Canada signed the TPP which makes copyright 70 years after the death of the creator.

Not exactly paradise.

But to be fair, those were provisions demanded by the American negotiators, and have been dropped in the updated CPTPP.

Canada had those terms removed from the TPP after the US pulled out.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2018/01/canada-successfully-stand...

We prefer to be taken advantage by Canadian Corporatists. Kinder-Morgan, our telecom cartel, etc.

KM is Texan actually, making the current headlines extra infurating.

DMT trip reports point to a use of psychedelics beyond therapy. Since so many users describe the same thing -- points of contact with other beings-- we can hypothesize that DMT gives us access to other dimensions or aspects of space and time. But how we move from subjective reporting to a scientific theory on this, I have no idea. (I have never tried DMT, it sounds terrifying)

This comment is naive, but not totally off-base. Psychedelics can cause real long-term problems for people even if used correctly. I liken it to skydiving, a potentially dangerous activity for which one must be completely prepared, with no absolute guarantee of safety.

That said, I would say that psychedelics definitely expanded my consciousness and changed my life. And that I stopped doing them in the nick of time. They do cause a turn inward, and what I learned is that turning inward can be an endless journey into the void. What I really wanted was to take my expanded consciousness and use it in the consensus world, and for that, I felt, you needed a clear head.

If you approach the psychedelic experience as Thompson did, with the macho attitude of getting as fucked up as possible on as much as you can stand, then of course you are going to come out of it with nothing.

Alan Watts put it best: "When you get the message, hang up the phone." Respect the experience, the power of the drug, and know when to stop.

When I was at University of Waterloo in the 80s, I went for a couple of talk therapy sessions with a very nice, empathetic woman employed in the Psych department. After a session, she said, "would you like to see something?"

Just adjacent to her office was a "trip room", probably constructed when the building was build in the 70s (?). It was round, completely lined with acid orange fabric, upholstered like a pasha's tent and filled with cushions in every colour imaginable. No doubt it had a superlative quadraphonic sound system installed. It also had a large, smoked glass window, for "observers." Not ideal for mushrooms perhaps but for other things...

Yes. Sticking only to the realm of hard science, the frontiers keep expanding (e.g. dark matter and energy). When it comes to our subjective perceptions and how the the brain assembles them into consciousness, we've barely a clue.

Scientific apparatuses have allowed us to "see" the complete elecromagnetic spectrum, the cell, the quasar... psychedelics may be an apparatus allowing us to see dimensions of reality heretofore unquantified.

There are frequencies we can't hear -- impossible with the physical equipment nature has provided in our ears. But science and engineering have a means for both proving to us they really exist, and mangling them (with a kind of fidelity) into some sort of analogous experience. Similarly there are frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot see. And microscopes, and telescopes and MRI's, and all the other wonders of our day take, which take a world that is impossible for use to sense directly and transform it into an analog we can sense.

So why do we cavalierly assume that our brains are physically capable of understanding all true things? What does a machine which transforms ideas which are literally inconceivable to our physical brains look like? What do the crude analogs of these inconceivable thoughts look like?

(I realize I've drifted far afield from the OP -- I don't mean to say that psychedelics are a window into true mysteries. But these discussions always seem to lead me down this path...)

Except all video is fake, that is, all videos are artifacts, artificial things.

"We’re not so far from the collapse of reality" -- am I the only one who finds this inane? No video is real.

Critical thinking as applied to the written word applies equally to the image. It's not rocket science.

Except everyone has been conditioned over the latest ~100 years to assume that everything they see in a video is real. That is: unless explicitly contextualised as fake, like when watching a movie.

Your premise that everyone should just "apply some critical thinking" directly contradicts the events of the last couple of years, not just in the field of video but within any form of media.

It sounds like you're agreeing with the original comment, but I think you might be paraphrasing it to highlight the absurdity.

And it does seem absurd, but it's true: almost everyone has been conditioned to accept news footage as 'pure' truth, something at the other end of a reality-scale from, say, movies.

I think it's hard to remember is that the majority of video is tailored with intent to evoke specific a response: To some degree, your reaction and emotions are at the mercy of the video producer - just like in a movie. Except in a movie, you have the safety switch of remembering it's "not real" - I think the lack of a corresponding mental failsafe with news causes subtle hysteria, confusion, and frustration.

Contrary to a lot of conspiracy, I don't think it's malicious (mostly), and I believe fundamentally journalism has noble goals - but I don't see it as deniable that "news" as a whole is under pressure to be compelling, and that, albeit subtly, twists what we're exposed to.

Crying "be more sceptical" isn't very helpful - it certainly wouldn't have helped me. I think more knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes of newsmaking might be more along the lines of what would help people, but I don't really know.

"Fake" almost isn't the right word. "Disconnected from reality" - subtly - that's the phenomenon causing trouble, in my view. But anything that's disconnected from reality, taken as truth, is open to manipulation; scepticism is appropriate.

Eh, I'm not sure. People have been skeptical of video forever, as long as they feel they have a reason to be. Hell, even the Moon landing videos are doubted by a non-insignificant number of people.

I think the "trust in video" is more a reflection of trust in the establishment, since those were the people who could really broadcast it. People who didn't have that trust in the establishment (e.g. anti-capitalists in the West) already doubted videos as well.

For example, where I'm from there's a significant number of people who are skeptical of the recent videos of the chemical attack in Syria.

You are not the only one who finds it insane.

A video is recorded, cut, and was subject to selection bias to begin with when somebody hit record; not to mention that the subset of things that are easier to record get moved to the front of the line.

Even if you accept the counter-argument that 'unaltered footage' is 'more real' - the entire act of passing a video around, by media, by people, by whomever - is, to me, far removed from the reality of being an eye-witness.

A 'click-bait' headline can be technically true, but there's a reason people take issue with them.

Maybe "fake" is too evocative of digital or selective editing - I feel you're describing a more subtle form of "fakeness" - the subtle loss of reality as something is encapsulated in text, video, etc. and relayed to someone who didn't witness the original.

That, or I'm projecting how I feel about the subject.

I'll add that, for me sometimes, and for a lot of people I know, it's easy to fall into the trap of getting emotionally worked up about some piece of evidence gleaned from the 'net, taking it in as real information, instead of taking it dispassionately as a simulacrum.

I worked at Alexa, then affiliatated with the Internet Archive, on exactly this, in the late 90s. We built our own server farm to crawl, process and store the data. We had 30TB of storage, holding three "snapshots" of the web, and thought we were pretty hot stuff. That would sit on your desktop today.

Crawling was the easy part. We had two processes of up to 40 threads each bringing the data down. Even this we had to throttle because we would use the bandwidth for the entire office, then based in the Presidio.

Processing the data was the bottleneck. Parsing, extracting and pushing to the database took months sometimes and the system broke down frequently. I was online 24/7 maintaining this system and it put me off working for startups forever.

All of the software, from the crawler to the parsers to the database system, were built in-house-- there was nothing out there to handle data of that scale at the time.

Our biggest concerns at that time were getting the cleanest data possible without duplicate pages, and being able to retrieve that data as fast as possible for real-time analysis. The engineers at Alexa produced some remarkable solutions to these problems.

Alexa's plugin gave us real time information on what people were actually looking at, and combining that with the the crawl data, we could have built PageRank. Alexa could have been Google, but went in another direction. We were acquired by Amazon in 1999.

To do this today would be an entirely different problem. The dynamic nature of the web, single-page apps, the orders of magnitude of scale--only the largest companies could begin from scratch with it.

However, you could build a simple system at home that could probably yield a few billion pages, process those, get users logs from some big routing point, and build a mini-Google.

“Alexa could have been Google, but went in another direction.“

Curious, why did they go in another direction?

Amazon's stated reason for acquiring Alexa was to use Alexa's technology to build a recommendation engine. Search was never a priority for Alexa itself. We are acquired for $100 million, so it was take the money and run.

impressive thanks for the wonderful read.

I'll let Sister Wendy do the talking here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sPATJc7rM

I see a lot of comments by privileged straight males on here. As usual, you just don't get it; you have not spent one second trying to put yourself in another's shoes.

I am a gay man who has been in the internet industry since 1996. From my long experience, about 50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome.

My career (and surely the career of the article writer and anyone else who is not a bro) came as a result of the other 50%, talented, generous men and women whose shared their expertise and encouraged me. I certainly did not pull myself up by my own bootstraps; without that assistance I would not be where I am today, which is team lead.

So for those who "abhor" the argument laid out in this article, for once, for just once, SHUT UP, LISTEN to what is being said, and consider how it you might be a carrier of the "racist, sexist and classist" attitudes being called out.

Do you mean "SHUT UP, LISTEN, then come to the expected conclusion"?

Expressing thought on the subject doesn't mean one hasn't listened, so it seems like the only way to pass this test.

Seconded.

If you're just looking at "work hard", you're not seeing other people need to work harder, and overcome a terrifying amount of uncertainty, to get to the same place.

Bullshit. At some point, someone encouraged you to succeed.

Maybe it was when you grew up and were encouraged by any given authority figure to do something, maybe it was finding common ground talking about your wife instead of your husband, maybe it was when you didn't need to wonder whether you were turned down for skill or skin color, maybe it was when you knew someone was interested in you not your tits, but you were encouraged.

Personally, I'm going to encourage you to actually listen to other people's perspectives instead of challenging them to justify their life experiences.

> maybe it was finding common ground talking about your wife instead of your husband, maybe it was when you didn't need to wonder whether you were turned down for skill or skin color

And maybe I am a self-taught gay Puerto Rican who disagrees that gay people need special encouragement in order to succeed.

Fair enough, mu apologies for getting all Reddit-y.

I'm in the camp that at some point, everyone needs help. The unfortunate fact is, a lot of people aren't going to get the same amount of help, or even help at the right time, and they're going to fail as a result. Worse, they're not going to realize they could have done better.

When we're talking about continuing to try, and being positive and always working towards a solution, part of the conversation should ideally be that getting to that place involves something different for different people. Fair?

I think you are magical and great.

>From my long experience, about 50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome.

I think this is partly because your gay. A lot of gay people have a sort of lisp and effeminate manner that advertises their sexuality and many straight men can notice this. It's not that the straight men are trying to discriminate, but their is a certain level of subconscious discomfort that will make it much harder (not impossible) for you to be one of the boys.

Of course not all men are like this, and it's possible for men who are like this to get over it. Please keep in mind though, I doubt that there's a deliberate action to exclude you... It's similar to how an 80 year old man is excluded from hanging out with teenage high school girls. It's not deliberate, you just don't fit in by your nature.

I'm going to assume that this post is coming from a place of social ineptitude and not malice, but just about everything you've said is insensitive, over-generalizing, frowned-upon, and kind of just untrue.

Honestly, I'm perhaps one of the least "progressive" people in this community, and I think it's pretty uninformed to think your comment is going to be helpful or describes an OK way to behave.

> everything you've said is insensitive, over-generalizing, frowned-upon, and kind of just untrue.

To be somewhat fair, the grandparent posting makes it clear that its comments apply to 50%.

I'm fully aware that it's frowned upon. There is definitely no malice intended. Perhaps there is a bit of social ineptitude, but this is the internet.

Let's put it this way. What I said is a generalization, and I framed it as a generalization. In no way did I say it applies to all people. But generalizations illustrate fuzzy truths that are as the adjective aptly states: general.

The parent poster also said something very general. He said that, and I quote: "50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome."

There are two ways I could interpret what he said. I could say what the typical millennial would say when he/she encounters anything slightly sexist/racist and tell him that just about everything he said is insensitive, over-generalizing, frowned-upon, and kind of just untrue.

Or I can see things from his perspective and realize that although he is stereotyping, he is definitely illustrating a generality that is a fuzzy aspect of the truth. As a straight male myself perhaps I can say something to help him see things from a straight males' perspective. Of course I would be giving him another generality but a fuzzy truth is still a type of truth.

I want to change what it means to be progressive. The reality of this world is that things are rarely ever fair, but the meaning of "progressive" has become twisted in recent decades. Progressive has come to mean not only treating all people equally, but to state that all races, sexes and people are equal in mental and physical ability. This is not true. European people are taller, asians are shorter... what black magic enforces the attribute that while physical qualities may be extremely different for all peoples, intelligence remains identical across racial boundaries?

This is not a pretty picture but to say that all are equal is to deny reality. Can we be progressive without denying reality?

Take the following stereotype, for example: Men are generally physically stronger then women and thus better suited for jobs that require more physical strength.

I've literally met "progressive" people who deny this reality. This is borderline insanity in the name of progressiveness. We've gone too far.

I support progressiveness, I support equality in judgement and treatment, but I cannot deny and I cannot unsee the reality of the unbalanced universe we live in.

I want to mention that I have had one instance in my life, being a straight male where I have become bros with a gay male. From my perspective we were just bros, his perspective was different. But that is besides the point. I just want to say that I am in a good position to sympathize with both the stereotypical "macho straight male" and the gay male, so it is of my opinion that it would be highly unwise for the parent poster to dismiss what I say too quickly.

Your initial post made me worry that someone with perhaps an empathy disorder was about to see a small mob gathering outside their home.

I wish you had expanded originally, because I totally agree that GP made a similarly unfair generalization.

In fact, I often wonder why it's constantly reiterated that I could never ever understand the experiences of an "out" group, but those groups regularly purport to understand mine.

>I wish you had expanded originally, because I totally agree that GP made a similarly unfair generalization.

I don't think you fully understood what I'm saying. I don't believe the GP's generalization was unfair. I believe he made a very accurate generalization. I believe his generalization is just about as accurate as my generalization. I'm just explaining the reasoning behind what he is observing and letting him know that it is not the result of intentional discrimination.

I felt as a I typed it that "unfair" wasn't the word I was looking for, but that's about all the investment I made in it. Something like "rounding error taken in aggregate", but your wording clarifies well.

Honestly, I don't bump into the 90s sitcom gay guy much, so that strikes me as inaccurate first, but I also don't have much experience with these infamous bros to know how wrong that is either.

Now I'm wondering if my inability to see these bros makes me likely to be one, like a trout thinking "what fish, dude? all I see are my friends"

But, that user's post was saying that their experience WAS negatively affected simply by virtue of being gay. Your comment doesn't do anything other than affirm their interpretation regarding how they were treated and why they were treated that way.

Yes it does. What of it?

I honestly wondered if you were a poe. I was laughing until I realized you are being serious.

Since 1996 programming has been about 50% frat bros? Really? The quintessential "nerd" job? I couldn't disagree with you more. While I haven't been in the industry that long, how I got into programming was through online forums, where I found incredibly helpful and nice people who didn't know anything about me. Even when they did find out I was pretty young (13ish), they didn't treat me much differently. While I didn't usually get explicit encouragement, I did get help, for no other reason than I wanted to learn and showed that by asking as little as possible to be able to get by.

That's a beautiful thing about the internet, the anonymity allows anyone to be anything and to cut through other people's (potential) biases.

I'll be honest, I have had a good life. I have good parents and friends. I'm immensely grateful for them giving me as good of a start as one could ask for. However, as I said in another post, I was swimming against the stream. My parents thought I was wasting my time, my friends would (and still do) poke fun at me for being a "nerd". So yes, I was lucky that I was born into a stable home with parents who cared about me. It wasn't "all me", I had strangers help me learn, I happened to stumble across the right communities. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

What do you do with the hand you were given? Do you think "Oh well, all is lost, I was born black and gay. I can only do something with my life if people encourage me"? Utterly ridiculous, a toxic and disgusting worldview. The soft bigotry of low expectations. You cannot control anyone other than yourself. There are plenty of genuinely unfortunate/discriminated against people, the question becomes, how do you respond? Do you give up? Or do you persevere?

So, your argument is that you are also a white male, like most other brogrammers, but you understand discrimination because you were treated nice while being anonymous online?

My argument is that programmers have never cared who you are. Only that you wanted to learn. That you are encouraging people to doubt the limits of their own potential and their reception into programming by making it out to be some horrible occupation that only bigots and homophobes go into.

Why would women want to join such a horrible and sexist place if that's their impression? Especially since it isn't the reality. I've come across a few assholes, but they were assholes to everyone. If you have a chip on your shoulder constantly to think "Someone may not like me because I'm x" you're handicapping yourself. Instead seek out the good people, who are the vast majority. Stop with the identity politics and who is the most discriminated or offended and get to coding.

>My argument is that programmers have never cared who you are.

I think the chorus of opinions from female regular programmers all the way to the highest echelons of the tech hierarchy (a la Marissa Mayer) expressing their concern that tech is a 'boy's club' and that the environment is not accepting of diversity is a pretty clear sign that something is up.

Telling people to stop their whining and get to work is easy to say when you have not been on the receiving end of discrimination.