ooobit2

I appreciate this. The point, succinctly: This is a manufactured problem for a manufactured solution that hasn't evolved utility.

... laws that protect minors as young as 14 from being coerced into sexual relationships with adults up to age 23... laws that limit corporate access to public water sources when the state is in perpetual drought... Oops. Those suggestions went right out the window. And into one of those 90% of fires that are man-made. Maybe someone will come by with a 24-pack of plastic water bottles we can dump on the fire, since pulling from the hose will put us over our government-mandated per-person use restrictions and cost us hundreds in fines... or even jail time!

Goodness. Yup! Well, that's a wrap on a Monday.

I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses.

I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.

The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.

And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.

It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.

Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.

Careful not to mix up definitions. "Long-term" in medicine does not mean "extended period of time." It more often means "requiring continuous monitoring or care over an extended period of time." COVID-19 patients are still actively monitored, especially now as we have meta-studies just released this month showing SARS-CoV-2 appears to have some preference to selectively target ACE2 (vasodilation). We don't have concrete alphas on any target yet, but we certainly have longitudinal studies in progress. It's been one year from the first cases appearing in Wuhan. We have traced and confirmed more than a dozen variants originating in post-Wuhan areas. The recent surge in new cases is owed almost exclusively to two variants with significantly higher transmissibility.

Last, I'd like to point out that while I agree this type of virus is relatively new to humans, and the -2 virus is very new, we do have a wealth of longitudinal knowledge from SARS and MERS cases to work with in conjunction with what we are discovering about SARS-CoV-2. So far, it is not the patients with respiratory illness that we need to be concerned about. It is the patients with zero respiratory symptoms, but high risk of other cardiovascular and autoimmune symptoms. I think we're more baffled by how this one virus can go from putting someone on a ventilator to putting someone at a significant risk of stroke in such a short period of time.

That said, I agree with you that these are apples and oranges. The brain-eating amoebas are a panic thing. COVID-19 is not something to shake a fist at. COVID-19 has been found in spinal fluid. Given SARS and MERS do not share this trait, we have a lot more reason to take -2 as a serious threat, regardless of its extremely high short-term survival rate.

Nothing good comes easy. The dozens of hours I'd spend staring at 26 lines in R just trying different ideas to shorten/optimize/improve clarity, and that wasn't something I needed to sell that someone else would depend on for business or personal use.

But I can relate to the pressure to deliver quick results. I found myself burnt out when working on a forecast model around three years ago. The constant "how's it goin'?" tore my attention away from the work, and I'm still convinced I could have delivered a better result.

So, in a way, I agree. In another, I understand the other side of the issue, and I think there are so many less time-intensive tasks going on around engineering that there's often little awareness that something like refactoring a class for better efficiency pays in smaller but compounding ways long-term, with most of the time cost and perceived opportunity cost being immediate and short-term. It's still worth it if you really do the math on the long-term benefit.

"I apologize for having misspoke earlier. The correct quote is: '...while still sounding like we're maybe worth $1b.' We could be worth more than the disclosed amount; however, we aren't sure if or how often, if ever, someone may be counting that number. It's really up in the air on occasion at around this point." - Me, still CEO, now an award-winning CEO.

This is why I can't run a company.

"Sometimes, it's probably almost approximately around what we think could be along the spectrum of known values." - Me, as CEO.

I agree. But I would like to point out that I did not initialize my thinking from Maslow's hierarchy. A discernible connection is coincidental rather than intentional. And that's what I intended to say through describing risk. It is safe to begin with the framework and work within its constraints to achieve a relatively predictable result. However, that also averts any risk inherent to failures along processes that discover novel relationships, test outcomes, compare against known outcomes. That may yield more desirable results, but it's more often riddled with stochastic failure. It's natural to feel repulsion to it, but the ability to persist against continuous discomfort is what separates the Bezos, Musks, Gates, et. al. from nearly everyone else.

On a related note, Bill Gates' recent doubts about the utility of all-electric long distance trucks was surprising. I don't know of nearly any other time Gates just reached into a field he has zero experience in and reacted to his own repulsion of his discomfort with the subject and its context. It was an odd, uncharacteristic move, and one that makes me wonder if his value set has changed enough that he cannot provide value and authoritative influence in consumer and enterprise hardware and software solutions anymore. People change, so maybe it's true. But man, I idolized Bill as a kid. It's hard to not feel like he's the reason people take people like me seriously, even today.

Bluetooth or USB? I'm hoping they finally installed some USB ports in volcanoes. It's 2020. Should be able to charge my phone everywhere.

I'm just sad it wasn't a trackpad. I'd have kicked it into the volcano.

Honestly, I think of any number of issues in the world that we have to navigate, and I am truly grateful that so few of them require a trackpad.

I think the one thing we cannot open for debate, because it is evident given any framework, is the impact of risk avoidance in knowledge acquisition. I once read that given a room with a table and some blocks, the idiot would wait for instructions; the smart person would try to surmise the intent placing the blocks on the table, the table in the room, and the subject (them) at the table; however, the genius would find novel ways to combine the blocks, the table, and the room, often at the bewilderment of any observer.

Frameworks are what smart people use to get results. I believe risk is the tool of geniuses.

It'd be obvious, for example, to add Bold, Italic, and Underline buttons for usability to the textbox I'm typing in. To me, however, the buttons, the textbox, even the text-styling characters are arbitrary constraints. I want to know if this "reply" feature could be built in-line, without a textbox? If I could eliminate the constraints one-by-one, how many ways could you and I interact over this specific topic that would be both novel and, perhaps, more engaging for us both?

It depends. For lists, I do spaces. Allows for more levels than a tab would. But for everything else, tabs.

I've also grown to loathe that first-line tab beginning the second paragraph. It makes left-aligned text look wonky.

I loathe centered text too.

I'm not a rounded rectangle person.

I think the colored block UI that's all over Android, sites like HN, etc. looks tacky. We went from semi-transparent glass UI to flat colored blocks, and somehow interfaces got slower and more processor intensive. Now, that's a horse of a different color.

100% of the time for me, I wouldn't wipe my butt with a trackpad, let alone use one for work.

It's always fun for me to meet people who do things the complete opposite I do them. It's oddly satisfying, like, I'm glad someone is my polar opposite on an issue or activity.

Oh, let's not with my country. We're also the only nation in the world that requires its abroad citizens to pay the same tax rates domestic citizens pay, and only offers a credit-basis for exempting income that you paid taxes on to the country you reside in.

It's the reason nearly all US citizens who move overseas eventually give up their citizenship. My great aunt left for Poland 30 years ago, and renounced her citizenship within 3 years because she was paying taxes on everything she earned twice, one under Polish law and again under US law.

Can it also not require Apple to get a 30% cut when we buy something from within an app, like... oh, IDK, a Fortnite skin? Because I think requiring us to tack on a 30% tax or for the devs to take a 30% loss on something Apple has nothing to do with is also unacceptable.

I don't know the direct answer, but I have a deduction in my head to work with...? I'll just put it out there: I think speed is deeply impacted by high-level frameworks that parse or compile at runtime. React Native is a framework on Android, which is a framework on Java, which compiles at runtime. IDK if anything in that chain compiles down to Assembly or machine code before you open an app made in React Native. That tied with the bloat of JIC background services sitting idle eats bandwidth. Garbage collection checks operate in a loop, checking again and again if all these unused but loaded processes still exist at their addresses. And when you pile those on each other, it seems relatively easy to see how modern CPUs don't seem much faster than chipsets from 5-6 years ago.

I stopped programming around 8 years ago because I hate the current MVC model most software is created and maintained with. What got me interested recently in dipping back in was a video on branchless programming. I love the idea of unit testing at the machine code level for efficiency, and then figuring out how to trick the compiler or runtime and the chipset into making quick, predictive outputs to reduce idling on branches or making 15 steps for something doable in as little as 4.

That feels like a completely opposing direction to take given the current priorities of engineers across almost all industries, even oldtime ones like Gaming.

In less time than it takes to read those papers, a tyranny would rise in place of whatever power it succeeds, and that would be insurmountable monopoly.

Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, but that's the issue: over time, people would adapt, not imminently. And the Tech executives would have far fewer barriers to implementing controls than the people would have the means to obstruct them.

I don't doubt for a second that Jeff Bezos would announce Amazon as a leader in "keeping us united as a society," while implementing a new policy in their warehouses that requires Safety teams to lash employees with a bamboo reed each hour if they have not met their rate.

The problem with anarchy, Libertarianism, socialism, communism, and so many similar-veined structures argued for is that these arguments so deeply idealize the end goal that they almost entirely are void of planned action during the transition.

We are physiologically engineered to take the path of least effort. Whatever minimal effort ensures the most survival. The downside to technology is an exponential drop in effort necessary for survival. We need look no further than how far off Reagan was about giving rich people more money in American capitalism (it worked until it snagged on steadily increased market instability, which has since caused massive crashes in 1987, 1996, 2001, and 2008, each time in different sectors and each time due to extremely risky and obviously absurd liability risks taken by the highest brackets of networth wherein any net loss on those decisions was guaranteed to be distributed, whereas any net benefit was guaranteed to be isolated in impact.) We can see this in social justice as well: Feminist organizers are struggling a lot right now after having envisioned a world where "misogyny" was eradicated, yet numbers across the board are going up... more sexual violence, more abuse, more online bullying, more conflicts with other civil rights' movements. The emphasis on a perfect vision has led some amazing women leading the movement to be targeted with abuse from other intersectional groups.

This is just a cursory perspective, and so much more nuance and detail is necessary to get a clear picture, but it is absolutely not as simple as saying, "Anarchy wants/doesn't want to abolish ___." Anarchy is one of a number of social philosophies that by nature are self-cannibalizing, and thereby illogical.

I think your opinion is irrelevant and based in ignorance of Islam and the values that a predominately Islamic society holds for its citizens. These are not easy or often flippant decisions made and/or accepted by people. But part of listening means accepting where you have a right to form opinions, to have them heard, and to feel entitled to them being relevant. This is not listening. This is you asserting a colonialist's supremacy on a culture that does not agree with your ethic. This same line of thinking is what led to the British invasions of Central Asia and Africa, that Indians were barbaric and Brits would bring the education and civil discipline to their land and improve their lives. Well, what good have yours and their Napoleon complexes left?

Western people are usually surprised to find out that people actually have freedoms outside of America and Europe. They just often choose to sacrifice more egregious ones for communal good than not.

I made it two paragraphs before I remembered the preface of Google's code of conduct was stripped of the line "Don't be evil." It's now the last line, which to me reads as doing the ethical thing is an afterthought. The much more ambiguous "Do the right thing," is in Alphabet's corporate code.

We need the ethics of AI to be an offshoot of open source. It's tough to suggest that in an environment where enough people can pressure a group to adopt objectively unethical policies, but at the very least open source communities do not have the trigger of financial risk.

Google is going to need to make money from this "Ethics as a Service" eventually. And that is an obvious, all too obvious conflict of interest for what Google envisions.

Maybe they can do this. I'm not 100% objecting to the idea. But I'd like to suggest they start with YouTube. Ads on the platform have quadrupled since November 2019. Creators are playing a lottery with monetization every other upload, and they're making as little as 1-5% compared to YouTube's ad-share program 10 years ago. Start there.

I feel bad, but then I remember that Aaron Swartz (created RSS, Markdown, and co-founded Reddit) committed suicide after federal charges would have put him in prison for life for stealing public grant-funded research papers from JSTOR at MIT.

I truly do not care about library theft at this point. Steal it all. There's nothing in their possession more important than a life, especially someone like Aaron, who had done so much good with his before he had even turned 18.

As drawfloat pointed out, Apple doesn't have to explicitly guarantee no susceptibility to malware. The FTC Act considers anything from an Elon Musk tweet about flamethrowers to a casual joke at Apple's Keynote, and weighs whether a reasonable consumer would expect the product to reflect that claim. That doesn't mean implied guarantees are as easily prosecuted. But it does mean that when Tim Cook or Steve Jobs, or another named executive, is on stage and says something along the lines of, "We don't have the same problems as Windows," and a reasonable audience member understands he's referring to malware risk on macOS vs Windows, that's enough to say Apple has made a legal guarantee to the consumer. The law is open-ended like this because promises can look like anything, from outright printing FREE SAME-DAY SHIPPING to printing in an FAQ that most orders arrive within 7 days. If it wasn't cost prohibitive, you could actually file a small claim against, say, Amazon, for a two-day Prime delivery not arriving within two days.

The broader point though, is that Apple has established the belief that macOS is not susceptible to malware. That's why people don't "need" a virus scanner running in the background.

And this belief is widespread enough that it warrants questioning the basis of a use case for this check: Why does macOS need to send my data to a remote server upon initial load of each application to verify it with Apple's whitelist (approve-list? what's the right term these days?), if the operating system's existing protection has to date fulfilled the implied guarantee by CEO, Tim Cook, and former CEO, Steve Jobs, of zero or limited, but otherwise insignificant, exposure risk to malware?

I stuck with Wells Fargo after their fraudulent account debacle, and I can attest first-hand that this will happen again, affect more people, and be only relatively as frustrating compared to the last big issue. It's when I look back on before that time that I decided to break with business after changes to Wells Fargo ACH policy in 2018.

In 2018, I was laid off, lost almost everything over five months. I had one bill on autopay that I eventually ran out of funds to pay. IIRC in June 2018, WF stopped denying repeat ACH attempts if, on the first two attempts, the funds were not available and/or WF would not choose to pay it and simply overdraw the account. Every single attempt would now process. On December 3, my account was at $490 when the $600 payment attempted, then again, and again, over and over, for 9 business days. My account was closed with a -$1,800+ balance. I lost count of the number of NSF fees by day four or five. And Wells Fargo decided to pay that payment upon closure of my account. So, I went from $490 on December 3, 2018, to owing almost $2,000 in fees to Wells Fargo two weeks later.

I'll pay it off when I can, as you know, it's still my debt, but while other banks were cutting fees, WF was changing its policies to ramp them up. I ended up in an unfortunate waltz of financial doom with them. And I had a low statistical risk of running into a problem with them because I used so few of their services. Don't leave it up to luck. When you see risky behavior, grab your money and go. They're willing to keep doing crap like this because they know most people think it would never happen to their personal accounts.

This cascade of comments is missing the point. It's like someone is pointing out the darker shade of clouds at the horizon and saying, "I think a storm is coming," and everyone here is just going, "Well, it could also be nightfall. I mean, the night has to roll on in at some point too."

Yes, it's just an initial check. But is it necessary? What exactly is the use case basis for Apple transmitting and logging data on every application you run on an operating system you have a consumer guarantee of zero-tampering post-sale.

So, let's work this out: How easy is it to not upgrade macOS, retain consistent performance as usual, and not lose support if the userbase remains unsatisfied with Apple's change to an exchanged good? By my understanding, as with Windows 10, Apple will eventually require you to upgrade. If you're upgrading to a system that maintains the same performance and does not introduce express limitations to the product post-sale, that's great! Go for it, live merry. However, in this case, the userbase has zero clarification on both co-owned data transmission and a remote check that appears to trigger a constraint on workflow. There's no use case basis that makes sense for doing this, because Apple has established guarantees for decades prior to this new process that claim macOS is not susceptible to malware. So, it begs the question: Was Apple violating consumer protections by making false guarantees, or is Apple violating consumer protections by limiting the function and utility of the product post-sale?

That's what people are asking right now. We don't care about the nuance of the check. We care about the basic characteristics of, and more importantly the legitimacy of any use case for this check, given promises made to consumers at a prior time of purchase.

We're seeing this right now with Epic's Tim Sweeney suing Apple for its mandatory cut on all digital goods. Yet a large number of people, people who claim to be pro-99%, anti-technocracy, anti-corporatism, are shilling the rhetoric that "it's Apple's platform" and "Epic knew what the terms were."

Well, yes, but that's exactly what SV activists and social activists are claiming has to stop. It's absurd that these same people are willing to defend the iPhone/iOS/Apple Services pipeline of proprietary anticompetitive dependencies.

I hope Epic wins this case against Apple. It's a precedent that needs to be set for limiting anticompetitive business and manufactured monopolies. Nothing Apple has in its portfolio is absent a perfect substitute in the very same market Apple is selling their products. But Apple has used proprietary inputs as a gatekeeper for their revenue. No one should have to buy a $49 dongle to plug an HDMI cable into their iPhone when every Android/Windows/Linux-based device has built-in support within the device. And if someone tries to push a "Lightning" to HDMI cable, Apple detects and deliberately locks off device content.

Too many big, beloved logos are built on anti-free market tactics, both by lobbying policy and private act. The sheer volume of this that Steve Jobs did in his lifetime made it hard for me to feel anything when he died. I genuinely felt relieved that this tyrant in technology, a man whose every product idea was just enough of a change of someone else's existing work product, slapped with intentional proprietary inputs to limit competition within the Apple eco-system, was finally gone. And then Tim Cook sashay'd on in.

It's absurd I have to reply with this: Climate change continues to be seen as debatable because climate change models keep being corrected past the degree of correction most people understand invalidates similar models in other fields of science.

So, using a pharmaceutical as an example: If Pfizer published findings that stated an HBP pill permanently reduced blood pressure by a specific amount after 60 days, then four years later came out and corrected that to 10 days, most people would be concerned that the extra 50 days of treatment carried significant risk of lowering blood pressure too far, and would ask whether Pfizer did enough to prevent such a significant risk of lowering blood pressure too far. And almost everyone would be more cautious about taking other Pfizer medications. Makes sense, right?

That's what people do with climate science models in the general public. When someone asserts confidence in a model one year then publishes a significant correction to that model the next, skepticism over the integrity of all of their models is reasonable. If they messed up so bad here, we need to know whether it's isolated in scope.

That said, the entire model was about speed. No one inferred a general direction of decline. They asserted high confidence in a model that, given additional data, completely changed. There is a rule of logic in data that as new records are added, each record becomes an increasingly smaller proportion of the overall dataset, and save for extreme anomalies, the expected rate of change for the model given each additional record declines on a curve. That is why random sampling of a population is used instead of the population. After a certain number of records, the relevance of any N new records are insignificant to the output. If the addition of new data completely threw off their model, even as a time series, they're overfitting or underfitting, but either way, they are not going to be trusted as a source of reliable information.

What I'm saying is we need to stop doing that. If we talk about the models as just being marginally accurate, we're more likely to stem attempts to debate the entirety of climate science. Regardless of how smart or stupid you think those who debate climate change are, they do influence barriers to act.

You point out a key fault in the approach people employ to derive inferential outputs vs. descriptive outputs. I feel like I could rant about the obvious wide MOE and high alphas that have to be employed for inferential models. But I also feel like it's a matter of convenience. Incredibly smart, well-learned data scientists are either subject to their own bias, to their employer's bias, to the audience's popular appeal, and a number of other skews to usable inferences.

Let's say we have 10 models of Greenland's ice sheet predicting non-linear declines in total ice at 10 different progressive rates. If those 10 models have an MOE in the top quartile, and the rate of change for the relevant variables meets high confidence, I'd say we can reasonably infer melt will progress similar to some of those models. I wouldn't shell out a publication declaring it an accurate model, or even one professionals should use to guide decisions. But, given additional precautions are taken, I would expect a sound decision to consider inferences from the 10 models.

I'm talking a whole different script and procedure for handling inferential outputs, communicating them to stakeholders, and setting fair expectations. It's an approach that people don't use, even though it is necessary. At the very least, it averts the kind of surprise conflicts in data that undermine productive, preventative planning and action.

Instead, like you point out, the approach and the bias inherent to the outputs necessitates extreme skepticism. I remind myself a lot of that line from Rick & Morty, when Rick says, "Sometimes science is more art than science." Data is the same kind of beast, especially as you attempt to work around rudimentary entropy. Physics isn't any less subject to the same context. We already have proof that the thermodynamics we see here on Earth are not uniform across the entire Universe. If you and I were standing at different ends of the Universe, I could as easily call you a quack for your declaration that a dropped ball's speed and trajectory can be predicted by your equation.

Anyway, I could keep going, but we both know the downvotes are self-righteous, self-aggrandizing people who have to be right to as deep an extreme as necessary. It's the only way they can sleep at night, so they can wake up and compound the mess they already compounded the previous day.

The fact that we were just saying, as recently as 2016, that things hadn't become "catastrophic" yet, only to four years later make yet another correction that vastly accelerates past existing predictive models is why climate change continues to be seen as debatable. We need to either admit that we don't know or start acting consistently like we do know.

Pushing out an article with a headline like, "Major-global-feature is past the point of return," is not exactly selling the idea of a carbon tax. And the only argument against the critics has been, "Well, it could get even worse!" You mean in 60 days, when we announce something like "China will be underwater by February 2022?" Investments to curb climate change start to look like snake oil when we're saying something can be fixed by it but then announcing 30 days later that it no longer can.