The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be

If a critical mass of people on twitter generate enough Section 230 hot takes, all that energy fuses to create renewed interest in the #FairnessDoctrine.

I wrote a book on the FD so let me walk you through why reviving it would be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

First, the Fairness Doctrine was responsible for the most successful episode of government censorship of the past half century. While the Fairness Doctrine was technically created to encourage fair and balanced coverage of “controversial issues of public importance"...

...in the 1960s the Kennedy administration weaponized it to punish conservative radio critics. You see, fairness is in the eye of the beholder--which is the FCC--and the person who appoints the commissioners--the president--gets a say in what looks fair or foul.

(JFK also launched targeted IRS audits of his right-wing radio antagonists; the power to tax is the power to destroy, after all.) Stations responded to the secretly government-organized pressure by dropping conservative broadcasters in order to avoid Fairness Doctrine complaints.

And lest you think this Fairness Doctrine stuff is just conservative bellyaching, bear in mind that the Nixon administration used the threat of Fairness Doctrine enforcement to help bring television network heads to heel.

Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.

Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.

So it's entirely reasonable that absent any other intervention, we should expect to hit ~30% vaccinated by the end of March.

I wrote a book about the Fairness Doctrine and how it was responsible for one of the worst episodes of government censorship in US history.

So I am somewhat alarmed at the calls percolating on Twitter for a new, internet Fairness Doctrine. This is a thread about why that is.

Let's start with what most people think when they hear "Fairness Doctrine." They imagine a time at an indeterminate point in the past when mass media was reasonable, balanced, equitable, and fair. It was a veritable golden age of mass media and the Fairness Doctrine was to thank.

Back then, radio & tv stations couldn't just air their opinions, spreading unchecked misinformation. No, they had to let the other side of any given issue have a say, giving the good guys a chance to check the bad guys when they told bald lies.

However, the problem with this narrative is that it is almost entirely a myth. In actuality, the Fairness Doctrine was a tool wielded by political interests in order to suppress dissident speech & prevent activists (from both Left & Right) from exposing the lies of the powerful.

But telling that story requires going back before the first major test of the Fairness Doctrine in 1963, before the rules were created in 1949, all the way back to the first meaningful attempt at federal regulation of radio in 1927.

Based on the latest info I could find, here's why what happened on Jan. 6th was worse than we thought.

It was coordinated. This was not merely a crowd of protestors accidentally incited to storm the Capitol by the intemperance of the President & other speakers at the rally.

Security experts are combing through the online chatter leading up to the rally and have found extremist groups planning violence. People came w/ malice aforethought, thus armored insurrectionists pushing to the front of the crowd, pipe bombs, & so

But it gets worse. The feds seem to be investigating several Republican members of Congress for connections to the organizers of the rally. (The FBI has warned lawmakers in closed door hearings that they may be shocked with what comes out.)

Indeed, at least one member of Congress, Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) alleges that these GOP members gave some of the insurrectionists tours of the Capitol building on January 5th, the day before.

The implication is that these GOP congressmen used the walkthroughs to familiarize the insurrectionists with the building layout so that they could push into the building and confront their colleagues who were opposed to overturning the electoral ballot count.

It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I

🕵️‍♂️ How Google's PageRank algorithm works

The PageRank algorithm gives each page a rating of its
importance, which is a recursively defined measure of importance, based on if important pages link to it.
It's recursive because the importance of a page refers back to the importance of other pages that link to it

Here's how it works in practice:
1⃣ We start with some pages and crawl them for links

2⃣ Each page has 1/N points (where N as the total number of pages)

3⃣ Add points to each page for the amount of links to it, divided by the number
of links emanating from the sources of these links

Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ

For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.

Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.

A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!

The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).