PhilipTheBucket
@PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
- Submitted 10 hours ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 1 comment
- Comment on YSK about Jury Nullification, if you're an American and you don't, look it up. 1 day ago:
The natural tendency of any government is towards tyranny. They’re not indomitable, though, and so sometimes the people fight their way a little more towards justice.
Inevitably, when the pendulum swings back, it develops that talking about the old justice-type of government that somebody won with their struggle, is punishable severely at the hands of the new government, which is simultaneously completely happy to be claiming for itself the mandate of the old government. When the old government wasn’t even all that “good,” just a little better than the norm in some respects.
- Comment on YSK about Jury Nullification, if you're an American and you don't, look it up. 1 day ago:
We adopted a lot of the English legal system since a lot of the same courts were still operating before, during and after the revolution. We just wrote a bunch more stuff down (since for some reason even really important stuff in English law is still this kind of “everyone knows it’s that way” weird type of oral history system.) We also modified certain aspects in a more democratic spirit. But a lot of the bedrock, things like precedent, judges, juries, appeals, habeas corpus, and so on, comes from that system, so Bushel’s Case is still relevant in terms of talking about the nature of the judge/jury relationship.
- Comment on YSK about Jury Nullification, if you're an American and you don't, look it up. 1 day ago:
The judge cannot. They can prejudice the jury severely through unequal treatment of evidence, witnesses, and through clearly showing their bias at trial, which in practice can affect the verdict dramatically. On the other hand, doing that makes it a lot easier to overturn the verdict on appeal.
The case which unequivocally established the right of juries to countermand the judge was fucking wild.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel's_Case
The judge was putting William Penn and William Mead on trial for leading an unlawful religious assembly. The jury found the defendants, basically, guilty of “speaking,” but not of the crime they had been accused of. The judge blew his stack and ordered the defendants to be tied up (?) and the jury imprisoned without food, water, or heat. After two days with no food, the jury returned, and amended their verdict to “not guilty.” The judge got pissed again, ordered the jury to be fined (?) instead, and one of the jurors said he definitely wasn’t paying that, and appealed the whole judgement.
The appeals court sided with the jury. People remember Bushel (the juror) and his name is remembered as linked with the principle of law, and all people remember about the judge was that he was an asshole.
- Heritage Foundation Presentation Details Plans To Doxx And Target Wikipeda Editors It Claims Are ‘Abusing Their Position’www.techdirt.com ↗Submitted 2 days ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 3 comments
- Submitted 2 days ago to archaeology@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Submitted 2 days ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Comment on Proton will no longer post on Mastodon 2 days ago:
Yeah. At best, it is clueless.
I think it’s maybe possible that they have a thriving community on Reddit, and not much interaction with people on Mastodon, and they can’t afford to invest the time to pay someone to maintain both, and so some middle-manager who’s not exactly a tech and privacy expert decided to go with the more active one.
You’re completely right though. Even in that super-charitable fantasy scenario, it would have been better to shutter the Reddit community, explain to the thriving community why they would be better served by a different platform, and keep going on Mastodon even if it’s something like 5 people.
- Comment on Proton will no longer post on Mastodon 2 days ago:
It’s not just the resources to mirror posts, it’s also the resources to keep up with communicating with the community, answer questions, maintain a positive presence. It’s not trivial.
I do sort of agree that it’s insane for any privacy company to be emphasizing Reddit over Mastodon. If anything, the limited resources should motivate them shutting down Reddit and keeping Mastodon. But it’s not as totally stupid an explanation as it might seem.
It’s also notable that Reddit’s features make it a lot easier to communicate with tons of people in a genuine way, with minimal effort (since it’s good at surfacing high-voted comments and letting you engage with those people). As well as making it easy to silence anyone who is saying anything you don’t want them to say, of course.
- Submitted 4 days ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Submitted 5 days ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 2 comments
- Submitted 6 days ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 4 comments
- Submitted 6 days ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 2 comments
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 6 days ago:
Yeah, so 18% of the stuff is shipped by someone else. IDK if you want to call that “a lot”, but I definitely wouldn’t call it “very few.” Anyway glad we got to the answer, however to characterize it.
- Comment on Lefty Stacks - Good writers talking about protest or resistance on Substack 1 week ago:
That was actually what inspired me to post this here. We’d been talking about it in the comments over there.
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
Do you have numbers for this? I tried to find some, and couldn’t.
- Comment on Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost 1 week ago:
So like I said, the whole thing is pointless, because Substack changed their minds and kicked out the Nazis about a year ago. Anyone who is attacking them for being a Nazi platform is looking for an excuse, because it isn’t true anymore.
That’s the point, right? Give public pressure to platforms so they will deplatform the Nazis? What sense does it make to fail to notice when they do, and pretend that are still hosting Nazis, and talk incessantly about it when some important non-Nazi is just trying to pursue the critically endangered act of journalism on this platform which has no Nazis?
Why would you do that?
- Comment on Lefty Stacks - Good writers talking about protest or resistance on Substack 1 week ago:
pcmag.com/…/substack-changes-its-mind-will-remove…
I asked this dude to show me some Nazis on Substack, because he was extremely upset about it. Guess who they insisted should do their own research, instead of him having to show them?
- Comment on Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost 1 week ago:
Yeah, Ghost is great. I’m not trying to say any bad thing about it. I think they’re slightly different: Substack went to bat in a big way to foster a community where real journalists could do their journalism there, and get paid for it, and to a large extent it worked. That’s why there are so many high-profile lefties writing there. Ghost is trying to set up a FOSS-style platform that anyone can use. Ghost has monetization too, but they didn’t prime the pump with it nearly as much as Substack did.
They’re both great. I think it’s pretty likely that anyone who’s screaming about Nazis on Substack is just looking for reasons to scream, and the Nazis have very little to do with it except as an excuse.
- Comment on Lefty Stacks - Good writers talking about protest or resistance on Substack 1 week ago:
Inb4 “Substack Nazis boo Nazis Nazis Nazis.” That is incorrect. There were only like 3 neo-Nazis, with about 10 followers apiece, but anyway they kicked them all out some time back now, because the entire internet was yelling at them.
I think it’s highly likely that someone who is screaming at you about how Substack is full of Nazis and officially “bad” probably is either just looking for an opportunity to yell and virtue-signal about how their purity test is more pointlessly pure than yours is, and not up to date on anything about the reality they’re talking about, or else they’re motivated by not wanting you and I to read Tim Snyder and Robert Reich. Either way the Nazis are mostly just an excuse.
I’m not planning to post any Nazi blogs. Everyone can relax.
- Submitted 1 week ago to newcommunities@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost 1 week ago:
absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.
How do you know that? Do you know them personally, or audited them or something?
I don’t know that they are, and looking over their resume it does seem unlikely. But, also, I would have said that same thing looking at Taibbi’s or Greenwald’s resume in 2017. I just know that in this story, they are presenting things in this absolutely wildly inaccurate fashion that would be right at home in a right-wing conspiracy. Certainly, working at The Intercept for a long time isn’t some kind of bulwark against being infected with right-wing-propaganda-ism, with Greenwald himself as one absolutely interesting counterexample clearly on offer.
- Comment on Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost 1 week ago:
Yeah, they have a paid+hosted option, or you can use the FOSS stuff it is based on and go it on your own. It’s a pretty good system I think.
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
Then they are being silly.
I actually don’t think that would be an issue in practice, given how alarmingly eager Fediverse instance operators are to get in bed with Cloudflare and AWS. But, if you are accepting payments, you are for the forseeable future going to be working with some kind of financial processor, and Stripe is far from the worse of the bunch as far as that is concerned.
- Comment on Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost 1 week ago:
Ghost is FOSS, that’s part of the whole point.
- Comment on Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost 1 week ago:
A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem.
What on Earth? They hosted like three Nazis, which is part of the overall commitment to letting people talk which leads them to host a ton of really good people. And then, when everyone on the internet yelled at them for it, raising a pretty reasonable counterpoint, they kicked the Nazis off. That all happened over a year ago.
It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them
I read the citation for this statement. What it says is very different from actively promoting the work of fascists and recruiting them. There is a whole fascinating conversation to be had about why some high-profile lefty journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald all of a sudden became Nazis, but it’s very misleading to assign 100% of the blame in this way to Substack, purely because they were working with those people before it really became completely clear to everyone that they for whatever bizarre reason had become Nazis. It’s a lot more complex situation that is being summarized in this extremely glib spin-soaked fashion.
And it’s funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen
Okay, fair enough. This is pretty interesting and I hadn’t known it.
On the other hand, Substack also hosts Sy Hersh, Tim Snyder, Salman Rushdie, and God knows who else. If they were planning to slant their coverage based on the fact that Andreesen’s company gave them $15 million in 2019 (which they then quickly turned around and gave big chunks of to working journalists), you’d think they would be making some kind of effort to downplay the leftist voices which they are currently hosting, outnumbering the “problematic” voices which might be there but which I have literally run across on Substack.
Elon Musk also, apparently, tried to buy Substack in 2023, and they told him to fuck off.
This whole article reads like a bad-faith hit piece aimed at one of the organizations that actually is trying to provide a space for good journalism including left-wing authors, and making sure that it’s sustainable and they can get paid. By trumping up some various things into much bigger deals than they need to be.
I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets, encouraging people on the left to savage and abandon them for various little misdemeanors until the only news outlets left are ones that are either bought and purchased, or too small and scattered to make a difference?
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
A lot of the terrifying aspects of slinging money around that people are talking about in this thread actually do become terrifying, once Bitcoin and friends are your platform. Fraud? Refunds? Someone hacked your server and stole your wallet? All that stuff is now 100% your problem, there is absolutely no way to “undo” of something wrong happens, and no infrastructure in place to handle any of it or any professionals with already a simple system in place for it.
I actually think 3% is roughly a fair fee for the processor to charge you, in exchange for agreeing to worry about all of that nonsense on your behalf so you can just collect the money. For in-person transactions, it’s mostly just a predatory rent payment, but for online transactions where the possibility for malfeasance is amplified, it makes sense to me.
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
Why do you hate fun
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
Yeah. I think a lot of the people in these comments are people just not experienced with business who assume that it is scary and impossible. There are certain aspects that are hairy if you don’t know what you’re getting into, but the whole system is designed to make it pretty easy. On the whole pie chart of “pain in the ass aspects,” there are some pretty big slices in places, but “I have to set up a Stripe account oh no” is not one of them lol. That one is a tiny tiny sliver.
Even if you decide to collect payments yourself and do payouts to merchants yourself, like a little Etsy or Amazon, dealing with the headaches involved with sending and receiving the cash will still be a minority of your problems. Although they will jump up to being significant.
I kind of want to express interest for getting involved with this thing with you, since I do think it’s a really good idea, but IDK if I really want to take it on. I do think it’s a really good idea, though. Basically add the “operated by actual humans” aspect to online e-commerce as it is being added for online social media.
- Comment on Can we please make a viable (federated!) amazon alternative? I have an idea! 1 week ago:
I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That’s how I know that part is trivial.
You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: stripe.com