I loved FFSend. When it died, I ended up standing up a GOKAPI server, as it was the closest alternative I could find at the time: https://github.com/Forceu/Gokapi

Definitely not as nice as FFSend though. I may have to give that fork a try instead.

It doesn’t have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.

That is what we’re debating, yes.

If it could be conclusively proven that a system like this has saved a child’s life, would that benefit outweigh the misuse?

If not, how many children’s lives would it need to save for it to outweigh the misuse?

Sure, maybe, but I’d also say you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Yes, we should absolutely have better mental healthcare safety nets. Yes, false positives are probably a pretty common prank.

But this isn’t a zero sum game. This can work on tandem with a therapist/counsellor to try and identify someone before they shoot up a school and get them help. This might let the staff know a kid is struggling with suicidal ideation before they find the kid OD’d on moms sleeping pills.

In an ideal world would this be unnecessary? Absolutely. But we don’t live in that ideal world.

That argument could be expanded to any tool though.

People run people over with cars or drive drunk. Ban cars?

People use computers to distribute CP. Ban computers?

People use baseball bats to bludgeon people to death. Ban baseball?

The question of if a tool should be banned is driven by if its utility is outweighed by the negative externalities of use by bad actors.

The answer is wildly more nuanced than “if it can hurt someone it must be banned.”

You say “the last time this happened” as if this wasn’t a generalized trend across all schooling for the past decade or so.

Out of the tens of thousands of schools implementing systems like this, I’m not surprised that one had some letch who was spying on kids via webcam.

And I’m all for having increased forms of oversight and protection to prevent that kind of abuse.

But this argument is just as much of a “won’t someone think of the children” as the opposite. Just cause one school out of thousands did a bad thing, doesn’t mean the tech is worthless or bad.

This article feels pretty disingenuous to me.

It glosses over the fact that this is surveillance on computers that the school owns. This isn’t them spying on kids personal laptops or phones. This is them exercising reasonable and appropriate oversight of school equipment.

This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.

The article also makes the point that, while the companies claim they’ve stopped many school shootings before they’ve happened, you can’t prove they would have happened without intervention.

And sure. That’s technically true. But the article then goes on to treat that assertion as if it’s proof that the product is worthless and has never prevented a school shooting, and that’s just bad logic.

It’s like saying that your alarm clock has woken you up 100 days in a row, and then being like, “well, there’s no proof that you wouldn’t have woken up on time anyway, even if the alarm wasn’t there.” Yeah, sure. You can’t prove a negative. Maybe I would usually wake up without it. I’ve got a pretty good sleep schedule after all. But the idea that all 100 are false positives seems a little asinine, no? We don’t think it was effective even once?

Could also be a correlation due to people who actually get diagnosed with dyslexia/dysgraphia being more likely to live in places that are more affluent or with better mental healthcare.

That would tend to correlate with generally more accepting populations.

That all sounds like it sucks, but I don’t think it’s as hopeless as I’m sure it feels.

Obviously this is just a snapshot into your life, and I’m sure there are more details under the hood, like what exact “adult responsibilities” and stuff you’ve got going on. That said, even in this text I think you’ve outlined a good bit of good stuff you’ve got going on.

First, I don’t know why you think conflict deescalation isn’t an absolutely in demand skill. Every job under the sun has conflict, and being able to manage that is huge. Even within Engineering, you could put that to huge use as a Sales Engineer or some other customer facing technical role.

Second, you got your bachelor’s in an engineering discipline. You can poo-poo your grades all you want, but at the end of the day you succeeded. No mean feat my man. That’s worth celebrating.

Finally, if you’re simply looking for a way out, there are institutions that are always looking for technical people. Obviously this is gonna vary a lot by country, so ymmv, but the government/military is always in need of people in technical roles, and rarely are able to fill them. It probably doesn’t pay nearly what a “normal” engineering job would, but it’d be more than an internship, and it would give you some of that structured camaraderie that you previously felt the lack of when trying to leave.

All that to say, don’t give up hope my guy. I know I’m just some schmuck on Lemmy of all places, but I think you’re capable of breaking out and getting to a better place.

You got this!

Genuine question, why not just walk away?

Like, it doesn’t solve the mental issues you’re already dealing with because of the years of trauma, but like, it seems like step one of healing would be to remove yourself from the situation, no?

Like, tell your dad he should probably get out, because you’re not gonna be there to play witness to keep him out of jail anymore, and then pop deuces?

Well, not every metric. I bet the computers generated them way faster, lol. :P

To be clear, harassment and defamation are crimes in the US as well. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can harm people with your speech with impunity. It’s a prohibition on the government from meddling with political speech, especially that of people who are detractors of the government.

I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)

So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.

And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.

Printing Nazi propaganda isn’t illegal in the US.

And I realize this isn’t in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.

It’s the old, “I don’t agree with anything that man says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” thing.

I can see both sides on this one I think?

Out of curiosity, would you feel differently about this if it had been a print newsletter or physical book publisher that was printing Nazi propaganda that got shutdown because they refused to stop printing Nazi propaganda?

If so, what’s the substantive difference? If not, are you affirming banning people from publishing books based on ideological grounds?

Obviously banning books is bad, but obviously Nazis are bad, and that’s a hard square to circle.

The NBA allows women to try out though? It doesn’t ban women from competing at all.

Why is this superimposed on a screenshot from Quest 64, lol?

Here’s the note taking and editors page of awesome-selfhosted. Looks like there are a few contenders in there. DailyTxT looks decent for your use case.

https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.html

I think you’d be surprised at the number of people who would in fact say that Susan Collins is fair game, but that’s neither here nor there.

I think we’re largely on the same page honestly. I think our difference, if there is one, is the degree to which we think morality vs tribalism is the true influencer.

And this is a bit of a tangent, but I think this is exacerbated by the fact that morals are held to varying degrees of closeness. As an example, everyone agrees that cheating on your SO is wrong. Everyone also agrees that punching someone in the face is wrong. But if a husband cheats on his wife, and she slaps him, you will have people take (often very vehement) different sides on the issue, depending on which “sin” they consider to be worse.

And so, expanding that to the tribalism issues at hand, the majority of people on both sides are attempting to stand for and push for virtues that they believe are most important. Sometimes that’s inclusivity and caring for the poor. Sometimes it’s family unity and economic security.

And don’t hear me wrong, while any of that can be turned towards hate by malicious actors, it is clear that that is occuring on one side more than the other. But that doesn’t make the virtues themselves invalid.

Sure, but it’s equally as unenlightened to say that politics hasn’t devolved into tribalism.

And let it not be missed that your example has one group actively participating in illegal and violent activity and one group that isn’t. The two groups aren’t equivalent on their face.

A more apples to apples comparison would be joking about people at a Trump rally getting killed vs BLM protestors getting killed.

And it absolutely would be hypocritical to joke about the one and not the other, and justifying it to yourself as being fine because people who go to Trump rallies are racist is in fact just tribalism.

To phrase it another way, it sounds like you are saying, to some greater or lesser degree, that, “it’s fine because my morality is perfect, and therefore anyone not on team ‘me’ is obviously pure evil and therefore anything said about them or done to them is clearly and perfectly justified as they aren’t people deserving of moral consideration.”