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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Because I am not sure if I want a 3rd party “controlling” my trafic. It sucks that my behavior is shared around in ad networks but I am not sure if the ad blocking components are more trustworthy. There are certainly good solutions out there but I am sceptic of the explosion of new ad blocking tools. Having said that, I never did a deep research to check if my scepticism is justified…



  • A point made by Morten Rand-Hendriksen: We software engineers are not real engineers. Unlike other kind of engineers, we do not have to follow industry code of conudct like meachincal engineers or civil engineers. We are just a bunch dudes that learned to use tensorflow on stackoverflow. That is why our work is dangerous and we can always just “be told” what to do for money.

    Airplanes could not be built like that. Calling ourselfs “engineers” is misleading as it suggest we follow some ethics or code of conduct. It will hurt us on the long run.


  • This contradicts somehow the use case of a federated network, but there would also be major benefits from something like this.

    I am not sure how to feel about this. On the other hand it would mean that a node in the network cannot “outgrow” its own “moderation power”. But this would make the nodes vulnerable to a terrible form of attack or it would force the node to implement more rigorous sing-up procedures. All of these scenarios could end up pretty distopian!

    I believe if users are empowered to participate in combating the problem, almost all users would. The question is, how can the nodes harvest this? What can ordinary users do to help?


  • Thank you OP for linking the original paper!

    I have seen it cited and re-cited by the usual outlets such as WaPo and The Verge. I feel they sensentionalize too much and very little info is available on the magnitude of this problem even on centralized platforms. I have a hard time believing that paid “content scanners” are an effective solution. And hopefully not the best solution the internet can come up with…

    Very grim topic but I appreciate the community talks early about it! I find it frustrating that major news outlets focus on sensentionalism rather than platforming a productive discussion…