How do you see the WSJ as not biased, when it's owned by Murdoch, who openly interferes in and biases Fox News, as has been demonstrated numerous times including in massive losses in court.
Do you think Murdoch wouldn't do that at the WSJ?
With that signal and the editorial page, I think it's wishful thinking to think the rest isn't biased - people just don't want to lose that institution. Much can be done without the reader knowing - omissions, slant, etc. In the end, you must trust them to a degree.
I think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played because they don't realize the game and its stakes:
'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered.
The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it.
It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information.
The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.
I wish sophisticated communicators like Gates would skip the strawpeople arguments as setups; it's the end of any serious examination before it even begins.
> doomsday message
That term reveals a partisan position: it's a strawperson ridiculing those who talk about the great risks and harms of climate change. 'Don't look up!'
> Interesting and different perspective
It's an old, well-worn perspective, that is commonplace now - especially in American business and government, it's more common than the 'realist' perspective on climate change. It's incredible that they - the entrenched, very powerful status quo power structure - depict themselves as insurgents for advocating the same old climate denial policies.
IMHO: The entrenched capitalists (including Gates) and their power structure simply don't want to change - a bias of the status quo. They are asserting a reactionary conservative position - no change, no matter what, and hate those who want change - regardless of its validity in reality, with the idea that nobody can make them change. They make spurious arguments like Gates to divert people - a tactic they can do endlessly.
The idea that the answer to the enormous damage of the entrenched capitalists is empower them more is, when you think about it, laughable and absurdly myopic and self serving. They can't even carry out the charade for 10 minutes - now those entrenched capitalists are building massive power-consuming datacenters, eliminating ESG, destroying renewable energy in the world's biggest economy ... I'm sure they'll save us.
But notice I keep talking about entrenched capitalists. An essential of capitalism and free markets is creative destruction. These failed capitalists - and climate change is an historic failure, about which their predictions and decisions were enormous errors - should be destroyed (economically) and buried like Lehman Brothers, and new ones, who correctly anticipate it and deal with it, should be funded.
Really, all we need is to stop making taxpayers fund climate change - prevention, remediation, cleanup from disasters, etc. - and have a GHG tax that prices things according to their real cost, rather than subsidizing the current failures. Then real, innovative capitalists in a free market can thrive.
There are interesting questions to pose - what are the differences and why not follow those paths. Signal is a different application and organization, which has different requirements and resources - for example, they can't optimize performance by sacrificing security, and they have limited resources. It's hard for me to imagine Signal, with already constrained development resources, devoting people, time, wealth and attention to building a private cloud - they would have two businesses, cloud and private communications app. And to match AWS would be pretty difficult - how about scalability for the days when Signals load shoots up? I wonder how these other organizations do it - some clearly have far greater resources than a non-profit with almost no revenue streams.
But you're kidding yourself and everyone else to state an answer. It's amazing how HN commenters love to use leading FOSS projects, like Signal and Mozilla, as targets for their performative takedowns - it causes real harm to the most important projects around. Taken seriously, the parent comment's arguments contain no engineering, and their foundation is a lot of assumptions and arrogance:
No engineering is required to understand those arguments. No competent practicing engineer would offer a serious opinion about an organization and technical issue that they haven't directly examined.
The assumptions are a long list: The totality of reasons that Signal has, as an organization, to choose AWS. The people who made the decision:likely others at Signal were heavily involved, and the CEO's role is unknown to us - maybe just approval - and possibly it was before Whittaker was there. Signal having unlimited flexibiliy in requirements and resources to optimize for this issue.
The arrogance is that we know better than Signal's CEO and team members, who are intimately familiar with the project, the organization, its requirements, its resources. The parent doesn't address most of those essentials.
But maybe the parent is performative - that's not illegal, but ugh, pick on the big guys; punch up, not down.
We do know better than Signal's CEO because Whittaker's statements are false. She said:
> The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers
> Which is why nearly everyone that manages a real-time service–from Signal, to X, to Palantir, to Mastodon–rely at least in part on services provisioned by these companies
Which is both dishonest and stupid. She's claiming it's impossible to run an app like Signal outside of public cloud despite all her main competitors doing so. That's why she lists a bunch of non-competitors to try and support her argument.
So it's ironic you say it's arrogant for us to judge their requirements, because we know their requirements. Signal's design is fully open and the requirements of such platforms are well known. It's rather Whittaker's thread which is the height of arrogance. Her response to criticism of downtime is to be "concerned" at the ignorant users who don't "understand" the "concentration of power" and to "explain" to people why it's impossible to do better even as her competitors all do it. It's practically gaslighting.
One major missing piece in using AIs is self-expression. The idea of writing is to express your own ideas, to put yourself on the page; someone writing for you, AI or biological, can't do that. There are far too many nuances and subtleties.
I suspect many students write to pass the class, and AI can do that. Perhaps the problem is the incentives to write that way.
> Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc
People have some different challenges writing papers and taking oral and written quizzes, but is one way or the other necessarily easier? For writing papers, think about language barriers, anxiety about writing ability, stress of writing papers, need for self-motivation and time management, etc.
reply