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For however long flagging on HN has no downsides.

The bill had no traction, "until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app."

"How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It" (https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-was-blindsided-by-a-u-s-...)

> its very obvious from public statements by both co-sponsors that the primary motivation for this bill was concern with Chinese influence.

Here's an op-ed authored by bill sponsor Mike Gallagher entitled, "Why Do Young Americans Support Hamas? Look at TikTok.": https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...


> This is brainrot conspiracy garbage.

Here's Mitt Romney explaining that "the number of mentions of Palestinians" was the reason why "there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok": https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587

> Additionally, if you're defending TikTok because it allowed them to amplify support for the Palestinian cause, it's interesting that TikTok themselves claim that you are wrong, as they said to the US Supreme court that "allegations that TikTok has amplified support for either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unfounded". Are they lying here? If so, why should we trust them with control over mass social media? If they're not lying, you are wrong.

The sentence that you quoted from that Wikipedia page came at the end of this paragraph:

  Several officials subsequently cited alleged pro-Palestinian bias on the app. While advocating for a ban, Representative Mike Gallagher alleged "rampant pro-Hamas propaganda on the app". Senators Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, Representative Mike Lawler, and other Republicans have also alleged that TikTok had a pro-Palestine bias, with Lawler even alleging that TikTok was being manipulated during pro-Palestinian protests at colleges. In a filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok's attorneys said, "Allegations that TikTok has amplified support for either side of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict are unfounded."
There's no contradiction if TikTok was telling the truth about its neutrality: not amplifying support for Israel was reason enough to get banned by the United States government, and immediately after Trump's first reprieve a year ago TikTok began flagging and removing "Free Palestine" posts as hate speech (https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/tiktok-labels-free-pal...).


The conspiracy here is the idea that the only reason someone might want TikTok in the US to be under US control is to suppress information about Gaza. The best reason is to have the media that people in the US consume not be controlled by geopolitical rivals through opaque algorithms!


Literally yes. "Tariffs on imports are designed to raise the price of imported goods to discourage consumption."


> I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail"

What were the repercussions of this: "FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websi...)


I think there’s a difference between leaving a CP site up for two weeks so you can track the users, versus actively posting CP on legal websites for the purpose of blackmailing third parties into blocking them (“The Bardfinn Method”).


"The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves"

"The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days"

"There was no other way we could identify as many players"

I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage.

Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement


In the pilot episode of Banshee (2013), a character has transparent monitors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PiIhMs4k88) which never showed up again. They seemed higher tech than anything else in the series and I was never able to find information on them.


When I first read Asimov's Foundation, I thought the decline and loss of knowledge in the Galactic Empire within a few generations was unrealistically quick. It's been eye-opening to witness new parents who not only don't know that they're supposed to teach their children to read, but wouldn't know how to do so.


Also, the Portland thing.

We have cameras and planes and stuff. How is the idea that downtown is a burnt out hole in the ground full of rubble (or not) an actual controversy?


Late GenXer here. I went from a place with pretty good schools to one with with pretty bad schools and a strong religious/honor culture background. I went from a humans can accomplish anything to one of we are damned at a pretty young age. It seems so many people are fact resistant from a young age.


The people who need to find out aren't curious and aren't looking for proof that counters what they're inclined to believe. They won't check what locals are saying and the videos of nothing-much-happening they're posting. They watch the same handful of shocking crime videos on Facebook and are sure the cities are overrun with rampant lawlessness (and apparently the residents are just persistently too stupid, over decades, to do anything about it, voting-wise, and need the Federal Government to step in despite their protestations and save them? It's a puzzling world view if you think about it for even a second), watch Fox News showing b-roll of fire and violence from one city block on one night for weeks on end (or from another city and year entirely) and claiming that's the whole city all the time, see news sites doing the same (one infamously put a photo of early '90s LA riots at the top of one of these articles recently, JFC)

You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically, overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century. The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still here, everything turned out OK) will be curious & interested enough to find that out.


Additionally, syllabaries (like the kana) are not alphabets.


You are technically correct! Alphabets (ABC) are for phonemes, syllabaries are for syllables (hiragana, Cherokee), logograms are for words (chinese characters). Of course, some writing systems are very much hybrids (like Chinese, or hieroglyphics, or even the humble ampersand).


To be sure, 'logogram' is an even worse word than 'ideograph' for what the Chinese writing system is.


Nonsense.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alphabet

> al·pha·bet

> a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order

And then it shows an Alphabet Table beginning with Hebrew and Arabic.


Nobody finds it at all questionable that this submitter has "authored" around a dozen such books in 30 days?


Yeah, 15 different "Little books of..." here: https://github.com/orgs/little-book-of/repositories. Seems LLM-assisted.

This post about neural networks is from the "Math" book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434678.


And many of them have the same "citation" to the math one by a Duc-Tam Nguyen, which they then didn't bother to adjust the title of.

I'd vote for flagging this submission. It's just AI slop.


I've been preparing these notes for 20 years, and now it's finally time to put them online. Please judge them by their content, not by whether they were "LLM-assisted" or not. All the books are licensed under CC-BY-SA, and I intend to keep sharing more with the community free of charge. If you find any errors, please open an issue or submit a pull request, and I'm happy to fix them. https://github.com/little-book-of/c/pull/4 (for examples, this one) I know many of these books still need polishing (fixing bugs, improving wording, etc.), but I'm glad that some people already find them helpful. It really saddens me when people dismiss the project as just "AI slop." I've poured a lot of time and care into it.


How much is CC-BY-SA worth if nobody knows how much of the content fell out of an LLM?

> I've been preparing these notes for 20 years, and now it's finally time to put them online.

As much as I would like to believe that, there are too many red flags at this point and you have given little indication that it's true. If you really are an expert in all the fields of your little books, it should be easy for you to provide references/credentials?

No, that's not gatekeeping, as in this day and age, those things become more and more important to be able to separate the sea of slop from the real deal.


Oh wow, I would not have caught that. I had a look at the first couple of pages, and as not-a-C-expert, it looked pretty solid to me. Readjusting our heuristics to generated slop (or even non-slop?) is gonna take so much more energy than before.

Although I've also been thinking about the overall role of effort in products, art, or any output really. Necessary effort to produce something is / was at least some indicator of quality that means that the author spent a certain amount of time with the material, and probably didn't want to release something bad if it meant they had to put a certain threshold of effort in anyways. With that gone, of course some people are gonna get their productivity enhanced and use this tool to make even better things, more often. But having to expend even more engery as a consumer to find out whether something is worth it is incredibly hard.


Because all the content is taken from my personal notes (with more to come on building a search engine, vector database, and graph database in C and Go), in the last step I used an LLM for editing and fixing grammar and formulas (typing LaTeX by hand takes a lot of time). If you find the content to be just AI slop, I'm sorry for taking your time.


Thanks for noticing!


I wonder if those LICENSE files in such repositories even mean anything in the world of LLM created stuff/slop/crap.

There is no obvious authorship attached to this "Little book" which is a tell-tale sign since anybody investing time into actually writing such a book would surely like to claim authorship.


It's just me and my operating system called Emacs, with no editor and no publisher. With the help of LLMs, I can finally share some of my notes and ideas with the world.


So you assume that writing those books takes little time? Just some "prompt magic," and boom, a book appears?


Yes, that's what I think. Considering the number of "little books" you (assuming it was you) published in the last weeks, it's a reasonable view, don't you think?


The fact that you preemptively lampshaded this shows that you are well aware that this post actually is textbook trolling whataboutism from an account that only started spamming submissions about other famines (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mhb) after a thread about Israel's starvation of Gaza (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45447699) hit the front page a day ago. A thread in which mhb posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454862), and a topic on which mhb has a long history on this site of genocide denial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731958, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44749417).


Have you asked yourself why exactly you and the HN commentariat are so fascinated by what Israel is doing and are not yourselves submitting front page posts about the orders of magnitude worse problems in the rest of the world? I'm surprised you can see past the plank in your eye to see the speck of sawdust in mine.


Please don't post personal attacks or insinuations like this on HN. There are easily-understood reasons why the Israel/Palestine story has more prominence in the Western media and on HN: primarily that the Western world has had such a significant and direct role in the affairs of that country/region through its complicated history of the past century-or-so. That doesn't mean we should ignore other conflicts and humanitarian crises. Human suffering matters, wherever it exists and for whatever reason. But we don't need to invoke nefarious explanations for why Israel/Palestine attracts more attention in the Western world.


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