- 7 Posts
- 37 Comments
no, this is one of the worst answers on Stack Overflow
OP had a specific question to capture opening tags. The thing OP asked about can be done with regular expressions. It is true that arbitrarily nested languages like HTML cannot generally be parsed with regular expressions, but that is not what OP asked about.
I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.
I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.
The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.
Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.
I stand by my statement that if you’re saving things to a file you should probably use XML, if you’re transferring data over a network you should probably use JSON.
No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.
On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.
Adult here, have plenty of money (and growing) actually. Wish I could easily buy more time with that money, but the system of wage labor mostly just isn’t flexible enough that there are many employers who will agree to “you get a few more weeks of vacation but a few thousand currency units less annual salary”. If I could do that, I would.
I am too young to remember that. Of course browsers are now free (at least as in beer, many also as in speech) again and that is a good thing. In my childhood, computers were pretty much synonymous with Windows and the web was mostly unusable without Flash Player and it’s a good thing that that has changed. Still, we don’t live in the utopian society I imagined the Internet would lead to.
2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication where we exchange ideas with each other without corporate media being gatekeepers telling us what to read, write and think!
2024: Hi, I’m Meta and everyone gets their information from my platforms and I can decide what ideas to allow there. What do you mean we weren’t supposed to have that anymore by now, whoever told you that kind of nonsense.
I think the line is easy to draw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
I oppose most censorship, but I do not oppose moderation. If you don’t want to see certain people speaking freely, you shouldn’t have to, but you shouldn’t be allowed to keep them from speaking freely to each other.
Isn’t this just a newer version of this? https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/evilmalware.html
I dislike the whole concept of “social media” in the Facebook sense.
I think the ideal form of “social media”, which was also popular in 2004, was the web forum. I want that back, not something where I have to follow people, but something where I can meet and find people with common interests and discuss those interests with them.