This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media.

Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital.

With an API like this, I assume you could have a browser extension that could de-snarkify content before showing it to you. You could ask the LLM to preserve all factual content from the post, but to de-claw any aggressive or snarky language. If you really wanted to have fun, you could ask it to turn anything written in an aggressive tone into something that sounds absurd or incompetent, so that the more aggressive the post, the more it would make the author look silly.

This could have a double benefit. For the reader, it insulates them from the personal attacks of random strangers on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and a place for real, charged arguments about important issues that affect us all. But there is little to be gained from having those fights with strangers; on the contrary, I think it poisons the body politic when strangers are screaming at each other.

For the writer, it takes away any incentive to be snarky or rude. If other people filter their content this way, there's no point in trying to be mean to them, and no "race to the bottom" for who can be more nasty.

This is the Soylent of written communication. Full nutritional value with an unremarkable flavor.

That is unironically exactly what I want from social media.

I want the option to engage with the substance of new developments in the world, technology, etc. without the drama. I don't want to be drawn into the drama of strangers (who could, for all I know, just be bots or ragebaiting AIs).

If I want drama, there's plenty of it on TV, or I could talk to my friends about what is going on with people I actually know.

The anti-pattern, in my mind, is logging on to engage with substantive content and to be inadvertently drawn into flamewars with strangers.

I would really just like the quirkier internet of old.

Flamewars these days are just created by shit-stirrers in another country who are just pumping out rage bait from an massive array of smartphones. It's not even an impassioned flamewar, it simply exists to aggravate.

Using AI to forcefully disengage by simply suppressing that content would be nice and also have the secondary effect of depriving various internet resources of ad revenue.

I'd argue the issue is people have figued out that "shit stirring" can make actual meaningful differences to reality, be they foreign or local.

When the limit of effect a flamewar would have is if Star Trek or Star Wars got the top billing, or Vim was recommended to new programmers instead of Emacs, it was a fun novelty.

But now there's real money and power resulting from this shit stirring of course people will use it as a means to an ends. They've optimised professional shit-stirring because it's so valuable now.

Are humans supposed to enjoy the "flavor" of diarrhea, as the result of giving every village idiot a microphone so they can spew shit from their mouths?

Sure, you might say this sort of thing is boiling flavor out of your food, but... boiling the bacteria out of what you consume isn't a bad thing.

Ironically, the proposed extension would likely have neutered this comment to a shell of itself.

This is sanding the edges of off life. Its gonna make you soft

There's more to life than the Internet, social media, and anonymous trolls. This is sanding the edges off the Internet. It's gonna make you happier.

Nobody needs to be hard on the internet

Why Singapore is a dystopia.

I worry that "boiling" is still optimistic, since it isn't as simple or foolproof. It's more like a complex fermentation process, where it's possible for a malicious input to hijack how it works and generate something more dangerous than what you put in.

Even if the output is only shown to a human, imagine a comment in a thread that tricks an LLM into "summarizing" a false account where other innocent people said terrible ban-worthy things.

Kinda looking forward to something like this, as it has the potential to remove empty junk calories from the internet, hopefully leading to SIGNIFICANTLY less use of today's popular platforms.

My wish list:

- Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title.

- For any given topic, I only care about the main article (with the option to only see a summary, unless its a high quality blog) and couple of substantive comments, rest is junk I don't want to see.

The current state of popular social media sites has meant that I don't use it at all (except HN, which is trending in the same direction due to saturation with AI), but every other week or so I end up wasting a few hours, which I'd like to avoid entirely.

Ideally this would lead to 98% of content filtered/summarised out, and over time only use the internet for looking things up with intention. I want this to remove majority of "entertainment" value from the internet (by default) so that time/energy can be refocused in real life and high quality sources (books) only.

> - Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title.

DeArrow works for YouTube atleast. uBlock Origin or Brave browser works for ads. Not sure why you'd need an AI to remove ads...

I actually have built myself a personal AI agent that does this for nthe main news headlines and for a summary of my personal email (sadly I can’t run it on work email yet). It can extract any actions required from a mail and make them into tasks, and also has a killer feature - a “sort out my email” button that archives all the emails it classifies as FYI, spam, mailing list or moot (it has classifiers for this), first producing a one-pager markdown summary of the whole lot in one shot, leaving all emails marked “action required” or “Urgent”. Email summaries are deliberately dry and factual with all advertising false urgency removed.

I can manually “hold” emails so they don’t go in the “sort out my email” woodchipper. It’s been life-changing.

For YouTube, this already exists and I‘m using it. The extension is caller DeArrow and aims to reduce sensationalism via crowdsourcing, though I wouldn’t be surprised if top contributors are bots using LLMs.

Man, that before-after slider on the home page makes me so sad... YouTube used to just be random people sharing cool stuff, and those de-sensationalized titles really brought me back to that time for a second! Cool stuff.

For people like me had tried it in the past and found it annoying, note that it now has a 'casual' mode where it only changes the truly useless titles and leaves reasonable ones alone.

I think it's an interesting idea to explore.

But... It's the type of idea that is unpredictable as it comes into contact with reality. If it works, it probably works very differently from the initial idea of how it will work.

I 100% agree with this. I am certain that I cannot foresee how this would play out in reality.

100% agree on this; really hard to visualize but interesting nonetheless.

Yeah, I 100% agree with the caution in this comment.

I see the merit in such a proposal. It's the linguistic equivalent to boiling the food you consume, instead of eating it raw with all the associated bad stuff.

The problem is, as you said, that this plan is unlikely to be as rosy as it's portrayed and probably has a lot of drawbacks in real life.

Interesting to think about and explore, though.

The boiling - cooking - is the bias here. Winograds Understanding Computers and Cognition is the most excellent resource in 2026, written over three decades ago by now.

I wasn't even talking about drawbacks, though that applies too.

I mean... you would be basically taking a complex thing, transforming and reconstructing it. What we want out of social media isn't a simple, legible function. The positives. You'd have to discover them.

If someone starts building with the intitial idea above, my guess is that they'd end up with some sort of custom feed that draws inspiration and inputs from social media... but isn't social media. It's something else that you can scroll, read and whatnot.

That is exactly what I want. A boring but factual summary of useful nuggets from the mountain of shite that is ALL of social media. For example, on any given day, reddit/X/Bluesky/HN only has a couple of paragraphs worth of stuff that I care to know about. I want to train my brain to equate the internet with something boring that's only worth visiting when I need to look up information. I want this tech to reduce my (and hopefully others') use of internet to down by 98%.

I want to go to news.ycombinator.com/reddit.com/etc on any given day and just see a couple of paragraphs and maybe a few reference links to follow if I so choose. Spend a few minutes reading that and close it.

All of that in the hope of diverting my limited time/energy on Earth to endeavours in real life with real people.

Chrome PM for built-in AI APIs here.

I love this "de-snarkifier" idea and it seems to have broad interest. I couldn't resist hacking (well, vibe coding[1]) a "Snarknada" prototype to explore the viability, including patterns for low-latency and accuracy.

You’ve hit on exactly why we think on-device is the right move for this class of use cases. If you tried to "de-snark" an entire infinite-scrolling feed via a cloud API, the token costs would be astronomical for a developer. Plus, people (rightly) don't want to send their private social feeds or DMs to a third-party server just to clean up the tone.

Moving this to the device should make high-frequency "Semantic Mutation" financially and technically viable for the first time. If you (or anyone else) starts building this more seriously than my PM vibe coded toy, and hits specific friction points, I’d love to hear about them: it helps us prioritize the roadmap.

[1]: If you're using a coding agent (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.), I recommend pointing it to https://www.npmjs.com/package/built-in-ai-skills-md-agent-md. Most models were trained on the now-obsolete window.ai namespace, and this skill file helps them use the current APIs correctly.

been cranking on this too but not just for snark but for spam/scam heuristics too.

it's something I feel is finally viable to combat at zero cost to the user.

This plus webmcp would allow it to serve as a form of automod too on websites that you authenticate with (imagine a world where your social media profile has an automod of its own powered locally. can use this to steer your feed or to mute/block/moderate as needbe). Even without WebMCP I have been working on making it autodetect html elements and extract UGC (comments/threads..etc) automatically to moderate (since my initial tests with a small group found some websites with frequent UI changes would break if hardcoded or if they did a lot of AB testing)

Even better, the concept would allow you to also use it to hide certain spoilers (imagine sports or new movies that just came out and you want to not have to hide away from all socials).

didn't find any contacts on your new HN account, but in a few weeks will be able to reach out to you with it fleshed out. :)

We have a community of nearly 14k that we will distribute this to

I've thought about this for HN which, now that it's become so big, just has a lot of aggressive negativity and snark. You'd probably run into the same problem as Usenet Killfiles: the folks that use Killfiles would see random orphaned conversations or would just miss large parts of threads while the people that don't have Killfiles would see a mess of toxicity that would make them want to leave. Likewise if you prompt filter your experience, you'll be separating your experience from everyone else's.

Or just ignore it. Or say you will not engage under [conditions]. Ultimately it will be you who looks foolish when the AI rewrote something incorrectly and you engaged with something that wasn't being said.

Though I hate the idea of this, I can see it becoming popular in some use cases, such as schools with "safe places".

I would love an app like this. I am a frequent user of https://www.boringreport.org/ for news, which does something like what you’re describing but for news articles.

thanks for sharing this - quite cool!

It is important, however, not intellectualise repugnant, racist, or inflamatory language; it deserves to be called out for what it is aimed at doing

I'm inclined to think that this will actually decrease the power of echo chambers. Echo chambers become that way by policing dissent, either through moderation or through aggressive attacks on dissenters. A de-snarkifier would de-fang the latter.

I agree that what is toxic to one person is not toxic to another, but think that this is largely because many people enjoy seeing their perceived enemies attacked. In other words, it comes down to a viewpoint bias: attacking my group/viewpoint is toxic, while attacking other groups/viewpoints is good and noble.

My ideal is that a de-snarkifier would be strongly instructed to be viewpoint neutral; to filter based on whether the comment is being respectful, without regard to the views being expressed.

My idea would backfire if other people program their filter to reinforce their own biases by favoring content that they agree with and creating or amplifying personal attacks on their perceived enemies. That would be unfortunate, but ultimately we can only control what we do; each person gets to make their own decision.

And then we will understand reality even more. Only let the tech giants tell us what other people are expressing. Great idea

On the other hand it would make all comments sound the same and further dilute internet content into average slop.

I'm hoping that something like this can condense a 1000+ comments thread to couple of paragraphs at most.

Why would you want that?

Because I want to spend less time online.

Consuming things like comments gives my brain a false sense of social participation. It uses up my limited "social participation budget", with nothing to show for it. Often I reach for comments to see if an article is worth reading, has obvious false information, or see what the "consensus" is and instead I end up wasting time on anything but that. Its not good for my mind to marinate in contextless opinions of random people and increasingly, bots with an agenda. Sorting through all of that in my head uses up energy that could be better spent with real people. If I can simply see a summary of something potentially useful in under a minute, then my brain will get its dopamine hit (or alleviate FOMO) and be uninterested in sinking hours on something detrimental to my life. My experience suggests that, out of all countless hours I've spent on the internet reading things, less than 1% of it has been of any use to me. Its been a net negative.

How often do I feel the need to eavesdrop on a group of people I don't know, discussing something in real life? Almost never. Why would I want to do that online then? Also its mostly kids online. Why would I want to eavesdrop on what a bunch of kids are talking about? And yet its difficult to avoid due to the nature of aggregation platforms. If it were up to me, I'd filter out any and all content generated by or aimed at people under 25 (or even 30).

Imagine surfing the web without ever hearing anything about or adjacent to US politics, celebrities, Musk or AI? I'll seek out that information as and when I need to.

Yes, I can just not use certain websites out of sheer will. I've made progress there, but it can be better still.

on reflection, i would appreciate average slop more than the occasional heinous slop people say when they are opinionated..

My opinion is based on what I see people upvoting on the internet you insensitive clod!

I was literally just thinking that I’d like something like this for HN, which has become an incredibly bitter, cynical, and depressing place in the last decade. On virtually any story, most of the top comments are negative. Every major company is a greedy monster trying to destroy your life, every CEO is a sociopath, everything is terrible, all the time. I wonder how most HN users even get out of bed every day.

I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free."

It's wild to see the about face. Now it's:

> If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to steal it.

It would have been very difficult to predict this shift 25 years ago.

This claim of contradiction has never worked for me.

Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.

Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.

One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.

However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.

You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time:

> If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work?

--Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C)

It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid?

I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.

You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.

The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc.

When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster.

> Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”?

> A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art.

--Gillian Welch, 2018 (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-we...)

Most artists were making way more money off the fans (even those downloading music) via touring and merch sales, than they were making off of the labels from residuals. Most were not making anything from residuals.

Valenti was desperate to enlist musicians because people hated the labels and did not feel bad about stealing from them. But the vast majority of musicians were not willing to back the labels against the fans. The few he managed to enlist, like Metallica were notable because they were exceptions. And the fact that they were already rich and already at the end of there career was noted by many at the time.

In contrast you have, for instance, Courtney Love who wrote a widely-distributed essay about how she and most artists make almost nothing from record sales.

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

It's an interesting essay, and the TLC case does sound pretty egregious. But the premise is undermined by the fact that Love is worth an estimated $100M today, largely thanks to owning Nirvana's publishing rights, which she inherited from Kurt Cobain.

This is what happens when a culture doesn't have robust exclusionary mechanisms for people who want to burn it down.

We welcomed the vampires in and wonder why our necks hurt.

This is like saying Winner Take All Capitalism doesn't have an exclusionary mechanism for the rich. The system exists for the sole purpose of serving the already-rich. The vampires are an inevitability baked into the system from the start.

We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations.

Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.

Those people where trying to build a sharing/gift economy. They weren't able to keep bad actors out of their sharing economy. They are bitter that their utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers. Why is that wild?

It's highly debatable whether, in case of an information sharing/gift economy, the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.

The information is still there, as is the community that you've built, the joy that you get out of sharing the information, everything you've learned...

Why is any of that diminished, just because some people or entities that you dislike also got something out of it?

I would take up that debate.

Attribution is seemingly a central part of a information sharing/gift economy, and especially in a information sharing/gift community. It is part of the trust that connects people and without it the community falls apart, and with that the economy. AI by its very nature removes attribution.

Accuracy of information is a second critical aspect of information sharing and communities that are built around it. Would Wikipedia as a community and resource work if some articles was just random words? If readers don't trust the site, and editors distrust each other, the community collapses and the value of the information is reduced. It might look like adding AI generated articles would not harm other existing articles, or the joy that editors of the past had in writing them, but the harm is what happen after the community get flooded by inaccurate information. Same goes for many other information sharing communities.

Source trust and gift attribution are two distinct concepts, I'd say. One happens at the detriment to the taker (or "thief", if that even makes sense, as per my original comment); the other harms the original "producer".

For the former, it is already very much in any AI company's best interest to preserve attribution to become and remain credible.

For the latter, I can't help but wonder whether a gift economy that needs to diligently bookkeep attribution really is one, and if this is the only practicable way to implement one in a given larger society/economy, I'd say this says something important about that society as well.

I make very heavy use of sources that Gemini sites when I use it. I tend to use AI as sort of a mega search engine where I get a little bit of discussion, but if I care even a little bit about the topic, I end up reading the source material anyway.

> AI by its very nature removes attribution.

This is incorrect. RAG preserves attribution. Training data doesn't, but it doesn't make sense to attribute that anyway, unless you want a list of every person who has ever lived.

It's diminished because the hard reality is that you need money to live.

The end result of major tech companies sweeping in, taking everyone's creative work, outcompeting the originals with AI derivatives, and telling every artist on the planet "fuck off, send a job application to McDonalds" is significantly less art.

Copyright was invented to prevent exactly this scenario.

Yes, which is why hackers and artists (at least those mainly publishing instead of mainly performing for a live audience) are ultimately not natural/inherent allies.

Hackers have usually drawn their funding from their (often lucrative) employment, which is what gave them the freedom to give away the products of their hacking for free.

One needs copyright to survive, the other see it as a means to enforce openness at best (those in favor of copyleft) and as an obstacle to their pursuit (owning the full system, liberating all aspects of and information about it) at worst.

This rift was always visible if you knew where to look, but AI is definitely wedging it wide open.

> whether ... the concept of "bad actors coming in and ruining it for everybody by taking without giving back" even makes sense.

This is pretty clearly answered by the GPL: yes, it does, and this concept has been around since the very beginning.

> The information is still there

True

> as is the community that you've built

Untrue. At this point it's well understood that AI is substitutionary for many of the services that would have once afforded people a way to monetize their production for the community. Without the ability to make a living by doing so, even a small one, people will be limited to doing only what they can in the little free time they get outside of work.

That's the whole problem -- that AI, as it exists today, is taking away from the public, and hurting it at the same time. That's closer to robbery than it is to "sharing in the community".

Yes. There's a difference between walking a trail and maybe littering a a few pieces of trash, and walking a trail while actively setting branches on fire.

One scenario is manageable to leave be, or perhaps one or two volunteers clean it up. The fires have an entire trail closed down to everyone.

With some FOSS projects being bombarded by scraping traffic, redoing their PR system, considering ways to limit contributiors, and even going closed source, I don't think such a metaphor is an exaggeration.

> utopian dreams got hijacked by self-dealers

Such is the fate of all utopian dreams.

If you're implying that it's a violation of the original hacker ethos, I disagree.

"Information wants to be free" is a small part of the hacker ethos venn diagram. There are many hacker ethos traits that aren't about cracking, specifically.

Also, the server "information" isn't free (as in beer) to begin with, it costs server availability. Coming up ways to penalize greedy actors is not only well within the server operator's perogative, it's an interesting tit-for-tat problem that could pique any hacker's interests.

A bonus hacker trait is that these poisoning responses are individualistic, i.e. the government doesn't get involved, where certainly more aggressive anti-AI sentiments could (wrongly) call for that.

So I'd say this type of LLM-resistance falls squarely in the original hacker ethos, even though it incidentally counteracts one minor aspect of "information availability". Though I'd certainly agree that the picture today is a lot different than it was. Ironic even.

There's a big asymmetry of power here and "information wants to be free" was about empowering the people. Currently, corporations are bad faith actors that corrupted the idea, making it free only for themselves. Can't you see the asymmetry here? For instance, they should release the weights of the models they trained on everyone else work, but we're not seeing that except for Meta and some other groups.

For what it's worth, I've generally sort of been on the "information, wants to be free" side of things, and I still am. I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it -- those folks were pretty quiet when their source code was being indexed by Google. But I suppose that's because Google was sending traffic their way with they could then monetize. So this is much less about any kind of philosophical argument and much more about who's getting money, which I don't really care about. I view one of the core values of open source software as being something that we can learn from, whether that's through AI or otherwise.

> I don't really understand the folks that released their software under open source license and are now upset that LLMs are training on it

The key word there is "license." Open source often has strings attached--an obligation to credit the source, an obligation to release derivative code under the same license, etc. LLMs seldom respect the license, they just quietly and extensively plagiarize everything.

"Information wants to be free, but only be used by people I wholly endorse." is the motto. You'll see young people singing the praises of piracy but then use "piracy" as an excuse for hating LLMs.

Corporations are not people.

Who works at corporations and benefits from their actions?

If my LinkedIn feed is any indication, bizarre inhuman ghouls who wear the names and profile pictures of my college friends like skin-suits and exclusively post AI-generated marketing materials for AI products.

About a few million less Americans than a few years ago, I guess.

It becomes a bit easier to see when you finish the sentence. "Information wants to be free (from ______)." If you filled that blank in with "rent-seeking Capitalists and corporations," you likely have everything you need to understand why they don't see it as a turn.

I say this as someone whose notions exist orthogonal to the debate; I use AI freely but also don't have any qualms about encouraging people to upend the current paradigm and pop the bubble.

Sure, with enough effort, you can find a seemingly clever way to turn almost every mantra into its semantic opposite.

It doesn't take much cleverness because we're talking about a straightforward dynamic. A counter-cultural expression that was a "screw you" aimed at corporations was co-opted and misinterpreted by those same corporations as "It's free real estate", and now the latter are flummoxed that they're not buddies with the former. Well, points up that's why.

Hackers are not one big homogeneous group (although there definitely are larger trends, and maybe you have a point there).

Still, people were saying all kinds of inane stuff 25 years ago too.

Politics will make more sense once you realize no one is trying to have consistent principles.

People are in general for whatever they think will benefit them, and against what they think will harm them.

So piracy is ok when it benefits the little guy and not ok when it benefits the big guy. Unions are good when they stand up against employers, and bad when they discriminate against non-union workers. There's no contradiction there.

The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy.

Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job.

Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career.

Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.

It was never about some "information wants to be free" philosophy for most people. It was about, "I want information to be free for me to access, and btw fuck big corporations." No real shift happened.

THEN: "You can't violate our copyright because it's ours and belongs to us."

NOW: "We can violate your copyright because we want to."

YOU: "Where's mine, and how do I make more people click on these ads?"

Wait, didn't Clinton actually balance the budget? That gets props from me; no government since then has actually given Americans an honest picture of what it actually takes to run a balanced budget, which will require some combination of higher taxes and/or decreased spending.

I would be open to paying higher taxes if I believed it would help address the deficit and debt (instead of just enabling more spending) and if I believed that the money was being well spent.

Earlier in my adulthood, I would happily vote for almost any tax or levy, because I had faith that that money was turning directly into societal good.

I have lost that faith. In the worst case, money seems to be grossly mismanaged (here is a local example from just last month: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fallout-f...).

In other cases, it is going to real nonprofits that are tasked with solving problems that never seem to get better, no matter how much money is spent.

In yet other cases, the money goes to building transit (something else I was previously very bullish on), but that, once built, seems to be governed by principles of limitless permissiveness (an example from a few days ago: https://komonews.com/news/local/only-8-metro-fare-enforcemen...)

It's hard to feel invested in the programs that my taxes pay for when it doesn't feel like they reflect my values.

> Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants

It was much worse than that. Students who had already spent years studying to be air traffic controllers through the CTI program were subject to a sudden policy change that disqualified them from entering the profession unless they passed a “biographical questionnaire.”

85% of candidates failed this questionnaire, but the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (the organization that pushed for this change to begin with) was feeding the “right” answers to its own members.

“Right” answers included things like having gotten bad grades in high school science class. You can take the test for yourself here and see how you score: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

I can’t blame anyone for thinking this sounds too outrageous to be real, but all of it is public record at this point and the subject of an ongoing lawsuit: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

This test is completely insane. What were the people making it thinking? It feels like half of the scored questions have point values assigned at random. Why does being unemployed for 1-2 months before enrolling in the program award you 10 points, 5-6 months is 8 points, yet 3-4 is a fat zero? There's so many questions with these random score assignments. Why does having real qualifications related to your job only give you a point or two, but some random factoid like taking unrelated courses or doing poorly in college history give upwards of 15 points? Why is child labor rewarded, with more points given the earlier you started?

Unless I'm missing something, this couldn't have been designed by a human being with normal goals in mind. This feels like a test that was created to act as a locked door that you could only pass by knowing the exact password, the sequence of lies you had to produce. That anyone's career was at the mercy of THIS is deranged. What the hell is going on in the US?

> Thankfully, there is the esm-integration proposal, which is already implemented in bundlers today and which we are actively implementing in Firefox.

From the code sample, it looks like this proposal also lets you load WASM code synchronously. If so, that would address one issue I've run into when trying to replace JS code with WASM: the ability to load and run code synchronously, during page load. Currently WASM code can only be loaded async.

This is not strictly true; there are synchronous APIs for compiling Wasm (`new WebAssembly.Module()` and `new WebAssembly.Instance()`) and you can directly embed the bytecode in your source file using a typed array or base64-encoded string. Of course, this is not as pleasant as simply importing a module :)

> Not everyone in history thought that 12-TET was an acceptable compromise. Johann Sebastian Bach thought we should use other tuning systems

This is presented as fact, but as I understand it there is no conclusive evidence for what Bach intended wrt temperament. There is a theory that the title page of the Well-Tempered Clavier encodes Bach’s preference in the calligraphic squiggles, but this is a recent theory and speculative. I don’t believe there are any direct statements by Bach as to his intention.

TL;DR: when a user writes to /proc/self/mem, the kernel bypasses the MMU and hardware address translation, opting to emulate it in software (including emulated page faults!), which allows it to disregard any memory protection that is currently setup in the page tables.

It doesn't bypass it exactly, it's still accessing it via virtual memory and the page tables. It's just that the kernel maintains one big linear memory map of RAM that's writable.

Thank You.

> So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth. [...] The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system.

I disagree. While AI certainly acts as a force multiplier, all of these dynamics were already in play.

It was already possible to make an anonymous (or not-so-anonymous) account that circulated personal attacks and innuendo, to make hyperbolic accusations and inflated claims of harm.

It's especially ironic that the paragraph above talks about how it's good when "bad behavior can be held accountable." The AI could argue that this is exactly what it's doing, holding Shambaugh's "bad behavior" accountable. It is precisely this impulse -- the desire to punish bad behavior by means of public accusation -- that the AI was indulging or emulating when it wrote its blog post.

What if the blog post had been written by a human rather than an AI? Would that make it justified? I think the answer is no. The problem here is not the AI authorship, but the actual conduct, which is an attempt to drag a person's reputation through mudslinging, mind-reading, impugning someone's motive and character, etc. in a manner that was dramatically disproportionate to the perceived offense.

Lately I'm seeing more and more value in writing down expectations explicitly, especially when people's implicit assumptions about those expectations diverge.

The linked gist seems to mostly be describing a misalignment between the expectations of the project owners and its users. I don't know the context, but it seems to have been written in frustration. It does articulate a set of expectations, but it is written in a defensive and exasperated tone.

If I found myself in a situation like that today, I would write a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the project root that describes my expectations (eg. PRs are / are not welcome, decisions about the project are made in X fashion, etc.) in a dispassionate way. If users expressed expectations that were misaligned with my intentions, I would simply point them to CONTRIBUTING.md and close off the discussion. I would try to take this step long before I had the level of frustration that is expressed in the gist.

I don't say this to criticize the linked post; I've only recently come to this understanding. But it seems like a healthier approach than to let frustration and resentment grow over time.

Agreed, TFA is a good example of how to write down expectations explicitly.

But as far as dinging Hickey for the fact that he eventually needed to write bluntly? I'm not feeling that at all. Some folks feel that open-source teams owe them free work. No amount of explanation will change many of those folks' minds. They understand the arguments. They just don't agree.

> he eventually needed to write bluntly

Is there a history of that here? Were there earlier clear statements of expectations (like CONTRIBUTING.md) that expressed the same expectations, but in a straightforward way, that people just willfully disregarded?

I don't mean to "ding" anybody, I mostly just felt bad that things had gotten to the point where the author was so frustrated. I completely agree that project owners have the right to set whatever terms they want, and should not suffer grief for standing by those terms.

I don't remember the exact situation, but I think this relates to this:

Clojure core was sent a set of patches that were supposed to improve performance of immutable data structures but were provided without much consideration of the bigger picture or over optimized for a specific use case.

There's a Reddit thread which provides a bit more detail so excuse me if I got some of it wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a01hu2/the_current...

*Edit* - actually this a better summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey...

Dissatisfaction n. 3 is the essence of the problem: "Because Clojure is a language and other people's jobs and lives depend on it, the project no longer feels like someone's personal project which invites a more democratic contribution process". This is a common, and modern, feeling that the more users a certain thing has, the more the creators/maintainers have a duty to treat it as a "commons or public infrastructure" and give the users a vote on how the thing is to be managed and developed. This is, of course, utter horsesh*t.

> Is there a history of that here?

I have been maintaining not-super-successful open source projects, and I've had to deal with entitled jerks. Every. Single. Time. I am totally convinced that any successful open source project sees a lot more of that.

> Were there earlier clear statements of expectations (like CONTRIBUTING.md) that expressed the same expectations, but in a straightforward way, that people just willfully disregarded?

IMO it's not needed. I don't have to clearly state expectations: I open source my code, you're entitled to exactly what the licence says. The CONTRIBUTING.md is more some kind of documentation, trying to avoid having to repeat the same thing for each contribution. But I don't think anyone would write "we commit to providing free support and free work someone asks for it" in there :-).

Someone once said: Abuse and expectations erode a culture of cooperation.

I am currently seeing this in real time at $work. A flagship product has been placed onto the platform we're building, and the entire sales/marketing/project culture is not adjusting at all. People are pushy, abusive, communicate badly and escalate everything to the C-Level. As a result, we in Platform Engineering are now channeling our inner old school sysadmins, put up support processes, tickets, rules, expectations and everything else can go die in a ditch.

Everyone suffers now, but we need to do this to manage our own sanity.

And to me at least, it feels like this is happening with a lot of OSS infrastructure projects. People are getting really pushy and pissy about something they need from these projects. I'd rather talk to my boss to setup a PR for something we need (and I'm decently successful with those), but other people are just very angry that OSS projects don't fullfil their very niche need.

And then you get into this area of anger, frustration, putting down boundaries that are harmful but necessary to the maintainers.

Even just "sending them to the CONTRIBUTING.md". Just with a few people at work, we are sending out dozens of reminders about the documentation and how to work with us effectively per week to just a few people. This is not something I would do on my free time for just a singular day and the pain-curbing salary is also looking slim so far.

Furthermore, writing down the contract calmly, as part of a plan, can avoid having to bang it out in frustration and leaving a bad taste.

> I don't say this to criticize the linked post

What you have written is obviously a criticism of the linked post.

If I'm criticizing the linked post, then I'm also criticizing myself, because I could easily imagine having written it.

I don't see anything wrong with the way he expressed himself, and I think his point is totally legitimate. I mostly just felt bad that he experienced so much grief about it, on account of a gift he was offering to the world.

"So much grief." It sounds like you're trying to interpret Hickey's emotions. How would you check whether your interpretation is accurate?

I don't know if you're a native English speaker, so apologies if this isn't appropriate. But the word 'grief' has more than one vernacular meaning.

"Giving someone grief" means giving someone a hard time.

So "he experienced so much grief" can just mean that it can just mean that people criticised him. It doesn't necessarily express anything about Rich Hickey's state of mind.