Thriptic

You are of course allowed to employ SOME obfuscation in research process, but you aren't allowed to shield your product and claims from scrutiny behind them. At the end of the day you have to validate that your product can do what you say it can do publicly through independent analysis, you have to run public trials against existing tech, and you have to explain how your tech works, which Theranos never did. They fought against scrutiny from the greater scientific community from day one; "just trust me it works" is not sufficient proof in science.

This is one reason why we have the patent structure, so people can publicly disclose data for validation purposes and still make a substantial profit.

I can't speak about any specific company, but there are several VCs that specialize in life sciences and medicine and have people with the requisite expertise to evaluate claims on their team (or know the people to talk to in order to get it). The average tech VC might not have a deep bench of life sciences people to validate specific tech with, may not know the experts in the field, and may not know how the industry varies from tech.

Similarly, if the company won't validate their tech in peer reviewed journals, they are full of shit. I strongly suspected fraud years before it was acknowledged because Theranos was citing "trade secrets" for why they couldn't release any data about their tech. We don't do trade secrets in medicine or science, and this is precisely why.

Preach. Boston is damn near overly hostile towards young people. They hyper regulate all activities and services that young people want to participate in or use as you point out, do nothing to reign in housing prices, and then are shocked when they have a hard time retaining talented people after they get their degrees. It's absurd.

It's largely arguing that most of the cybercrime jobs basically are desk jobs. It principally says two things.

First, that most jobs in cybercrime involve selling services to end users and whenever you sell services you not only have to provide customer support which sucks but your customers will have reliability and usability expectations which become annoying to fulfill when you have to maintain your infrastructure in a clandestine way.

Second, most of the positions in criminal orgs involve low skill bitch work because if you had the skills to do the real programming / security / ops work required to do more creative cybercrime then you could easily go get a legitimate job with great pay or go do your own thing.

Well, first I can almost guarantee that the surveillance tech being employed on a predator drone is substantially more advanced and wide ranging than a simple human operated video camera, but I also don't think it's a good idea to have guys with video cameras in helicopters recording protests either unless it's to film illegality. It has a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech. Peaceful protesters really shouldn't be getting surveiled / data gathered during protests shouldn't be getting mined, and unless authorities can guarantee that isn't happening then recording makes me uncomfortable.

Under your logic, any time the government breaks a law and harms me, I am automatically entitled to disregard the law as well and retaliate. If government can't follow the law, why should the people? It's pretty easy to see why we don't want to live in a society where rule of law is disregarded.

The issue is there is no transparency about what is happening with the data that is being collected.

Exactly this and I'm surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment.

Extract this scenario out into meat space. Imagine if a town was running a bulletin board where anyone could post town news and a citizen posted a flyer talking about town crime statistics that were wrong. A town employee noticed and posted an addendum identified as being from the town right next to the flyer saying "actually the real data is X". Should town employees not be allowed to do that?

I would argue that Google has an obligation to be transparent, they do not have an obligation to be neutral. As you state, they are a private entity and can do whatever they want.

If news providers and other knowledge providers are allowed to curate what data they present then I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Google be held to a higher standard. Further, literally nothing is stopping you from creating your own knowledge aggregator if you feel that Google is doing a bad job of displaying pertinent data.

I always wondered what was going on when I saw localhost show up in the connections listing for a site in uMatrix, TIL.

It's also possible to run a web browser in a docker container which can be interacted with on the host OS. This avoids the permissions issues with solutions like firejail:

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

It doesn't seem like fraud when they are still delivering an actual pizza; that's basically just leveraging a sale. It becomes more dubious when they aren't delivering the finished good.

I'm confused. Doordash is knowingly reselling an item for 75% off and someone bought many of the items. No one was defrauded; everyone in the transaction was paid what they wanted to charge, and everyone got what they paid for. What is unethical here? Are you saying it's unethical to take advantage of a sale?

A plausible plan for actually solving the root problem, namely a realistic strategy for mass testing, contact tracing, and non-voluntary quarantine; or a functional vaccine. Right now we have neither, so getting people back out simply puts us back into the same situation we were in before initiating the lockdown.

Not unless they are going to send people home if they are positive or forcibly quarantine them and perform contact tracing and further testing. Thus far most western governments have strongly resisted enacting such measures.

You can't safely open up without employing either highly accurate testing + rapid testing + forced quarantine + contact tracing, or having your population immunized. It's pretty much that simple.

They wait until a vaccine is available. That is obviously what they are shooting for using this tactic.

It's actually very smart. You can try to achieve herd immunity if vaccination proves nearly impossible, but why not wait and see while you can?

They presumably mean until coronavirus disappears or a vaccine appears and everyone is innoculated, so indefinitely.

I agree with you and would add loss of high level mission. When it becomes unclear to people what the broader goal of the company is and how they fit into it, or if they are only rewarded for achieving a local goal (eg hitting some artificial metric) even if their actions impede the broader goal, then you will only get optimization towards the local goals regardless of overall outcomes.

Assuming that we remain bogged down by COVID for many more months / get a second spike of infections due to premature reopening, can we expect manufacturers to release new models and put dealers under additional new pressure to liquidate existing stock, or will they likely hold off and release 2021 models in 2022?

I grow tired of the narrative that companies should have seen this coming and hoarded cash. Investors are never going to allow companies to sit on massive war chests of cash in perpetuity because ROI is then zero and that's not what investors lent them the cash for. If they wanted invested cash to be sat on or hyper safe investments, they would buy government bonds or park the cash in a bank for less risk. If companies have tons of cash and aren't doing anything with it, it is inevitable that investors are rightly going to clammor for buy backs or dividends to see ROI. Besides, basically no one has the cash on hand to deal with a long-term collapse, regardless of executive behavior.

I would say performance is so contingent on wiring quality that it cannot be reasonably assured. I tried out a TPLink system that claimed to be able to deliver 300 mb/sec and only managed 10. The fundamental problem is that you tend to want to place the units in areas with the highest potential for noise (eg near lots of electronics).

They look stuff up all the time. Most physicians try to stay on top of developments in their field by reading scientific journals. Most also have access to subscription services which will provide background and lay out current best practice guidelines / treatment recommendations for almost every disease. Another poster mentioned uptodate which is one of the most popular examples. It's not uncommon for a physician to reference this with the patient still in the room.

The name for what you and the parent described is a review paper. I can't speak for Math or CS, but in life sciences the following techniques would work:

1. Search X and sort by citation count. High quality review papers get cited A LOT, typically in introduction sections of primary research papers. Alternatively, google "[X] review" or "best review paper on X".

2. Look for review journals. Many fields will have journals who only publish reviews. Nature has several such publications for example.

3. Look for the top journals in the space (start by sorting by impact factor) and see if they have review sections. If they do, try to search those sections. Most journals will reach out to top labs in a space and request that they write a review on a subject if the journal editors feel one is needed.

4. Ask someone in the field. Any researcher should be able to immediately point you to canonical reviews in their space.

Not a site per say but a big piece of infrastructure. Before there was Steam there was Sierra's website which hosted half life updates, and World Opponent Network, a matchmaking service from Sierra who eventually got acquired by Valve. You would access WON through the half life game. Using it for online play was downright hilarious, especially because everyone was playing on dedicated servers with manual patching. A new version of the HL server / client would drop on Sierra and you would have to get in line and wait for hours at File Planet or Major Geeks or another mirror in order to download it. For like two weeks you would be getting version conflict errors because 50% of servers / clients would patch quickly and the other 50% wouldn't. Searching for a server was pretty much like using grep, there was no friends list or chat, it was amazing hahaha.

I agree that people didn't really understand what they were getting into fully when they initially agitated for it, but it's definitely the case that there was broad initial public support which is what allowed the companies to get a foothold.

Exactly. It's hard to have collective reform without there being a collective.

Thing is, good regulation is extremely tough. A good regulator needs to deeply, deeply understand the industry, where it has been, where it is going, and what the problems are; they need to deeply understand the spirit of existing laws rather than the letter of the law and be ready to thoughtfully and creatively deal with edge cases; they need to have some risk tolerance to allow for growth while still protecting people; they need to be able to balance the interests of competing groups; they need to be able to be proactive / innovate rapidly in the face of changing conditions meaning they need to understand the bleeding edge and be consulting with the groups at it; they need to see big problems like pandemics coming and push people in the right direction; they need to resist the calls for deregulation for deregulation's sake from industry as well as resist the calls for regulation for regulation's sake from politicians who want to appear like they're doing something about a problem; they need to deeply care about the users they are charged with protecting; Finally, they have to have brass balls. They have to be unafraid of standing up to politicians / the public / industry and saying you are wrong or sorry, we were wrong.

It's really tough to find lots of people who can do all that for not much money / acclaim potential.

Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted, regardless of legality. Very few lawmakers want to aggressively go against public sentiment just because the law says they should.

So to be clear, the existing Firefox on Android which has broad extension support is going to be replaced with a version with less extension support? Why? One of the biggest value adds of Firefox on Android is broad extension support.