geofft

This is an excellent point from the comments, from one of the signatories:

> If you as a public university had no power against racism beyond the nobility of your intentions, your mission statement wouldn't matter a damn anyway. The public university's power against racism is the inherently anti-racist power of genuine knowledge.

And I think it actually refutes some of the more simplistic comments by other signatories about e.g. a desire to keep politics out of science or whether a university's goal should be truth or social justice. Such a phrasing implicitly claims that social justice (however one defines it) is a separable goal from truth. It reminds me a little of the "non-overlapping magisteria" non-solution to conflicting claims from science and religion, that either science determines truth and religion determines, I dunno, vibes, or alternatively that religion has real truth and science is limited to some subset of reality - it solves the problem by refusing to take either one or the other seriously.

The claims of politics and social justice are claims within the domain of truth, just as the claims of science are. Either climate change is happening and merits a response, or it isn't. Either diversity brings conflict or it doesn't. Either the implicit association test is good science or it isn't. Either social Darwinism is good science or it isn't.

The goal of the university should be to seek the truth because it helps humanity. This is why the research university publishes its research and the teaching university opens its doors to the public, after all. There are enough places (as we tech folks know!) where you can pursue the truth about many things for private gain.

Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion. It might take us a long while and to false places on the way (as with social Darwinism), but once we've landed on the shores we sought, we need to build something there. And those of us who adhere to the cause of "social justice" as widely understood (and I certainly count myself as one) must believe that the claims it makes about the world we live in are in fact true, and that the pursuit of truth will keep us focused on what actually benefits the people or causes we support, and we need to not cede ground to the idea that our pursuit of truth is somehow a different thing from the ordinary pursuit of truth.

This is not pointlessly-spent energy! It is part of the job of software engineering, in much the same way as fixing compiler errors and debugging is part of the job of software engineering. Your work isn't done just because you have a program that makes sense to you.

Think about technical discussions as a thing that you need to spend extended amounts of time and energy on - probably more than programming, once you get senior enough as an individual contributor.

(So, yes, I think it's a lack of skill, largely because of a lack of recognition that it's a skill worth developing. I can't say whether the "blame" is yours or theirs, but it is highly likely that everyone has a lot of room to get better at it.)

Yeah, but I think the term "self-host" is a little bit conditioned on the HTTP model itself. If we had some sort of Usenet-style distributed infrastructure, you could imagine two ways of publishing content, either running a static site generator locally and using that to push content to the world (and you would be directly negotiating with people about whether you're a spammer), or using some helper online tool a la WordPress to render the content and have them do the push (and they would take responsibility for making sure it gets pushed). In that world, where the end-to-end model of our world's HTTP is uncommon, I think people would still call the first way "self-hosting."

In fact I think we do use the term "self-host" in exactly that way when talking about "self-hosted newsletters." I can (and do!) run a newsletter where I generate the HTML and the MIME document locally, find an SMTP provider of my choice, and instruct it to directly mail recipients. I maintain the mailing list (in a text file in a Git repo) and pass it to my SMTP provider every time I do a mailing, and people contact me directly to sign up. I could also use Substack/Tinyletter/Buttondown/etc., which would have various advantages and disadvantages; the hosting provider would handle most of this for me, including maintaining the list of subscribers. You can also talk about "self-hosted Mailman," etc. In these cases, the self-hoster sees the email addresses of subscribers but not (necessarily) their IP addresses.

I don't think I'm conflating TCP and HTTP. NNTP, UUCP, and SMTP all use TCP, but they're designed in a way that doesn't have this property. In fact it's not even HTTP per se that's a problem. It's mostly about what I called "direct HTTP" - though you posted your comment to me over HTTP, there's no HTTP (nor TCP) connection to me.

(Also other comments claim that the CLOUD Act means that if GH the US entity runs EU servers, that doesn't actually solve the problem - it'd have to be a non-US entity not subject to US jurisdiction. That's why I think the old-school-web model of mirrors is a better example; they're generally run by universities or other entities with no legal relation to the site they're mirroring.)

My personal website is a publicly-accessible static site. Blocking people from it is not meaningful.

It might be meaningful under the model of direct HTTP, where you could be DoSing me or trying to exploit my web server. But if you don't contact me over HTTP, then that problem doesn't arise. There's no meaningful concept of blocking people from a Usenet post I write. Even for indirect HTTP, I don't need to block people from my GitHub Pages or from my HN comments. They're public.

If I add dynamic feature like a comment system or discussion forum to my website, then it becomes meaningful, but also at that point I can implement a way for you to consent to sharing your IP address with me as part of signing up.

From GDPR article 2:

> 2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data:

> (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity

My sense (I am neither a lawyer nor European so this is certainly not European legal advice) is that you cannot use GDPR to compel someone to delete your contact info if they're solely a social acquaintance, but you can use it to compel them to delete it if they're a one-person business of some sort (contractor, Etsy seller, lawyer, etc.).

In general "factual information" is not a defense to a whole bunch of things that society generally recognizes as not protected by free speech (the broad concept, not solely the legal right). I cannot claim to be lawyer and provide you with legal advice, even if that legal advice is correct. I cannot redistribute copies of Taylor Swift's latest album, even if (perhaps especially if) it is a faithful copy. I cannot make a public list of all the black people at my company who show up late to work and leave the white people off that list, even if I'm accurate about when they're showing up. If I am a doctor, I cannot publish transcripts of all the conversations I have with patients.

And a few of these aren't even heinous! If I happen to be self-taught in the law and I am particularly good at giving wise and helpful legal advice, but I am not actually admitted to the bar, nobody is directly hurt by my advice, but society has decided the potential for harm in this situation is high enough that I still shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Then how do you decide what is (or should be) a right and what is not? Suppose someone claims a right to gay marriage, or a right to employ only people of their race, or a right to bear arms - how does society (the citizenry, the legislature, and/or the courts) decide whether that is indeed a right?

Absent a holy constitution given to us by the divine, the way we decide what is and isn't a right is we look at its effect. Places that recognize a right to bear arms, for instance, do so because they believe that arming the citizenry protects them against abuses of the government. Places that don't do so because they believe that disarming the citizenry protects them against crimes from other citizens. To the extent that one of these views is correct and the other is not, it is not because they guessed wrong about the nature of the universe - it is because one argument is correct and another is not.

Free speech is not axiomatic. Free speech is a right (and I agree it is a right!) because it has particular positive effects on society, through the benefits of open and unfiltered public discourse.

And the same reasoning helps us define exactly what "free speech" is. We make significant restrictions on free speech - classified information, copyright and trademark law, slander and tortious interference, electioneering laws, unauthorized practice of medicine or law, fraud, etc. - in the expectation that those restrictions serve to benefit society, and in the understanding that if we were to allow these forms of speech, they wouldn't really serve the goals which we see free speech, overall, as helping. If I were to say "I am a licensed doctor and I think you should take two pounds of Vitamin D a day," we understand that the benefit of me adding that statement to the public discourse is nil, and the harm is great, and so we don't recognize that as protected by free speech.

No, but he happened to be wrong for it.

The NSPA's goal was never to actually hold a march. They never did hold a march in Skokie, after that defense. Their goal was to harass Jewish communities through the process of applying for the march, which Goldberger, for all his good intention, assisted them with.

As the article notes, they sent letters to a whole bunch of suburbs asking for a permit to hold a march. They never followed up with the suburbs that ignored them, nor did they march in those suburbs either.

The whole thing was a bad-faith tactic which today we'd call trolling. They weren't fighting for their right to speak freely in Skokie, they were fighting for their right to use the legal process to harass the city of Skokie.

"Moon" is the name of the person who spoke the thing above that is being discussed in this thread.

Advising underage people through a wiki on how to make hormones at home is neither sexual assault nor grooming as the term is conventionally understood. How could it be? You can't get in contact with an anonymous reader of information that has been published to the public. You have no idea what they do with that information. So I am not really understanding what its relevance in this thread is.

(If anything, it's an example of free speech. You might not be a fan of it, which is totally fine, but information that advises people of any age on knowledge that people would prefer to be un-known is obviously at least as deserving of free speech protection - both in the legal sense of protection from government interference and in the moral sense that lovers of a free society should support it having a platform - as anything posted on Kiwifarms.)

Stars don't represent anything real. You don't star a project when you clone it, when you grab a packaged version from a package repository or the home page, when you use it as a transitive dependency, when you scale it out successfully to thousands of machines, when you pay for a support contract, when you contribute a pull request, etc. In turn, when you do star a project, it doesn't require the project to even work, let alone do things well, respond to feedback or contributions, etc.

And startups have long asked for people to star their projects for visibility.

I don't know at what point it hasn't been "gamed." Maybe there are now bots starring repos, but is that meaningfully different than masses of very real humans being excited by hype?