I'd be interested, but they don't even list any anthropic model on their code review benchmark, so I feel like they haven't really tested their benchmark on SOTA models.
Whenever I see this, I make the (almost always correct) assumption that the SOTA models had an advantage, with the alternative explanation being a complete lack of awareness of the state of AI (which is very very rare for a tool like this).
With SOTA missing, it also is a strong indicator that someone like you is not the target audience.
Why would I ever connect my fridge to the internet? I cannot fathom any feature on a fridge that would incline me towards giving it the wifi credentials.
What if your fridge could do an AI thing and the groceries to refill itself would just arrive? Could be a fantastic way to control your diet by only buying foods that satiated/goal oriented you approved (as opposed to hungry you walking down aisles of product placements in the grocery store)
Why do you need a fridge to do that? An AI agent with access to your Instacart account could do it. If you only buy groceries with that it knows roughly how many calories it purchased and you should've consumed since the last order.
I'd rather my fridge observe there are no apples, than to just assume N apples have been eaten. Especially relevant once you make if a family of 4, not an individual.
I don't think it's worth it myself, but here are some of the features of the Samsung Bespoke fridge that use wifi:
Notifications and Alerts:
If the door is left open, or the fridge temperature is leaving safe temps, or the water filter needs changing, it can send a push notification to your phone. (Useful if something fails; or if a kid/guest leaves the fridge open by mistake).
Remote control and monitoring:
You can use the camera to see the contents of the fridge. You can also adjust the temperature remotely. (Useful if you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you have milk?) It looks like they also have "AI" try to categorize these for you.
Built-in tablet:
The touchscreen is basically a builtin tablet. You can use it to display photos (pulled from your online albums), show the weather, or control "smart home" stuff like playing some music on your speakers. I imagine you could also try to put recipes or cooking videos on there. You can also easily order groceries from it or add to your shopping list (with your voice).
I'd rather have a separate device for most of this, but I can understand the appeal, especially if you're not privacy-conscious.
That's probably because you're a developer, and as developers it's really easy for us to develop tunnel-vision for some reason, and really hard to see the perspective from a "regular person", the sort of person who a salesperson can say "You can now get alerted when you're low on eggs, no matter where you are!" and the person will think that's a cool feature with no drawbacks.
It got nothing to do with someone being a developer and having tunnel vision. In fact I would argue that many people that work in tech would be the most likely to sold on such a feature.
It has everything to do with being frugal and whether you see the utility. There is very little benefit in being alerted when I am low on eggs because I can simply open the fridge and look. I can also normally buy eggs anywhere, at any time of day.
Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
But lots of the average person don't do much of that sort of reasoning, lots of people live life basically on impulses. They buy stuff based on their feelings, not based on "does this solve an actual problem I have that actually needs solving?".
> Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
I reason about the same amount as anyone else.
> But lots of the average person don't do much of that sort of reasoning, lots of people live life basically on impulses. They buy stuff based on their feelings, not based on "does this solve an actual problem I have that actually needs solving?".
1) There is no such thing as the "average" person.
2) There is nothing special about you, I or anyone else. The fact is that everyone makes lots of irrational decisions every single day without thinking about it.
Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that. I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
> Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that.
It often is. Often out of necessity.
You are making the mistake a lot software developers and other professionals often make. Is that they think rationally and others do not. This is because in one area they are forced to think about things rationally because otherwise something simply doesn't work. This translates poorly often to outside of their field because they are often making incorrect assumptions.
I have seen little evidence that professional in software are any more or less rational, frugal than any other group of people and often they will spend their money on absolute garbage. This is so prevalent there are memes about it online.
Moreover I've seen many Software Developers and people that surround them in tech (e.g. BA, Testers, Project Managers) fall for some of the most obvious bullshit.
> I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
So, I could say the exact same thing to you. TBH, I actually think this is projection. The way you are talking is like the way I used to talk when I was younger and had less real world experience. It should give you pause that another person has a radically different opinion, is arguing against their own group (I am a dev) and I can back that up with a decent rationale as to why I believe it.
Your argument throughout this boils down to "I think this is true, because I think other people are dumb". Which is pure hubris.
> The way you are talking is like the way I used to talk when I was younger and had less real world experience.
It's incredible interesting, if anything else, that I feel the same about you and could have written exactly the same thing as you seem to lack real-world experience, and probably are a bit younger than me, judging by what you wrote.
But instead, probably better to stop here and acknowledge we won't get to anything interesting after all, so thank you for your time, and maybe see you around :)
> if anything else, that I feel the same about you and could have written exactly the same thing as you seem to lack real-world experience, and probably are a bit younger than me, judging by what you wrote.
IME, those who start claiming the other person lacks real world experience as an argument (like you did), is normally making up for the fact that they don't.
> But instead, probably better to stop here and acknowledge we won't get to anything interesting after all, so thank you for your time, and maybe see you around :)
We can't get to anything interesting because you ignore what you don't want to engage with. There were a huge number of presumptions you make without even realising it in your statements.
I also want to know why you think that developers are more rational? You never gave a rationale other than what boils down to "I think other people are dumb, and developers are smart". That was your entire argument.
At this point they start to demand it, whether that's setting up the product or registration needed for warranty protection. But you obviously can still cut them off on router.
Soon though they won't ask, LTE-M / NB-IoT, both chips and plans are becoming very cheap and unless you are living in a faraday cage it will take control away from the user completely.
Well, I think that justice has been served. The feds' prosecution of Ulbricht was the epitome of throwing the book at someone to make an example, when the government's case was pretty flawed, in my opinion. 10 years is enough time to pay the debt of running the silk road.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???
If the liquor store owner knows that some of those bottles might contain pure methanol, and people end up dying from drinking said methanol...then, yes, I do think the store owner should do some serious jailtime.
Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.
> It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out
Based on what? This sounds completely made up. Anyone could sell on Silk Road, and faking reviews would be trivial on an anonymous platform. And if someone died from drugs they bought, they're not exactly leaving a review, are they?
Sellers have reputations in real life, but it can actually be difficult to link a death to a specific dealer without a thorough investigation. Even more so on an anonymous platform. Would Silk Road have cared if the police linked deaths to a specific seller? Fuck no.
For the record, I am not anti Silk Road, I'm actually for legalizing drugs. I just find the notion that drugs online were inherently cleaner to be naive Libertarian propaganda.
Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.
There was no equation there actually. Let me unwrap it for you, probably this way it will be clear: first line was a satire of the parent comment along the line of depicting deadly but permitted matters; second line was the unpacking the satire higlighting that the fella hopelessly confused (now, this was more like the equation you sought) a socially permitted activity with an illegal one.
>Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.
There's nothing beyond morality. Laws are an application based on morality.
And as we know with the 18th and 21st amendments, even the law can have shakey morality based on more factors than "what is good for the populace". That's more or less why I'm against most drug laws. They were not made with "the good health of the people in mind", they were a scapegoat to oppress minorities. It's all publicly declassified, so no one can call me a conspirator anymore.
I don’t think that’s true. Maybe in its infancy law really looks like that, but as societies grow their law books get more complex and can very easily become separated from majority perception of morality. Does morality explain zoning laws, or is it more about the equilibrium point of a pluralist conflict, everyone looking out for their interests, etc.
Roughly. But always read between the lines and follow the money. We didn't selectively ban Tiktok because government finally woke up to the dangers of social media.
Doctors can be arrested for malpractice. I sure do wish we could arrest some of these car makers for telling staff to skimp on details and taking "recalls" as a cost of doing business, but that's an issue for another time.
> unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
There's illegal activity on popular forums all the time. How much should Facebook/X/Reddit be accountable for those?
The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
You're right. Ross should have been granted a drug selling license, analogous to a liquor license, and it should have been revoked if he failed to check ID before allowing people to make purchases on his marketplace.
Doing business in, or running, a marketplace without established legal regulations opens you up to undefined consequences. Without laws to bind you, there are no laws to protect you.
Idk about silk road, but hydra (russian online marketplace) was the best thing that happened to russia drug market. It had very good reputation system and even labs that did random testing of drugs being sold
Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs
I don't think those types of hypotheticals are taken very seriously in court rooms. One, they are effectively unfalsifiable, because it's a about harm that could have happened but didn't. Two, they can be applied universally. Any action might have prevented a catastrophe, after all. Courts persecute based on laws broken and harm done.
Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.
As an Australian who had friends who bought product on silk road my understanding was:
1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.
2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).
Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.
An 18 year old lad from my village, who had just started a job programming, bought a drug from an online “pharmacy” and it turned out to be spiked with a synthetic opioid (N-pyrrolidino-etonitazene) and he died in his sleep at home, alone.
On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.
The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.
If you knowingly operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold, you very much bear some responsibility of those injuries.
If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.
Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.
You can clearly see that "deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl)" didn't particularly alter or rise until after the 2013 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down of the Silk Road website and arrest of Ulbricht.
If the Silk Road Marketplace had any influence on fentanyl deaths Then some kind of spike would be expected during the years of operation, 2011-2013.
So I could bring down eBay by opening a store; selling something that I know (but eBay doesn't) is dangerous / broken / false. If that sale goes through, should eBay be taken down since they operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold ? eBay cannot reasonably test every single item that is sold through their platform. Same goes for every second hand marketplace in the world. They need to take some measure to address this, but cannot reduce the risk to 0.
As far as I know, SilkRoad had a whole reputation system in place to allow users to flag untrustworthy sellers; that system was inline or even ahead of what many "legal" marketplace had put in place. A part of why SilkRoad was so successful is precisely because overall that reputation system allowed users to identify trustworthy sellers.
This theory was actually tested last year and...eBay won.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of the EPA against eBay in 2023, seeking to hold them liable for prohibited pesticides and chemicals as well as illegal emissions control cheat devices sold through the platform that violate multiple federal laws and environmental regulations.
There wasn't even really an argument about whether or not the items were actually illegal to sell - all parties including eBay basically stipulated to that and the judge even explicitly acknowledged it in her ruling - the entire case came down to whether or not eBay could be held liable for the actions of third party sellers on their platform who they failed to proactively prevent from selling illegal items.
In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted eBay's motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides eBay immunity for the actions of those third party sellers.
DOJ filed an appeal on December 1st so we'll see where that goes but as it stands now - no, you couldn't take eBay down even by listing stuff eBay does know to be illegal, based on current precedent.
Why the courts applied Sec230 that way in one instance and not another is the real question and the more cynically minded might also wonder how eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's various philanthropic and political endeavors (including but not limited to being the $ behind Lina Khan's whole "hipster antitrust" movement) could be a factor too. He's no longer an active board member but still a major shareholder whose existing shares would likely be worth a lot less if a case with a potential ~$2 Billion in fines had been allowed to proceed.
Ebay tries to prevent you from selling illegal stuff though. Silk Road didn't. The reputation system was to prevent scams and bad quality products, not to prevent illegal transactions, right?
A large minority of the population (and in some cases, like weed, an overt majority) of the population don't think those transactions should be illegal. "The law is wrong" is sort of the whole point, and why Ulbricht is a quasi-folk hero.
It's a philosophical difference. As someone running a market where buyers and sellers meet I think it's valid to let the buyers and sellers participate in the exchange among themselves at their own risk. The person running the market doesn't need to treat the participants like children. Plus, if you're on the TOR network and buying obscure research chems using crypto in the early 2010s I think it's safe to assume you're more sophisticated and aware of what you're getting into than the average person.
I think there is some difference between running a marketplace which you intend for people to sell products legally on, and a marketplace which you intend and know people will sell products illegally on.
Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.
Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.
Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.
I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.
This is why people only blame the DZOQBX brands that sell on Amazon for review fraud and not Amazon themselves, who are blamelessly hosting all those fraudulent sellers.
Smart people can differentiate between a transparent marketplace which provides a net economic benefit to society from an obfuscated one which by design enables illicit activity.
So much corporate/gov negligence leads to permanent environment damage, cancer, death. In most cases it's a slap on the wrist. Maybe some exist, but I'm having a hard time finding an example.
Show me one executive that served this kind of jail time despite direct links to the deaths of multiple individuals and evidence of negligence leading to those deaths.
You can certainly make an argument that the sentencing was warranted but there's a whole lot of history of being sentenced, if at all, to far less for far more egregious crimes.
The government should have investigated the people that listed and sourced the drugs
this isn't controversial to say, the governments just go for the laziest intermediary lately
but there is the choice of doing actual investigations for time tested crimes. those dealers just went to other darknet markets, which are far far bigger than Silk Road ever was
People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.
But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.
He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
Hard disagree - Zuckerberg absolutely is responsible for inadequately policing calls for genocide on his platform. Just as every social network is responsible for policing child abuse materials. Should they be punished for such content being uploaded? Of course not. They should face punishment where their wilful failure to police such content results in active harm. Facebook's utterly irresponsible behaviour in Myanmar is a great example - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
In the case of the Silk Road of course, it's much worse, since the platform specifically existed to facilitate illegal behaviour. I couldn't care less about the drug dealing aspect per say, but absolutely facilitating sale in these quantities with no protection from outright poisoning from contaminants is immoral. But he also sold weapons via 'the armory' https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/not-ready-silk-roads-the...
I didn’t say Zuck isn’t responsible for the ills of his platform. I said DPR is no more responsible than Zuck or Spiegel. That is, that there’s a distinction between facilitating a drug deal and dealing drugs, just as there is a distinction from managing a communication platform that promotes hate speech and violence.
That distinction wasn’t recognized, and I called attention to it. And also to the fact that Eva Spiegel very strangely isn’t catching any shit whatsoever for knowingly running the nation’s most prolific child porn brokerage platform, with a product tailor-made to do so.
drugs is one part, but silkroad facilitated more than drug, guns, fake documents, stolen data, money laundering, fake currency, contract killers... the list goes on.
Are you confusing SR with other darknet markets? SR explicitly banned most of these things (guns, fake currency, stolen data, contract killers). Yes, fake documents were allowed.
People are usually jailed for hiring contract killers, even if the contract killer happens to be a FBI informant and the murder does not end up getting done.
There wasn't any evidence that actually happened. It appears that it may have been fabricated by the same investigators that later robbed him of some millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Then when it went to trial the murder-for-hire charges were completely dropped due to lack of evidence.
He was convicted of:
1. Conspiracy to traffic narcotics
2. Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) (sometimes referred to as the “kingpin” charge)
3. Computer Hacking Conspiracy
4. Conspiracy to Traffic in Fraudulent Identity Documents
5. Money Laundering Conspiracy
I think they were dropped because in 1 out of the 6 cases, the investigation was tainted because the associated government agents committed their own crimes, and also maybe but I can't prove it everyone thought that prosecuting someone who has been sentenced to 2 life sentences + 40 years is a waste of time.
The hitman was a conman for a murder on a fictitious person. While he fully believed he was committing a real assassination, you can't convict people for killing imaginary people.
I'm not convinced that you looked at the article you linked.
> That’s because he was the Silk Road employee implicated in an elaborate, and fake, murder-for-hire scheme, created in part by a corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent.
>DPR contacted one of his trusted drug dealer contacts, Nob, and asked him to kill Green for $40,000. Shortly after, Nob sent DPR photos of Green covered in Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup and victim of an apparent asphyxiation, to prove the murder had been carried out.
> Unbeknown to DPR, Nob was no drug dealer. In fact, Nob was Carl Mark Force IV, the very same DEA agent who had arrested Green.
Both were fake. One was a con by the DEA and the other one a con by a single guy posing as executioner, victim and a slew of other colorful characters.
Real justice would be changing the laws and sentencing guidance (through a democratically legitimate process), and re-evaluating the sentences of everyone affected.
Whatever you think about the outcome in this case, it is the moral equivalent of vigilante justice. It is unfair to others convicted under the same regime, who don't happen to be libertarian icons who can be freed in exchange for a few grubby votes.
I have been surprised by the strength of Devin at the beginning of my team's use of it, but lately it has been a letdown. I don't know that we are ready to cancel yet but Devin faces some growing headwind for me, at least.
Wow, this made me really emotional. And even though I definitely did not expect a chill Bali DJ set as the motivational link, it also resonated with me in some way.
I can't think of a more honorable way to move through life. I liken the act of closing shop at this point for Hindenburg to the legend I know of Cincinnatus, the Roman emperor who did the job of emperoring and went back to his fields when it was done.
It also moves me how the team is described, as being from whatever background, but all moved by the same fire. I wish that I could be a part of something like that. What the hell am I doing with my life?
Perhaps I am underthinking things here, but this seems like a good use case to just use UDP here. Save all the power consumed in the original connection set up and just the router will handle NAT re-allocation whenever you phone home, right? Responses to those messages should be properly routed to your device. Building on top of TCP seems like a lot of effort for this network situation
Wow, I have been looking for a resource like this for years. I had put the question more in the form of, what year did they call it in Rome what we now call the year 1 AD? Now I know it's Augustus 30 or something like that.
I would like to see this in a timeline format where all the different eras can be shown along side each other.
The existence of a configuration that limits attestation to a probabilistic phenomenon seems like a very thin foundation to stand on here - if it can be changed to requiring 100% attestation rate in the future I think it will be changed as soon as it is feasible to do so.
I haven't reviewed the proposal enough to see how they implemented that, and if it was done in a cryptographic way that prevents changing to 100%, then that could work. But the fact remains that control of our browsing computing environment is diminishing under this proposal.
It seems to me that “if it can be changed to 100% attestation rate in the future, it will be done” is a slippery slope argument and assuming bad faith on behalf of the proposal writer.
I think if it were changed to be 100% then it would be problematic. Also it seems the proposal writer would also agree that some form of opt out is required to make it viable so as to not forbid unknown clients.
I think its important to stay away from considering potential “what ifs” that completely defy the intent of the spec. For an example of why this isn’t effective discourse, we could have a potential addition to the spec to explicitly block users from certain countries. That’s not great but also its easy to understand why its not worth debating that point (even though it does sound scary).
If you had said that 5 years ago, I would have believed you, but the latest trend of megacorporations and billionaires moving against the interests of their users and ignoring their complaints has changed my stance on that.
Google is a big dog and will not care about our yapping. If it's allowed to do as it will without consequence then it will do so, and there is nothing that individuals can do to stop it other than to cease using their products.
Part of the job of web specification development is to determine what potential bad actors could do in the future. If a spec was proposed that easily allowed blocking users from certain countries, I would want that listed in the potential risks. Mitigations and technical requirements are introduced into specs all the time that only exist to stop a potential future attack.
I don't understand how a probabilistic holdbacks can be effective if you can requests for the attestation token multiple times. If the holdback percentage is 10%, the probability of getting no attestation for 10 calls in a row would be something like 0.1^10 = 1e-10. This seems trivial to implement and use to block users.
Granted, I don't fully understand how they intend to holdback, but even if they cache the results of the attestation such that 10 calls in a row fails to attest, they can't cache it infinitely. Website can employ traditional fingerprinting techniques/cookies in combination with attestation to build pretty foolproof systems to not serve the user based on attestation results.
This too. Maybe Google is willing to say something like "okay, for the duration of today, no WEI for you"; but unless they're doing something a lot more clever than the spec suggests, the "fallback" could very well be "retry the request until it succeeds and sends an attestation token."
Google would need to make holdbacks persistent enough that you couldn't retry them and get a different result. Even if they do, there are other problems, but... I mean, randomly failing requests is definitely not enough to guarantee that attestation would be optional. And there are no details I see in the spec that suggest to me that Google is planning to do something different.
How would you even differentiate between retries? If you isolate it by domain, the website can redirect you 10 times, each collecting an attestation token. They could perform statistical analysis with cookies. Websites could even force logged in users to conform to a particular browser (banking apps already do this). It's difficult for me to understand how the authors can miss these implications. They even said that with holdbacks the websites can still perform statistical analysis. Statistical analysis is not just a tool for aggregate data. It can be applied to a single client with enough other identifiers.
The "explainer" does actually address this, by talking about "a small percentage of (client, site) pairs". In other words, a particular browser, going to a particular site, will always and forever either enable holdback or not.
So, no, you couldn't continually request attestation from the one site. Instead, you could create 20 separate top-sites and load them all in tiny iframes. :)
Even if requests to separate domains didn't work, a 5% user loss is likely something that many websites can afford to ignore.
Remember that Firefox has at least a 3% marketshare. Safari has somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%. If websites are willing to go Chrome-only in that environment, permanent holdbacks won't change anything for those websites.
Particularly not if the solution to those holdbacks is "reinstall your browser and the holdback will probably go away." Which... they'd need to be unless Chrome starts tracking users to figure out who should have what holdbacks :)
The only way that holdbacks matter is if they affect 100% of Chrome users -- ie every single one of your customers/readers will at some point not send you attestation at some point for your website. And even then... telling them to refresh the page becomes a problem.
But it it's only a subset of users, then just banning 5% of users (especially from ad-supported platforms) seems perfectly feasible for a company and would probably be a preferred solution for some of them.
----
User: "Hey, for some reason when I browse Reddit nothing loads."
Support: "Yeah, very rarely a new Chrome install will do that. If you create an account and sign in, and then you send us some verification documents like an ID so we know you're not a scammer, then you'll still be able to browse. Otherwise just reinstall Chrome."
User: "Is there anything else I can do?"
Support: "No, we have to protect our ad integrity. If reinstalling the browser doesn't help, contact Google about it."
----
> Instead, you could create 20 separate top-sites and load them all in tiny iframes. :)
I have vouched for this article because it blew my mind.
I had no idea that there are left-leaning, feminist-identifying women who held such views.
I wish this article laid out a more substantive foundation for why the author holds their views. I tried to look into the book she mentioned, and I do worry that there's a bit of a echo-chamber effect going on here, because somehow the book was featured by Tucker Carlson? [1]
But it seems that there's a lot of passion here about protecting women-only spaces. I can respect that.
I think you may find this article of interest, it's a decent backgrounder to this point of view, and hopefully gives insight into why many left-leaning feminist women have adopted this view or are moving towards it:
Holly Lawford-Smith's book Gender-Critical Feminism expands on this in much detail. Kara Dansky's book, that you cited, is an enlightening read too, with more of a focus on US law and politics, as her linked blog post is. If you would prefer a more philosophical treatment of this topic, may I also recommend Kathleen Stock's work Material Girls.
> I had no idea that there are left-leaning, feminist-identifying women who held such views.
They're among the most vocal and out there group among the feminists, they're hard to miss.
> because somehow the book was featured by Tucker Carlson?
That should be a big clue. These aren't feminists looking out for other women, these are feminists looking for ways to elevate themselves at everyone else's expense.
Frankly it blows my mind to see this bigotry on hackernews, yet here we are.
I find it interesting that so many commenters here have reacted to this female-centered perspective with such knee-jerk emotion, throwing around accusations of bigotry rather than engaging intellectually with this feminist viewpoint.
At least there was one commenter who approached the issue with intellectual curiosity, marvelling at a point of view he'd never before encountered, and on that basis I consider this article having been well worth posting.
It's prison. You don't want them fighting and fucking, you keep them separate, not based on sex, not orientation, not identity, not race, (they will largely self-sort along those lines anyway), but rather on the key thing that actually matters: their ability and prediliction for causing violence/problems/injury/the thing you're trying to avoid.
The person in question like to fight people of a certain skin color, gender, identity, orientation, favorite food, etc? Keep the INDIVIDUAL that's causing a problem separate, not whatever demographic they belong to.
Can't keep them separate? Sounds like you overcrowded your prisons, which is an entirely separate issue. Trying to blame gender or sort the problem through the lens of sex/identity/gender just means you know have 3 separate groups that are fighting and fucking amongst each other. Good job, just wasted a bunch of time and resources on some virtue signalling.
Additionally it would be better to try to actually reform and treat people instead of just punishing them then tossing them aside, then wondering why it's so hard to keep the peace in the prison. But yes, the Trans people are the problem /s.
> It's also a test of absolute statements about bigotry
No, it's a dog whistle based on a false premise. You don't call for nuance with an "absolute test". You do that to feign an air of tolerance while pushing forward the narrative.
So I Answer with nuance about said shades of gray, and your response is that you don't want to read that much and "Its a binary question".
> For the record, the narrative I'm pushing here is "shades of gray
Fine. Let's assume that's true.
> Convicted formerly-male rapist, now identifies as female. Which prison do they go to
With information given, it doesn't matter, but generally default to male for violent criminals.
Reason: You prioritize protecting others from violent offenders over the offender themself when push comes to shove, which is what you're forcing by framing the question in such a way.
If we modify the question slightly to remove the implication and give enough actual information to make a determination, we'd specify who the male had raped. You send them to the opposite. Unless it's both/unclear, in which case, you refer back to my default.
It's not a hard question. But the way you frame it is straight out of a fascist handbook (Throw the "paradox" of tolerance in their face while strictly framing the question in a way that does not allow for nuance), especially while trying to advocate for "shades of gray" while insisting on reducing the discussion to a binary question. It's not productive discourse.
So no, the narrative here you're pushing is not "shades of gray", it's literally binary.
Hang on, we agree on where the prisoner should go. Obvious slam dunk case.
Why am I a fascist for it and you're not?
Yes I am deliberately winding you up here but maybe you're overattached to some narrative points? It comes off just like the people raving about groomers.
You still haven't picked up on the fact that I'm addressing your choice of manner to engage as a troll, not on the merit of subject at hand because I knew this wasn't about that anyway.
I don't know if you're a fascist, but you're using textbook fascist tactics to very poorly try to "gotcha me" before I called you out for not engaging in this topic in good faith, which you've now admitted multiple times.
To be clear, nobody is “formerly-male”. Gender reassignment through hormones and surgery doesn’t actually change sex.
The answer here depends on what you think the purpose of segregated prisons is. If you think it’s to reduce the risk of females being attacked by males (because the overwhelming majority of sexual assault is done by males to females), then males (regardless of gender) must go to male prisons.
Are you clear on the difference between sex and gender? Some people think prisons are supposed to be segregated by sex, with gender being less relevant to the purpose of protecting females.
Doesn’t really matter what they identify as. If they’re male they should go in the male prison. Identifying as something doesn’t change the physical attributes that make males a potential threat to females.
What a lot of people don’t understand about this flavor of feminism is that it isn’t about gender, or directly about trans people. It’s about the primacy of sex in defining and defending women as a class.
Social roles, gender, clothes, appearance, identification, personality… none of these things are what makes a woman a woman.
How do you vouch for posts? I didn't know that was a feature, and I have 900 karma which should be enough, but it doesn't show up the next to the flag (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/two-hn-announcements/). The flags make sense though, it's too explicitly political and has opinions many on the site don't like.
This is called gender-critical feminism, a predominantly left-liberal movement that left-progressives in the US don’t distinguish from right-wing anti-trans people like Tucker Carlson. In the UK there is a clearer demarcation between being gender-critical and being anti-trans.
It is based on the idea that violence/harassment/oppression of women is rooted in sex (biology), not gender (social roles) and therefore that sex is the more important and meaningful way to define and protect womanhood, and thus that “woman” means “adult human female”, and is not something that can be identified into.
