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bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Suspect in YouTube Shooting Posted Rants About the Company Online

For her personal site:

BE AWARE! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for personal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people, hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk, abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism & sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,..... & turning people into programmed robots! "Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it" Adolf Hitler... There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not supported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated, so that people can hardly see their videos!

Yeah I think you’re onto something. I’m also sure that pictures of animals a lot of people in Youtube’s major markets see as pets being mutilated, generated scads of complaints. When you’re dealing with many millions of people, it is not unusual to respond to large concentrations of complaints. We should probably talk more about how thst works, and how it sometimes allows for careless or bad actors to silence people. Still, it’s understandable in a context other than attempting to be a censor, and just acting like a business. She comes across as angry and rigid in her views, but that describes quite a lot of people. Still, if someone “knows” something and is very angry, it can be hard to reach them.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Facebook reveals Russian troll content, shuts down 135 IRA accounts

You know the old saw, “quantity has a quality all of its own.” I’d add that these guys could have done both. They could have high follower count identities, medium, and low. They can have highly active accounts, and “sleepers” and everything in between. It would be unwise to make too many assumptions based on limited press releases from Facebook. It’s more sensible to think about what they could have done, and then move on from there.

They could have had tiers of accounts, all for different purposes. They could have used a ton of low accounts to simulate a grassroots response, to openly troll and be banned, and all kinds of things. They’d have cultivated more and less popular, and obvious accounts as well. If they were smart they’d have a whole layer of accounts designed just to be caught, and give a misleading impression of their competence and methodology.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Facebook reveals Russian troll content, shuts down 135 IRA accounts

People can exert a lot of influence with just one account, and in this case it’s about 270 so far. You’d be surprised at how effective Sybil attacks are with far fewer than a dozen accounts, never mind hundreds. When those accounts build reputation, often assisted by more accounts, it’s even more powerful. Still, the biggest advantage is that you get to probe your audience multiple ways, then just go with what gains traction. The reputation of any one account doesn’t matter, it’s a “team” effort.

So while you or I might care about what we say, try to build a reputation, and in general say things in accordance with what we believe, they don’t have to. It’s a radically different proposition, and devastating when done well. Even being discovered can be its own kind of “win” if it creates distrust and instability within the network itself. You can undermine faith in said network by exposing it as essentially corrupted, albeit by you.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Report of Active Shooter at YouTube HQ

There’s a significant difference between a discussion on this event when we know the facts, and discussion while it’s ongoing and multiple versions of events are being offered by dozens of sources. The phrase, “Ongoing tragedy” was sort of the key to my post.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Report of Active Shooter at YouTube HQ

Oh good, I was worried that an ongoing tragedy wouldn’t turn into a predictable political discussion quickly enough. It’s important that we speculate wildly and inject our own politics into this right away. There are internet points on the line after all!

This whole thread shouldn’t be on HN in the first place, there’s no solid information, and the trolls are already sharpening their fangs.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Psychological warfare waged on kids

While the article raises some valid and disturbing points, I feel like it’s missing the fact that kids have always been subjected to psychological warfare. “Be good and do what you’re told, or He’ll awaits!” The problem now is that the war is automated and online, but I feel like the solution is the same! Teach critical thinking skills. Prepare young people for the complexity of the world, the ads, the religion, the appeals to emotion. We’re not getting rid of phones and the internet, so prepare them for it.

Limit screen time, limit access as best you can, but think in terms of what you can add and not just take away. Give them the tools to fight the war. Yes, it means they’re going to be less likely to believe in your brand of god or political ideology just on your say-so, and that’s probably hard for some to swallow. It also means that some manicured and coiffed shill can’t do the same through a screen.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists

As you can see from some here, people just want to believe. Fusion is the power source of sci-fi, and they’re scared of fission. As with self-driving cars, people just imagine what it could be like and that’s enough for them. Never mind that decades of R&D on fission has yielded breakthroughs in safety and efficiency, and by the time a workable fusion design is possible far more advanced fission will be possible. People want the future to be now, so they believe their way into it. Scientists want funding for research, so they sex it up for the media and mass consumption.

The truth is that politics aside, we could be using fission today to solve the problems people want fusion to solve decades from now. Granted, if aneutronic fusion becomes possible (no time soon, even experimentally with a surplus of energy) that will be a miracle. DT fusion though, is only useful for research purposes.

Most people, including most people here don’t have a working understanding of nuclear physics or the requisite engineering of a power plant. When you don’t understand the hurdles, fusion seems kind of magical. If you’re desperate for advanced space flight, fusion seems kind of magical. Even more, no one has any negative experiences with fusion, while we’ve been literally burned by fission.

It’s hard to argue against a fantasy, and hoping for fusion also let’s people ignore the hard work of using fission. The politics feel intractable in the US, the waste is manageable, but scary. Fusion isn’t real yet in that sense, so like an online romance people can project a fantasy onto it.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Kodi No More

Same here, and I was about to rage when I had a face-slap moment and a good chuckle. This was very well done.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Mushrooms: coming soon to a burger near you

You can also use it to jack up the flavor of cheese! I love adding a little bit to dehydrated cheese, and using the mixture on popcorn. It’s more cheesy than cheese (if you know what I mean).

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Mushrooms: coming soon to a burger near you

Emphasis on tasty! The savory “umami” nature of mushrooms complements and enhances meat wonderfully. I’ve blitzed up some dried mushrooms in a blender and mixed it into panko breadcrumbs, and it works like MSG only better. Mushrooms are basically culinary magic, and criminally underused (other than as you say, those nasty white ones) in this country.

No really, I love mushrooms.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: April Fools’ Day 2018: the best (and lamest) pranks

LEGO’s fake product of the day is clever, and something that actually needs to be invented: a vacuum cleaner that not only picks up bricks, but stores them by color and shape (and separates out dirt on the floor). Anyone who’s stepped on one of these in the middle of the night or who has a LEGO-obsessed child knows what I’m talking about.

It really does need to be made, and I’d pay anything for it. My nieces and nephews are crazy about LEGO, but our familys’ feed are not. I was sitting for them a few months ago, and I stepped on a brick, and stepped on it so hard that I fully expected it would have embedded itself to the bone.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

Amen. Once you upload it, you should just assume it’s out there forever. It’s probably worth assuming that virtually all anonymity can be pierced, if not now then within a decade or two.

With a few exceptions, anonymity online is ephemeral at best, subject to the motivation of the person/org trying to deanonymize you.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Russia May Be Targeting Undersea Internet Cables

Of all the things Russia does, this has to be one of the most expected and universal. What major power isn’t going to have plans to tap or cut cables?

Nerve agent and polonium poisoning is unusual and reprehensible, this is not.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Another chapter on Facebook’s privacy woes is being written in Latin America

If we add that up with the lack of control from governments and Facebook attempts to solve the issue, we have a ticking time bomb. The only positive, Galup says, is that services like the ones on offer from Cambridge Analytica are prohibitively expensive for most political parties in Latin America.

In this case, the only thing saving elections in the region from outside corrupting influences may be the greed of those same corrupting influences.

Jesus, that’s rough. We’ve been screwing with elections South of our border for generations, and now we’ve de facto privatized it! We have a talent for cultivating blowback, and I really hope that FB doesn’t become the new face of that story. I guess Bosworth would just shrug and point out that this is all good, and if Americans are subject to potentially lethal backlash it’s just growing pains for FB.

bitumen | 8 years ago | on: Creator of “Ren and Stimpy” Accused of Preying on Underage Girls

A really staggering amount of the time, “Privilege” as it’s used in politics today is just a convenient bludgeon devoid of critical thought. In this case though, “better off not knowing” is pretty much the definition of privilege. Of course we can just not click, forget about this and move on, because we weren’t young girls this man groomed and abused. We were never in an office full of poeple aware of what was being done to us, but how didn’t see a point in helping us.

I’m not saying that you don’t have the right to not know, but at least appreciate how lucky you are to be in that position. I would also urge you to consider that it might not be the right thing to do, and in a very small way, be a continuation of what society did in failing those women when they were little girls.

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