Considering the rate of change in this field, what would be beneficial to learn for people who don't actually get to use machine learning in their day to day job? I'd love to dive in and learn more about machine learning but I don't want to waste time learning something that will be totally irrelevant in a couple years.
"Progressive" is marketing term backed by a shaky ideology that has been totally twisted to serve the powerful.
Eric Holder for example was hired for big money by Uber to push the narrative that background checks for Uber drivers is discriminatory against minorities, never mind that lack of background checks exposes women (especially women of color) to a lot of danger from sex offenders.
Another example is in my own city of Seattle, Comcast for years has been successfully advocating against broadband competitors and one of their "arguments" is that building out higher speed internet in high income areas will cause inequity that will affect minorities in poorer neighborhoods. By "progressive" logic this makes perfect sense but it's obvious that it's simply a powerful company blocking out competition.
> A website ban isn't even remotely the same thing as a legal sanction.
The Supreme Court seemed to have very different take (Packingham v. North Carolina):
"Social media allows users to gain access to information and communicate with one another on any subject that might come to mind. With one broad stroke, North Carolina bars access to what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and
knowledge. Foreclosing access to social media altogether thus prevents users from engaging in the legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights."
That wasn't the point of my comment. Yes 1A only applies to government censorship, however the SC clearly view access to the internet and social media as necessary for full exercise of 1A rights. It's now on the legislature to actually write the laws that would grant free speech rights to internet users.
What makes them private? They're operated on the phone company's lines and by talking on their lines you're compelling them to carry certain speech. The logic that states private communication carriers have an unlimited right to ban what they want to on their networks leads to the conclusion that "private" phone calls can be censored.
It isn't wire-tapping if they block you from accessing the wire to begin with. Forcing the phone companies to carry your speech over their wires is compelling speech across their property which should be against their 1A rights if you're correct. However, it clearly has been ruled not to violate their rights.
I mean, there's a law against it. But there is a lot of known warrent-less wire-tapping, both by govt and industry, and everyone shrugs.
And it's not even a de jure vs de facto thing, since by now a lot of the ostensibly illegal stuff has been either defended successfully in courts or buttressed by the govt.
Germany consistently places higher than the USA on international press freedom indices. The press, in general, is a protected institution there, whereas here, blowhards like Trump do their damnedest to intimidate journalists out of doing their job, which is to expose the dealings of government to the public.
And you don't have to read Hackernews for long to see how terminally fucked and anti-freedom the U.S. justice system is. Things like plea bargaining, money bail, and systemic racism in law enforcement and criminal proceedings make U.S. "freedom" illusory unless you're white and wealthy.
As for democracy, it's well known that votes in Congress can be easily bought in the US, far more easily than in Germany's parliament.
For better or worse foreign and domestic terrorist speech is treated separately. If ISIS was a domestic terrorist organization afaik they would have 1A rights.
What's the connection to the first amendment? Did the government dictate bans? I saw very little concern from the "free speech" crowd about the government's ability to censor US publishers from publishing content by foreign authors.
There's been plenty of concern about that. See the Mehanna case from a few years back. Also, the USG was giving Twitter shit about having terrorist content on their site for years.
Experience seems to indicate the opposite I think. The danger of niche mobs and/or terrorism is very real and scary, but losing our freedoms in order to address these perceived dangers is always far worse. For all the fear the "alt-right" has generated, exactly how many people have been come to harm because of them? They probably number in the dozens, which is a terrible tragedy but ultimately is that worth losing our fundamental rights? I personally don't think it is.
I would argue that the alt-right panic (as in, if I thought white genocide was a thing I'd be panicking too) + nihilist troll tactics elected Trump, which has caused much harm.
I think a world where those people were no-platformed more often might be a better world, but of course I can't know.
And getting no-platformed isn't losing rights, you can always make your own platform, it gets easier and cheaper every day.
You can't really "make your own platform" though. Ultimately the ISPs could shut down access to any website they don't think their customers should have access to. The only recourse would be for the censored to somehow construct their own physical internet infrastructure, which was so difficult and costly the first time that it was highly subsidized by the government.
And do you honestly think you should have the right to determine what elections should be considered "harmful" enough to shut down others speech? There is a wide range of opinion short of the alt-right but in the same direction that could be shut down too, for instance apparently a majority of white people think there is racism against now (https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-a...). Do you think this opinion is so wrong that it should be silenced from the public forum? Do you think it would even be possible to do so?
I would only insist on making a distinction between "a public form" and "the public forum"
As an owner of a machine, I see no reason I should be forced to host some conversation I consider harmful.
OTOH I would encourage ISPs to maintain a common carrier status just out of pragmatism. Once you memory-hole connections to some IP address, I think you become responsible for the content you serve. All or Nothing.
The experience of 1930s Germany and Italy, 1980s Rwanda, Serbia and Srebenincia, and just recently Myanmar apparently don’t register on your scale of “problem”. Why is that? It is a very misguided position to say that can’t happen here. US society has been building toward a populist-led Fascist break, with dehumanizing rhetoric by right-wingers, whipping up fear and hatred, forming armed militias and concentrating supporters in police and military, and now a true fascist as president. Why is it that it won’t happen here?
I think eroding free speech rights, especially in a time of increasing political extremism, will only make such tragedies more possible, not less. How long until extremists in power figure out a way to use the newly acceptable restrictions on speech in their favor? What happens if there is another 9/11 under Trump when freedom of speech has been sidelined? Can Trump then pressure companies to ban Muslims and political opponents off of the internet entirely "until we can figure out what the hell is going on"? Accurately predicting how loss of freedom will affect future tyranny is like accurately predicting the stock market, it just isn't going to happen.
