He Always Had a Dark Side • Hacker News Board

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#361

Post by hendry » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #13

> Lulu told me that when Le Roux was 15 or 16, in the late 1980s, the local police raided the family home and arrested Paul for selling pornography online. This seems a bit odd to me, having lived in South Africa at that time. There's almost no way a guy at home would have had that kind of access in Apartheid South Africa to the internet back then. There was access, but it was through big companies or academia and on…

> Telecoms operator allowed in Apartheid South Africa (Telkom) would have been unaffordable.

Bluebeep dude! Where were you? https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/714901743830700032

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#362

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #341

ekianjo wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everything have to end up in a podcast?

because reading is such a drag. No but really turning a long text into podcast can really add to a work. Just Look at something like Serial.

Serial works this way because it uses a lot of interviews from external folks. That would not work at all in writing. You have to design for reading or design for podcasting, there's rarely a case where something works well on both media.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#363

Post by sinxoveretothex » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 12:13 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #241

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? I was directly responding to your criteria for assessing morality.

Fair enough. I have little use for assessing the moral opinions of others. As I wrote recently, stuff that isn't testable isn't worth worrying about.

I can't tell if you're being serious or facetious.

A given moral rule doesn't change because it's held by you versus someone else. Just like it makes no sense to refuse to answer the question of whether a fruit is an apple because it is in my hand instead of yours.

In other words, by having a moral rule yourself, you implicitly have a moral metarule: a rule about how to choose your moral rules.

Your refusal to answer the question doesn't make sense.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#364

Post by bipingautam » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

i did not like truecrypt very much just because we could not choose the encryption encapsulation in any order we could choose (like something to remember like password) like in ANY order blowfish-blowfish-sherpent-aes ...... etc in any length or combination. there were just hardcoded defaults to choose

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#365

Post by bipingautam » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

i did not like truecrypt very much just because we could not choose the encryption encapsulation in any order we could choose (like something to remember like password) like in ANY order blowfish-blowfish-sherpent-aes ...... etc in any length or combination. there were just hardcoded defaults to choose

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#366

Post by katiabachko » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

Folks might be interested that the new episode has been posted: http://atav.st/1UWp09h

It follows the arrival of a mysterious arms shipment, and Paul Le Roux's shift toward violence, with a cameo from an animal trainer who worked with the whale in Free Willy, and also, Le Roux's private militia in Somalia.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#367

Post by mratzloff » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #362

Jommi wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because reading is such a drag. No but really turning a long text into podcast can really add to a work. Just Look at something like Serial.

Serial works this way because it uses a lot of interviews from external folks. That would not work at all in writing. You have to design for reading or design for podcasting, there's rarely a case where something works well on both media.

Yes, but I think it's probably possible that interviews could be conducted. Maybe interviews were even already conducted and recorded for this approximately 50,000 word series...

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#368

Post by mirimir » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 6:39 PM UTC

sinxoveretothex wrote: post #363

mirimir wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I have little use for assessing the moral opinions of others. As I wrote recently, stuff that isn't testable isn't worth worrying about.

I can't tell if you're being serious or facetious. A given moral rule doesn't change because it's held by you versus someone else. Just like it makes no sense to refuse to answer the question of whether a fruit is an apple because it is in my hand instead of yours. In other words, by having a moral rule yourself, you implicitly have a moral metarule: a rule about how to choose your moral rules. Your refusal to answer…

People have all sorts of moral rules. It tends to vary by culture, religion, and so on. Maybe you can abstract them all into some overall set. But you lose some subtleties.

But I also don't judge the moral rules that others hold. That's one of my operating principles. You can't judge without knowing that you're right. And there's no canonical source for that. I do have opinions about how well some moral rules work vs others. But that's not about judging, only assessing workability.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#369

Post by mirimir » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 6:46 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #328

patio11 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police officers, almost universally. Abortionists. Parents of little children, frequently. "This guy we pictured in front of a gay bar." Many people who find themselves targeted by one of the (numerous) Internet hate machines. Elected officials. Unelected officials. Anyone involved in a contract negotiation with the Teamsters. People who take substantial efforts so that ex-romantic partners do not discover where they…

There's a difference between outing details of someone's life with salacious or hostile intent and telling a story. The fact that this guy on one hand built an incredibly high quality application that had and has a major positive impact on the world is a story that needs to be told. The fact that he's a damaged, amoral man who is allegedly a career criminal and drug dealer is a story that demands to be told. He repre…

Maybe drug dealers are the unsung heroes of drug law liberalization. The Drug War was arguably driven by racist and authoritarian goals. So dealers are arguably freedom fighters, rather than criminals. Maybe he killed some people, but I suspect that was in self defense.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#370

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #259

mirimir wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of "criminal kingpin" is entirely based on "a group I identify with". In this case, some nation or government or whatever. So, as I see it, there's arguably no fundamental distinction between your two examples. It's arguably all about power.

Dude, please. Laws are abstractions and relative and whatnot, but Really Bad People do exist and the public has a right to know. Otherwise, why have journalists or even laws at all?

But myerbergs_army's stated rationale was not that Le Roux is fair game for doxxing because he's so bad, it was that he was fair game because his activities are newsworthy.