. The cloud made this a lot easier, as everything could be done programmatically, but the philosophy held true long before that.

It doesn't mean CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, or YAML. Those are all incidental.

The moment specialised "DevOps" teams started springing up it was all over. We just reinvented the sysadmin.


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