For the last couple years, the male subset of my children's church youth group used Discord for coordinating activities, and I learned about my daughter's activity plans via email. As of last month, both subsets are moving to WhatsApp. I'm not sure if this particular change is "too little, too late" to have kept them, or if indeed it drives some of the youth and their parents away faster.
There's a proposal to build a "small" (24 MW) data center literally within walking distance of my home. utility press release newspaper article I haven't submitted my own public commnent on it yet, and I actually might be weakly in favor of it. It's "different", planning to use the waste heat as part of the city's municipal hot-water supply (used to heat State Government buildings and other downtown buildings).
The site in question is currently deep-discount overflow parking for the city's minor-league baseball stadium and downtown offices, but in fact even before COVID the parking garages were never full for some reason, maybe telework, maybe overall government size reduction, maybe some work moving elsewhere in the state, maybe more people carpoooling and using mass-transit. Across the street to the south is a recently rebuilt Wendy's, and then the freeway; to the east, an oil-change place, and then a railroad track. Some houses within hearing distance, but a lot of noise already.
I have a nonzero reputation on Stack Overflow, but I haven't written an Answer since May 2024 and the last of my Answers that has more than one upvote is from 2020. I for one hope it does weather the storm, but the high bar to making a "good" contribution is a challenge.
And the comparison to Wikipedia is apt in some ways; but Wikipedia also has a lot of content on history, politics, and religion, and in the past had (perhaps still has) some editors who wanted to make sure certain modern social causes were mentioned in all related articles. Stack Overflow itself doesn't have that. The subject area is purely technical.
From their status page...
> Oct 20 1:26 AM PDT We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. [...]
> Oct 20 12:51 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. [...]
The number might also be somewhat inflated by people who have a "work" account and a "personal" account, or an "employer" account and a "contract client" account, or who have switched jobs within the past year.
But you can sue the manufacturer of a hammer if it's sold with a defect where the head appears to be attached and it actually is likely to fly off in normal use, and some guy buys it, uses it, and the head flies off and hits his buddy in the face.
If a professional news reporter or lawyer uses ChatGPT and doesn't check their sources or citations, that's on them, but if some random person tries to use ChatGPT to obtain current news or legal advice, the developers and owners of the service are ultimately responsible, and "how much" is a question of fact, not something that can be decided pre-trial.
(Speaking hypothically about what the law should be. I Am Not A Lawyer...)
For distinguishing between "legitimate advertisers" and "shady, definitely con artists", sure.
For distinguishing between e-mail I actually care about and e-mail I'd like to insta-delete and not see any more, not so sure. On my work account, I get email from supervisors, coworkers, colleagues, external business partners, external salesmen. For the most part, only the generic sales pitches from external vendors have "unsubscribe" links. And on my personal account, I get email from family, friends, open-source collaborators, volunteer-work collaborators, religious associates, former colleagues, businesses I'm dealing with, lawyers I'm dealing with, and recruiters. There as well, the truly personal messages are unlikely to have "unsuscribe" links, while the generic advertisements for things I'm not even interested in often do have a purported "unsubscribe" link.
Both my church and a non-sectarian youth development organization I'm involved with seem to have gotten caught in the spam-fighting crossfire this year. Each had a system that allowed members of the organization to send e-mail to other members; in the church, for local leaders to reach their own congregation; in the youth organization, for "unit leaders" to put items on a calendar, which would send out reminders at a set time before the event. The youth organization's systems were actually put on a well-known spam list, and I've also heard reports from people who just didn't get messages I sent through the church's system. On the other hand, mail from the "unofficial" channel of my personal address to the same people seems to have still gone through during the same timeframe.
Two weeks later, yes the static parts of the website are up, but important functions (including the "Forgot my PIN" login flow) are still broken. And calls to the main Customer Service number listed on the website get a short mesage "We appreciate your patience as we work to upgrade our Customer Care systems as soon as possible..." (in English and Spanish), followed by hangup.
(I am not a Boost customer, but I have a close relative who is. We'll be switching her to a different carrier as soon as we can figure out how to port her number, which was originally her landline number. I did reach a live person by calling an alternate number, but that person said due to the "internal system error" even they couldn't do anything.)
P.S. have you read the supposed 100 examples of threats of violence that were not removed? I have not, [...]
Well, here are some declarations and attachments to start with... Declaration of Amazon Executive 1 Declaration of Amazon Executive 2 Exhibit D Exhibit E
The Amazon response to the complaint cites about 15 examples taken from the 100 items that had been reported: [WARNING: as should be obvious from the article, this is full of offensive language; and I had to edit it a bit to avoid the "looks too much like ASCII art" filter warning.]
To be clear, per Amazon's answer, they brought "content threatening violence" to Parler's attention in November. It would be a stretch to characterize anything I see in Amazon's filings as "planning" an attack.
And it's possible that even in the week leading up to January 6th the absolute number of violence-inciting, electoral-count-related posts on Facebook, or in YouTube comments, was higher than on Parler, just because those platforms are so much bigger. But on Parler, it seemed like the actual majority of comment traffic was either "stop the steal" complaints (with a range all the way from "here's another interesting affidavit" to "bullet to the head"), or memes mocking the appearance and assumed sexual history of famous Democratic politicians including Obama, Pelosi, and AOC, or anti-vaxx/anti-mask attitudes toward the pandemic. I saw all of that on Facebook/YouTube as well, but on Parler there was little else... at least in the comments on the posts of any "influencers" I checked.
I would guess actual "planning" also took place using Discord groups, Telegram/Signal, CB radio, phone calls, regular email, and like-mided people literally meeting in the street and chatting.
And the HORC isn't saying that the FBI shouldn't look at at Facebook and Google and other communication tools; they're just stating the obvious, that Parler is a good place to start and a place the investigators shouldn't ignore.
(By the way, the committee acronym HORC reminds me of the Spanish noun horca, a hangman's gallows. Weird coincidence?)
I went on Parler myself, posted something pro-vaxx and a link to the National Archives, and earned the threat "you better watch your 6 commie, we're coming for you". It was really bad.
I'm not aware of any group of stationery vendors effectively "de-platforming" people in Colonial times based on their politics.
What do you think the stamp act was? But you're right, that was the government, not paper/ink vendors themselves.
... on VHS tapes picked up at a garage sale.
Last night I was talking to my kids about the pandemic, and they asked "How did it start?"
My response was something like the following...
"Probably it started in a city in China where people eat bat-meat. They were keeping bats in cages, and didn't wash their hands after handling them, and they caught the disease from the bats. It didn't help that the local communist party, equivalent to a city or state government in our country, arrested the first doctor who discovered the disease for 'spreading counterrevolutionary propaganda', but the national Chinese government mostly did what they should have. It didn't help that President Trump kept telling people that they didn't need to worry about the disease, and that it would magically disappear, but our governors and mayors mostly did what they should have.
"I saw a story in the news the other day that the C.I.A. is investigating a theory that the Chinese government was trying to make a secret bioweapon, and it leaked out of the lab, infecting first the city where the lab is, then the whole province, and now the whole world.
"If you talk to a random person on the street-corner in Iran or North Korea or Cuba, they will probably tell you, without any evidence, that the American C.I.A. developed a secret bioweapon, and unleashed it by flying secret agents to China and infecting people there.
"If you talk to a random person on the street-corner in Palestine, or Egypt, or Syria, they will probably tell you, without any evidence, that Mossad developed a secret bioweapon, and unleashed it by flying secret agents to China and infecting people there.
"If you talk to a random person on the street-corner in any Latin American country, they will probably tell you, without any evidence, that either their government or their country's most vocal opposition party helped the C.I.A. develop a secret bioweapon, and then the C.I.A. deployed it by sending secret agents to a city in China, from which it spread.
"I don't 'know' how it actually started. I'll let you consider the evidence and decide for yourselves. As soon as a vaccine is available, I will make sure we, as a family, all get it. As soon as free testing for people without symptoms or health risks is available, I will make sure we are all tested. Until then, I think we should eat healthy, get exercise, and take advantage of our time isolated at home to study and improve ourselves mentally and spiritually."
Important to note the qualification to the advice in that article:
For those using Zoom to keep in touch with friends, hold social events, or organize courses or lectures that they might otherwise hold in a public or semi-public venue, our findings should not necessarily be concerning.
The other web-conference platforms (WebEx, Skype, Hangouts, etc.) can all be used in such a way that they'd be targets for "Zoom bombing".
As far as I know, the other major web-conference platforms don't necessarily offer "end-to-end encryption" either.
And Microsoft had 4,000 employees in China several years ago, and was planning to hire more.
I have concerns about Zoom's sudden path to apparent monopoly, but some of the recent anti-Zoom pronouncements seem like they might really be attempts to clamp down on personal use of an organization's devices, fueled by competitors' FUD as they try to buy time to make their own products more secure and more user-friendly.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
