kolektiv

I pretty much stopped reading at the justification for hanging around on X. Lots of people are still there! But at least own it. "I implicitly support the owner of the Nazi bar as long as he tells most of the Nazis to stay away from me" isn't a moral stand I'd be comfortable committing to on paper, digitally, or otherwise.

I used to go to that bar a lot. When it became clear it was becoming a Nazi bar, and the owner saw that as a feature, not a bug, I stopped. Describing it as a network prison seems to imply that staying there isn't just a choice like anything else. Yes, it's a choice with consequences, potentially very negative ones, but these things often are. If it were always easier to be moral than amoral, we wouldn't be in this mess.

It feels like RFK Jr. is likely to take exactly the wrong lesson from such a statement...

No, but I am arguing that - from my perspective - the appropriate weight for those claims, fantastical as they are, would be zero consideration.

But we don't have to take all claims which may potentially be true one day equally seriously, or ascribe them equal weight (and thus, we are not required to act on all claims).

I actually do believe that it's quite possible that one day an artificial consciousness (for some value of "consciousness") could be created. I don't believe I've seen anything which makes me think it's going to spring, as an emergent property, from any of the current systems. I can't prove whether it will or won't; it is entirely subjective/intuitive, but then so are all of these claims.

So given that, how much time should I be required to spend debating what to do if the systems we currently have are unknowingly recreating slavery? Especially when all time spent has a cost as well as value, and we live in a society in which some people are only too willing to knowingly recreate (or perpetuate) slavery? Which one of those should seem more urgent? If I can only act on one of these, which really seems more defensible?

We don't wait for conclusive proof of the future before we act - we don't live in a world of definites, but we decide every second which things are probably important and which are not.

Also wild that they're willing to just put "Anti-Fascist" in there as the enemy - if you're anti-anti-fascist, that's kind of hiding in plain sight, as if they weren't already. Simply staggering to think that in such a short space of time a country can head off the rails quite so much, but it should be instructional - whenever you look at history, the collapse often happens slowly - and then all at once...

It's a common (and somewhat right-wing) trope, but it's not really true. Thousands of people aren't arrested for "mean comments" or similar. That isn't to say the UK has no problem with the balance of freedom of expression and regulation, but it is nothing like the impression you'd get from some sources. There are some high-profile cases which are commonly misrepresented to support these claims.

It's not even just music anymore. I love motor racing, but at the last meeting I went to, sat in the stands at an iconic first corner, tense with anticipation as the race started... Everyone around me sat there holding their phones up, filming it. I couldn't even see properly because of the forest of arms. People don't just... experience... something now.

What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.

> For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.

I really wasn't trying to chastize, honestly it was intended as a friendly dollop of advice as someone who's dealt with this kind of thing. But since you have replied, I would say:

> Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in.

Relevance is likely to be seen as contextual. Someone wishing to do something a full decade ago is not likely to be seen as sufficient evidence to justify contacting them now in case they still wish to. That's a big chunk of the point about time-limiting data retention - the data gets less relevant and more problematic over time. I get that you're not trying to colour outside the lines here, but from the perspective of your users, and anyone looking at their potential complaints from a regulatory perspective, the window in which they reasonably consented to contact has closed (and probably some time ago).

The regulations are there, ostensibly, to protect consumers. They will be interpreted in that light. I can almost guarantee that if you sent an email to your downloader base 10 years after they last heard from you, being ignored will be the best case, and the worst will be reports to local regulators.

> over the last decade

Be aware that under various regulations, you're potentially already at risk of accusation in terms of unwarranted data retention. If you haven't got a good reason to have kept those email addresses, something like the GDPR might not interpret that favourably. While the GDPR doesn't specify actual time limits, they are expected to be proportionate. Financial records are generally 7 years unless otherwise legally required, so for a decade, you would be saying that these email addresses are more critical/valid than that. That may be the case, I don't know your business, but be careful if you don't want some very awkward questions asked. Just the hassle of having to deal with complaints you might get (and various regulators would take notice of 1 million instances) is likely to be more than it's worth for most.

The suggestion downthread to send a very clear "we still have your address, would you like to opt in to this newsletter, otherwise we'll remove it" is not a bad one, but even then, some people will object to you still having it at all.

I'm not entirely sure I can agree, although the premise is seductive in certain ways. We do lie to ourselves, but we also have meta-cognition - we can recognise our own processes of thought. Imperfect as it may be, we have feedback loops which we can choose to use, we have heuristics we can apply, we can consciously alter our behaviour in the presence of contextual inputs, and so on.

Being wrong is not the same as a hallucination. It's a natural step on a journey to being more right. This feels a bit like Andreesen proudly stating he avoids reflection - you can act like that, but the human brain doesn't have to. LLMs have no choice in the matter.

Very clearly put, and I'd only emphasise that without the final "enforcement" point of that, the other points become entirely irrelevant. While European regulators have imposed some significant sounding fines on prominent entities, they generally work out to be "less than the value gained by doing the thing in the first place" - or at least close enough to that for the entity to not consider it too negative/a future deterrent.

Unless you have some body which is a) serious about enforcement, b) sufficiently toothful to make a dent and c) not undermined by wider geopolitical posturing or economic neutering, you can have all of the regulation you might want and still end up in the same place. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try and control this, but that we have some extremely large genies to stuff back into bottles along the way.

I think what leads to poor mental health is varied - poverty is definitely one cause, presumably one which is lessened in this case. I completely agree with you that there are more than two alternatives, but society seems unwilling/unable to consider any of the more radical.

You could frame those visitors to the Taj Mahal as victims, but that takes quite a narrow and short-term view of value to them. Would the Taj Mahal be as pleasant a place to visit if it were in an even more unequal and precarious society than it is? We all pay for things that don't directly benefit us through taxation (usually). The childless pay for schools, the car-less pay for roads, but we benefit from the society that having them creates. It seems hard to say that those visitors to the Taj Mahal would not benefit from being in a more prosperous and sustainable society.

Yup, there's a huge number of entirely physical/analogue ways that "many hands" could make the world a significantly nicer and more sustainable place. Public works, environmental works, having the capacity to do more than the bare minimum for the quality of the built environment - there is no shortage of things worth doing, just things worth doing profitably.