Yup, these kinds of things are definitely on the agenda as we integrate the core ideas here into Hazel. We kept things minimal in Tylr to focus on the core ideas with minimal "magic".

Indeed, that problem (ambiguity about where to put matching delimiters) is what motivated tylr. The solution is: when the location of the closing parentheses isn't unique, as in your example, tylr puts it in the "backpack" above the cursor and enters "restructuring mode", letting you select where it should go (within the valid region).

Yup, tylr is a minimal prototype, ala Hazelnut, intended to be adapted and integrated into Hazel (happening now!)

You can still say whatever you want, you just can't compel others (including businesses) to assist you in conveying your speech. This is really basic stuff, it is surprising how difficult many otherwise smart people are finding it.

Smart people are finding it difficult because it's absurd to accept that gigantic monopolies are allowed to control the free flow of information.

I can't even go out and speak in a public square, because it's illegal. Internet censorship by corporations is still censorship.

you are right from a constitutional perspective, but it's somewhat misses the point.

Private censorship is still censorship, particularly when the public square is privately owned.

if we can't stop the tit for tat between left and right from escalating further I truly fear for this country.

To be clear, you're referring to "the right, led by the President, organizes and executes a violent attack on the Capitol, so companies refuse to continue providing services to those people" as a "tit for tat".

There is a difference between cases when business needs to spend effort to assist you, and when it needs to spend effort to prevent you. Here preventing is actually harder, because there is no difference to AWS/Twitter which combination of numbers it stores and it has to go out of its way to read the number and block specifically your speech.

The dominant cost here isn't the cost of the employee that has to update their database, it is the cost of lost advertising or customers angry that your company is providing services to terrorists.

If twitter had done this for advertisers and the customers, their price of their shares would not fall.

Agreed. And, if I don't want to make a cake for a gay wedding no one can compel me to do so.

Certainly a relevant comparison, but if sexual orientation is, like race and gender, a protected characteristic, then it may make sense from a balancing perspective to not allow that to be a valid reason, even if "affiliation with a terrorist group" remains a valid reason to choose to deny service.

There were people with zip tie handcuffs and guns in the chamber, fortunately after it had been evacuated. I don't know what they planned to do, but I imagine best case would be a hostage situation where they demand that the electoral count be stopped until their conspiracy theories about electoral fraud were considered. Worst case they execute democratic leadership, which is far from an implausible scenario given reports that they were looking for Pelosi and Schumer's offices (and found them, and looted them). Keep in mind that their media sphere is full of conspiracy theories that accuse politicians of child abuse. Minimizing what happened here would be a big mistake.

We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.

The flip side is when your friends on the platform don't have enough interest in whatever interest of yours you're trying to learn more about... You go browsing groups and it needs to be sorted/ordered/tailored/suggested somehow unless you want some useless thing like alphabetical order. Should I join A1% Landscaping or Aaron's Aardvarks?

So a search engine?

Having the list be seeded by your own thoughts means you're still sort of in your bubble. I'm talking about the (important, IMHO) use case of wandering through the world seeing what presents itself. Perhaps ordering by popularity makes sense (simply skip to page nnnn to discover unpopular groups) but that feels like it would also have downsides.

Sure. There is no way to eliminate whacko conspiracy theorists and fringe forums. They existed before social media too. The idea is that interpersonal dynamics can help manage these things: if your uncle Frank posts about chemtrails, then hopefully someone he trusts can point him in a different direction in the comments, and if not, at least the people reading it will see the comments. If Facebook just surfaces this information, you get none of this: click and boom you're in an alternative reality full of lizard people and humans in cosmic battle.

You can walk into the office, but you won't get a meeting with Wyden if you aren't on the schedule. Instead, if you are a resident of the state, they'll have staff that will meet with you in a small conference room, take notes, maybe ask a few questions. These are typically fairly young intern types, so don't expect too much depth from them (in my experience, you're going to get some very naive questions if you bring up anything related to science/tech policy). They'll then tell you that you are being heard, thank you, and send you on your way. This is occasionally a useful thing to do, e.g. to bring attention to a niche issue, cause, or special interest that their office might not be aware of at all.

Definitely this. I would suggest you do some leg work to at least get in with a legislative assistant. The more prepared you are, the more you bring to the table, the more specific of an issue or ask, the more you will be 'heard' if you will.

Also most don't know your House Rep's office can help with way more than listening to complaints. They are very helpful. Case work, lots of student stuff (if you want to go to a military academy), maybe some grant stuff. But especially if you are having VA bureaucracy issues. There is budget for constituent services including Franking $ to reach out to their constituents. Members actually try here because it helps them win elections.

Wait, this is a thing that people actually do? I thought the "talk to your representative" thing Americans say was a polite way to tell people off.

Well, it certainly was a few decades ago when I was in my twenties. I was in Washington D.C. as tourist, walking around, seeing the sights. Having been educated in a typical U.S. public school of the time, I thought to myself, "Gee, as long as I'm here, I should visit my representative's office." The security situation was probably different then. I just wandered around the building, found his office, walked in, and announced myself as resident of his district. He wasn't physically there at the time, but I was welcomed and given a tour and chatted with a staffer.

I was nobody - just a kid - but I was voter.

It’s a thing in every democratic country – although usually, only few people actually use this, and those few tend to often be the rich.

If every now and then regular people would also use this right, we’d be able to change a lot.

Definitely!

An in-person meeting is the best way. If you figure that an e-mail is worth X, then a phone call is worth perhaps 100X, and an office visit is probably 10000X. Politicians do actually want to know what people care about, and the amount of work you do to get in touch definitely factors into how representative they think your opinion may be.

I've done it, but at my Representative's local offices back here, not in DC.

Talking to your representative is a basic civic duty.

Is there a way to follow up on the mentioned issues?

Make sure you write down the name of who you spoke to, and see if they'll give you their email address. Then you have way to follow up, either directly or by calling the office and saying you had spoken to so-and-so and wanted to follow up. Obviously the people you speak to can't promise much of anything, but if you bring up something that sounds important to them, they will do what they can to move it through the bureaucracy. Follow-ups can help keep it on the radar or make it more urgent. Obviously there are no fool-proof methods here (and congress is full of fools). And people don't like to say no, so you may need to read between the lines sometimes to figure out that they decided your requests were inconsistent with whatever political school of thought that representative subscribes to.

Andrew is actually joining our group, FP Lab, as a PhD student this fall and will be contributing to Hazel amongst other things. :-)

Reminds me of a math blog I set up in grad school called "Nothing Left to Prove". No posts.

Or, what is left to prove is trivial.

I've tried to get my head around the limited information out there on how much turbulence there is at various altitudes but I don't know enough about that area of physics to get a good sense of it. Do you have a citation for the "roaring convection currents" claim? Fast winds aren't necessarily a problem, its the derivatives that cause problems...