Larry Sanger
Online knowledge organizer. Co-founder of Wikipedia, Ph.D. Philosophy.
June 25, 2019
FAQ about the project to decentralize social media
See also: Declaration of Digital Independence -- Social Media Strike! -- FAQ about the project to decentralize social media -- Resources General questions What is the Declaration of Digital Independence? Here it is. It is not meant to be a general bill of digital rights. Rather, it has the…
June 9, 2019
Version history for “Declaration of Digital Independence”
1.3 (2019-06-29) Added CC-by-sa license (thought I had done this earlier but apparently not). 1.2 (2019-06-29) Added a quote from Thomas Jefferson, author of the original Declaration, and a picture of his Monticello. 1.12 (2019-06-26) Bolded the words "We, therefore, the undersigned people of…
June 5, 2019
The Antivitist Trend in the West
Recent events have suggested that there is a trend afoot in the West: that life is overrated and that death is not so bad. Call it, for lack of a better term, antivitism (from Latin vita, life). I'm not saying there's a "death cult." But there is evidence of a rather odd trend that seems to…
June 5, 2019
Is letting a 17-year-old die morally equivalent to killing her?
A spate of news articles appeared yesterday, reporting that Dutch 17-year-old mental patient Noa Pothoven was euthanized. This formulation—she was euthanized—caused outrage in certain circles. This is factually incorrect, they say. She was not euthanized. She took her own life. What are the…
June 1, 2019
Some thoughts on the new Voice.com project
This evening we finally learned what the #B1June hype was all about: among other things, a new social media system called Voice.com, built by Block.one, the company behind the outrageously well-performing EOS token. (Full disclosure: Everipedia, where I am CIO, is built on EOS and is the recipient…
May 24, 2019
How to write an app (that respects privacy and supports security)
Some difficult-to-meet requirements Be open source. Don't make users have to trust your black box. I don't want to have to trust you. I don't know you. Don't just release your in-house source code. Develop in public; practice outreach to OSS developers to loop in others; make distributed code…
May 13, 2019
Why your company should consider getting a NAS
What's a NAS again? "NAS" means "network-attached storage," but this buzzphrase has come to mean more than just a backup drive for your local network. It's also, and maybe more importantly, an easy-to-set-up personal cloud server. You use it for document storage and sync a la Dropbox; to sync…
May 10, 2019
Talk back: Why should we have more restrictions on “harmful” speech on social media?
Dear all, This is a different sort of blog post. Rather than me writing yet another essay to you, I want to open the floor to you. I want you to answer something for me. It's like the subreddit "Change My View." This is aimed specifically at my liberal and progressive friends who are very…
May 8, 2019
How I got rid of Google calendar
It was about 2013 that my friend Terrence Yang told me I should be using Google Calendar, because everybody was using Google Calendar. So I did. And he was right: almost everyone else was using it, as far as I could tell. There was a period between approximately 2015 and 2017 when I was getting…
May 7, 2019
If you want government censorship through the back door, advocate for social media regulation
Last week, Facebook permanently blocked the accounts of a motley assortment of conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Semites. This set the Internet, especially the free speech loving parts of the Internet, in an uproar. (That would include me.) Conservatives, who normally cheer for…