samthecoy

Interesting! I think there's a tangible difference between "you may only use this product if you support/disavow $x" (as in, some public statement of views is a prerequisite to being allowed to use something) and "you may only use this product if you do not cause harm in some tangible sense".

While I'm not necessarily saying I agree with either, the first is certainly less reasonable than the second (and the two examples linked are of the second kind).

Could you give some examples of this trend? (Not aware of it, personally—curious to see an example)

> So you need to have a secure method of communication to transfer the code? Then why not just use whatever that is to transfer stuff?

Because sometimes that secure method of communication is speech. This is a particularly good utility for transferring information to parties that you can talk to verbally. Also, a bit quicker than plugging a USB stick in.

*not all inputs

Partial functions are not the same thing as "partially applied functions". Partial functions means that not every element of the domain is mapped to an element of the range, for example:

    divTenBy :: Double -> Double
    divTenBy n = 10 / n

If you actually call the above function you get a runtime exception. We really don't like functions that do this; they are called partial.

This article is not well written.

A big benefit, especially with more people, is that it's relatively painless and socially natural to break out into multiple small discussions (as might happen at say, a coffee meeting irl). The awkwardness of 12-person video calls is extremely painful in other software.

This is a misapplication of Popper's tolerance paradox. You do not describe our "being intolerant of their intolerance of our products (content, code, and signals)", but rather our "being intolerant of their products (content, code, and signals".

Facebook must make political decisions, because it must have a stance on content moderation. Even if that stance is "we shouldn't moderate content", that is a political decision. All possible actions and inaction around content moderation require political decisions, and you can't be in the social media business without having a content moderation policy.

If you work for a large social network with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion.

If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.

EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.

If anyone is interested, there is an excellent "plain style" guide which is recommend for much of the British Civil Service. It's called "Plain Words", and is by Sir Ernest Gowers. It's received an updated version in recent years.

I know what that word means, but only because it appeared in Asimov's "The Stars, Like Dust", which I finished two days ago. I didn't know what it meant, and had to look it up.

At some point, can you not file some kind of harassment lawsuit? Is it legal to continue to send someone bills for which they aren't liable?

Does anyone know of a relatively accessible book that introduces quantum mechanics well?