postnihilism

And when that company commits a crime, it should be punished and its stock should lose value.

It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes.

This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.

"This 'Skinnerism' has been discredited in cognitive psychology decades ago and makes absolutely no biological sense whatsoever for the simple reason that any organism trying to adapt in this way will be eaten by predators before minimizing its "error function" sufficiently."

"Living learning organisms have limited resources (energy and time), and they cut the search space drastically through shortcuts and heuristics and hardcoded biases instead of doing some kind of brute force optimization."

But those heuristics and hardcoded biases were developed through brute force optimization over the course of billions of years, a massive amount of energy input and many organisms being devoured.

kbensons is explicitly referencing a legal case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

Given the relationship the current US administration has with Russia, it seems like Facebook would be a less welcome alternative for a pro-democracy Belarusian protestor.

It's currently a good predictor (socio-economic clustering) but it's less causal (find the right buddy -> immediately become wealthy).

It's objectionable because it introduces yet another mechanism for dramatically increasing inequality and economic stratification while also making capital markets more corrupt and less efficient, which undermines core aspects of our economic system.

Agreed, but the parking lot example seems like a clear example of public information.

And immediately the single most important aspect of financial success in the United States becomes having golf buddies that work in finance and M&A.

General intelligence in its biological form was achieved with hundreds of millions of years evolution, which required the "evaluation" of trillions and trillions of instantiations of nervous systems. The total energy consumption of all those individual organisms was many many orders of magnitude more than all of the energy that has been produced by the entirety of humanity.

Are you describing yourself as European with a capital E?

Are you asking me if I think Facebook should have to host that content? Naw, seems like a better fit for tiktok.

You think his marketing team randomly chose from a selection of polygons to run as the primary image on a national ad campaign? The Trump administration loves their dog whistles.

I support your position of outlawing lobbyists, overturning Citizens United and instituting a blanket ban on political contributions by corporations.

I have an immediate family member with rheumatoid arthritis who struggled to fill their prescription through Kaiser because of this as well. It caused a lot of stress in my family. If they were unable to fill their prescription and had complications as a result, they may have needed to go to the hospital, which is not something you want to in the middle of a pandemic when you have an autoimmune disease...

I know someone who submits PRs to large open source projects at the beginning of the year to update forgotten copyright values in their codebases in order to get listed as a contributor on github. It's a bit tongue in cheek but on first glance their open source contributions look pretty impressive...

It's a classic :)

I made a little framework for building these types of models: https://github.com/jrhdoty/SwarmJS

Here's a boids implementation using it: http://jrhdoty.github.io/SwarmJS/

Hi maram, I'd love to have copy too. My email is postnihilismhn@gmail.com. Thanks!

As long as it stays within the boundaries set by the law. Stop trying to tell a large corporation to stop doing business and make profits, go change the society in which it operates.

This comment posits that companies act in a closed system. Companies don't just act within the boundaries set by the law, they actively seek to directly change laws by lobbying and to change the interpretation of laws through litigation in order to best suit their interests. They are political agents as are their workers.

It might bring more gray area into your life but like it or not what you do for your day job can have moral implications. You may have taken this post as a personal attack because you work at Google, which may be why you are so vociferously arguing against it. But even if one disagrees with where this person drew the line I think it behooves everybody to at least occasionally reflect on the ethical implications of how they spend their time, especially in tech where what you work on can easily affect millions or billions of people.

I'd hope this discussion would be more about the merit of where this line was drawn in this case rather than whether or not one is even justified in taking a moral stance instead of just putting their head down and shutting up or quitting.

How does this play out at work?

You saddle up to a co-worker at the water cooler. Hi Yasir (he's from the Bay Area), you know your religion has a terrible record of human rights? Yeah? Cool, see you at the standup in 30 minutes.

Equating 'misogynistic divorce laws, violence against “immodest” women, and application of the death penalty for homosexuality' with an entire religion of 1.6 billion people is the issue, not criticism of a specific country's human rights record. You should not come to work and rail against a major world religion...

The first generation TPUs were focused on inference. Second generation TPUs are focused on both training and inference.

https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/google-cloud-off...

Your company almost certainly makes use of multiple pieces of open source software. What do you do when you need a feature that doesn't yet exist in one of them?

His pulled hamstring is from over extending this analogy.

Maybe, but using one of the most successful and wealthy institutions in the world as an example of ineffective bloat isn't useful for the overall argument.

"This workout routine is a waste of time and effort. See, look at Usain Bolt doing it."

I've enjoyed the Deep Learning Nanodegree [0]. It is a 6 month survey course of deep learning techniques and applications. Some of the lessons and instructors are better than others but overall the content and projects have been good.

This course is not to be confused with the one-off deep learning course they offer [1], which I have not taken but have heard is not as good.

[0]https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning-nanodegree-foun...)

[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730

My comment about 'White Male Persecution Complex (PC)" was tongue and cheek. I should have known that would be a mistake in this conversation.

I have many white male coworkers (as you'd expect given the demographic statistics for tech) and I have nothing but the utmost respect for their ability. I don't harbor any assumption that, "that they've had a silver spoon in their mouths their whole life."

I don't think that believing that there are groups that have been more economically and socially marginalized than white males is alienating. I also don't think that it implies that I believe my white male coworkers have been given a free pass to the positions they are in today. Everyone I work with has had to pass the same bar.

As I've stated, all of the statements I've made here are my own, made on my own time, on a public site and do not represent the views of my employer. I leave my politics at home.

Could your great grandmother vote?

Hence the white and gold, (er, blue and black dress). I'd reiterate and ask you to have a conversation with a female colleague or friend who works in tech and ask for their perspective.

We had racial policy in the form of slavery, then segregation and Jim Crow, to discriminatory housing policies, to inequitable application of drug laws but now, let's just ignore race and all of its historical context when it comes to outreach and public policy.

That is how it is possible to logically disenfranchise a group of individuals by ignoring their group characteristics. The disenfranchisement already happened.

Diversity programs are not about punishment it is about recognizing the historical context in which we are acting.

Yes, but the beginning of those conversations can't be, "you're biologically inferior at doing the same job as me." That's not "engaging in reasoned debate", it's being an asshole.

We can have a discussion about the merits of public companies engaging in diversity programs without starting from that premise though.

I appreciate where you are coming from. And I agree we should, "strive towards a world in which we stop making exactly those kinds of distinctions and instead judge people on the content of their character and the value they can create." And I honestly believe that diversity and outreach programs are part of that process.

The economic and social structure of the United States is the result of historical processes that were driven by racism and sexism; disparities in wealth and power between these groups continue to exist today due to that legacy.

To take one example, "If average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today." [0]

While it is a great sentiment that everyone should be treated purely as individuals and it is something to strive for, it completely ignores the economic reality of our country and is an ahistorical approach to public policy or the construction of a hiring pipeline.

We can argue about to what role public companies can or should play to reduce these historical inequities. I think that outreach and education at all levels to increase the number of candidates from underrepresented groups in the tech hiring pipeline is a great step and that reducing these inequities, beyond being ethical, will create a stronger workforce. Others might disagree and have good reasons to disagree. That is a conversation worth having, but it needs to happen in the historical context in which we find ourselves.

Writing a manifesto that claims that the disparity in tech is the result of biological differences that lead women to be inferior at performing in tech and leadership capacities is not the way to start this conversation. In fact this is the exact kind of sentiment that you call out by saying, "I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place."

[0] http://www.ips-dc.org/report-ever-growing-gap/