This is so overwrought. We're not talking about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish here, where Microsoft wanted to exploit their OS monopoly to bend the Internet to its will. Cloudflare's products are popular because they solve real problems; Cloudflare is not responsible for the popularity of outsourcing SSL termination, the difficulty of implementing SSL properly is, and if Cloudflare ceased operating tomorrow there would still be vendors and customers for SSL termination aplenty.
That's what domain fronting is for, and even though the GFW attempts to filter by SNI, genetic algorithms like Geneva are able to find workarounds: https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/papers/foci21.pdf
Since the project at the OP link is mostly/initially aimed at Russia, in my own experience, it's not always just DPI — it's often DPI combined with a firewall. Roskomnadzor can order to block access to a domain, but then they can also specify an IP or a subnet instead. For example, that's what happened when they tried to block Telegram, which does not use DNS at all.
• a quick search for "refuting bell's theorem" will turn up attempts in 2000, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2017, etc, so let's take this with a huge grain of salt
• Europhysics Letters is a reasonably old journal (1986) but an impact factor of ~2 is pretty low; I wouldn't consider this a major journal
• As the Reddit discussion notes: "Just because you call your model locally realistic doesn't mean it's actually locally realistic. Calling it "contextual" doesn't change that. ... That part where the "context" of photon 1 changes the polarization of photon 2? That's not local.": https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/nig8d5/bells_theor...
The recent spike in homelessness, the health insurance coverage gap, rising economic inequality, we are facing many major urgent crises. But there is a severe lack of imagination to suggest that our problems as a society or species can't or haven't been far, far worse.
A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.
Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.
This sounds naive to the point of dystopian. What about tragedy-of-the-commons collective action problems, like pollution, natural resources (overfishing, overlogging), climate change, herd immunity?
Canada and Nordic countries rank highly in every major freedom index, yet these countries are all known for relatively high tax obligations and comprehensive environmental and climate regulation. No one serious believes all externally-imposed commitments are avoidable or oppressive.
> What about tragedy-of-the-commons collective action problems, like pollution ...
I (and OP) wrote about (informal) duties defined by society as a whole, not (explicit) laws approved and enforced by government. Laws are necessary minimum to have functioning society and can handle these kinds of problems.
That is such an interesting and...low-level way to think of it.
To me it feels a little deeper than just there being a "maze of rules". Your earlier mention of "everything's connected to everything else" resonated with me more.
In a sense, the expressive power of programming languages, and mathematical notation, feels very small. I liked the board game metaphor brought up in the top comment: programming languages and mathematical notation merely feel like arrangements of board game pieces (from an infinite box, and the rules of how they can be arranged are "context-free"). They don't have meaning except what we impose (ideally, assisted by comments).
A metaphor I brought up in another comment is that it feels "easy" to systematically translate an arbitrary program into an equivalent diagram, such that the diagram would contain 100% of the operational information in the program, and could be runnable as-is. (Would be cumbersome to input into the computer, ofc.) Whereas the idea of systematically translating an arbitrary natural sentence into a diagram just seems...nonsensical to me. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
> Whereas the idea of systematically translating an arbitrary natural sentence into a diagram just seems...nonsensical to me. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
we actually literally did this in high school. It was very informative for me.
This is really an interesting thought. Would it surprise you if I said that for me, it works in an opposite manner? I first think in terms of diagrams and the construct sentences for it, whether it be programming language, natural language or math.
Others here, and presumably your friends, have talked about how they think of programming "visually", but they don't think visually about conversing in natural language.
I thought of a concrete way to describe it: it "feels obvious" to me that any programming language could be "easily" replaced by a systematic diagramming method, with programs translated systematically into equivalent diagrams. If anything, a diagram would be clearer and more readable to me than the same program in plaintext. (Of course, it would be much more cumbersome to input such a diagram into a computer than plaintext.)
Whereas the idea of systematically translating arbitrary natural language sentences into diagrams is...nonsensical to me. I mean I wouldn't even know where to begin.
I'm curious if for you, do you feel like you could easily systematically translate a natural language sentence into a diagram? Or, because you don't think as visually as people like me, translating a program into a diagram is not "obvious" to you at all? Or maybe this distinction just doesn't feel significant to you, one language being diagram-translatable and another being diagram-untranslatable doesn't cause them to feel different, they feel equally language-y to you?
Context-free grammars were originally invented by linguists for analyzing natural language. You can see examples of phrase structure and dependency diagrams e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar
For what it's worth, I agree with OP, and have a very "language-oriented" thinking style. I certainly don't visualize anything while programming or doing math (except for geometry and the like). My thinking feels like it's more based on constraint solving and seeing analogies between domains.
I do feel that I could easily translate natural languages into a diagram as well. I am a very visual thinker, but that visual seeps into natural languages as well.
Whoops, missed the comment window on all the replies to me except for this one!
I clearly completely failed to communicate what I meant about "diagramming" a programming language, as evidenced by all the people pointing out that syntax tree diagrams work fine on natural languages, and indeed were originally created for natural languages, which is totally missing the point.
What I meant was that the semantics of programming languages are so limited and constrained that they could easily be translated into an "executable diagram", such as a control-flow graph for imperative code, or a dataflow graph for functional code. The syntax of natural languages is indeed more-or-less similarly constrained as programming languages, but the semantics of natural languages seems completely nebulous and ill-defined to me.
To use the board game analogy from earlier, you could conceivably learn to play chess entirely in terms of chess notation ("1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6"), without ever learning about the 8x8 chessboard or the 16 pieces. Chess notation shares no syntactic structure whatsoever with the "syntax"/diagram drawing rules of a chessboard and pieces, yet their semantics are exactly equivalent.
In the same way, the "syntax"/diagram drawing rules of control-flow graphs has no syntactic structure in common with imperative code, yet exactly equivalent semantics. Could you imagine a diagram system that has no syntactic structure in common with natural language, yet completely captures the semantics?
I cannot begin to imagine that. The semantics of natural language defy description.
I think you should also examine the possibility that gp is straightforwardly wrong, and that a good apology can make things better, even (or especially) in the face of being called out on Twitter. Consider how Dan Harmon reacted to Megan Ganz calling him out on Twitter: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/11/16879702/dan-harmon-ap...
Doubtless many people have made things worse with "non-apology apologies" [1]. But your brain wants to say "apologizing is right" because when done right, it is right.
To me, truth and reconciliation are self-evidently how we build a better world, and refusal to take responsibility for mistakes is self-evidently corrosive to the individual and to society.
