SoylentNews

So I'm not going to make a big, pretty production of it, but back in July I mentioned I was learning Rust. I'm getting to the point I'm almost comfortable with it. I'm too tired to go into nice pretty blocks of Rust code here, but I'll give you the general idea.

There's a lot to like about Rust, and also a surprising amount to dislike. I'm going to be sticking with it, but it's definitely got its own downsides.

I like the tuples being a built-in type. They're often quite useful when you can't be bothered to think of a name for a struct with 3 int members. And, like more dynamic languages, you can unpack them into the local scope.

I *really* like the type inference abilities of Rust. In C++, it generally only works one way, but with Rust, you can declare a variable with no type, and then in another block in that function, finally give it a value. The Rust compiler is really good at figuring out the types you mean, in contexts where C++ would just throw its hands up as per the C++ standard document.

I like the iterator syntax, and how so many things are just traits you can fiddle with yourself, including iterability.

I like how I can use almost anything as an expression, including blocks themselves, match expressions, conditionals, etc.

Rust, over all, feels like a much more expressive language than C++. It definitely feels new, which makes sense, because it is.

Now for the bad parts:

I *revile* the coercion to a standard variable naming scheme, which is snake_case for methods and locals, and PascalCase for traits and types. All my code in all the languages I work with uses PascalCase, unless it's literally impossible like Ruby and Crystal.
I strongly encourage everyone who uses Rust to do the work of the Dark Lord, and drag their balls across the Rust devs' faces by using whatever styling you want. Break them.
They suggest spaces and K&R braces, but they can eat my 4-width tab and allman braces. Some things I will not compromise on.

The code of conduct is too strict, and as a result, I am deeply troubled by the cohesion and centralization of the Rust community. You'd think it would be a strength, but part of what I love about C and C++ is that nobody really owns them, nobody can really control you. Because Rust has such organization, they could hurt me a lot more should they decide that my notorious sense of humor is not to their liking. Volition famously has some very grotesque phrases in the comments in its source code. The idea of having to self-censor saddens me deeply. I want to be able to tell all my users to suck some pungent diarrhea from my hairy chocolate starfish, but with Rust, it could potentially get a project pulled from crates.io. :^(

I think the bottom line is, the language overall is very good, but I would definitely support alternative implementations such as gcc, as worked on by this guy, and also separately by this guy. Donate to them if you can.

SpaceX Starship fires up three Raptor engines in prelude to high-altitude flight

Update: At 1:21am CDT (6:21 UTC) on October 20th, Starship SN8 ignited all three of its Raptors’ preburners, producing a spectacular fireball noticeably larger than the one produced during the rocket’s first October 19th preburner test. A mere two hours later, with no break in between, the steel rocket prototype fully ignited all three Raptor engines for the first time ever, likely producing thrust equivalent to ~90% of a nine engine Falcon 9 booster for a brief moment.

Crucially, aside from physically demonstrating Raptor’s multi-engine capabilities, Starship SN8 – already a first-of-a-kind prototype – completed and survived a static fire seemingly unscathed on its first attempt. If the data SpaceX gathers from the milestone is as good as the test appeared to be, the company could be just a few days away from installing Starship SN8’s recently-stacked nosecone, followed by a second triple-Raptor static fire test. If that second static fire goes well, SN8’s next task will be the first high-altitude Starship flight test.

[...] Curiously, moments before preburner ignition, one of the three Raptor engines appeared to command an aggressive jet-like vent of liquid oxygen identical to a vent seen just a few hours prior during the first aborted preburner test. There’s thus a chance that only two of SN8’s three Raptor engines successfully started their preburners.

More details: Starship SN8 conducts milestone Static Fire test ahead of nosecone install

Update: SpaceX Starship go for nosecone installation forward after historic static fire

This 'Please Like Me.' Women Fire Back: 'No Way.' caught my eye, so I decided to have a closer look

FT seems to indicate women vote is not likely to favor Trump (not only in Pennsylvania)

In this Pennsylvania town, racism 'was quiet.' Then Trump stoked fears of violence - hmm, so blacks voting against Trump is a matter of survival in PA? Gee, great way to make friends, mate!

Even seniors are abandoning Trump in Pa. Downplaying the pandemic was the last straw. - looks like the best Trump can hope is the pandemic to kill all seniors before they vote.

James Hill hardly leaves his home in Philadelphia anymore...
Every few days, he’s back at the kitchen table in Chestnut Hill to write another condolence note memorializing a friend of a loved one he’s lost to this deadly disease, 10 so far.
“Telling us not to be afraid of the coronavirus when so many people in the White House are coming down with it is ridiculous,”

AP says it's the Evangelicals but looks to me like the "non-college educated" is a better description for Trump base.

---

Edit: 14day rolling averages in 8 swing states

"The Guardian is collating polls in each of these ​states, as well as another set of national polls. Any polls deemed unreliable – for example, because they have small sample sizes – are excluded."

The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2019 (S.2658, https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/2658/text ) has languished in the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for nearly a year.

The bill, introduced with bipartisan support, would require large communications platforms to implement APIs to allow other platforms to directly interact with users on their platforms.

Aside from the obvious advantages of this strategy (lowering barriers to entry for competitive platforms and reducing the influence/market power of these platforms), other, potentially more free speech and privacy protecting platforms could have the opportunity to flourish and, hopefully, create a broad-based decentralized digital public commons.

I have written to my House and Senate representatives to express my support for this bill. Perhaps other Soylentils might like to do so as well.

The text below is what I sent to my senators:

I strongly urge you to support the ACCESS Act (S.2658 - Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2019) introduced by Senator Warner and encourage your colleagues to do so as well.

The bill requires that large communications platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide mechanisms for other platforms to interoperate with their platforms.

This is important for several reasons:

1. The sheer size of these platforms lock your constituents into them, creating huge barriers to entry for competitors and stifling competition in the Social netwotking market;

2. The ACCESS Act would create a mechanism for other platforms to interoperate with these huge platforms, some of which already exist and others which could provide users not only with superior capabilities, but also with the ability to exert more control over their personal data and information (cf. Diaspora, https://joindiaspora.org );

3. These huge platforms have enormous control, not only over the news and information that their users see, but also over the marketplaces created by their sheer size. Requiring them to freely interoperate provides an opportunity to create a true public commons divorced from any particular corporate entity;

4. As we've seen in the recent (and not so recent) past, these platforms exert an enormous amount of influence and have a huge economic impact on us. As such, there have been calls to break up these companies to limit that impact and influence. I posit that creating an environment which will significantly reduce barriers to entry into this space will encourage competition and limit the impact/influence of these corporations, while creat new opportunities, new jobs and a broader set of voices on the Internet.

I'd further urge you to introduce amendments to this bill to accomplish the following:

1. Reduce the size of impacted platforms from 100,000,000 users to 100,000. This would allow a rich ecosystem of communication and social networking platforms that can interact and give everyone an opportunity to connect with others in a decentralized, open way. It would also provide strong incentives for entrepreneurship in this space and encourage innovation and competition;

2. In addition to tasking the National Institute for Standards and Technology with creating the protocols and interfaces required to implement this bill, invite the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to participate as well. The IETF (https://ietf.org/about/ ) are the people who have, for more than 30 years, been developing, documenting and implementing the technical standards that have made the Internet the economic and cultural dynamo it is today.

Please make this a priority, because broad-based, open communication, discussion and the potential for enhanced personal privacy are critical to our democracy and cultural cohesion.

Feel free to plagiarize all or some of it should you choose to pass it along to your representatives.

Do any Soylentils have ideas and/or suggestions beyond mine for why to support (or not) this bill?

Washington Examiner (right leaning) "snitches" on GOP Sen. Sasse saying Trump 'kisses dictators' butts' and mocks evangelicals

The convo is linked at the end of TFA, I brought it here for convenience.

Sasse, a possible GOP candidate for president in 2024, is up for reelection on Nov. 3 and is expected to cruise to victory.

In an audio clip of the call, obtained by the Washington Examiner, a female constituent asks Sasse to explain “your relationship with the president” and wonders, “Why do you have to criticize him so much?”

...

Sasse spokesman James Wegmann confirmed that his boss made the comments, saying the call occurred earlier this week.

“I don’t know how many more times we can shout this: Even though the Beltway is obsessing exclusively about the presidential race, control of the Senate is ten times more important,” he said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. "The fragile Senate seats that will determine whether Democrats nuke the Senate are the races Ben cares about, the races he’s working on, and the only races he’s talking about.”

...

Sasse began by criticizing the media. “In his partial defense here, I think that lots of the news media has pretended that COVID is literally the first public health crisis ever. And somehow, it's Donald Trump's fault. That's not true. They just wanted to use it against him," Sasse said.

And then he added: "But the reality is that he careened from curb to curb. First, he ignored COVID. And then he went into full economic shutdown mode. He was the one who said 10 to 14 days of shutdown would fix this. And that was always wrong. I mean, and so I don't think the way he's lead through COVID has been reasonable or responsible, or right.”

Sasse also explored Trump's foreign policy and other issues.

“The way he kisses dictators' butts. I mean, the way he ignores that the Uighurs are in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang. Right now, he hasn't lifted a finger on behalf of the Hong-Kongers," he said. "The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women, spends like a drunken sailor. The ways I criticize President Obama for that kind of spending, I've criticized President Trump for as well. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He's flirted with white supremacists."

Sasse fretted that Trump and his "stupid political obsessions" could drive the country further to the Left. “If young people become permanent Democrats because they've just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics, or if women who were willing to still vote with the Republican Party in 2016 decide that they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future," Sasse said. "I've spent lots of the, of the last year on a campaign bus, and when you listen to Nebraskans, they don't really want more rage tweeting as a new form of entertainment," he said. "I think the overwhelming reason that President Trump won in 2016 was simply because Hillary Clinton was literally the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling.”

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Andrew Torba
An Open Letter to President Trump on Section 230

By e-mail and First Class Mail

Dear Mr. President:

Gab AI Inc. (“Gab”) is a small company that has been a repeat victim of Big Tech’s immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

We are attacked by Big Tech because we stand for freedom and because we compete with their control over the flow of information online. We operate a social media site that has one core rule: political speech that is protected by the First Amendment is allowed on our site. We do not take sides.

We run an entirely legal business. We proactively engage with U.S. and international law enforcement to keep illegal activity, and criminals, off of our platform.

We refuse to censor legal speech. For this, we have been the target of extreme left-wing activists who have been successful in getting us banned from:

        The Apple App Store, the Google Play App Store, the Mozilla Extension Store, and the Google Chrome Extension Store.

        By payment platforms including Stripe, Paypal, Square, BitPay, Coinbase, and Visa.

        By hosting companies including Joyent, Azure, Backblaze, and Amazon AWS.

        By storefronts including Shopify and Gumroad.

        By third party software tools including Embedly, Helpscout, Pusher, Medium, and Mailgun.

        From crowdfunding websites including Patreon, StartEngine LA, and even our own whitelabeled portal when Amazon AWS refused to run it.

        From Twitter Ads.

In short, Section 230 – and political bias – has allowed Big Tech to deplatform us from practically every single major resource required to operate our business.

We have every reason to hate Section 230.

But we want you to keep Section 230 exactly the way it is.

Section 230 helps the little guy. We seek to protect free speech on the Internet, and Section 230 is the only thing that stands between us and an avalanche of lawsuits from activist groups and foreign governments who don’t like what our millions of users and readers have to say. Without Section 230, we couldn’t stand up to these oppressive forces that want to eliminate free speech online. With Section 230, we can.

All over the world, the market is providing free speech-oriented alternatives to Big Tech. The single best thing you could do if you want to beat Twitter is NOT to abolish Section 230, which will take years and will hurt the companies you need to protect conservative thought – and indeed all free thought – on the Web.

The best thing you could do is to use sites like Gab.com to disseminate content and information your supporters need to read. The Free Speech Internet is growing fast as millions of people make the move over to Gab. If you join the Free Speech Internet it will grow even faster.

We have reserved an account for you at gab.com/realdonaldtrump. Do the right thing – do the effective thing, the thing that will help end Twitter and Facebook’s dominance over the Web for good – and get on Gab, and join us in our mission to make the Internet free again.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Torba, CEO Gab.com
October 16th, 2020
Jesus is King

https://news.gab.com/2020/10/16/an-open-letter-to-president-trump-on-section-230/

From the horse's mouth

'Sorry sunshine, wrong place' – Winston Peters shuts down American Covid-19 denier at campaign event

The party leader was taking questions from the crowd after giving a speech when a man with an American accent rose to ask for proof that Covid-19 exists.

"Where's your evidence that there is a virus that causes the disease?" the man asked, referencing a scientific method which he believed had not yet been satisfied for Covid-19.

Peters - who had already been short with the man for attempting to ask three questions rather than one - didn't hold back in his answer.

“Sit down, sit down," he said. "We’ve got someone who obviously got an education in America - 220,000 people have died in the US, where there are eight million cases to date. We’ve got 79,000 cases just today, probably in India, and here is someone who gets up and says ‘the Earth is flat’.

“Sorry sunshine, wrong place,” Peters said to applause.

The man then tried to reply but Peters moved on to the next question, telling him: "Quiet, we have manners at our meetings as well."

Take this as a sample with how the world outside US deals with the lunatics.

1. No "teach the controversy", no wasting time with "non-sense is still free speech, rebut it or you're wrong"
2. [see subject]

Ever find a field on an official form that you don't really have need of, have no idea what to put in it, but it's a required field? Well, here's what I do. These are what I've put as payout descriptions on Stripe to BoA transfers over the past year:

• bribes and hush money
• monthly embezzlement
• hookers and blow
• normal old transfer
• from some nigerian prince

Note: Occasionally telling Stripe to pay out whatever is in our account with them to our BoA account is the sum total extent of my involvement with SN finances.