crusso

I actually spent a bit of time searching for a letter she sent with an ultimatum to her management. I've seen this referenced multiple places as "the email that got a Google researcher fired": https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

But that doesn't seem right. That looks more like a different type of letter, sent to a wider audience than just Timnit to her manager(s).

I've seen referenced that there was a timeframe for when she was going to quit that she mentioned. I see no such reference in that letter.

Maybe there's a real copy of the letter floating around. My guess is that people pretend that they've seen "the letter" but only read this other one I referenced above.

I'm happy to be proved wrong, though. I have no dog in this fight except to understand the truth of the situation. If you've seen a different letter than shows her ultimatum and time frame, please share.

I got that book based upon a HN recommendation. It's fascinating reading and made me think carefully about how much sleep I was getting.

I used to think of sleep as something that I could put off on a whim and catch-up on over the weekend. I would stay up later to play video games or program if I felt like it. Now, I'm a lot more rigorous in keeping to my nighttime sleep schedule. Whatever I'm doing can normally wait until the next day.

No, the jump/push analogy is too contorted to be meaningful. Employers and employees have a relationship that has processes that have common meanings and names like "resigned" or "fired".

There's no accepted relationship if you push someone threatening to jump. You're just an a-hole committing assault and possibly murder.

Is there a link to the letter that she sent? That could help to clarify.

I agree that it could be viewed as firing language, but only if we had no context.

However, we have context. We know that an ultimatum including a resignation threat was given.

Accepting that resignation and making the termination of their employment relationship immediate with some extra "Yeah, this is for the best" language doesn't mean that she was fired.

If you only want to consider the limited context of ignoring that she submitted a resignation ultimatum, aren't you just cherry picking?

I'm just going by the CNN article and her tweets, which include the response from some manager, Megan:

As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467

Looks like Timnit Gebru made an ultimatum and offered her resignation if the terms of the ultimatum were not met. Google accepted her resignation and chose to have it effective immediately (as is often the case when you resign and a company feels like it would not be beneficial to have a longer departure period).

It's not like I'm taking only the words of others. I'm reading what Gebru herself chose to put out there.

As someone who just learned about this kerfuffle a few minutes ago, that doesn't make sense to claim that she was fired.

If you offer to resign if new conditions of employment aren't met and the company accepts your resignation without honoring your exact terms of schedule, it sounds like you largely were responsible for terminating your own employment. Claiming that you were "immediately fired" as she tweeted just sounds dishonest to me.

Because this particular job does require a certain independence to do it properly

Does it also require a certain intellectual integrity to do properly?

Because claiming that you were "immediately fired" online, then later having to "clarify" that you actually submitted your resignation because some demands weren't met sounds pretty dishonest to me.

There's a lot of truth in that, but it's not strictly true.

And yet, rayiner's comment appeared faded-out from down-voting when I came upon it.

And that's the real problem. He had truth and thoughtfulness in his comment (yeah, you can quibble about federal attempts to override local policy), yet even a smart group of people like regular HN users tribalistically downvoted it. Rayiner sinned by making a coherent argument against throwing Republicans under the bus for metro-area problems.

We are a tribalistic society and it's only getting worse. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters would defend him. He was probably right. When evidence of Biden's family corruption surfaced before the election, the media and tech giants actively suppressed and subverted the information.

Ending no-knock warrants or shuffling around police roles just eats away at the edges of the problem. If as a society, we can't find ways to get at truth and logic that cuts through the dynamics that push tribalism, we're doomed to a never-ending race toward the drain.

Are there any persons who can work, say, 8+ hours? I mean, really work, not be at office.

Yes. Some people can, some people can't. Some people can, but they don't really need to in order to do the job that they get paid for. Some people struggle for 9 hours a day trying to do the job that someone else can do in 2.

Mental performance varies tremendously from person to person, as does athletic performance. Can someone run 4 miles in 20 minutes without stopping? Sure. Some people can keep up that pace for a marathon (26 miles).

I wouldn't worry so much about what other people are doing. Just focus on your own performance and improve it (or don't) based upon how you feel about your productivity and its impact on your life. If enhancing it is your goal, you've taken the first step of measuring it and understanding what influences it. You could cut out distractions and see how that works for you.

For me, improving my performance has always meant synching up my work with what interests me. Sometimes that can mean changing what I'm working on - when I have that flexibility. Sometimes I have to jump-start my interest in a more boring problem by trying to mentally frame it in a way that I framed other problems that have interested me in my life.

I know. If it were still a thing, I'd probably play it today. /C++

Efficacy is still tested with vaccines because there is a statistical expectation of contracting a given disease.

If you give 40,000 people a random mix of placebo and vaccines and then monitor whether or not they contract the target disease, you get an indication of efficacy by comparing the vaccinated group to the placebo group.

If you're not in one of the early target groups, I would assume that tens of millions will have received it before you - in the USA alone. We should have a lot of data to look at in a short amount of time.

I ignore all of the COVID vaccine messaging histrionics. The level of ignorance and political maneuvering out there is astounding.

When I'm afforded the option to get the vaccine, I'll make an assessment of risks based upon data we have at that time vs the risks of contracting COVID.

If I had to make that decision today, I'd take the vaccine. But by the time I'll likely be able to get it in February or so, we'll have millions more data points that I'll be able to consider.

Bolo was a cult phenomenon back in its heyday in the early-to-mid 1990s. It was a game with a great deal of tactical and strategic depth that it allowed a huge range of player ability. It definitely wasn't the kind of game where some newbie could just start playing and get a lucky win or be a master in days or weeks. It felt more like a sport where you needed to practice the basics (like you mentioned on taking PBs) while you also learned a lot about strategy.

My favorite times were the Bolofests where traveling boloers would come into town and we'd all get together to play on a LAN.

Andrew Welch had an intense Bolo addiction for a while. It was in the latter part of my own Bolo addiction, but we played quite a few games together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)

Ah, Bolo.

I've been kind of astounded at the number of people I've seen who claim that they won't be taking the vaccine, no matter what.

Nice article. It manages to explain the uneasy feeling I've always had when people authoritatively talk about "decoupling HTML and CSS". The coupling is somewhere, and where it is causes tradeoffs that need to be considered.

The real puzzler is how they used both spellings in one headline.

You're right. That would be a counter-example because of non-biological second-order effects.

But in this context, we're talking about first-order biological effects that aren't accounted for because of race. If race doesn't have biological underpinnings then the larger argument is meaningless.

If it's a social construct, then it can't have a biological impact on the efficacy of a vaccine.

You see the paradox?

Your scenarios depend upon narrowly assumed premises that fail as soon as you put real people in the mix. Sure, if we lived in a perfect world where your woodworking moderators knew for a fact when libel was taking place or Nazis were posting - then we could all rest easily because they would de facto be preventing harm, not causing it.

But that's not the way it works. In reality, moderators don't know legal libel when they see it to the point that they should be automatically indemnified. We see in day-to-day life that not everyone who is accused of being a Nazi or a racist is one in fact. Sometime the accusation of being a Nazi is itself the libel, and if your woodworking moderators are participating in the perpetuation of that libel; then they should be held to account.

If your woodworking community, through moderation, decides to weigh in on user comments through moderation, badging, or editing; then it should be liable for any libel that it amplifies through its policies. If a person can show actual damage from those policies in court, then why should your woodworking community get a pass?

If I, as a user of social media, want to belong to a community that removes misinformation around the election, government shouldn't ban such a platform from allowing to exist (since without 230,

You continue to indicate that you haven't actually listened to the arguments made.

The Republican argument is not about whether or not a company can censor information on their platform. In no way is it about the government's "banning" the existence of such a platform.

It's about whether or not the government should blanket protect companies from normal legal liability when they make publishing/editorial decisions over their users' content. That's what Section 230 does.

If Section 230 is removed or amended to the liking of Republicans, it won't be the government that punishes Twitter for their editorial/censoring decisions - it will be everyday people who can make a libel case based upon harm that Twitter caused them. Why should everyday people not be allowed their day in court if they can make a legitimate case of harm as a result of Twitter or Facebook policies?

The Republicans are pretty clearly wanting to remove legal protections of section 230 of the CDA for social media companies that are acting as quasi-publishers by suppressing the speech of users on their platforms.

The Democrats want more effort made by social media companies to fight what they perceive as online misinformation... and are asking for more suppression of speech on social media platforms.

Nobody is hiding the ball here. These are direct statements made in the opening remarks by the leadership of both parties.

No, my statement was not ambiguous - unless you haven't listened to what is being said by the mainstream representatives of both parties.

If you watch the hearings, you'd know that both of your contentions are strawmen of what each side claims to want.

It happens. It's whimsical and seems often to be based upon media-generated hype. Important decision-makers like Comey and Clapper both lied to Congress in significant ways and never faced any repercussions. A little nobody like Roger Stone lied to Congress and was prosecuted to the hilt.

Look at the prosecution of Roger Clemens. Why the hell was Congress holding hearings about steroid use in baseball?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/5-people-who-lied-...

The Left and the Right used to agree that freedom of speech was fairly sacrosanct.

Because you want to be on record as having notified an attorney and law enforcement of the problem and your intention to experiment with the company's permission.

You want things on record in any way possible.

Just getting an emailed "okie dokie" back from some company executive and then doing something that could later be construed as illegal is a bad idea.

Always involve an attorney and possibly law enforcement rather than trusting that these companies will do the right thing.

You're claiming a "both sides" problem in a system with extraordinary power imbalances.

Businesses in a free market aren't writing laws and regulations that can put people in jail. With government's great power should come an acknowledgement that it must solve the problems it claims it can, in the way it claims it can, or back the hell off.

Perhaps the Raspberry Pi is used to control a robot, collect sensor data, whatever. Perhaps it was just for the fun of it.

I've used similar techniques for doing a wide variety of operational tasks, so it can be worth it to take the time to figure out how to easily set up tunnels and reverse proxies.