kunfuu

Non-BSL4 labs shouldn't be ignored, though. Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was a Non-BSL4 lab involved in researching bat viruses in the city. See my other comment as well.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

Yet another hypothesis being pushed by the CCP party-state is the seafood imports hypothesis. Although the motivation behind CCP's push is questionable, this hypothesis shall be treated seriously, given that in the early investigation before the ban, signs of the virus were detected at stores selling seafood instead of stores selling illegal games.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was another lab in the city near the market, which was a competitor to the lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology that is most widely mentioned, under the umbrella of a university of agriculture/forestry/geology (I don't remember the exact details).

I am not sure about the validity of the rumor, though.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

Here is my heavily biased take. People need to teach analytic philosophy, scientific methodology, logical empiricism, social-psychological dynamics, journalism, jurisprudence, and perhaps a version of initiative (e.g. initiative to try doing journalistic investigation or playing an impartial judge) in middle schools for every student.

I'm not sure if it is too much to ask from folks, but progress doesn't come easy anyway.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

I have an amusing idea: an independent amateur journalist network, composed of people doing the field work, in their free time. I'm not confident it will ever come true, but it's good to fantasize, at the minimum.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

IMHO alternative solutions are possible.

All effects aren't caused by a single factor. Free speech as a causal factor may enable an unfortunate causal path, but we can weaken this path by attenuating or removing its enabling antecedents, or by adding or amplifying its mitigating decedents. As such, multiple solutions to a problem that corresponds to a causal path exist.

Our values and understanding decide what solutions we seek. If a person doesn't recognize or underestimate the benefits of free speech, this person may accept or prefer a large degree of censorship as the straightforward solution.

Of course, finding an alternative solution needs insight and broad knowledge, which perhaps isn't that commonplace, even in academia.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

Slightly off-topic. I was thinking if people can enforce a model where users can choose to delegate encryption work to OS or some kind of network gateway, and inspection is allowed before encryption happens, this would be a clean and built-in solution for the inspection issue.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

This reasoning is valid when randomization is not pre-configured and is done at the individual level. It doesn't hold when talking about changes that come with browsers etc and deployed at scale.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

I read a bit about that. The claim that Google was blocked due to unwillingness to follow Chinese laws isn't true.

Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.

When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.

EDIT2: corrections

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

That's terrifying, given so much of the ancient world is still unknown to us.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

Markdown isn't plain Unicode text. It mixes markup marks with plain text, and is intended to provide more layout than plain text. Plus, the question is rather broad, as there are so many non-alphabetic languages around the globe. I'm not knowledgeable enough to offer an answer.

You may want to read the work by W3C[0]. Some requirements mentioned exceed the needs of simple written communication, but not all in my experience. The problems usually arise when you mix different scripts.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/typography/

EDIT: clarifications.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

My 2cents.

1. A markup language taking multi-lingual considerations to heart is a must for me. Markdown doesn't work well for non-alphabetic languages in terms of typesetting etc. The web is global and multi-lingual, a new web (if there is one) should be, too.

2. I prefer a new content web rather than a new document web. When I use the web, I absorb and sometimes create content beyond documents. I don't want art communities, for example, to be excluded from the new web. Although an art sharing community can be modeled after documents technically, 'content' is the more apropos. Your mileage may vary, though.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

How hard is it to turn Servo into a project funded by mass small donations?

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

The second one doesn't sound like a mistake to me. Someone being able to consistently post so quickly is actually a valid sign of being a bot.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

I was researching this topic once and found that two related keywords in epistemology are "epistemic peers" and "peer disagreement", although arguably having a different focus. I guess some may be interested, so I'll just leave a comment here.

I don't know if there are other discussions on similar topics in other fields. Finding the right keywords is always hard for outsiders.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

I disagree with your factual statements as well as political theoretical statements.

Regarding political theoretical statements:

There are different paradigms of liberal democracy currently. Some of them can be regarded as appealing to the will of the majority for legitimacy, but essentially they don't assume that the majority are reasonable, but merely that we shall respect the will of the majority and base policies on their stance.

Disregarding illiberal democracy paradigms, all liberal democracy paradigms recognize the value of minority voices and recognize that their rights shall be protected, the right to freely express included.

Regarding the factual statements:

The mainstream US media didn't take social media as an input of significance for understanding the majority stance of US population before 2016. Those journalists had their echo chambers and represented a vocal minority in their echo chambers.

Social media, on the other hand, provides a meaningful alternative allowing some different opinion groups to express their opinions beyond the echo chambers of mainstream media. The liberal-leaning mainstream media now has a tendency to exaggerate the influence of some niche circles on social media (e.g. the so-called alt-right), though.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

I agree with your point, but I feel there is a need to nudge people into civilized discussion platforms, where people can engage in critical analysis towards a wide array of factual statements and opinions, perhaps by placing a mandatory notice above suspected misinformation, polarizing info etc. Without such a platform, free speech could be divisive rather than liberating or illuminating.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

I would prefer something like:

    match node:
        on (time _ 1 @ 0, foo _ 2, bar _ 3, baz _ any, status _ 1 @ -1):
            do_something()
            rematch do_something_2(foo)

'_' indicating span, and '@' indicating position of the first item. Both can be omitted.

kunfuu

6 lat temudiscuss

Hypothesis driven research disregarding rigoriousness of hypothesis formation is most often flawed, as the hypotheses will be filled with suspicious/flawed concepts that cannot serve as reliable and meaningful abstraction of reality.

Consider the measures prefixed with 'real', for example, 'real wage'. The concept of 'real wage' isn't meaningless, since it captures the relation between wage and purchasing power when inflation is involved. But what about cases where inflation is not involved, or cases where we need to consider interactions between some other factors and inflation? In those cases, the concept of 'real wage' is often impedimental and misleading, a ratio indicating purchasing power would surely be a better choice.

Consider the concept of 'equilibrium'. I can hardly see any empirical foundation of 'equilibrium' when it's invoked by empirical economics research. There are stationary periods of prices. But it's a different story to interpret such stationariness as a state of equilibrium with a mysterious process forcing prices to always gravitate to this state. This interpretation is without empirical foundation and yet its reliability is often assumed a priori in the research.

If you are not persuaded, it's okay. Regardless, I don't believe hypothesis formation is irrelevant.

EDIT: On second thought, my case against 'real wage' above was missing the key. The key is that purchasing power is what matters, and the purchasing power (most of the time local) of stock variables (e.g. savings) is what matters. To adjust flow variables by inflation is often misleading.

Submissions

China blocks Wikimedia Foundation’s application to become an observer at WIPO

The Hysteresis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet

David Graeber on harmful jobs, odious debt, and fascists who mind global warming

The Case for Prepaid Debit Cards (2019)

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