Threads for guan
I also noticed that they finally stopped overriding “smooth scrolling” on Macs.
Literally laughed and giggled out loud. Absolutely hilarious.
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It would have made a little more sense if the block size were, say, 8 or 16 bytes. But yeah, I laughed too.
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A large block size would make sense but the 1 byte block size made me laugh the most.
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SIM31 is a digital mode that is similar in many ways to PSK31, but has forward error correction.
I am very familiar with this smell from my $megacorp days and it smells of something brown and sticky and I don’t mean a stick.
First of all, this, and the whole letter, attempts to present a justification for why the experiment was carried out in this manner in terms of “this is the only way in which it could have been efficiently carried out”. Even if that were the case, and there really is no other way to study the efficiency of a review process with 100% accuracy (which is extremely doubtful IMHO), that is no justification for carrying it out in the first place. Some experiments simply cannot be carried out in an ethical manner. Tough luck, but there are always going to be other things to write papers about.
But the justification for not kickstarting any kind of discussion and not getting consent is pretty dubious:
Deliberately sending buggy patches is not the only way to study the review process. You can do an “offline” study and look at regressions, for example, where the harm is already done. Or you can carry out the study “in vitro”, where consenting maintainers review different patch streams, some of which do include “hypocrite commits”. They will be on the lookout for bad patches but you will have a baseline based on the false positive figures from the maintainers who only got good patches. Either the false positive figures will be good enough to draw some conclusions about the efficiency of the review process, or they will indeed show that knowledge about the possible presence of bad patches influences the review process to the point where the experiment is useless. But in that case you at least have a plausible justification for a “blinder” study, and you can discuss better methods with the community.
IMHO, given the large volume of patches in some subsystems, and the fact that maintainership is hierarchical to some degree, I also suspect that it’s possible to co-opt the maintainers into this experiment, if you do it over a long enough timeframe. But suppose this really isn’t the case – this argument would’ve seemed plausible if other avenues had been investigated, but this apology letter doesn’t mention any such investigation.
It’s also not just about the ethics of this particular experiment. And also not just about the ethics, but the results, too.
Linux sees a lot of participation from so many different parties with so many conflicting interests (to cite just one example, many countries have various bans into place for Huawei’s telecom gear, but are otherwise using telecom gear that runs Linux which receives plenty of patches from Huawei, some of them quite, uh, controversial). So research into these processes is definitely relevant.
But without scrutiny and without good barriers in place, all you get is half-assed, under-the-radar attempts like this one, which are not only going to get a big backlash from the community, but are also not going to give very relevant results, because you can’t get the funding and set up a relevant, sufficiently large experiment while keeping it quiet. At least not in a public setting, where you have to publish or perish.
An IRB that evaluates studies using human subjects will sometimes consider requests for use of deception or lack of informed consent. See, for example, this IRB’s guidelines on research involving deception. However, it’s quite difficult to get approval for use of deception or waiver of informed consent, and the researcher would have to make a very good case that either the harm to the subjects is minimal or that the research couldn’t be carried out otherwise. A good IRB would question whether alternative solutions, like the one you describe, could be feasible and still accomplish the goals of the research project. In the “hypocrite commits” study, as I understand it, they didn’t even seek IRB approval.
I’m not too familiar with federal legislation (I’m, uh, across the poind) but IIRC consent is required even in research that involves deceptive methodology. You’re still required to get consent, and while it’s not required, it’s considered good practice to include a “some details to follow later” note on the consent form.
I am fairly sure (but see the note about being across the pond above…) that this study wouldn’t have gone past the IRB in its current form, because one of the key requirements for approval of deceptive methodology is proof that the study cannot be carried out without the waiver. It’s possible that the experiment could not have been carried out otherwise, but you’re required to show that. The paper doesn’t even discuss this aspect – it looks like they didn’t even bother to seriously consider it.
A waiver or alteration of informed consent is possible in the US, you can see the rules at (f)(3) here. Among the requirements are that the research involves no more than minimal risk and that it can’t be carried out without the waiver.
Which isn’t even a requirement! Your research can be 95% accurate, and you can still get results from it and come up with new things to research based on that. Instead, they made it all-or-nothing. In which case, you’re right, the choice should have been nothing, not all.
You can first lead a small observational study retrospectively like this but you’re going to need to run a controlled experiment to have more confidence that the results aren’t just statistical flukes and biases. Experimenting on humans without consent is obviously really bad. The arrogant and tone deaf response from the PI is just something else.
Of course, but it’s a lot easier to get community support if you lead with “this is what we tried, and this is what we’d like to try in order to get better results” rather than “lol hello lab rat” and end with a letter of apology that can be summed up as sorry we got caught.
I don’t think the Linux kernel development community lacks awareness of just how finicky the review process is. It would’ve been very easy to get them on board with a study conducted in good faith. The fact that these guys didn’t even try isn’t even disappointing, it’s maddening.
I am a fan of RockPro64. It has a Rockchip RK3399, with dual-core Cortex-A72 and quad-core Cortex-A53. It also has a slot for the vendor’s eMMC cards, so you don’t have to deal with microSD cards that end up breaking. The price is reasonable, you can get a heatsink with or without a fan, and I like the company: they do cool things like Pinephone, a $200 Linux smartphone.
How well does it work with stock distro-provided kernels, like the generic ARM64 kernel in Debian or Fedora? I don’t like SBCs that require their own custom kernel, or worse, their own custom-made distro image.
The RockPro64 is very similar to the Pinebook Pro. I would be astonished if the Manjaro Arm builds that are available for the Pinebook Pro don’t Just Work there.
The release notes for Manjaro ARM 21.02 says that they supply an image for it.
There’s not any secret sauce at all in Manjaro ARM. The kernels are generally pretty vanilla upstream beasts. You might have some work to do to get other distributions packaged so UBoot will deal with them, and there might be some manual effort to get UBoot in place, but with a good open worked example like Manjaro, it won’t be bad.
My understanding has been that you will generally not find an SBC that works well with a generic Linux distribution. (Might be wrong.) I ran Armbian on a RockPro64 and it worked quite well; now I run FreeBSD 13 on it and it has no issues at all.
I also use Armbian, which I find “generic enough” these days for these boards. At least it’s not some weird out-of-date custom image. It appears that there are now daily Debian images (more details here), but I don’t know what kernel they use.
By generic Linux distribution, what do you mean? Does manjaro arm qualify?
Yes, that looks very good, and just the counterexample I was hoping for.
See the blogposts here https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/archives (June 2020) for a lot of good info about RockPro64 and Linux
Interestingly, macos still includes Perl as the most prominent scripting language (in terms of number of executables in the base install). On a just installed catalina there’s many more perl scripts than shell and python scripts altogether:
I just noticed this when a colleague was bugging me than his mac was a really slick modern unix, with no bizarre legacy like perl scripts and whatnot.
Thanks for these stats, very interesting.
Is “mach” the compiled system executables? I’m not familiar with these parts of macOS.
Yes, Mach-O is the native executable format of the Mach microkernel, which is part of the macOS kernel.
Apparently. I just found a string that is unique, the complete “file” output is this:
EDIT: there’s also a few other types:
From OpenBSD 6.7 (
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin):Exactly, it’s still in base because there are base utilities which require perl. And changing that would be quite the hassle, i.e. rewriting the package management tools (pkg_*) and some other scripts.
Really clean! I do not dare to do this for a full ubuntu install, it would be horrifying.
On my Raspberry Pi:
Ahh, this is fun.
Ok, but at least do not replicate my ugly script. A shorter and more efficient code can treat all types on a single pass:
Alas, this overcounts on systems where one or more bin directories are symlinks to other directories. By adding (yet another) sort/uniq stage, we can deduplicate everything
On my (arch linux) system, this yields the output
There is an additional part to this though: for some reason, a bunch of scripts are provided as two or even three versions of the same thing, running via “perl”, “perl 5.18” and “perl 5.28”.
of the ~233 results on my system, 11 are from my own install of auto tools (so not part of the base system); 71 target perl 5.18 specifically, 63 target perl 5.28 specifically. So that leaves me with ~99 that just target ‘perl’, or 88 from the base system.
How many of the perl scripts are part of the actual perl installation (eg. pod, dbi, lwp, cpan, etc)? heh
It would certainly be interesting to know how many of those scripts were actually things that were actual system components or utilities in their own right.
I still use Fever, a self-hosted reader by Shaun Inman, even though it hasn’t been maintained since 2016.
In the US, we have TAXSIM, a research tool for calculating and simulating changes in tax codes.
I’m against this. I want to have at least one place on the net where that kind of topics are considered out of scope.
Everyone upvoting this needs to realize it’s already in scope. We’re doing it on the regular. The majority voted for politics. Several people, including a mod, threatened to quit the site if it changed. Politics is staying.
From there, a politcs tag that can be used as a filter is an improvement on current situation. It doesn’t legitimize or threaten anything since what’s being tagged is already legitimate by majority vote. A tag can give Lobsters minority something to help them.
Meta tags are how we fix scope.
That’s fine. Im saying you cant get changes if you open with statements or base your plans on the idea that there aren’t a huge pile of people already discussing politics, that have been for years now, and who vote in favor of it (including several mods).
People’s statements and proposals should include the fact that they exist.Then, try to win some of them over (the moderates). Alternatively, do what the political side has been doing more than no-politics side: invite many like-minded friends who might vote for same stance.
While it’s tempting to believe we can find a compromise where everyone can “live and let live,” I’m skeptical that adding a politics tag will do anything but legitimize that lobsters is no different from other news sites.
And, honestly, if a mod is going to quit over something like “I’m upset we can’t discuss politics,” they might not be a good fit for moderating a technical-only board.
There are other people who would do a fine job as moderator. You, for example.
The point is that I don’t think “Some moderators are willing to leave” is a good argument to depart from the mainstay of the site: lobsters has been for tech. Everywhere else is for tech and politics.
What is “technical only” even mean though?
I think there’s a lot of social stuff around tech that can be interesting and feels relevant to lobsters (example: governing structures for certain open source projects. Would be weird if we didn’t talk about what happened in Python over the past 18 months)
I am for tags to help people slice things up as they want to (after all there are other tags on the site as well!), but I think we should at least agree on a premise.
As to the difference with other news sites: well, compared to the orange site there’s a lot less “entrepreneur” posts. Lot less “growth hack” stuff. That’s how I read the difference
Unrelated but is the RMS thing “politics”? There’s surely a better tag name for this stuff. “Social”? Could let people filter out posts about linus’ rants (not that that happens anymore)
Yes it’s absolutely politics. Your opinion on whether it was good or bad that RMS was forced out of the FSF is directly related to your opinion about feminism, the correct way to talk about sexual assault, how to weigh the value of freedom-preserving software against other non-technical values, and a host of other opinions about how humans ought to interact with one another that have nothing to do with technology. In fact, it’s exactly the sort of politics that is bitterly controversial, and thus is the sort of thing that people who don’t want to deal with bitter controversy would want to analyze as “politics” so they can ignore it in favor of things that aren’t bitterly contested, i.e. the sort of politics that made this meta thread exist.
I’ll add that many of us just want to ignore it in select places like Lobsters to get (a) more value from those places and (b) a break from the politics. Throwing that in there since some people here kept pushing the no politics here = want none everywhere / head in the sand.
Yeah, I get my political coverage elsewhere. The SNR on political threads here is abysmal; loads of undergraduate level mudslinging, people arguing past one another, jumping on anyone who isn’t already sufficiently woke… it’s a mess.
I appreciate that you ssid something. I didn’t know if anyone with your leanings thought that way. Maybe I was assuming too much there.
“While it’s tempting to believe we can find a compromise where everyone can “live and let live,””
I’ve about given up on that with how many groups’ politics have gone. They want to go against their outgroups. Looks like human nature in action.
“There are other people who would do a fine job as moderator. You, for example.”
I appreciate the vote of confidence but I’m saying No 100%. I’m good at helping folks and calling them. Mainly a catalyst for change at various levels. Folks like me are also disruptive enough in most communities that it’s better we be moderated than try to moderate.
“ they might not be a good fit for moderating a technical-only board.”
I’m normally in agreement. Given the style of politics, maybe let them do what they want to advance our better cause [for this web site]. I made an exception for her, though, since she has shown unusually high commitment to addressing her own biases and being careful in her role when subjects trigger them. Way more than most in far-left, P.C. politics. Likely more than many in moderation positions. Doesn’t seem right to encourage people of such character to leave over political disagreements on a site currently favoring such politics. There’s still alternatives to explore that keep us mostly together before going to that extreme.
1,000x this. It’s everywhere else, all the time. This is one of the few (largely) politics-free bunkers left on the internet, bunkers with a technical focus. I’m so sick of politics, it’s probably starting to make me physically ill and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way. It’s stressful and distracting. There are already so many websites you can do the politicking on.
Lobsters is not free of politics, it just goes undiscussed and unquestioned. It’s not like you can opt-out of it by pretending it doesn’t exist.
We’re not “pretending it doesn’t exist”, it’s just off topic. There are other sites to discuss politics. I think creating a tag would tacitly encourage such posts.
When you say it’s off topic, would you have examples of what would be on or off topic here?
To be honest I think a lot of us are mostly aligned but the term “politics” is vague
Examples:
technical breakdown of figuring out the sourcing of the 2016 election hacks (assumption: on topic since it’s a technical post)
article on Google lobbying efforts to avoid privacy legislation (assumption: kinda off topic cuz it’s basically business and legislation stuff)
an article discussing Python governance and the walrus operator (assumption: on topic on account of being around governance on developing OSS, as well as being news about pythons future in general)
I can’t speak for maddogshark. The first item would probably be accepted because it’s a technical post that might teach people things tech-specific. The other two wouldn’t despite having value. They’d likely learn about that from other sites when their mind was in gear to deal with all the crap that came with them. Technical posts probably were relaxing by comparison. May or may not be speaking from experience.
I’ve been wrestling with writing another comment on this topic, but you articulated it well.
Lobste.rs is based in the US, and many of its users are from or in the US, but not all. As a non-US citizen it’s quite frustrating following along with US political debates and not being able to do anything about them - because I cannot vote in US elections.
There’s a large community of tech people for whom English is a first or second language. Not all of them are from the USA. Inviting political topics will inevitably lead to proportionally more content that only US tech people have any legal way to act on. Is that really what we want?
I agree entirely with the gist of your point, but actually and shockingly, people can and do opt-out of it by not understanding that there is no such thing as apolitical technology. The reason that this disconnect is so contentious is down to the definition of the word ‘politics’. For some people ‘politics’ is the thing that they see politicians doing - it involves elections and governments; it’s covered on the TV, it’s social-interaction and media driven; it’s entirely uninteresting and irrelevant - it’s just unoptimised human beahaviour. For other people ‘politics’ is how we live together – every decision an individual who is part of a community makes can have an effect on the other people in that community and ‘politics’ is how we figure out how to live together.
By the first definition, technologists understandably choose to opt-out of politics. They prefer to work on their craft, and they leave the ‘politics’ to other people. The technology they build is not ‘political’ because it doesn’t directly have anything to do with this notion of politics.
By the second definition, all tool productoin is completely political, therefore everything every technologist does has a political effect. By this definition much of the work of technologists influences or drives poltics directly. Because technologists tend to use the first definition, they unwittingly conceding the immense power of their work to others who do not understand it and wield it for political or capitalist reasons.
Except the thing you leave out is that the majority of Lobsters talking politics usually vote in the far-left, PC camp. They push for political things most people, majority or minorities, don’t push for. Many equate dissent with personal attacks and other extremist reactions. Their outgroups get downvoted into oblivion since they have superior numbers and non-political side mostly avoids those political threads (their votes invisible).
So, rather than “discussing politics,” what you’re actually advocating for in this environment is for folks wanting political conformance to their belief system to talk about their belief system, other people to speak in a way that’s not seen or just torn up by majority, and majority beliefs on politics to float on top of the technical posts as they sometimes do. That with no change to anyone’s tech, job status, political affiliation, etc. Just a shout-down by whoever is in majority at a given time enjoying seeing their beliefs in a high place with lots of people clicking a button instead of out there making their supposed goals happen in the real world. (Some exceptions.)
I can’t imagine what good that does here on a site hardly anyone reads. Most political topics require prominent or popular people to enact change. Alternatively, massive numbers of everyone else which requires putting the message in sites of massive reach. If they’re putting it here, they’re probably not really doing politics so much as getting a mental high on Internet feel-good points (i.e. slacktivism). Lobsters has some benefit in politics that I’ve seen. It’s just not that by far.
Many Lobsters have downvoted, flagged, called out, commented, PM’d on, etc posts on how they were offensive or non-inclusive for their content. I let them do that to me for a long time to my own posts to understand their views. Although mostly aggressive, some were helpful responding with links in public or PM’s to help me understand what they believed.
Thing is, I spent much of my life in states with the most blacks and plenty women who didn’t believe damn near anything like they claimed. They said they were “creating inclusive environments” for those people but were actually systematically shunning and eliminating anyone with different beliefs than *themselves” who seem like they weren’t minorities or were quite privileged. I’ve only seen one survey that even attempted to confirm or refute this with most whites and minority members disagreeing with the politics of Lobsters that’s supposedly about including minority members. If survey is true, they’re actually racist and sexist as can be excluding as many of them as necessary to achieve conformance to their political goals.
You can keep attempting to call me out. I’m just countering this myth that these political Lobsters represent minority groups down here who mostly seem to agree with me on these topics and often love working with me. Such a jarring mindset where political Lobsters think these people would hate me super-worried about my speech online when most in real life down here like me with few concerns about online forums. They’re mostly worried about overt racism/sexism, getting jobs, paying their bills, promotions, funding, etc. Shit that actually impacts their lives.
Keep calling me out about text on an online forum instead of helping them with the things they care about. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it. (sarcasm intended)
Edit: re sarcasm, double true for the folks in the hood that have no air conditioning in these hot summers. How about all you people so concerned about minority members do a collective funding drive to make sure they have A/C so they don’t fucking pass out or aren’t affected by heat exhaustion so much they can’t improve their current situation? As always, you could be doing plenty for them if focused on them not what articles are on tech forums or the topic of the moment with outrage culture.
I would like to discourage nickpsecurity from deleting anything they’ve posted so far. It’s not ugly, it’s perfectly reasonable and relevant discussion given the topic at hand.
It is the case that “far left” people come to lobsters, regardless of whether by “far left” you mean traditional socialists/communists, or more modern progressive moral authoritarians who define all sorts of ordinary activity as oppressive against nonwhites, women, or various queer demographics. My own impression is that people with leftist politics are a large proportion of the site’s active membership, but not an overwhelming majority, and I don’t have the data to guess at percentages.
nickp is talking about the black people he knows in his IRL community because a lot of the political rhetoric that progressive moral authoritarians use is grounded in understandings of racism from the US black civil rights movement, and it therefore makes sense to talk about how that rhetoric is inconsistent with the opinions of actual black people he knows. Even using the word “minority” as if it centrally means “black Americans” in opposition to ethnic majority “white Americans” is grounded in the facts on the ground of the 1960s civil rights movement in America, not necessarily of America today, or of any other place in the world.
Certainly nothing he’s mentioned is out of line, incorrect (as far as I can tell), and it’s certainly on-topic in this sort of meta-discussion thread about what sort of political rhetoric should be allowed on lobsters. I don’t like the suggestion that this is something he should feel like he has to delete.
In particular, I really appreciate reading from nickpsecurity on this stuff because I’ve always lived in a nice part of town, and I get too much of my info about the world via social-justice-flavored social media, while he actually lived - and lives - in the spaces that get talked about but not invited to the table.
Been going through threads still on my phone since I’ve been so busy. Just got back to this one.
(I appreciate @Hail_Spacecake’s accurate analysis of what I was doing. I’ll just add that I’ve done this in many places across many cities and towns mostly with poor to working-class people with quite a few middle class. Idk about upper-class blacks since they mostly ignore me like other upper-class people. I dress down on purpose to appear less significant to get more out of observations and surveys.)
I appreciate you, Daniel, for ID’ing yourself as the other side, reading perspectives of your other side, and noting impact of bias. I wasn’t sure if more than a few of you existed here based on majority comments. So, thanks for the feedback. Makes the work more worth it.
Got one more example for you tonight I’m sending as a private message.
It’s like bringing you beef patty to a vegan grill party. One could do it, but people would honestly question whether that person is just doing it to annoy them.
We’re discussing it, we were discussing it on recent articles, debating it heavily on Palantir thing, had the “Community Standards” thread with proposed CoC, and so on. It goes plenty discussed with several metas questioning or advocating the hell out of politics here.
Again, it’s better if nobody pretends Lobsters is something it’s not before attempting to accomplish something with it. Addressing the actual site and what goes on here will work out better.
This view is why I initiated this discussion, for there seems to be plenty of disagreement and implicit understandings on what is permissible and what is not. If there weren’t any political discussions, there wouldn’t be a need to talk about them. But as I said, since it looks like there is a change in the community, it could be worth reconsidering, not to please one or the other, but find an common agreement.
The posts have survived the front page and all -1 Off-Topic flags that people have piled on it. From a puristic standpoint, you’re completely right, they’re off-topic, but people upvote them anyway, and there are evidently moderation actions taken against them. I think the battle on that front is completely lost; the posts are too popular. At least with a tag, we could filter the stories, as opposed to have nothing at all right now.
That’s how Im seeing it.
What if one had a tag, but it’s hodness modifier would pull it down, as to not motivate discussions, but enable filtering.
A technical solution could be that this tag would be a co-tag or a partial-tag, meaning that it wouldn’t suffice for a post, but can only be added to other tags.
A co-tag could perhaps be “political” instead of “politics” to further underscore that the post is not primarily discussed as a topic of politics, but it has political implications.
You’re right, that sounds better.
I like that.
If we’re going to go with a technical solution, make the “hotness mod” so negative the story does not show up on the site.
If someone were to start a clone of lobste.rs for more culture and political talk, I’m all for it. I would really like to see much less of it here. It has had a serious impact on the value of the site, in my opinion. Lobste.rs is less and less a place I want to visit (but I still love it).
Clarification: it’s not so much the culture and political talk as it is submission of news items.
Or create a
politicstag, but make it opt-in (instead of opt-out).That would effectively make the tag a community-shadow ban, which doesn’t have to be restricted to politics, but isn’t quite where I was going at. It seems like a one-sided solution, because it would only be in the interests of those who are totally against interacting with any political posts, but ignore those who are interested in it, which are still a considerable bunch. “Ruthlessly” privileging one of these camps over the other is something that I think should be avoided.
My point was somewhat facetious. I don’t think there should be any technical solution to this. I’d rather see a community agreement to avoid political posts at all.
As @nickpsecurity says, we’re past that point already. It will be most difficult, to agree because
I don’t want to drag this thread out too long (that never works well). I don’t think we’re past that point and I am not swayed by the cited argument.
I want to be clear that I am not against a political discussion, nor do I think it is something that can be avoided. I do not, however, want to encourage it. Adding a tag would not help in this regard. Right now political discussion (mostly) comes out in the comments. Adding a tag for it would make it explicit in the stories, more so that already exists. It will exacerbate the problem.
Not really one-sided. It is a way to keep it away from folks that don’t want to see it. That’s one thing tags already do here. However, it will also highlight the content for politics supporters. That’s the other thing tags do.
They’ll also still be able to discuss it amongst themselves and folks that don’t filter.
Edit: Added an example highlight in case some of you don’t know of or forgot it.
Edit 2: Clicking that tag myself led me to the Texel submission I somehow missed. See! There it is in action.
I get that, but my issues was that a “minus infinity” hotness-mod, would effectively hide the content from everyone, anything that gets posted lands on the last page of the feed, making filtering it irrelevant. That means, even for those who would be interested, it wouldn’t be highlighted, because it just never appears.
Oh no, I wasn’t agreeing with minus infinity thing. Just a tag that could be suggested, highlighted, and/or filtered.
Oh, my bad then.
If we’re going to go with a technical solution, bring this ‘hotness mod’ under user control by letting every user choose for themselves whether or not to mute this
politicaltag? I don’t see why it would need to be banned for everybody.That’s already the case. Anyone can choose what tags to filter.
Indeed, that is what I was hinting at. I should have spelled it out, perhaps. Thanks for making sure I knew :-)
Oh, my mistake, wrote that response in a hurry :/
Wow it’s almost like you wish you could filter the items about politics. I sure wish there were a feature for things like this!
It’s not just that. These political articles aren’t just objects in a vacuum, in their own way they mould the site culture and content.
If you’re against politics on the site, you should either leave or advocate for a politics tag so you can filter that content. It’s always been here, and it always will be here. If you’d like to totally avoid politics I honestly suggest watching home cooking videos on Youtube instead of browsing a website oriented around discussion and news about a multi-million dollar male-dominated industry that regularly contributes to devices used to harm people around the world. Those cooking videos are comparably extremely chill.
The about clearly states that: content that does not fit into any of those categories should not be submitted. There are many interesting things on the net that I’ve decided not to post here because I value what we have here and don’t want to post inappropriate (for this community) content. By creating ‘politics’ tag we legitimize such content and risk significantly increasing number of politics related (or even worse - politics only) content submitted. I would prefer to keep lobste.rs as free of politics as possible so for me the best option is to flag and hide such content, which hopefully sends clear signal to submitter.
I’ve been here since 2014, you’re wrong. “Culture” is the catch-all for this content. You would prefer whatever you prefer, but I don’t really care about that. Filter the tag if you don’t want to see it.
Filtering the tag doesn’t solve the issue that the mere existence of it attracts a certain … kind .. of people I’d rather not spend time with, because they have not much to contribute.
I’ve yet to have to filter a tag here. I assume that by filtering a tag, you do not see the submission nor associated comments? Because I usually read /comments before I read /newest, personally.
Correct. For example, if I filter the webdevelopment tag because those stories are not relevant by and large to my work in embedded engineering, those stories will not show up for me at all on the front page. Useful to improve the signal to noise ratio, since lobsters covers a variety of tech topics.
The “culture” tag has been on this website since 2015, and has since regularly found its way to the front page with distinctly political posts. If politics “attracts” some type of people you don’t like, they’ve long been here already.