This was written on cohost.org and thus references some matters that had happened around this time. Much of this thinking applies to other websites and is why I rarely talk about social media companies since they’re all going to be a waste of time in some way.

Rarely do I dare wade into the discourse, but I felt like it was time and I need to voice my support for the decisions made by @staff to the benefit of the site as a whole. It is hard to discuss content moderation openly and their decision to open the floor on content many who see it as objectionable as well as not was not only brave, but completely the opposite of what one would expect from much bigger social media outlets.

Like many, I find a lot of content disturbing. I am not going to hide this fact. However, regardless of the reasons for my biases, it is irrelevant to the reality that cohost faces: it is a small operation, moderation requires a lot of resources, and moderation on a service with an international audience is extremely fraught with legal jurisdictional landmines.

This point is lost on so many people in the comments made in recent posts by the cohost staff, leading to inappropriate ad hominem remarks and outright accusing them of censorship.

Let’s talk about the second point, because the first one has me quite angry.

Firstly: if you scroll down to the bottom of any page on cohost, you’ll notice that has a copyright mark belonging to anti software software club llc who describes themselves as a “not-for-profit software company”. If you have never seen the term “LLC” before, it means “limited liability company” and that should be your first clue about what grounds you stand on.

As an LLC, this makes cohost a private space. As a private space, cohost has every right within the confines of the laws they’re governed by to do whatever they want. This means and is not limited to deciding on what content they wish to permit or deny on this website. This also means they have every right to object to your participation on this website and that is regardless of what sort of financial relationship you might have engaged in.

Because of cohost belonging to an actual company, all staff have to abide by the laws of whatever jurisdictions apply to them. But because this is also the Internet, laws of which apply to users outside of the jurisdiction of what cohost itself is subject to come into play.

Many of the dissenters against cohost often look inward at their own countries’ principles and never consider the headaches others face. I am not an American and I do not live in the United States, so while I may benefit from cohost’s existence at the will of the American constitution and its federal and state laws, I am still subject to the laws of Canada and the European Union because of my nationalities.

There have been Supreme Court cases in Canada which have made certain content outright illegal to possess and there are laws in Germany against certain imagery of which I need not elaborate on. These are just a small sample of situations where if cohost wants to exist for an audience outside of the jurisdiction it is legally incorporated in.

If we flip this on its head, despite the fact that the United States is not the country I live in, the DMCA still ends up applying to me. If I download a movie through illicit means and I am caught, despite my ISP being outside of the country, they’ll still handle a DMCA claim against them because failing to do so has repercussions for them as a service if they wish to benefit from connecting to the United States. This is very simplified, but I am certain that you understand this logic.

For cohost to exist outside of an American vacuum, they have to consider what content they wish to permit. The alternative for them is to do what every small non-European website does when they don’t want to deal with GDPR: block anyone from the EU. This happens and if this small group of people were to get their way, cohost would effectively become an American-only website.

Is it censorship for them to remove content they decide is objectionable? Of course it is. Is it bad? Objectively, not really. And to further this: it’s a private space.

And that is where the first part I skipped needs to come up: this isn’t your space.

For cohost to come out and talk about this the way they did, it wasn’t an invitation for you as an individual to act as if somehow your rights were being violated because they decided as a private entity what they wish to have on their private space–irrelevant of whether or not you have paid for the service.

Also if you’re an American and you’re going to rattle off “free speech”, you should feel ashamed of the fact that a foreigner is more aware of your rights than you are.

If tomorrow it was decided by the staff that my posting about obscure video games was not going to be allowed on this website, that is their decision. Am I going to like it? No.

And that is the point: if you’re here to post content that cohost, a private company no less, objects to, you know where the door is. You can complain on some other website about cohost and let an echo chamber make you feel better, but maybe consider that there are other people here too and you have to share this space under the rules set by cohost themselves.

All of this falls on the shoulders of three people who are human beings. They are here to provide a website for us to shitpost on. They don’t have the resources to moderate content which often requires nuance to understand and examine. Speaking professionally, I do not want them to have that burden (I for certain know more about this than you do). If they don’t want the content you want to post on here, that is your problem and not theirs.

At least we don’t have to worry about people buying us custom titles.

I posted this reply elsewhere but figured I’d share it here too.

Stuxnet was not only a complex attack but the whole operation was clandestine and intentionally vague in its origins. Nobody officially admitted to its creation even though it was produced by the United States and Israel. Russia is not unwise to these sort of attacks on its industrial control systems and unlike Iran is unlikely to fall victim to the same tactics due to the nature of the country being the source of such attacks themselves.

I would not rule out the possibility of a Ukraine or someone aligned with Ukraine attacking Russian industrial control systems, but Stuxnet was such a huge investment of time and money and it would be easy to tip one’s hand very fast were the tactic to be used today. You’re more likely to see someone on Twitter brag about finding some random water flow system for a distillery or some sort of traffic light system via Shodan than something like the 2015 Ukrainian power outage.

Basically, Stuxnet was a slow boil and is now too obvious to anyone familiar with this stuff. Would not rule it out, but I am not going to bet on it.

This is my line of work and thus y’all get a rare opinion about geopolitics from me.

Mars and Earth at its closest point are 54.6 million KM apart. However, this shortest distance is not expected to occur until 2287, but as a consolation, almost two decades ago we were as close as 56 million KM. This variability exists because both Earth and Mars do not have perfect circular orbits around the Sun.

In that distance, light takes a hair over three minutes to travel. While the space between Mars and Earth is a vacuum, were it not to be and sound could propagate between uninterrupted, it would take almost four years to go between the two planets.

Now why do I care about this?

If you take the total distance of roads on Earth, it would come up to 62.3 million KM. Humans have built enough roads on this planet that if stretched out, it would easily slap Mars about twice per Martian year.

The thing that I cannot figure out is how much of that distance is paved. World Bank data is consistently too old or poorly defined, and some countries of advanced development (Austria, I am looking at you) do not seem to provide a percentage of what roads are paved versus not. However, some messing with the numbers in the cited reference (which is based on data from the CIA), it seems that 22.6 million KM is a reasonable number.

At 22.6 million KM, that is of course not enough to make to Mars. But, this is where it gets interesting because Venus has a much closer orbit! At its closest, Venus is 0.28 AU or 41.9 million KM away, meaning that we’ve paved enough roads on this planet to get us half-way to our runaway greenhouse of a neighbour.

Although Mercury is the closest planet to us most of the time keep in mind.

The banner text above reads:

Programming is the second literacy. The first one gives you knowledge: the second allows you to implement it in practice.

However, below, the three posters underneath have my attention.

• There’s a new IMKO2 in our school
• Train Basic everyday!
• That’s my new friend?

The IMKO 2 is an 8-bit computer made in Bulgaria. It was largely compatible with Apple II except it supported the use of Cyrillic.

I kind of want a high-resolution of any or all of the posters shown because they’re kind of endearing. It’s interesting to see that the posters were promoting the use of computing using English as opposed to Russian, due to the school’s location near the Finnish border.

There are some additional details about this image if you’re interested:

The first winter computer class for children (1985-6), a class at Chkalovski Village School No. 2, using “Pravets 82” computers. On the photo, unidentified school workers are familiarizing themselves with computers. In winter, a class was held here for children and adults. There were no exams: children were graded for creative works, and adults were not graded at all.

Image source: Wikipedia.

This closed hand accepts a 1, 2, 4, 5, or 7 souzu tile.

If a 1 souzu is dropped, it’s 6 han and 30 fu for 6,000 points for a tsumo (haneman) and 5 han and 40 fu for 12,000 points on a ron (mangan). With the the ron, it’s a straight and a half-flush, but a tsumo gets you and additional han for the self-draw. It’s less points for the tsumo due to the lack of a ron basically.

Now if that hand is declared as a riichi, it’s an additional han and pushes it up to 18,000 if I get a ron and still 6,000 on a tsumo. The next best tile in lieu of a 1 souzu is if a red 5 souzu is dropped which should give 12,000 I believe.

If a 4, non-red 5, or 7 souzu is dropped, it comes out to a 8,000 point hand if you land a ron and I think 6,000 if it is a tsumo.

The south wind only has value beyond 1 han if you land a ron unless it is your seat wind and or round wind. If you are in south and you are sitting south, this hand becomes 24,000 points on a ron and 8,000 on a tsumo. It should be 18,000 on a ron for the red 5 souzu.

You basically want a 1 or red 5 souzu tile to drop from another player to get that hit. The only thing which makes the hand sweeter is if you hit someone on the last drop, you flip a kan on the south winds, get some closed and or open dora to make say the six or south stronger, and so forth. As an opposing player, this hand is an outright nightmare and if done early enough on, it’s likely a guaranteed win.

Calculating mahjong hands sucks a lot so if you see a problem with how I scored this, by all means provide a better calculation! That said, this was east 2 and my seat was west so I wasn’t going to get a lot out of my honour tiles.

I got a tsumo on it.