961–970 of 1001 posts
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Hell even Telegram(esp in earlier days) looks like a Whatsapp re-skin to the untrained eye
Maybe they are now ( haven't used Whatsapp in a while ), but not 5-10 years ago
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Musk unbanned literal Nazis and people who posted CSAM, while also making "cisgender" an autoflagged word on Twitter.
I'm pretty into right wing blogs and forums. I have yet to see even a glimpse of a Nazi and even anyone that goes beyond "why is half of Bidens Whitehouse Jewish? Isn't that weird? Why do so many politicians have to take a photo in Israel?" That's as 'Nazi' as it gets.
It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in. I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who…
Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.
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The HN crowd is far right but they would never admit it. Most people are unaware of how political parties shift in composition and ideology over the decades. The contemporary American software engineer resembles the professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the suburbs in the 80's and 90's.
The HN crowd is far left but they would never admit it. Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections. There was a time in America where the notion of…
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More to the point: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/scotus-tosses-cl... "On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related content."
Further in that article: > “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech," Alito wrote. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent." It seems like the court had agreement that government coercion did happen. They threw the case out because they couldn’t draw a direct…
The only "pressure" that was put on FB, was the same put on Twitter, which was that reports and requests from Administration employees has some higher gravity than other reports. The "investigation" here, and Zuckerberg's responce are not evidence of wrongdoing, only political maneuvering.
Notably, Meta's algorithmic feed evolved so rapidly that it had major consequences before they were well understood. 1) FB launched and was able to scale past MySpace by making its feed algorithmic and gracefully degrading the freshness of content to get good uptime while MySpace was unusable during peak hours of the day. 2) FB realized that the feed being algorithmic could be a good thing, and could drive engagement…
1-10 sound about right. Though I'd question how relevant the algo/scaling component really was for FB to outcompete MySpace. > it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall. I mean, it's not like the CCP isn't doing a superset of the same things...
Or a subset! Facebook is also a very effective social credit score if viewed through that lens.
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Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.
If it goes through I bet you are going to have all sorts of people trying to claim unrealized losses for a tax break, that is gonna be a fun time for the courts.
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of d…
I'd much prefer seeing us close up the tax loop holes than create an even more complex system. Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer. We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than further increase its complexity.
You can't really deduct realized losses either (annoyingly). You can use them to offset gains in future years, but they're not a deduction.
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> The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%. All companies eventually go to zero and some of them do it without a lot of notice. How many people in the year 2000 expected Kodak to be bankrupt in a dozen years? But that isn't even the main problem. Suppose you own 51% of your company,…
> Suppose you own 51% of your company, i.e. a controlling interest. The company is doing very well under your leadership -- value doubles. But then you have to pay tax on the unrealized gain. The shares are your main asset so the only way to pay is to sell them. Now you no longer have a majority of the shares and control of the company moves to the soulless Wall St vampire squid which only cares how much money they c…
So your premise is that the government gets the shares, but can't sell them and can't vote? To begin with this implies that they would never be able to spend the money, and then what's the point? Moreover, that's effectively taking those shares off the market, so if the policy applies to everyone (i.e. price goes up so all shareholders have a capital gain) it would be equivalent to a reverse stock split, which is a paper transaction with no real effect.
> But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
Those workarounds aren't free. VCs are wary about putting a lot of money into a company without a corresponding allocation of voting rights, i.e. the exact opposite of "the founders keep voting rights for themselves". Also, first time founders often don't know they can even do this and by the time they figure out it's important it's too late.
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This is not the first time Pavel being not very truthful. I rememeber when he was the CEO of Vkontakte, in 2012 he published a post claiming that he is living a modest life: "I don't own planes, cars or homes. My world is walking or riding the subway and sleeping in a 215 sq ft rental apartment. Those who want to be me would also have to give up meat, alcohol and expensive clothes". And just a year later there were t…
AFAIK all this info was leaked by the enemy of Pavel's brother, they had a conflict over a woman, not saying the information is false > while driving a Mercedes it's typical for the rich to register their properties to a friend/family/classmate