cluse

Having a child predecease you is one of the worst things that can happen to a person in general. This is a common sentiment in humans. The strange thing is that you mentioned you're trying to follow "logic." This is not logic. These are emotions.

Well, we're talking about someone who was in legal trouble for taking information from academic libraries that he thought should be free for all. He was willing to put himself at a great personal risk for the sake of making information free. So he would probably be critical of OpenAI for not being open enough, and would probably champion the cause for more and better open source models.

Her argument wasn't that you should be able to go from level 8 to 10 in two years.

Her argument was that she should have come in at level 9.

The Bloomberg article clarified it like this:

"She came into the job with 23 years of experience in the financial services and technology field but was hired as a level eight employee while other men who were hired at the same time as her, and allegedly had less experience, were hired at level nine. As a level eight employee, Rowe made about $750,000 a year while some of the level nine employees made over $1 million a year."

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/google-must-pay-fe...

As some others have mentioned in this thread, the most important problems are often not the most interesting.

For example, Code for America has several "civic tech" projects where volunteer software engineers can make apps to make it easier for recipients of government benefits to navigate the system. These kinds of "civic tech" apps make government more efficient. They have a direct and measurable positive impact on poverty and inequality.

But these projects are not particularly interesting from a technological perspective. They are not rocket science. They are just web apps. A lot of the time, solving important problems is not particularly complicated or difficult. You just have to care. In other words, you have to be able to prioritize your values over your ego. Will you be able to put on your resume that you learned a fancy new technology? Probably not. But will you be able to say that you had a positive impact? Probably yes.

If you are a software engineer looking to make a positive impact, you should search for terms like "civic tech" or "humane tech" to find projects that are driven by humane values, not profits. Or you should reach out to a nonprofit organization and ask if they need help with their website. They could often use help with making it easier to get donations, communicate their message, contact a politician, or do other stuff related to their website.

The other thing to remember is that solving the most important problems is not just thankless, most of the time. It also doesn't pay well, because it often involves serving people and communities who don't have the ability to pay much. But if you are one of those patient people who prioritizes your values over your ego and your finances, I respect you, and even though I don't know your name, you are my favorite kind of person.

I think the world would be a beautiful place if the most important problems were also the most financially lucrative to solve. But we don't live in that world. We can't expect the financial incentives to line up with what's important. If you serve a nonprofit that aims to make the world a better place, you probably can't do it for the money. It has to be because you care.

The tone of this thread is so unrelatable to me. I feel like the total opposite of the sentiment in this thread. I want to work in a place that pushes me to do better and fulfill my potential. I know that's hard, because true learning is almost always uncomfortable and feels like work. But in most jobs throughout my career, my experience is of feeling stifled and asphyxiated. In practice, many times when I've tried to "grow" in my role, the reaction from my colleagues was negative and I got the sense that I didn't belong there, that I was stepping on people's toes, that overworked people felt insulted or threatened rather than relieved by my offer to take on tiny pieces of their responsibilities. Things have gotten better now that I'm in my 30s and better at standing up for myself, but I'm still in an uphill battle just to be included in conversations. As someone who is passionate about technology, I want to answer questions like, "What's the hardest thing I can do?" or "What's the most awesome thing I can make?" or "What's the biggest positive impact that I can have?" And then I feel jealous when I read this thread because I wish I had a tenth as much support as some of these people have. I wish I had a manager who wanted me to grow too much!

Google offered several times to work with Apple to get full compatibility with their messages. Apple refused every time. This is Apple's deliberate choice.

You sound like you work at a larger company. I've worked at large companies and it's amazing how many resources large companies can waste, and how easy it is for people in those companies to hide that waste.

It drives me crazy when I see a lot of waste - whether it's time, money, or just human potential when people want to achieve more but they don't have the right opportunity because others dismiss them as not having potential. I became much happier when I moved to a small company that was run much more efficiently and very little was wasted, and if people are in a position where they don't feel good about what they are doing, there are sufficient opportunities for them to do something different.

I wish there was a way to maintain git version control while still being able to send and receive files from attachments from people who struggle with the idea of reading or reviewing something in any way other than by getting an email attachment.

I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, edit them, and "check in" the document afterward. The problem was that SharePoint was slow, so it was more convenient to work from local copies. And many people couldn't resist the urge to send documents as attachments when requesting feedback from someone else, thus breaking the version control system. And if someone already had "checked out" the document, there was nothing stopping someone from just working from a local copy, making changes, emailing it to me, and saying "Incorporate these changes into the final version."

It was common for someone to work from an outdated version and accidentally overwrite someone else's changes. Even though SharePoint stored every version, it was still a lot of manual work on my part to be a human git, manually combine edits from multiple reviewers, and update revision history tables on the first few pages of every document because nobody else had the time to do that. There were a lot of manual, human errors introduced by me and others. Partly because sometimes people would make minor changes without updating the version of the document, and then you'd have no idea that you were looking at an older version.

I use git for docs version control now, and sometimes I think of ways to make documentation controlled by git while still making it user friendly for non-technical people to contribute to it. What if you could send someone a file as an attachment, they could edit it locally (perhaps in Markdown or similar, with a text editor that has a Markdown preview), then open it in a special text editor let them click a button that would make a pull request for them without them having to understand anything about git? Maybe the special text editor would also notify them as soon as the doc became outdated.

And if even that was too hard, maybe they could save changes, return it to the sender as an email attachment, then the recipient could quicky make a pull request.

It would be glorious.

An inclusive culture is one where you feel like you belong, and you don't feel a pervasive sense of being alienated, a sense that other people don't want you to be there. The sense that your contributions aren't valuable to the team.

If you don't know what this feels like, good. Over time it really wears you down.

I think if Yale had a true meritocracy for admissions, they would have a majority Asian student body.

And I think if they actually admitted all of the Asian students that fulfilled their acceptance criteria, they would probably want to expand the school so that a more diverse student body could fit into Yale.

Out of curiosity, I wonder how much larger Yale would have to be, in order to retain all th Black, Hispanic, and Native American students that they currently have, while also including the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.

Would Yale be twenty-five percent larger? Twice as large? What's the scale here?

Social media platforms are designed to show you content that is more likely to get you to engage with the site by sharing the content, liking it, or commenting on it.

This creates an incentive for people to write provocative and controversial content because it's one of the easiest ways to get attention, because the platform assumes that if you're getting reactions from people, your content deserves to be seen by more eyeballs.

I've thought a lot about this and I think there are many changes, mostly design changes, that would decrease toxicity on social media platforms. I think most platforms wouldn't implement these ideas because they would decrease engagement and ad revenue on their sites.

Here are some of my crazy ideas (in paragraphs because I had trouble formatting bullets):

Allow negative reactions from normal users to make content less visible to others. The advantage of a downvote system is that it takes the burden of content moderation off of moderators and puts it more on the people who consume the content most. The disadvantage of a downvote system is that often, when people are downvoted, they don't learn anything because they often don't know why they were downvoted and they have to guess. Maybe when you downvote someone, you should have to pick a reason and then a breakdown of the downvote reasons should be available transparently for everyone to see.

Content recommendation improvements. YouTube's algorithm is infamous for converting people from moderates to Neo-Nazis. Part of this is that the algorithm that shows you what video you should watch next just shows you what videos keep people watching YouTube. It makes no effort to separate news and facts from opinion and infotainment, so the lines get extremely blurry. If there were separate communities on YouTube for news on different topics, or for opinion and infotainment on various topics, it could shield people who really just want the news from being exposed to three-hour-long alt-right rants, if that is not what they were looking for in the first place.

We need more awareness of emotional manipulation on social media and news content. As an example, if a headline has the word "disturbing" in it, I would call that emotional manipulation because the headline is trying to do your thinking for you, reach conclusions for you, and tell you what to think and feel before you had a chance to read the article and digest it. Too often, we vaguely point to "education" as a way to protect people from sharing toxic content or disinformation online. The fact is that educated people are human too, just as emotional as anyone else, and are not going to be in a fact-checking mindset when they see a social media post with a headline or image that makes them feel sad, angry, or disgusted. We need a platform design that lets ordinary people flag, downvote, or otherwise participate in the fight against emotionally manipulative content.

We need to improve the moderation process so that people trust moderators more, can understand their decisions more, and can contest their decisions if necessary. I think that when a moderator removes a post, it shouldn't disappear. It should be replaced with a list of the rules that were violated for everyone to see. And moderators should be able to hide a post temporarily to give the author a chance to edit it and resubmit it. Also, the first time someone posts in a forum, when they write a comment, they should see sitewide rules and community rules right before they submit, giving them a chance to go back and revise their post. (This mainly applies to a place like Reddit, but I think a platform like Facebook would also be better off with community rules.) These changes would make it so that people understand moderation more, can see a more transparent process, will stop being surprised by moderation, and will overall have a more positive experience with moderators.

On Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, I believe some of the problem is that the platform encourages you to follow people. When you follow personalities instead of topics, it introduces a lot of potential toxicity and content moderation problems. There's no bechmark for civility, nothing you're encouraged to talk about, just opportunities and rewards for creating drama. If these platforms made it harder to make everything oriented around personal brands, and easier to engage in communities that at least have a stated purpose, that would probably help to discourage toxicity, because in a community with a stated purpose, it's easier for a community member to say, "That type of content doesn't belong here, this community is supposed to be about x." Where x is a fairly uncontroversial topic.

In my opinion, based on 11 years of using Reddit, these things support good online conversations. I'm of the strong opinion that social media platforms should put less emphasis on general content aggregation (think of reddit's "front page of the internet) and they should put more emphasis on communities and specific topics. Twitter improved after it let you follow topics in addition to people, because topics usually provide more reasonable, more natural starting points for discussion than viral content does.

Here's my list of the best ingredients to facilitate good online discussions:

- Smaller, niche communities that allow people to talk about common interests instead of just scrolling through shallow, forgettable, crowd-pleasing posts - A voting system that lets better comments get more visibility - A website design that prioritizes discussion over pure content aggregation, which does things like providing moderation tools - A good headline for the discussion to start with. The starting point matters a lot. It helps when there is strong discouragement of editorialized and sensationalized titles. Good discussions usually don't result from a post featuring a provocative or polarizing photo or meme. A discussion is more likely to be good if it starts with a neutral title or an open question. - It's better when there is complete transparency and openness about exactly what is allowed or not allowed, encouraged or discouraged, and what gets you banned. People care more about a community when the rules are enforced fairly and predictably. Otherwise they get resentful.