Causality is just determinists starting with “time travel is impossible” and finding a fancy name for it.

I don’t want to say they’re wrong, just that asserting casualty in a discussion about time travel being impossible is kinda like asserting Godwin’s Law in a discussion about whether or not Trump’s a nazi.

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When the USA was civilized we required every food sold to the public to list its nutritional information.

https://calories-info.com/mustard-vs-ketchup/

100g of ketchup or mustard both have about 100 calories, with ketchup getting more of those calories from carbohydrates and much less from fat.

Even if you make your own ketchup or buy a no-sugar added brand, it still has a fair amount of carbohydrates. And a substantial amount of salt.

https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/2594364/100g/1

Both are worth including if you’re calorie counting. (And don’t necessarily trust the per-serving size label, since if they set that low enough they can round down and claim a 100% fat cooking spray is 0 calories. We only used to be civilized.)

A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.

Off the top of my head:

• Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
• Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
• Follow best-practices for accessibility.
• Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.

Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.

To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.

The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.

You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.

If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.

It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.

If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.

Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.

Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.

Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.

Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?

If you don’t like meta any more than I do, why are you arguing so strongly that they deserve the benefit of the doubt?

And, more interestingly, what precisely do you mean that Meta including themselves as a recipient in every WhatsApp chat would not render their E2E encryption equivalent to HTTPS?

AFAIK both are in-transit encryption that prevents casual monitoring by other entries along the network path between you and the person you’re chatting with, but expose you to undetectable monitoring on the part of the service provider.

You are assuming good behavior on the part of a corporate giant grown out of a social media site literally founded to spy on its users. A company who is literally being sued for their claims that their chat app is meaningfully encrypted

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-law/whatsapp-lawsuit-encrypted-messages-10504837/

Even if Meta isn’t currently including themselves as a hidden participant in every WhatsApp chat, you should assume that they can do so and act as if they will do so.

Odds are pretty good that their encryption usage is good enough for any lawful behavior you may engage in, but you shouldn’t trust Meta or any software they provide with anything that would destroy your life if it was revealed.

Meta using the name of a formerly independent company for their current pseudo-private messaging app does not mean said app meaningfully predates the one whose tech they use.

https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

(Please share if you have a link arguing the opposite.)

More importantly, the encryption in Whatsapp is closer to HTTPS than it is to PGP. It keeps anyone except Meta or the recipients from keeping a record of what you say, but you should absolutely assume Meta is recording what you say on WhatsApp.

(And you should also assume anyone you talk to is keeping a record as well.)

Most of the people I know have largely abandoned personal email. Way back before everyone had a personal number it made sense to share your email with your friends, but nowadays ‘contact that goes directly to them’ is good enough for casual purposes.

(And as understand it, WhatsApp is a cancerous fork of Signal created by Meta as a response to people abandoning their social media site for private communication or discord. Plain carrier messages for casual communication, signal for avoiding third-party interception, and social media for folk you don’t trust with your phone number.)

This isn’t a paradox. It’s the ordinary and expected outcome of you have a junior whose work you can never trust.

Regardless of what your profession is, if you have a source of “work input” that requires specific instruction for near every task and whose output must be carefully examined, then the part of your job which is reviewing drafted work would necessarily increase.

This is especially true in engineering fields, where the things that can be abstracted into repeatable tasks usually are. Computers saved structural engineers from having to do all their math separately and higher-abstraction languages saved programmers from having to futz around in assembly, but neither of those had to be manually checked.

There are also laws about who can post bail for you. My understanding is that they need to either have an actual relationship with you or be a licensed bondsman. Either be someone who can guilt you into going to court or who will hire a bounty hunter to haul you in.

(And bail bonds are unfair bullshit, but that’s a different thing.)

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Yes. Having any one person 'in charge" who is not an immortal with superhuman morality and judgement will eventually lead to tyrannical suffering or the waste of a bloody civil war.

Lemmy (and piefed) is a great example of human societies done correctly. There are people who run things, and while they can establish whatever rules they want for the parts they run, everyone else is free to either ask for a change or go elsewhere.

For bad actions, options range from immediate negative feedback (downvote) and.corrective speech (public comment or private message), to negative consequences from those in power (ban account from instance), which can ultimately rise to community separation (de-federation). Heck, even the underlying software can be forked or replaced.

Of course, the stakes here are essentially trivial. Which means the consequences are too, but also we all have less incentive for bad action than in the real world where poverty and death are a possibility from bad action.

Putting the mob in charge is the least-bad form of government humans have ever conceived of.

Experts can and do establish reputations to persuade the masses or those chosen by the masses.

When we try putting the experts in charge directly, they invariably become corrupt and stop being as skilled.

There is a reason why America’s founding fathers put a wall between church and state. Not because they thought religion was bad, but because they learned from history that when you give a topic-expert political control they stop being good at either function.

Censorship is suspect, not inherently bad.

Freedom of viewpoint expression is a key part of democracy and modern society. But it’s not an absolute right of unfettered communication, since that would lead to no recourse when a racist troll projects a deep fake of you raping small children on the side of your house.

Being able to sue someone for libel is censorship. Property rights allowing you to control what happens on your house are censorship. And, yes, the government arresting that hypothetical racist troll for the production of child pornography is also censorship.

Of course, we could just define censorship as “suppression of protected speech” or something similar, but that just hides the game and helps folk who actually want to censor political ideas they don’t like get away with it.

I wonder how many lives would be saved if this was repeated enough to be made common knowledge.

Considering all of the times a child has accidentally discharged a firearm and killed someone, I don’t think it’s as many as the other rules.

I like the actors, I like the characters, and the interplay between the three superheros was great. Not to mention the absurd joy of saving a whole bunch of humans by way of non-euclidian space cars.

But the marvels didn’t have a villain worth punching, and felt like it implied a Captain Marvel 2 or “fall of the kree” Disney+ series that never happened.

(Seriously, though, if you skipped this one and heard it sucked, you heard wrong. It was probably the best marvel movie since Endgame, aside from maybe FF or that Spider-Man where DrStange channels the idiot ball.)

This looks like one of those “well, duh” scientific studies that feels obvious but hasn’t necessarily been done before.

Kin to “heterosexual men are aroused by lesbian porn” or “support for banning trans girls from sports decreases among those who actually know any.”

Basic fairness says if the rich aren’t paying their fair share, we should either raise their taxes or lower everyone else’s. (Which could lead to hyperinflation for all most of us care, except that the rich are better suited to fleeing inflation.)