This whole situation is absolutely stunning to watch.
Sleazy government officials illegally order sleazy Facebook employees to censor people. Predictably, the government was caught because large groups of people conspiring to do something nefarious for extended periods of time ("conspiracies") are difficult to hide. When the government is caught illegally and unconstitutionally censoring its own people, the people get mad. And after all that, the sleazy media reports this as "poor, pitiful government workers just can't trust Facebook as a paragon of virtue anymore."
> This whole situation is absolutely stunning to watch.
It is but not for the reason you think it is.
The twitter files are about a period of time where _Donald Trump was president_!
People go on-and-on about how twitter shadow bans people and lies about it. They never did any of that! "Shadowban" has a specific meaning and by that meaning they weren't shadowbanning. It'd be like saying a missed field goal is a "roughing the receiver penalty". It's just not what the words mean. When Twitter was asked, by Congress, if they artificially lowered the rankings of posts Twitter said yes. There is nothing hidden about this besides that fact that nobody watches congressional testimony and your hivemind doesn't surface any highlights opposing the hivemind's view.
By 2023 all of the 2020 election claims had been thoroughly investigated by numerous Republican officials and committees and they found no actual evidence. Anyone who still believed at that point in the claims the election was stolen is at best willfully ignorant.
The analysis here is using publicly available data and they are pointing out statistical properties of that data that they say are highly indicative of manipulation. They are giving enough information for outside statisticians and others to reproduce their work.
This is not at all comparable to most of the claims after the 2020 election. The closest comparable claims in 2020 were some of the claims based on some vote distributions in some districts not obeying Benford's law. Those didn't hold up because given the demographics of those districts Benford's law would not be expected to hold.
(I wrote a web-based simple simulation using data from one of the states that the people basing claims on Benford's law were using in order to illustrate how much the distribution could differ from a Benford distribution. Anyone curious can find it here [1]. There's a link on that page to run it).
What's the political alignment of this group? All we have is a paid press release from a group founded in 2024, with an executive board consisting of "Jive, Lilli, and Nathan."
What they are showing is that not in-person ballots favored Harris--which is no surprise as on average Democrats are more concerned with Covid than Republicans as evidenced by the latter having twice the demographic-adjusted death rate from it (and probably actually higher because it is a diagnosis not liked in many Republican areas and it's easy enough to "overlook" the sudden death was actually from a clot from Covid infection.)
But this time around it's not going to face honest scrutiny in the courts so they won't have to admit they have nothing.
Thats what Five Eyes does and always has done. It asks other countries for info on their own citizens so that they do not have to break their own laws in accessing their data directly.
Suffice to say, they don't even have to backdoor the encryption to give the UK what they want. iOS users are like fish in a barrel, if you force some insecure paradigm on them they can either adopt it or leave.
I'm surprised more people here don't pay for iCloud for at least the bottom tier storage (50GB). The free 5GB is almost worthless in 2025 for doing nightly backups. I don't back up with Apple Photos but even with "just" app data my nightly auto backups are like 10-15GB.
Even on iPhone there are much better and much cheaper solutions out there (not to mention cross platform) and those have everything a couple of times better than Photos.app and then a bit more. Maybe except Apple's troupe of privacy claims.
Like what? I use Backblaze B2 to backup all my non-Apple stuff and that's $6/TB/mo. iCloud's 2TB plan is $10/mo, so actually cheaper per TB, but with Backblaze you only pay for what you use so it may be cheaper. But pricing is pretty comparable, and I can't even imagine what a PITA it would be to use B2 for Apple stuff, so certainly seems like a good value. Are you saying there are even cheaper solutions that also have good Apple integration?
Status symbol? Here's my take on it - iPhone is dozen a dime here in my country now (3rd world) but iCloud, iMessage are not. iCloud+ is definitely not. People are used to WhatsApp here (just to take an example of messaging apps) and even if they ever stumble upon iMessage they immediately see what a decidedly inferior and opaque oddity that thing is.
From what I can tell looking at SpinLaunch's website and web search, they were founded in 2014, "launched" a couple projectiles in atmosphere, had a leadership change in 2022, and have been pretty quiet since then.
Unless I've missed something, the headline "Giant catapult sends satellites into space" is not true. To date, they have not put anything into orbit and the company appears to be on life support.
SpinLaunch built a prototype back in 2022 that can throw stuff up to suborbital altitudes. The big version was supposed to be done by now.
They had a lot of trouble finding a launch site. Hawaii didn't like it. Alaska didn't like it. Australia was discussed but nothing happened.[1]
This might be useful if there were space stations that needed large, frequent deliveries of fuel, air, and water.
I think the idea was technically a space trebuchet, but the energy for launch is stored in a flywheel. It's still far too little energy to do anything real.
Coordination and shared purpose are often good things actually. I'm so tired of people decrying any pursuit of consensus and collective action as tyranny, it's intellectually lazy and just leads to further atomization.
Voluntary coordination and shared purpose are great things.
Otherwise, all the “forward” and “shared purpose” euphemisms do not change the fact that you have a tyrannical system, nor do the “intellectually lazy” ad hominems.
Uninformed or misinformed people can make choices against their own interests, such is MAGA.
Facts and physical primary reality matter more than ones opinion, but we paint the sun on the sky and order the tides to recede to please the king anyway.
An informed populace can make informed decisions.
Lying fake news not so much...
Aka $50million for condoms in Gaza is a lie.
Alternative facts will bite us all when the pedal hits the metal.
> Voluntary coordination and shared purpose are great things.
To an extent. We can never have 100% agreement. For example, we would still have Polio if the anti-science squad hadn't been forced to go along with the plan.
At the risk of sounding "elitist", fifty-four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. We should not let their inability to function in the modern world keep our entire society functioning at or below the sixth grade level.
I earn my paycheck in Clojure and have for about 10 years. In my experience if your code ends with ))))))))))) you're doing it wrong. This is a code smell for me.
Instead of (qux (baz (bar (foo x)))) use other tools:
- Big picture: is this code overly procedural? If so, is it possible to make it declarative and functional?
- Line-level picture: one of the thread macros, functional composition, etc. will make this more readable. For example: (-> x foo bar baz qux).
> We expect any lawmaker worthy of that title to listen to what this federal court is saying and create a legislative warrant requirement so that the intelligence community does not continue to trample on the constitutionally protected rights to private communications.
Sad to say it, but I find it laughable that the intel agencies would suddenly stop if it were illegal (though of course it should be illegal). They operate in secret and anyone in the government who opposes them will commit suicide or suddenly be in possession of child pornography.
As New York Sen. Chuck Schumer once told Rachel Maddow on air, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” [1]
This has been a definite problem with the rhetoric starting at an intensity of 10/10 and having nowhere to go. The other problem is that everything that's happened has had people actively diminishing it, to make the reaction seem more outrageous, so we're all numb to so much of it. I've thought of it as The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but that's incorrect, because there's always been a wolf.
Have you heard stories about women (and men) who believe ‘they love me, they’d never cheat on me’ while their spouse is not only clearly cheating on them, but bragging to friends that they are cheating on them?
That’s what is happening.
And the more in-your-face it is, the more they’ll double down or even attack the people
trying to tell them.
Sleazy government officials illegally order sleazy Facebook employees to censor people. Predictably, the government was caught because large groups of people conspiring to do something nefarious for extended periods of time ("conspiracies") are difficult to hide. When the government is caught illegally and unconstitutionally censoring its own people, the people get mad. And after all that, the sleazy media reports this as "poor, pitiful government workers just can't trust Facebook as a paragon of virtue anymore."
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