It's pretty apparent that the arrests are happening to people who explicitly call for violence, eg the woman who called for burning down all hotels housing immigrants. Musk, Rogan, etc are patient zero of the ones amplifying the false idea that you can get in legal trouble "for posting an opinion."
> It's pretty apparent that the arrests are happening to people who explicitly call for violence
Unless the statute specifically makes that distinction, then that's not very compelling. There are already laws against inciting violence. Hate speech laws are specifically understood to be about outlawing speech that contain or incite "hate", whose definition is typically broad.
If that comment meets the bar for "explicitly calling for violence", tens of Hackernews posters would be getting arrested daily for how they talk about billionaires. AOC should avoid travel to the UK because her "eat the rich" rhetoric is an explicit call for violence under this standard. Etc etc.
No, what they've done is create a low and unclear bar for what constitutes criminal speech, which allows the police and judges to apply the law selectively. So yeah maybe technically it's illegal but you won't get arrested for saying "eat the rich".
I interviewed for an eng role at Coursera back in 2012, not too long after they were founded. Their claimed goal at the time was a re-imagining of education, insisting that current educational institutions were stuck in the past.
Despite that, a large portion of the interview focused on my grades from my time at University, and the specific course-work I had taken. Note that this was for application engineering, and it wasn't my first job out of school. About half of my frontend engineering session was the interviewer focusing on my single sub-B grade (got a C+ in Operating Systems). Mind you, my overall CS BS GPA was a 3.5 from a top-10 engineering school, with a 3.6 in major-specific courses. It seemed like the team was largely Stanford grads, and they really, really, really cared about GPA and school-- basically playing right into the legacy education system.
I knew at that point that there was no way the company was going to "disrupt" anything with regard to education.
A specific example: for some reason, when working on Playwright scripts, Claude really likes to inject
await page.waitForLoadState('networkidle');
But this isn't good, and is not encouraged. So much so that there's an eslint that suggests removing it. This means that by running the linter, if Claude does decide to inject this, it gets taken out, because the linter runs and then tells it so.
> The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate
This was their claim, but it did not pan out in reality. It flopped on launch, hard. Peak player count since launch has been less than 100, and is currently hovering around 25.
It was really proof that gameplay often takes a back seat to visual identity, ESPECIALLY if the gameplay is extremely derivative, which this was. They had a massive amount of goodwill from fans of the genre, but when they started sharing screenshots it deflated fast - its not a 2025 game, its a 2010 clone of a popular 2005 game. Its nigh impossible to make a spiritual successor to genre defining games in WC3 and SC2 - too many things need to go perfect.
It had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
Huh the gameplay was ass?
The units weren't interesting, the strategies derivative, the flow bad, the balance off, not even half finished campaign and 0 goodwill from kickstarters after rugpulling content that was promised and charging them for it
The sign for me was when the art style was announced. The last thing in the world I want from a modern RTS is Fortnite-style animation targeted towards tweens.
Kali ruled. I played a modified version of Hellfire (unofficial Diablo expansion that technically didn't support multiplayer) on Kali for the longest time. GTX_Rage, if you're here, I want to talk to you!
> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it"
Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible"
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
The problem is that this administration and their ilk have incompetently misinterpreted 'censorship' to mean 'not letting random strangers use your private property to publish things you don't want them to.'
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
In the context of the Constitution, government censorship is the only thing that the United States cares about.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
If I was on a telephone call which selectively declined to transmit certain words or topics to the receiving party, I would consider that a form of censorship, even if it wasn't the government doing it.
> You can just move to a different country that doesn't censor you.
The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it.
"You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
In the past, when "private property" was literally property, a whole town owned by a company (used to be very common), American courts decided that the company owning the town couldn't restrict free speech in that town.
These days the "property" in question is just a fancy telecom system. And it's already an established principle in America that the phone company doesn't cut off your line just because you're talking some political smack.
When that "private property" is a larger business than many countries and can literally sway elections then yes we should not treat it the same as your personal blog.
Is this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
Except they're under pressure to not exercise such wide latitude. A few months ago, many who had already passed the exam and were just awaiting placement found out they would have to retake the exam, a different one more to the liking of the current administration:
Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
Hopefully, yes. The free speech situation in Germany is ... not good. Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
> Completely useless and reactionary laws restricting speech of specific symbols are only a small part of it of course but any global pushback would be good.
You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.
Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.
And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.
Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
Apple wanted to scan pictures stored on our phones using a perceptual diff algorithm and compare them by similarity to known CSAM. So basically there’s a world out there where the baby bath pics your wife took will get flagged and she’ll have to prove she’s not a predator.
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