While it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to third party services to resolve these issues, it’s worth noting that JustWatch will tell you where a movie can be found and Letterboxd (among others) will give you a somewhat more clunky unified watchlist.
“Safety” is overloaded here. I agree with the author; the new front end doesn’t seem safer for end users. It probably does make it safer for Reddit in that it’s harder for scrapers to do their thing.
They kept at least the main floor in Russell Investment Center. I don’t know if they have all ten+ floors any more. They were trying to sublease around 100K square feet right after the pandemic but I haven’t seen any news since then.
Think it's significant that Zillow's one of the few significant tech companies to maintain full remote working? They don't leave an Amazon-sized hole in downtown, but they had quite a few floors.
It’s a shame Graham has failed to understand the point of the statement he’s trying to critique.
The argument isn’t that earning money is inherently immoral. The argument is that you can’t earn a billion dollars without assigning a higher percentage of revenue to yourself than is fair. I’m not going to argue that one way or another here, because I don’t think it’d be a useful discussion: I’m just pointing out that Graham doesn’t engage with the key premise.
He also might want to check his percentages a bit. Funding 30 startups which have produced billionaires is nice. It represents 1% of the world’s billionaire population. You know who really knows how to make new billionaires? The world’s richest families, that’s who.
I was not a software engineer but yeah, I think so. Every now and then we’d have to go get Mike Burrows to do some consulting work to rewrite a bit more of the code in assembly.
This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer.
We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better.
But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale.
And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product.
And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.
Even if it’s true that most unhoused people are mentally ill — and I agree with Tim’s reply — you have must consider causation versus correlation. Is an unhoused person dysfunctional because they were always that way and thus doomed to lose shelter, or are they dysfunctional because living on the streets is extremely damaging?
You see this question a lot when discussing drug usage among homeless. The percentages of addicts is undeniably high; we know this from point in time counts, for example. Some people take that as proof that homelessness is the fault of the homeless: they made the bad decision to take drugs, and that’s why they lost their jobs. But there’s also a lot of data showing that people are more likely to become addicted as a way to cope with street life.
And if, in fact, losing your home is something that can happen relatively easily in part because of wealth inequality, we’re right back to the original assertion.
Underbuilding is for sure another factor. It’s just not the only one.
FWIW, I don't think "don't get to participate in that society" is exactly the same as punishment, but it certainly can have that aspect for the theoretical abuser so I'm probably quibbling over a semantic discussion. I just care much more about deterrence than punishment.
Kids on motorbikes is a good analogy. The line I'd draw is between dumb actions that cause harm only to the actor and dumb actions that cause harm to others. Another, more charged analogy is smoking in public -- I have no doubt that the world is better when fewer people do this. It both reduces harm to others by a measurable amount and, since it reduces the overall number of smokers, reduces the cost to society created by people with poorer health.
But wow there are a ton of implications to just blindly saying that's a good idea. The implication that it's OK to mandate behaviors in order to improve an individual's health is not one I'd accept universally, to choose just one example.
Ideally you want people to recognize that Alex Jones is a bad actor and ignore him by themselves, which mitigates the harm he's doing to others by lying. I have no idea how to get there, though.
They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere.
And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being.
Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.
The key element you’re missing is that the lawsuit accused Alex Jones of knowing that he was lying. I.e., it’s not that he was speculating — it’s that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth.
To quote Jones:
“We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”
That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.
Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie.
The cost seems really high. On the other hand I thought bringing the Onion back as a print comedy newspaper was insane too, so possibly they know things I don’t. There is a business plan here, even if it’s a dumb one.
Came here to say this! It’s the largest public video collection I’m aware of, at over 150,000 titles. Also they rent by mail. Not cheap but when you really need that movie…
2017: the ACLU defends Milo Yiannopoulos' right to advertise his new book. They file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting a Tea Party supporter challenging a ban on wearing political insignia at polling places.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
I am not running either of these at the moment, because of security concerns, but I did play with openclaw for a day or so. It was clearly potentially useful. I got two use cases working easily:
1. When I get a weekly Scarecrow Video pre-order email, extract a list of movies and use my Letterboxd rating history to determine which of them might be interesting to me. Let me know what I should pay attention to.
I tested this on five of the pre-order emails I had sitting around; it was useful for attention conservation.
2. On a daily basis, check Beacon Cinema's list of upcoming movie series and send me a note if there's a new one.
So useful that when I turned off openclaw, I vibe coded a general purpose RSS bridge (yeah, I know about the PHP one and the existing Python ones) and added a scraper for the Beacon page.
My general paradigm, which is not the only available paradigm, is that the claws are strongly useful as information filters. The risk is that they filter out the wrong thing, of course.
I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(