shaki-dora

Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship.

Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.

As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.

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The quickest way to autocracy is pretending there's no difference between it and democracy.

This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.

Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens not to be corrupt: why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?

That argument is trivially true for most any civil liberty: the promise of a fair trial is protected only by the next higher court's fairness, etc.

To categorical discount the value of the rule of law, and to apparently consider that idea to be so obvious that just about half a paragraph of argumentation is given for it, strikes me as... just scary?

There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".

And, fwiw, technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary. The internet was praised as the killer tool to empower the individual against censorship. And yet there still is no technology that makes accessing Wikipedia in Shanghai as easy as it is in Billings, Montana. Bitcoin was hailed (by the conspiracy-minded) as a tool to overthrow democratically-established institutions. But, as it turned out, regulators were far less interested in shutting down Bitcoin than expected, and did not even break a sweat implementing KYC nad similar regulation across the cryptocurrency universe when needed.

In the US, very little. That's because there really aren't many meaningful protests these days, because the US has effectively killed the public spaces protests rely on. But the Tea Party movement was arguably influential, and protests were its main tool. Occupy Wall Street was also far more successful than commonly believed: the 1%-vs-99% divide has become a central narrative of US politics, even on the right.

Outside the US? The Arab Spring was nothing but protests, and it did topple something like a dozen governments. Yes, the new ones mostly failed, but that's a different matter.

In Ukraine the protests succeeded. In Hong Kong, they certainly seem to be a major pain for the local government as well as China.

Environmental protests have succeeded almost spectacularly over the last decade or so. Germany's anti-nuclear movement relied on protests as their main method-the Green party was actually founded by a group of people who first met at a protest. Today, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and similar keep climate change in the news week by week. That's the sort of pressure without which the Paris accord would have never been attempted.

Compare any agenda from a G7/G8/G20 meeting a decade or two ago, and you'll notice that issues such as the environment, labor protection, or fair trade have gone from zero to dominating these meetings.

The US-EU trade agreement basically died on the day that half a million people in Berlin protested against it.

Obviously, it is often impossible to unambiguously assign causality. It's a complex system where everything affects everything.

But purely subjectively, I am actually surprised by how effective protests are. Consider Ukraine, where a single protest at a central square toppled the government. In practical terms. a Tiannanmen-style massacre was entirely possible. But the protesters won. Why? How?

I hate to break it to you, but the BBC being British and public hasn't exactly been a secret.

Do you have any examples from, say, an EU country supporting your accusations?

Erdogan is a corrupt fascist and a war criminal (most recently: killing civilians in Syria). But I agree: the coming economic crash is the least offensive consequence of his regime.

I really don't understand how protests became conflated with violence (mostly in the US, as far as I can tell).

Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful.

Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise.

Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.

That statement seems wrong in the strict sense, since the "Havlak" benchmark from your link has a more extreme difference between Crystal and Nim and was not included in the article's tests.

The word "bias" has several meanings. One of them is an accusation that those two benchmarks were chosen specifically to produce the desired outcome. Considering the above, and that Base64 and especially JSON parsing are very common, I think it would be fair to allow for the possibility that the article's author chose them accidentally and not with any intent to deceive.

FWIW I was surprised by the article's focus on interfacing with C, something I have not done in 20 years of programming, and was wondering if it was a (possibly subconcious) choice to set up Nim to win.

OT: This is the first time I've seen "Energy" being measured in a benchmark.

That strikes me as a really cool idea, both because it measures CPU usage over time, a figure that has always been of interest for such comparisons, as well as highlighting the ecological and economical aspects of computing.

FWIW, my experience with quite a few (usually small(ish)) tasks I implemented in Crystal is in line with the article's.

Once, a CSV-parsing and string-wrangling data batch job in python indicated it would take 27 hours to finish. I got annoyed and wrote a line-by-line translation in crystal. Writing it took about 40 minutes. It took a total of 2.5 minutes to run, that's two, almost three orders of magnitude.

As I said, this was a line-by-line translation, so whatever mistakes the python version had, the crystal version would have also had them. There are, however, a bunch of specialised python libraries (numpy et al) that weren't used, and I guess you could achieve some significant performance increases that way. Coming from ruby, I just happen to be quite productive in Crystal, to the point where I stumbled over the article's description as a "systems language".

All employees are free to leave... That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. But the specific outcome here, I. s. suicide, is fiendishly difficult link to any one cause.

The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?