If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not identical.
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.
If you don't want all the ports at once, then it sounds like modular ports is perfect? You can just attach whichever combination you need on any given day / moment. Or am I missing something?
Fair enough, that wasn't really something I was thinking of. Of course, at that point you're really just changing from having to carry around a bag of dongles to a bag of ports. Not having to remember to have to put in/bring my HDMI port to a presentation is a little bit convenient.
It's funny how every society has its own way of mistreating children, yet never considers it a problem at the time. We look at the ways children were harmed and exploited throughout history and shake our heads at how our morally underdeveloped forebears could be so cruel and misguided. Then we turn around and declare that our children have no right whatsoever to privacy, and that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good".
I firmly believe that a hundred years, people will look back on practices like this and shake their heads at the appalling attitudes their primitive ancestors had towards children. But I imagine that's little comfort to the kids subject to this kind of abuse.
I strongly agree with your entire comment. That said, I think this:
> that everything they read and write should be surveilled 24/7 by teams of strangers, for their "own good"
Are actually two separate problems with our society.
Problem 1: denying privacy to children, various forms of helicopter parenting. This you've covered, and I agree this is our era's way of mistreating children.
Problem 2: "by team of strangers". as a Service. This is a much broader topic to cover it all here, but constrained to the context of data processing and children - social-wide, we're too eager to entrust sensitive matters to random strangers, giving them too much leeway, as if they weren't incentivized to abuse it in every way they can get away with.
People are having ridiculously inconsistent "trust functions" here. You wouldn't give this level of access to a small shop from your neighborhood that offered you a service, but you give it to a random tech startup from far away, just because the guy looks kind of creepy and the startup has a shiny web page. Even though a realistic threat model would suggest the former can be trusted way more than the latter (less incentives and less capability to screw you over, and they live near you). It's like most people can't internalize the lesson, even though they're being repeatedly screwed over by almost every business they interact with.
What pisses me off more, is when it's the other party that inserts some third parties into the process. When you have a kid attending a school, there's a degree of trust and responsibility shared between you and the school. But then the school outsources data management or remote learning to some random vendors, vendors who absolutely cannot be trusted. And as a parent, you can't do much about it.
One day in the future people will look back at our times and think about all of us and most of the market the way we today think about literal snake oil salesmen and people duped by them.
> What pisses me off more, is when it's the other party that inserts some third parties into the process. When you have a kid attending a school, there's a degree of trust and responsibility shared between you and the school. But then the school outsources data management or remote learning to some random vendors, vendors who absolutely cannot be trusted. And as a parent, you can't do much about it.
I don't understand why the parents are letting the school into their kids heads while they're at home to begin with. School administrators shouldn't be parenting (and we should ask ourselves why this seems reasonable for them to explicitly assume parenting roles over all the kids), and they should probably be more concerned about what kinds of porn their teachers are watching. They should never, ever be concerned with the question of which kids are watching which porn unless it somehow literally cannot be avoided because the kid drags it explicitly into the classroom.
"If so, this is no different than your employer actively monitoring your activity on their devices"
When I was 12, I didn't sign an employment contract with my school and they didn't pay me. Have times changed so much? Why would you imply that two relationships are in any way comparable?
Owning a device does not grant you a right to violate people's privacy - if you lease a car, is it okay for the rental company to install cameras in it and record you having sex in it?
Surely you understand why a school-owned and school-provided device is monitored by the school, and why this scenario is not directly comparable to a car lease (with a lease being quite a different contract, with different goals and legal mechanisms)?
Whether or not you are being paid is irrelevant - the key part is that some other entity is providing hardware that they own and allowing you to use it under certain conditions. Those conditions are: use it for the purposes agreed upon, and the device will be monitored to ensure it is being used for only the purposes agreed upon.
I certainly don't think we're doing our kids any favors with the constant and forced surveillance 24/7. But I can understand why an organization wants to keep their hardware managed.
Not at all, I do not see how a school's interest in monitoring a measly $300 chromebook outweighs a child's privacy. Meanwhile sportscars are used to break the actuall law, not T&C, daily, and occasionally kills people, yet company's interest in monitoring their $150,000 vehicle doesn't seem to matter.
The only difference here is that kids are powerless, unlike customers renting sportscars for $$.
I'm having a really hard time following the thought process here.
For one, I already said I agree that children's privacy shouldn't be invaded - that's not the point. The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Secondly, you first talked about a lease and now you seem to be talking about cars in general? But also companies which issue $150,000 sports cars? (Which company provides $150,000 sports cars, by the way? So I can apply.)
For what it's worth, every corporate fleet vehicle I've had the pleasure of using has been strictly monitored by the company who owns it - just like they monitor the other hardware that they own and lend me.
And if you're not talking about corporate owned vehicles - we're back to square one. Leases are different contracts with different expectations than loaned devices.
> The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Why should that right win out in this case over the user's right to fiduciary technology that puts their interests first?
A company car can be worn out by driving it around for frivolous reasons, so the company will impose a condition that you can't do that, and monitor you to make sure you obey the restriction you agreed to.
A school issued laptop is not going to wear out any faster or slower depending on what you type on it. And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
The school might have a legitimate interest in whether the students are leaving their laptops plugged in all night mining Bitcoins and wearing out the battery. They don't have any legitimate interest in the contents of the students' diaries, whether they're written using school-issued tools or not.
Teaching students to expect this sort of treatment from people with power over them is corrosive to society.
> And there's clearly no restriction here against personal use.
Are you sure about that? I'm not allowed to use my employer's laptop for personal use. Why am I allowed to use the school's laptop for personal use?
> That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy
You like to talk about rights. Doesn't the school have the right to say, "You can't use this device unless you comply with the (arbitrary) rules that I make. One of those rules is that I'm going to spy on your use of this device. If you do not like it, you are free to use your own device instead."
Sorry, there may be a restriction against personal use; this system is not being used to enforce a restriction against personal use, as described in the article. It's being used to monitor all use, personal or otherwise, for content the school is interested in, no matter in what context it is written. It's not scanning for non-school documents in general, or video games.
The school has a right to impose conditions or monitor, to the same extent that anyone lending someone something has that right. But in this case it is in conflict with the child's rights, in a few ways:
1. The child may not know about the monitoring.
2. The child, being a child, may not actually have a feasible way to use their "own" device. The school-issued device may be the only device they have access to or that they or their family can afford.
3. The school may expect or require them to use the school-issued device in certain situations, and may not appreciate it when the child troops into class with their own personal machine, or tries to take a test from home on an ordinary PC.
4. The child has a right to a good education from the school, to make them into an adult that one is happy to share a society with. A good education should teach a person not to tolerate arbitrary restrictions, conditions, or monitoring without good cause, especially from a governmental agency.
Finally, I believe users of computing devices have the right to be able to rely on those devices as extensions of themselves. Having somebody else all up in your computing experience is a lot like having somebody else inside your head, and in general it shouldn't be allowed.
Sorry, what I meant to say here I think is that Gaggle isn't being used to enforce a restriction against personal use. It seems like the school district in the article doesn't particularly care whether students are using their laptops or school accounts for personal use or not. They're not surveilling Google chat and e-mail looking for just any personal communications, or excluding academic communications form surveillance.
Look at the "what Gaggle flagged on kids' computers" chart: none of this is "video games" or "wasting time on YouTube" or "visiting sketchy domains that might host ransomware". If that sort of stuff was in "Other", "Other" would be the biggest category. If personal use of the devices or accounts outside the particular areas Gaggle scans for is against policy, the school doesn't seem to be using this tool to try and enforce that policy.
They are instead using the tool to examine everything the students do or store that might be related to these topics, whether it happens during personal or academic use.
> The point is that Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use.
Or we should aggressively throw that idea out and take privacy rights to take precedence over corporate ownership of property. If the organization isn't willing to trust you with that device without constantly monitoring you, they shouldn't "lend" it to you (since "lending" in this context is always coercive and its mandated by your employer as well and you cannot effectively opt-out).
I believe I already agreed that surveillance culture isn't doing our kids any favors. Not sure why you are trying to convince me on that, despite me saying it in my first post.
You keep arguing from the perspective that the school/company necessarily has the "right" to spy on anyone using its loaned equipment.
I thoroughly reject that right as being valid. It should never have been invented as a concept, and you should not be defending that supposed "right".
If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them, and I expect the article to be returned to me in good condition.
And you keep arguing that "surely you understand that they must have right" which is exactly what I'm rejecting, and its very frustrating that you can't even seem to comprehend that someone would strenuously object to your premise to begin with. You just keep on restating that I MUST agree with you that they have that right as a premise to the argument. I reject the premise. If we can't get past that there's no point to this any more, we can't even have an argument about the beneficial effects of rejecting that premise and the horrible effects that keep getting worse and worse of being brainwashed into accepting those "rights" like they're physical laws and not something that we can choose to change.
And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed to accept things that never should have been accepted.
>You keep arguing from the perspective that the school/company necessarily has [...]
Because I am able to separate what is reality and what my ideal is. My ideal aligns closely with yours. But I try not to let it cloud what the reality is; mainly that organizations which provide assets for free to employees/students are allowed to stipulate conditions of use, one of which may be monitoring.
>If I loan a friend something I don't have the right to spy on them, I trust them
You are absolutely allowed to give a laptop to a friend and say "By the way, this has a keylogger on it. If you want to use it, just know that keystrokes are being recorded". You, as the owner of that device, have every right to do that. The key being that you notified the other party (like, for example, terms and conditions of use). Trust doesn't even come into the equation. Would that make you a shitty friend? Yes. Can you still do it? Yes.
>And if you get pissed off at some point in the future about our surveillance state, take a good look in the mirror and figure out if you're part of the problem or not and if you might have been flat out brainwashed
Jesus that escalated quickly. I am saying that organizations are allowed to have terms of use on their equipment, one of those terms being that the device is monitored, and suddenly I'm the cause of the surveillance state.
"mainly that organizations which provide assets for free to employees/students are allowed to stipulate conditions of use"
1. They are not 'free', they are paid for with taxes
2. stop equating employees and children, it's daft, any judge would throw out such argument without a second thought
3. there are currently like 30 active lawsuits against schools and states for spying. The case law is not set on this matter, it's a new phenomenon and now is the chacne to set the recond strain.
4. Just because you put 'your house now belongs to me' or 'you are now my slave' into terms and condition doesn't make it legally valid.
Indeed it did and it reminds me of a lot of conversations I’ve seen on Twitter with unreasonable people who hold the entire world to their personal ideals, everything else be damned.
"Organization A is providing their owned device to Person A, and they have a right to monitor its use."
That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy. You can demand compensation for damage, but you can't control their life.
If it did exist, it would lead to dystopia. A microcontroller with Wi-fi cost like $0.5, in the next 10 years they will be in library books, pens, shoes, do you want to live in a future where literally everyone can spy on you and fine you every time you let wind because it's against term 527 in T&C?
>That's the point I am trying to get across - there is no such right to violate privacy.
Who says you have a right to privacy on a device you do not own, provided to you by another organization for a specific use case (school-related learning) and which comes with terms and conditions of use (which, more than likely, includes a monitoring clause)?
Hate to break it to you, but schools and organizations have rights too. One of those being "if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property.".
"Who says you have a right to privacy on a device you do not own"
The law does. You paid for the device, or a car or a house you are renting. For the duration on your possesion the owner does not get to randomly violate your rights. If they are not happy with it, they should not have given you the device.
"if you are using our property, we have the right to monitor it. Because it's our property."
While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house, and a waiver in case it ends up being child porn .
Also give them a waiver in case they record a conversation with your lawyer, doctor or employer, breaking attorney-client privilidge, medical privilidge or sensitive conversation with your employer.
>The law does. You paid for the device, or a car or a house you are renting.
You aren't renting a car. You are being provided a laptop, owned by someone else, and allowed to use it subject to the fact that you follow their terms and conditions, which happens to include monitoring. Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving.
>While you are at it, give them the copyright to any sextapes they record in your house,
If you wanna make sex tapes on company or school provided laptops... By all means, go for it. But I have no idea what it has to do with this conversation
"You aren't renting a car. You are being provided a laptop, owned by someone else"
You are being provided a vehicle, owned by someone else. There is no difference, neither is an act of charity
You dont have to use a car, but your kid has to be at school, and has to use their laptop, so you don't have a choice to reject the 'terms and conditions'.
Is you kid's privacy worth less than $300 laptop?
"Please tell me specifically what law this violates, rather than hand-waving."
American Civil Liberties Union director Vic Walczak said that “the school district's clandestine electronic eavesdropping violates constitutional privacy rights, intrudes on parents' right to raise their children and may even be criminal under state and federal wiretapping laws.”
You’re living in some kind of world very different than mine. See “Acceptable Use Policies”, which are standard practice for equipment owned by large organizations lent to their employees, staff, and students. Even universities have these policies for loaned equipment.
> Surely you understand why a school-owned and school-provided device is monitored by the school
Not at all, no. Ownership of the device (worth very little, maybe I'd feel different if it was a $100+K instrument on loan) should morally grant no spying rights whatsoever to the owner.
Privacy of the person, but particularly a child, far outweighs the importance of any cheap gadget.
The fact that we think that either of those are okay is wrong.
The fact that you're sitting there wondering how I could possibly object to something so normal and obviously correct is precisely the entire fucking problem.
None of these invasions of privacy should be allowed or considered normal.
I value the privacy of my children and have trusted them with their devices for the most part. I avoided parental controls and blocking applications, I don't monitor them or know their passwords
But once my oldest (9) started disappearing with his iPad for too often and too long, I did browse his YouTube history (I had to ask him to unlock his iPad, as I don't have or know the passcode). And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old. I have also made it a rule that computing and screen time needs to happen in family areas
I still feel like I violated his trust. But I also feel like I can't responsibly allow him to have access to YouTube or the full Internet without experiencing negative effects to his emotional development. I am unsure if I am a helicopter parent in this situation, and if I went too far
ah, your parents probably didn't let you rent whatever you wanted from Blockbuster or buy porno magazines at the convenience store, seems like it's basically the same thing
> And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old.
Did the same for my 6 year old. Yes, there is a lot of stuff I dont want my kid watching.
He used to watch video game videos, mainly by other kids, so I didnt mind.
Then one day, I heard him swearing. Looks like some (a lot?) of these kids swear, even in games like minecraft. And they use sexist language; again, these are videos by kids, some just a few years older than my son.
And now Youtube is banned.
I dont understand where this "helicopter" parent thing comes from. Like another commenter says, will you let you kids eat anything they want? Watch TV till 11 in the night?
I'm curious what do you mean by "adult content" on YouTube? Like sexually explicit or suggestive things, music videos, etc, or rather some other too mature topics?
There are a lot of sexually explicit videos on YouTube. I didn't realise and it was totally my fault for not looking into it as soon as YouTube usage started going up
Or steal your parent's credit card. Its an American company after all they use their CC for everything and a CC is completely normal for identification for some ungodly reason that I do not comprehend.
Just to resgister an account? Is this a new change? It's the first I hear of it, and I have family members with GMail accounts who were <18 only few years ago.
Not to register an account, but any video flagged as any kind of explicit, suggestive or problematic content requires age verification. There was some flack recently as YouTube was requiring age verification for LGBT+ support videos.
For what it is worth, I have a son a little younger than yours and have decided I will do the same.
My reasoning is that these platforms (as we've recently seen) know full well that they cause harm. That gets verified pretty regularly by independent researchers. Standing by and letting a preteen deal with that on their own has predictable enough results: my job is to Sherpa kiddo through life and part of that involves deploying myself as a kind of surrogate sense of self regulation when his fails. I'm pretty liberal and allow privacy on most things (I would never read a diary etc) but draw a line between what he consumes and produces. Privacy is for production, at the moment. Private consumption can come later.
I think it's kind of a reverse anthromorphization, where you don't really think about the specific thing that's happening (some random person getting access to your kids private communication), but think of it as just some abstract thing
Alas not enough people are "pissed off". Societies, in particular the US, are now taking unprecedented risks, dissolving long-standing practices, trampling on moral standards, pursuing massive violations of trust, all in the name of profit making (that - in the scheme of things - is actually quite puny).
Now, it is clear that the diffusion of digital technology invariably takes us to different pastures. We are not in Kansas anymore when everybody carries a connected supercomputer. Both parenting and education will be impacted and will never be the same again. A new equilibrium must be found. But what is happening in the past decade or so is just an unwarranted wild west that capitalizes (literally) on ignorance, inertia, confusion, regulatory capture and political dysfunction.
> the former can be trusted way more than the latter (less incentives and less capability to screw you over, and they live near you).
How is this remotely true? The stranger, after you stop paying them for the service, might spread lies about you, treat your child badly, show your child things you wouldn’t want (guns, drugs, movies, etc). The faceless corporation directly profits off the information it gains, but you can be sure the access control and security measures taken by them mean it’ll never be used to oust something embarrassing about you to your community. Only a dozen or so engineers at Google have direct database access and all of that access is logged and audited.
"you can be sure the access control and security measures taken by them"
How could you possible write this, did you live under a rock for the past 10 years?
Big Co's have literally extorted people and leaked their sex tapes, Vigilante placed bounties on people's heads, Equifax left national databases unsecured, phone operstors have sold realtime location to the highest bigger and left the website to access it unsecured, the list goes on an on. Unbelievable!
I agree with you. I'm not sure I see the direct link between privacy and freedom.
I can be free to do what ever I like, with a complete lack of privacy. Inversely I can lose all my freedom but have relative privacy (i.e solitary confinement). It seems more, repercussion curtails freedom, not privacy. (Perhaps a pointless distinction).
No privacy means you need to consider what you do in light of who might judge you for it.
That very strongly stifles dissent, just because people self-censor out of fear.
Imagine the principal was a bit of a bully, and students knew he could sometimes read their chat messages. They would probably be a lot less likely to talk with each other, or even with their parents, about the bad behavior of the principal. To my mind, this would make the students less free.
Yes, It was probably a silly distinction. But I think trust is what leads to freedom, and privacy is used to reduce the need for trust. But there are other ways to build strong trust (or trust-less) networks.
"I'm not sure I see the direct link between privacy and freedom."
Have you seen "never talk to the police" video, explaining that not even congress know how many different crimes/laws are on the books?
Explaining how easy it is to charge a random person with a crime and get a conviction based on just ill reflection of their character?
Can you draw the logical connection between lack of privacy and how easy it makes it to charge random people arbitrarily? How this could be used for political gain, profit or to supress dissent?
But you are merging issues. The US having complicated sets of laws isn't really an argument for/against privacy... it's an argument for reform.
I can definitely see how a lack of privacy can be used against you. But I'm just saying it's correlative or causative. i.e you can be fairly transparent with a group, and still be relatively free with that group. The privacy isn't what leads to that freedom, it is trust.
At the government level, that is possibly non-existent. But I think it's important to remember that it's trust (or not needing trust) that is the driver of freedom, not other factors.
In principle your arguments are reasonable, but i don't think they are achievable.
Trust is cool, but it's a system designed for friends and family. Can you trust 300 million people with you internet banking password? It's statistically inevitable that some or them are dumb, evil, crazy, or all of the above.
"isn't really an argument for/against privacy... it's an argument for reform."
I don't think its possible to reduce laws to such an extent, lawyers can't know all the laws in the same way developers can't know all the code, and you can't fit all the code of a modern computer into something manageable. Every country I know of is in a similar situation.
Basically thats why we have warrants for search, right to silence and make dragnets illegal.
Also world without privacy is a world where anyone can impersonate you and commit fraud, and anyone can sue you, and even if they loose, financially ruin you.
I agree on all fronts. I don't think we should aim for zero privacy... and you are right it could be a dystopia existence.
But there is a balance where if we view trust as the key, and privacy as the ability to control trust. Then we can come up with solutions that may compromise privacy to some degree but maintain trust. (I don't know what they are, I'm speaking in the rather useless abstract).
More we might miss some good solutions if we are blindly protecting privacy (which is the natural knee jerk I end up with)
Correct is: privacy as a concept already existed in the Ancient era. It is one of the younger human rights, it gained wide-spread adoption in society/culture and accompanying recognition in law about 200 to 100 years ago.
If you define privacy as to be "when watched", then, sure, we've never had privacy. But that I don't think that definition is accepted by many, and it'll lead to an unproductive discussion.
The expectation of privacy has always been when traditionally not under the eyes of others. We've always had this in villages where kids sneak away from supervision.
What we're talking about now is different. It's non-privacy without community. Humans function properly in small tribal groups. If the person invading your privacy is a faceless bureaucrat, then you're much more likely to be misjudged. That's the problem.
> Humans function properly in small tribal groups. If the person invading your privacy is a faceless bureaucrat, then you're much more likely to be misjudged. That's the problem.
Small closed groups feature bullying or enable serious abusers fairly often. Misjudging kids or mistreating them, domestic violence, guys beating weaker guys were just fact of life in villages.
I trust the more important problem is education of kids, kids will not always grow and become a virtuous guy. they need help and teach, but now parents even argue to teacher for let their do not need to write homework...
This has nothing to do with the rights of children. This is about the school system as an ever present overbearing parent in place of the Childs real parents.
Children do not have the right to privacy they are not adults.
I disagree, emphatically. Privacy _is_ a human right; nobody has the right, privilege, or ability to intrude and exfiltrate data from my mind. Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind. It ought to share the same privileged status as our deepest, innermost thoughts.
My biggest concern regards the balance between privacy and monitoring is that children nowadays (and even adults) are highly enabled to commit social bullying. Nothing is really disciplining them properly, causing recurring “bowling for Columbine” events we see almost bi-monthly.
It doesn’t help that foreign states are probably working to purposely inhibit or even disable American society as a community function. (See news about Russian state companies and Facebook manipulation from more recent news)
Privacy is important, but public safety has a higher priority.
The biggest risk is abuse of the data, not the basic mission of these monitoring services
Yes, the biggest risk is abuse of the data- but the basic mission of monitoring is also an unacceptable risk. To me, this is similar to the notion: "Yeah, we're building a nitrous fertilizer bomb in the shed, but the _real risk_ is if our neighbor tosses a smoldering cigarette butt into the yard. The grass could catch fire!"
I also respectfully disagree. I'm a sincere egoist, so I say that: no, public safety is not a "higher priority" than _my_ rights, nor is it of a higher priority than any individuals' rights.
I think the solution to bullying, and generally the unwelcome encroachment of others into our spaces, is some ability to rebuke the interlocutors' access to our space entirely, permanently, and even prematurely. You'll notice that the goal of surveillance is antithetical to this, entirely; I take it to mean that the possibility of bullying is endemic to surveillance. You can not have surevillance without the opportunity for gross abuses.
Don't get me wrong, I do care for public safety and the collective well-being. But that is because I choose to care, because I choose to sacrifice of my means and materials in the times and places that I find necessary. The goal should not be, that we allow people their freedoms except where it is inconvenient to the collective purpose. The goal should be, to empower upright and moral citizens to understand their innate ability to make the world better.
Yes, this is an imperfect solution to the collective well-being. There will often be times where such individuals do not understand or accept their privilege to enrich the world of themselves; and, at the end of the cultural moment when the cards are dealt and the pot is dealt, we might find that such an approach is utterly immeritous toward the goal of preserving our common heritage. If this should happen, then that will be a great tragedy indeed; yet it won't be so great by half as the tragedy of even a single human being denied the full fruit and art of living with their full power.
EDIT: Also, I'd like to draw a line between privacy and anonymity. Privacy means I ought to have a space where nobody can exfiltrate resources from. This does not enable bullying, because bullying requires some degree of interconnection, whereas privacy must be specifically preserved where intercomnectivity is the state of business. Anonymity, I grant you, does allow bullying (to the degree that anonymity allows you to interconnect while refusing to allow other parties to identify you.) I will entertain conversations about the dangers of anonymity, because I think there is a happy middle between "don't track me" and "interact with me as a known quantity."
Surveillance is antithetical to both privacy and anonymity. To the degree it is antithetical to privacy, I will fight it tooth and nail, and forever condemn the sniveling ne'er-do-wells that think themselves privileged in _my_ spaces.
> I also respectfully disagree. I'm a sincere egoist, so I say that: no, public safety is not a "higher priority" than _my_ rights, nor is it of a higher priority than any individuals' rights.
Isn't the problem with this position that you cannot reach "universal rights" if you approach from individual self-interest. What if my particular circumstances mean that I don't want everyone to have Right X? I see egoism and universal rights as incompatible. Perhaps I look at it the wrong way.
> I think the solution to bullying, and generally the unwelcome encroachment of others into our spaces, is some ability to rebuke the interlocutors' access to our space entirely, permanently, and even prematurely.
This doesn't handle the very real threat of Grooming, or unrecognised bullying. Children will tolerate quite a lot before they even realise it's not healthy.
I am a strong proponent of privacy, but I don't see an easy solution to children online. It shouldn't be black box, as they can easily end up on the wrong side of the internet. But it equally should not be a white box.
I can't agree with this. I'm a staunch privacy advocate by normal millennial standards(by HN standards I'm probably middle of the road for the privacy concerned group)
But certainly privacy is a privilege, maybe one you get de facto at some point, somewhat akin to voting, but obviously in certain situations people lose their privacy rights. In an extreme situation you could look at a prisoner, but also consider that we allow people to be monitored at work - and we have legal methods of removing privacy as well - a search warrant for example, or sexual predator lists.
>Computers are nothing less and nothing more than an amplification system for the mind.
The same could be said about automobiles being an amplification system for the legs, but you have to get a license to drive one because of the destruction that they can cause.
It is likewise with a computer; people here, of all places, should understand how destructive a computer can be. Look at how people are polluting their minds with misinformation and divisiveness on social media, or in more extreme cases, doing things like using bot nets to DDoS websites. Children don't have enough understanding of the world to be given privacy. If a toddler locks themselves in the bathroom, you shouldn't have to respect their privacy if you think they have gotten into the medicine cabinet, you open the door.
I think the whole concept of remote administered tests is ludicrous, a physical presence with a proctor is the minimum standard for a trustworthy results that's not 1:1 video chatting for the entire duration(and even that can be gamed to some extent). To me it makes absolute sense in a competitive academic environment like a school to have keyloggers and network IP monitoring if you want any semblance of fairness. Make kids use a certain, monitored machine for schoolwork. Otherwise those who can afford to and/or have the propensity will cheat. Unless of course you're fine with academic achievement being an even stronger proxy for class.
I'm not saying kids can't have privacy mind you, and especially not that we should give up privacy entirely. But I don't think that kids should have a right to privacy with regards to their education.
I remember reading a cryptozoological theory that there could still be some mammoths left, hidden in the vastness of Siberia. Absurd, obviously, but I always thought you could make a great film about a ragtag crew searching for the last remaining mammoth tribe in the wilderness.
Actually that idea is intuitively easy to understand once you consider how large Siberia is. It's hard to imagine humans could extinguish any species there, even one that's so hard to miss.
But if course, we don't really know how Mammoths lived, how far they travelled, where and when they bred, etc.
Maybe all humans had to do was wait on some river crossings in a specific time of the year because some instincts told the Mammoths to traverse that route every year before mating season. Or maybe we didn't extinguish Mammoths and they died from some contagion (why should that only happen to humans?).
One country has a legend of mammoths. One country has Loch Ness monster. Another has sasquatch. Another has yeti. Some even have dragons or sea creatures.
> For AI researchers to move past the behaviorist conflation of thought and action, the field needs to drink again from the philosophical waters that fed much AI research in the late 20th century, when the field was theoretically rich, albeit technically floundering.
Well, gosh. Fancy a professor of philosophy deciding that AI needs more philosophy. Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage in all this ugly mathematics and -eww- engineering, then it's no price worth paying.
>Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage in all this ugly mathematics and -eww- engineering, then it's no price worth paying.
What makes you think the author is saying anything like this?
Good. But nesting could and should have been added to CSS a decade ago or more, and it is an abject failure of the working group that it wasn’t, despite the obvious, overwhelming demand from authors.
"Abject failure" is more than harsh. Not many people have the expertise to sit on these committees and the passion to drive through new changes. It takes a while.
In 2012, the www-style mailing list (where the CSS WG organised and discussed before moving to GitHub) was receiving up to 1400 messages a month: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/ . There was active participation from professional, full-time standards experts employed by Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft and more organisations. The author of this nesting spec first proposed it in 2011: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Jun/0022....
And this was hardly the first such discussion. You can find requests going back for years before even that point, with people requesting nesting/hierarchical rules and being shot down.
So no, there was no lack of expertise or passion. So why has it taken this long? A failure of leadership? A failure of process? Perhaps the few, pigheaded opponents of an obviously desired and useful feature were able to sabotage progress by making it impossible to achieve consensus. I don't know. But I refuse to let them off the hook because they finally got around to delivering something in 2021 that the web should have had in 2001.
> So no, there was no lack of expertise or passion.
Passion to make proposals != passion to drive through changes. Making the proposal is the first step. If you're in it for the long haul, you make revisions and get consensus.
Software engineers, largely speaking, love to design things, build them, and move on to the next project instead of dealing with maintenance. Standards committees, largely speaking, are designed to get consensus first and figure out what the issues are with a proposal before implementing it. This kind of "eat your vegetables" way of working drives off a lot of people. And of the remaining engineers who are patient enough to drive something through committee, most of them are off busy doing other things.
You might have a taste of what this is like if you have ever worked at a company that did design docs before implementation. Like, if you're proposing a change to the system, and you write up a short document and get a couple other engineers assigned to review it. Have you ever had more than a couple engineers assigned, like five or ten? All looking at it with critical eyes? Now imagine that they work at different companies.
> Perhaps the few, pigheaded opponents of an obviously desired and useful feature were able to sabotage progress by making it impossible to achieve consensus.
Jeezus, that's a great example of the kind of attitude that makes this so painful in the first place. I want to print this comment out on paper and mail it to the next person who complains about slow standards committees.
You're speculating about how people's personality flaws are sabotaging the process. Well, guess what? You're not the only one doing making shitty comments like that. People who make committees work get a lot of disrespect from random strangers on the internet.
Maybe someday you'll sit on a committee, but you shouldn't have to do that in order to have an ounce of empathy for how standards committees work.
Dude, this spec was ten years between ideation and a FPWD, for a feature with proven demand and prior art. Sympathy for committee members would be easier if they gave any sign of recognising that this constituted a failure to make timely progress and fulfil the working group's chartered purpose: advancing CSS to simplify web authoring.
But standards committees display the same depressing insularity and hostility to outside criticism as most institutions, preferring to censure its tone instead of reflecting on its truth. In reality, it wouldn't matter how diplomatically it was conveyed, it wouldn't trigger any kind of self-reflection, just the exact same special-pleading about their task's unique difficulty.
Almost all Latin American countries are presidential republics. This is a system of government that basically guarantees instability. The separation of the executive and the legislature is supposed to provide greater accountability, but eventually leads to populist presidents quarrelling with intransigent representatives. The result is political logjam and either the president finally disposes of the legislature, or the military gets rid of both.
In contrast, Australia and Canada both have Westminster parliamentary systems, where the executive is drawn from the legislature. Thus, the prime minister is guaranteed a base of support there and populist candidates cannot entirely circumvent it. The system has its flaws, but it does seem to be more stable in the long run.
I think that this can be better qualified. Presidential republics make sense if you have a truly federalist system, formed by existing states that have unified under one government. The US for example does not have a centralized health care system, police force, banking system, legal system, and education system.
Some, though not all, countries that have copied the US presidential system are in actuality centralized with most power being invested in the federal government and by proxy, the president. It is a recipe that dictators like as they can pretend to be democratic leaders but not actually have to share power.
If your country is centralized parliament works best. If it is decentralized then any parliament is going to be toothless like the UN, entirely dominated by single strong internal powers like the EU, or incoherent like in Star Wars :)
"If your country is centralized parliament works best. If it is decentralized then any parliament is going to be toothless like the UN"
The Australian example undermines this claim.
Australia is a true federation. Similar to the US, the constitutions of the six states predate the federation and remain in force. The federal constitution gives the federal gvt constrained powers (e.g. military, foreign affairs) with powers defaulting to the states (e.g. police, health).
The country is broadly decentralised due to its constitution and geography.
The federal parliament is a Westminster system - prime minister elected by members of the legislature, head of state that serves a largely symbolic role, distinct upper house designed as a house of review.
The Australian settlement routinely produces stable government, workable majorities in parliament, is a true multi-party system, and has shown itself to be capable of big-picture reform.
Admittedly, some of this is down to strong good microstructure. In particular, the preferential voting system.
The Westminster system is also an strong fit for centralised countries, as seen in the UK and New Zealand. If there is one criticism of it, it is that it can be difficult to get enough of a gene pool together to form an effective executive when the population of house members is too small. Smaller Australian states often struggle to produce competent executives. There are similar problems in the almost-Westminster Scottish, Welsh and NI parliaments. These problems are further compounded by proportional representation, which favours chest-thumpers (small parties) and political hacks (large parties), all of whom are very poorly suited to executive responsibilities.
The Federal Reserve is a pretty centralized banking system.
To your point, however, the US has had prosperous period of its history with free (I.e. no central/federal control) banking. See Rothbard's "The Mystery of Banking."
> (...) but none of those are a meaningful threat to American democracy.
Jam 6 was literally a coup attempt ordered by the president to disrupt the session in Congress that formalized the election results to avoid stepping down after losing the elections.
Exactly which part of this do you believe is not a threat to any democracy?
It has nothing to do with resources. Per person, Argentina had more land and more natural wealth than the US. The reason our presidential system is less prone to upheaval is the Constitution, its separation of powers and its checks and balances which have, historically, provided for a relatively restrained power of the presidency in the US compared to other presidential systems. Also, the US has what are recently referred to as "norms", precedents set early in the Republic and reinforced through hundreds of years of peaceful transitions of power. These hold a great deal of weight, even now.
The political independence of the military, its culture of unwillingness to step into politics, and the taboo on the use of the military for policing on American soil, is another key component in American stability vs the rest of the Americas.
Whether this holds up for another 5 years is anyone's guess. My family is from Argentina, and having lived there myself I see the US sliding in that direction. One very telling thing is the increasing justification of political violence that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. However, America has been through periods of political violence before and has not degenerated into a dictatorship, although it's come close.
The National Guard are under state level control, and the police although "militarized" technologically, are nothing remotely resembling the US military - or even the Argentine military. I brought it up because in almost every country in LatAm the military has at one time or another overthrown the elected government. That hasn't happened in the US. That's a significant problem if a national military begins operating as a police force.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, just want to add that as a European who lived in the US around 2000 for a while, it feels like a police state from time to time.
I lived outside the US from 2004, including in France and Spain from 2009-2014. It definitely feels much less militarized there than in the US. Returning to the US after ten years was absolutely shocking.
However, I also lived in countries in Asia and Latin America where the actual military plays a major role in policing and putting down protests. Now I live in Portland, where the militarized local police put down protests, and I can say that the qualitative difference between those situations is that the local police do not represent the government of the country. They still answer to the courts. They can't throw you in a black hole without legal representation. They don't have the true power of the state behind them. They may be fucked up as hell, but they aren't the army, in the sense that the actual military is sent in to suppress uprisings around the world.
That was my point about what allowed America to escape the tragic cycle of coups that has befallen most other presidential republics ... the taboo on the military engaging in domestic policing. No other country in Latin America has that taboo, and as a result the army in each county functions as a bludgeon by whoever takes absolute power -- usually fascists, but in odd cases (Venezuela, El Salvador), leftist totalitarians.
In France, the Gendarmes patrol plazas and parks in full military attire and arms: fully automatic weapons and combat shotguns. The same in Spain and Italy with the Policia Nacional and the Carabineri. That’s unheard of in the US, outside of some spots in NYC or DC.
Vast natural resources creating wealth for the entire population. (Before anyone says “there’s lots of poor people in America...they are not even close to poor by world standards). When the economy is almost always booming, jobs are plentiful, things are cheap, there’s no reason to overthrow a government. As the famous quote explains, “it’s the economy stupid”.
I used to think the two party system was a major driver in polarization and resulting instability in the USA and UK, but I guess people can refuse to listen to each other in any system (Israel, Italy, Sweden).
>Had the capital riots gone a little differently I could see a civil war starting that would destroy America.
So what, they make it into the senate chambers, kill some politicians for being traitors, and then what? declare a coup and expect everyone to take them seriously?
And even if they flip the Capitol Police, what do they do when Maryland and Virginia roll their national guards through DC?
We’ve survived assassination of the President on multiple occasions. I have no idea what people think the January 6 rioters could have done to meaningfully affect the country. It was a very small populist uprising that was quickly put down. (We’ve dealt with those too—Whiskey Rebellion, etc.)
Trump declaring martial law and increased powers under the pretense that our legislature would be incapacitated and the resulting shit storm of animosity between Democrats and Republicans. Many of his supporters and closest personal allies were waiting to seize an opportunity for this end.
Trump would have been happy to do that. He might have even thought it was possible on that day. In the end, he couldn't do it because he didn't have the key support necessary from the military or his own DOJ. Because that would be a step too far. The bureaucracy, even stacked with his own appointees, had no interest in seeing armed conflict. To be cynical, whatever he was offering just wasn't enough to take that bet.
> (...) He might have even thought it was possible on that day. In the end, he couldn't do it (...)
I don't see how claiming that you believe a few challenges would pop up along the way can refute the fact that Trump's goal was to overthrow the democratic process to force himself into staying in power in spite of the election results.
Quoting Mike Pence, on rejecting Trump's threats on Jan 6 insurrection:
> "There are those in our party who believed that in my position as presiding officer over the joint session that I possess the authority to reject or return electoral votes certified by the states," Pence said. "But the Constitution provides the vice president with no such authority."
Your edit with Pence is confirming my point. Trump wanted to overthrow the government and his own appointees wouldn't go along with it because he wasn't offering enough assurance they'd get away with it. Re-read what I wrote.
I don't think you were able to read or understand what I pointed out. It's immaterial what you thought was or was not possible.
The relevant part is that the president of the US of A, along with his political party, thought it was possible to overthrow the elections they lost to preserve themselves in power, and executed their plan to overthrow the elections. That's what the Vice President stated. Which part do you want to deny?
Even though the VP stated he intentionally rejected the president's plan, let's keep in mind that the president's plan also involved assassinating him along with members of Congress as part of his plan to overthrow the elections.
What are you, looking for a fight? No one's disagreeing with you. I live in this country. I watched it on live TV. I have no doubt what his intentions were. There's no need to insult me and say I can't understand what you're talking about.
That explanation wouldn't work for the era at the end of the 1800s when Venezuela adopted a USA type constitution that was meant to imitate the USA as closely as possible.
It seems strange to me that software engineers are so frequently singled out for schedule slippage, when the impression I get is that every novel engineering project suffers from the exact same problem. Projects to design and build new military and civilian hardware and infrastructure always involve budget and schedule overruns of months or years. Can anyone provide convincing empirical evidence that software projects are delayed more than hardware projects of equivalent budget and distinctiveness from previous solutions?
A negative comparison often seems to be made between software engineering and construction, but it seems to me that the latter is a unique subfield of engineering, where you have an unusually large number of projects with a roughly homogenous set of constraints and variables. This has allowed those constraints and variables to be studied, understood and mastered to produce a discipline that more closely resembles mass-production. And in those subfields of software that also involve more homogenous constraints, such as the production of standard commercial websites, you do see a more controlled and templated approach, using tools like Wordpress.
Wise moves on the part of the project proponent, had they presented their project with a 17 year construction and 11 billion euro budget it never would have been started.
Humans are optimistic. If we knew in the beginning how long something will actually take we never would start many things.
I think there's a difference between companies that build software for the market versus those that build software for a contract. The former tends to be driven by a team that believes in the product that they're trying to deliver, has a management team that has at least some vision for the software and investors that believe in the company's approach to the market. They want to make software / a product that represents the organization well and has long term value.
In the latter case, like so many government sponsored engineering projects, the company has no real long term incentive beyond what is written into the contract. Management isn't driven by the software being produced so much as meeting the contractual requirements that result in payments. In my experience, software contracting houses are a lot more likely to hold schedules over the heads of developers, and that's purely driven by the terms of the contract (billable hours). In contrast, even when I have been a contractor for a company that is building the product for itself, they tend to push for the goals of the project while ensuring it meets the needs of the company. The difference in pressure as a developer is quite substantial.
I think you'd be surprised to see how much of the roadmap at a typical "build for the market" company is driven by specific contracts. In my experience, the proportion is high even in consumer tech, and easily clears 75% for even the most commoditized of enterprise software. The stereotypical contract shop is distinguished more by poor planning and an aversion to shared architecture than any real difference in incentives.
> It seems strange to me that software engineers are so frequently singled out for schedule slippage
It follows this trend I've seen across the board in business throughout my career, of mistaking the last hair on the last yak for the entire job. The classic example is documentation. "Hey the electrical drawings are due on Thursday the Aprilteenth, can you have them ready by then?" Oh sure, that's two months away, that's plenty of time to bang out some drawings, right? But wait! The drawings depend on the functional specification. And the functional specification depends on the functional description. And the functional description is blocked on some TQs from the client. And you're still expected to produce these drawings by Thursday Aprilteenth when realistically you're not going to see even a first draft of the functional specification until the Wtf'th of August. But now it's your fault that the drawings are late because you weren't paying attention and you agreed to a due date that didn't depend on your dependencies.
I take this one particularly personally because I'm in industrial automation and, almost by definition, we get the last bite of the pie on every single project. Sure, there are some things we can start early but on the project-specific parts, generally we're waiting for everyone else to do their job before we get priority.
"Can you help us with the motion control software for AwesomeBot?"
Sure, no worries!
"Just remember we need AwesomeBot running by Thursday."
Hey cool, you present me with an AwesomeBot-shaped shell and I'll fill it with closed-loop-ey goodness.
"It's Friday, why isn't AwesomeBot doing somersaults like you told us it would?"
Uh well, AwesomeBot is lying disassembled on the mechanical workbench and half the laser cut sheet metal hasn't arrived.
"But you told us Thursday! Okay, we'll finish putting AwesomeBot together and let you know when it's done."
<fast forward 17 months>
"Hi remember us? We're AwesomeBot inc."
Oh hey how's it going with that?
"We've got AwesomeBot fully assembled and we're ready to go! Can you come down tomorrow and install the software on it so it does everything we ever dreamed of including anything we might have imagined it might do in the 17 months since we last saw you?"
Uhhhh... so how's testing going, have you switched it on yet?
"No, why would we do that? We were only waiting for you!"
I’m also in industrial automation and know the challenges of being “last” in years long projects.
We are very deliberate about setting deliverable dates in time after the required inputs by others are available, and when inevitably they are not, we have a spreadsheet sent to the customer every 2 weeks which shows what information we are missing and the delay that is causing to our progress. As we are liable for damages if we delay the project it is necessary for us to have the proof that we did not cause the project to be behind schedule. This often means having these difficult conversations only a month in to a year long project when vendor drawings we were promised are not delivered.
I "grew up" in industrial automation, I feel ya on delays. I relocated overseas for DCS project on a new chemical plant. The planned length of the assignment was 14 months...4.5 years later, we were finished. One EPC was not able to get the underground utilities installed in time before other EPCs (there were 4) started moving in pipe racks, equipment modules, etc. Imagine trying to put in all your underground cables, sewers, pipes, etc. after the site had already been built on top.
Another EPC was moving so fast to try and meet a project milestone in order to get paid, they installed an instrument enclosure totally backwards (huge crane required to drop enclosure into place). They still got paid as the milestone didn't specify the enclosure had to be installed correctly.
One of annoying aspects about controls is that non-technical stakeholders see a mechanically complete object/machine/plant and wonder why it isn't working yet. Also, I always found that the controls guys were the first to get yelled at if something at site stopped working.
> We are very deliberate about setting deliverable dates in time after the required inputs by others are available, and when inevitably they are not, we have a spreadsheet sent to the customer every 2 weeks which shows what information we are missing and the delay that is causing to our progress.
This is a great approach if you can stay that organised. It reminds me of one of my fundamental rules of business - the two benchmarks you're compared to are the previous entry in the Gantt chart and your counterpart in the client organisation. If you can stay ahead of both of those, you're golden!
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.
And so on...