AFAIK nobody has yet invented a way to give government limited capability to control something. If they have the ability to suppress child porn, then they'll also have the ability to suppress Thomas Paine's "Common Sense."

So do you give government unlimited capabilities and rely on their good faith execution of laws, with court oversight? That used to be the classical answer to everything, but people (with very, very good reason) have lost faith in that.

Your post makes a lot more sense if replace the word "censorship" with "ratings."

As for your 2nd last paragraph of questions, the answer to every one of them becomes "whatever the user wants" if you have the client do it (the user's chosen client, chosen from a pool of many competitors which all speak the same protocol), rather than some backend server.

You may as well just go turn yourself in for your thought crimes now.

I tried, but the form's page didn't load. Some kind of uBlock Origin bug, I guess.

it looks like he's made a lot of people happy with who he's been picking for cabinet positions and other federal executive positions. I know almost none of these people so I'm taking it on the words of others that these people aren't all that bad.

Oh my. You might want to check out his picks for

1. Attorney General (both the current pick and the previously withdrawn one)
2. Secretary of Health and Human Services
3. Director of National Intelligence
4. Secretary of Defense

These individuals in particular are quite ... noteworthy.

Big tech is eventually going to comply, because they have too much to lose. It will happen.

People need to stop relying on "big" tech, and IMHO one really import thing they can/should do is free themselves from having to rely on big tech's software repositories. The two highest-profile examples of that are the Apple and Google app stores for their mobile OSes. (But desktop Linux users, you might have noticed how your situation eerily resembles the centralized distribution commonly used by mobile users.)

Nobody except politicians (who want to buy eyeballs, since controlling media means you get to control votes) probably cares about TikTok. Nevertheless the recent drama with TikTok shows how the US government intends to control people: ban companies from having certain things in their repos. The TikTok story is interesting for that alone.

We need to find some way to condition users into using independent repos, so that secure communications don't get effectively (if not technically) banned. The current trajectory looks like some day, you're going to either have to "sideload" Signal, or learn to do without.

Does it even count as "speech" if it influences people but no one other than you knows you're making it?

I am seeing lots of people talk about it this way, and it's making me think people haven't read the text of the law.

TikTok is not the entity whose 1A rights are being infringed. They may or may not even have 1A rights, at least in the mainstream view, since they are a foreign company.

Whose rights are being infringed are the repository owners: Apple and Google. And this law, exactly as currently written, would also apply to organizations such as Debian.

Did everyone hear that? Debian. I urge everyone to read the damn text. (And to be fair, Linux distros are where I would expect to find the least shady applications, so if we trust the government then it's unlikely Debian would actually be prosecuted for their packages. But we are nevertheless giving the government a new power over them.)

We're not pointing out gun at foreign authors who write books that we don't like; we're pointing our gun at your neighborhood librarian whose library contains a book that we don't like.

One might wonder why anyone would bother to spend the money to pay off Giuliani's debt. What can he do for anyone? His benefactor would be right to ask, "What's in it for me?"

But I do remember him long-ago (late 2020?) saying he had "insurance," though we never found out what that means. Maybe it's about what Giuliani won't do to someone?

Have fun with the imminent civil war.

Great idea, and I'm sorry I didn't see the ramifications of a civil war earlier.

All we have to do is keep the civil war in a state of existence, even if not much is happening. If it's technically never a time of peace, then there's never a time when soldiers can't be quartered in your house. "Didn't you hear there's war on? Now feed my brave Magamen!"

TikTok doesn't matter and nobody cares if people still use it. The value in this is that now we have our foot in the door, such that we can have government dictate what is not allowed in a software repository. (Apple and Google were technically the victims here, and we all hate those companies, right? Fuck them!!)

That is the new law, to which SCOTUS gave their stamp of approval. Finally, Congress can keep unwanted writing out of your neighborhood public library without worrying about SCOTUS overturning them.

Celebrate this today by kicking a librarian in the nuts.

Looks like Congress was just given the power to abridge the freedom of speech. Some people think Congress shouldn't have the power to abridge the freedom of speech, but those people are vastly outnumbered by those who think not just the First Amendment, but all of the Bill of Rights, is worthless bullshit.

If you don't defend basic tenets, they won't defend you. So now the government has the brand new power to say what is allowed in a repo or library, and what is not allowed. And we didn't even have to pass an amendment to repeal the 1st; we just decided "fuck it, this is popular so let's do it."

There's no reason we can't give the rest of the Bill of Rights the same treatment. Maybe a few years from now, all of us will have an amusing anecdote about the time we had to quarter troops in our house.

How about 1981? The Last One

It may not have been "AI", but it was the first of many such things to boast the end of human programmers.

Usenet has what you need, though "driven by algorithms" is pretty vague. But I assume that when people talk about algorithms in social media, they're really talking about differences of opinion on how to "best" select/sort posts. The beauty of Usenet is that selection and sorting is handled by the client, so every user can have it their own way, if they want to.

It does occur to me, social media in the 1980s/1990s really was nicer. But it was smaller, too, so you usually couldn't stalk celebrities, ex-girlfriends, coworkers, etc unless they were fellow dorks. What's the fun in that?

Presumably, these rights all existed before we had networked computers. How were these rights protected back then?

If people could use pre-networked-computers solutions to access these works, would that allow today's digital libraries to remain proprietary and preserve publishers' desire to keep them cripplingly difficult to access? Today's rulers are going to need some way to acknowledge Little Peoples' rights while also functionally denying those rights.

"For example, I prefer doing math in Chinese because each digit is just one syllable, which makes calculations crisp and efficient."

Damn you, seven!!!