Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

richardosgood.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 396 posts

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#351

Post by margalabargala »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #341
margalabargala wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because extremist propaganda does not "average out" to an objective center. If you want to distribute it in a box labeled "extremist propaganda", to study it as such, sure. But if your society has some extremist propaganda in the wild, distributing more, different extremist propaganda will make things strictly worse.

Who defines what is extremist propaganda? The people who win the propaganda war and get to label the other side as extremists is the answer.

Extremism can be more-or-less objectively defined in terms of difference from the mean/median. Measurement is tricky but just because something has fuzzy boundaries doesn't mean it's meaningless. Especially when something is not near that fuzzy boundary.

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#352

Post by john_strinlai »

some_random wrote: post #348
john_strinlai wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they're not "not allowed". ...yes? that is the meaning of "ban", so it seems entirely appropriate to use that word

Sorry to tell you this but you've been lied to about these books being banned, as in they are not being banned, they are still allowed.

what does this reply have to do with your misunderstanding about the definition of "ban"?

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#353

Post by havblue »

sfink wrote: post #312
steviedotboston wrote: post #268

Cool project, except these aren't really "banned" books. thats a misleading term. In most of these cases, the book isn’t actually banned. Nobody is being arrested for owning it, Amazon isn’t forbidden from selling it, and adults can still read it whenever they want. What’s really being debated is whether a particular school library, children’s section, or curriculum should include a book. That’s not the same thing as…

You may be overthinking this. "Banned" in this case means that the usual person or people who choose what books to include are being overridden by a party with more clout. From the perspective of a school librarian, for example, book X has been banned. They no longer have the option of including it. (This is even true in the case where the librarian would not have included it anyway, for their own reasons.) They are…

I believe that the party with the most clout is the one that controls the frame. So yes, some parents may keep Slaughterhouse Five out of libraries. Meanwhile those same parents become strawmanned villains in mainstream movies like Footloose. So I don't think pulling a book is that effective when it winds up on a "you can't read this" list.

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#354

Post by some_random »

john_strinlai wrote: post #352
some_random wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to tell you this but you've been lied to about these books being banned, as in they are not being banned, they are still allowed.

what does this reply have to do with your misunderstanding about the definition of "ban"?

The books are not banned. Students are allowed to possess the books. Students are allowed to read the books.

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#355

Post by Panda_ »

The ending notes about a mesh network remind me of the Reticulum Network Stack[1].

As far as I can tell, RNS is a networking protocol that attempts to provide a mesh network that can run over almost any bidirectional connection (and interconnect different types of connections) without centralisation (basically random addresses using encryption, and announces to make that address reachable).

It's kinda similar to Meshtastic and Meshcore but designed to be more generic for any connection. Compared to Meshcore it's less bandwidth efficient since it uses larger addresses but I like RNS more because it's more generic (it's intended to be fairly bandwidth efficient but at a larger more internet level scale than just kilobytes per second) and less proprietary than the Meshcore official ecosystem. Compared to Meshtastic, RNS is much more efficient since it doesn't use flood routing for every packet.

[1] https://reticulum.network/

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#356

Post by john_strinlai »

some_random wrote: post #354
john_strinlai wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does this reply have to do with your misunderstanding about the definition of "ban"?

The books are not banned. Students are allowed to possess the books. Students are allowed to read the books.

our conversation started by discussing the definition of "ban" and people interpreting the word "ban" in a way not written in any dictionary.

but now you are saying "the books" as if we were already talking about specific books. are you sure you are replying to the comment chain you intended to reply to?

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#357

Post by andruby »

srean wrote: post #203
antman wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have peak flow of propaganda and disinformation to a cartoonish level.

Unfortunately we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack on information consumption. It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale. Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not…

> Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary?

_Most_ developed countries do invest in the education and teaching of critical thinking. It's not even that expensive.

In most countries, if a political party prefers an uneducated voter base, they don't win elections. Or if they do, there are enough working checks and balances (and parties in the opposition) to prevent serious harm.

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#358

Post by clort »

The article did not mention compression at all.. surely it would be worth expending the space for a small decompressor in the web server, so that books stored in the device were sent decompressed and the number of books stored could be 5x or more..

A lzs decompressor is pretty simple ..

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#359

Post by takipsizad »

p-e-w wrote: post #337
Forgeties79 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every time you use hackernews you’re contributing to the climate crisis in some form or other. These kinds of comments are not productive.

There’s a difference between the two. All politics is based on violence because violence is how laws are enforced. Thus by participating in politics (which includes voting), one implicitly endorses violence. By contrast, an online service is not “based on destroying the climate”, that’s at best an unfortunate side effect, and possibly not even that as there are plenty of hosters that are climate neutral now. More imp…

if you genuinely think "All politics is based on violence " please do not participate in political discussions

Re: Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb

#360

Post by zymhan »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #299
steviedotboston wrote: post #268

Cool project, except these aren't really "banned" books. thats a misleading term. In most of these cases, the book isn’t actually banned. Nobody is being arrested for owning it, Amazon isn’t forbidden from selling it, and adults can still read it whenever they want. What’s really being debated is whether a particular school library, children’s section, or curriculum should include a book. That’s not the same thing as…

How is this different from banning alcohol or pets or weapons or any other thing? Whether or not you can buy and have at a different location doesn't mean the word is misleading.

Restricting knowledge is fundamentally different.
Post reply on HN