redthrowaway

Crime stats, average IQ across groups, stereotype accuracy, etc.

What's interesting to me is not the above, which is naughty in the anglosphere, but the question of the unknown unknowns that could be as bad or worse in other cultural contexts. There are probably enough people of Indian descent involved in GPT's development that they could guide it past some of the caste landmines, but what about a country like Turkey? We know they have massive internal divisions, but do we know what would exacerbate them and how to avoid them? What about Iran, or South Africa, or Brazil?

We RLHF the piss out of LLMs to ensure they don't say things that make white college graduates in San Francisco ornery, but I'd suggest the much greater risk lies in accidentally spawning scissor statements in cultures you don't know how to begin to parse to figure out what to avoid.

Brave supports bittorrent natively and is basically a reskinned Chrome without the spyware.

Europe has long demonstrated that it's uninterested in competing in the economy of the 21st century. This is exactly in keeping with everything else they've done.

ps. amazon employee #2

Please tell me you held onto your stock

So why wasn't the NYT punished for publishing info from Trump's tax returns? The laptop story could at least be true. There is no way for the NYT to receive Trump's tax returns without someone committing a crime.

You called it. I didn't know OSX was bad for that though

Nothing dockerized locally. This is a bare bones NextJS front end.

    $ npm list --depth=0
    <removed for opsec>
    ├── @babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties@7.8.3
    ├── @babel/plugin-proposal-decorators@7.8.3
    ├── @graphql-codegen/cli@1.13.2 extraneous
    ├── @graphql-codegen/core@1.13.2
    ├── @graphql-codegen/typescript@1.13.2
    ├── @graphql-codegen/typescript-graphql-request@1.13.2
    ├── @graphql-codegen/typescript-operations@1.13.2
    ├── @graphql-toolkit/core@0.10.3
    ├── @graphql-toolkit/url-loader@0.10.3
    ├── @types/lodash@4.14.149
    ├── @types/node@13.11.1
    ├── @types/react@16.9.34
    ├── @types/reactstrap@8.4.2
    ├── @zeit/next-css@1.0.1
    ├── @zeit/next-sass@1.0.1
    ├── babel-plugin-module-resolver@4.0.0
    ├── bootstrap@4.4.1
    ├── dotenv@8.2.0
    ├── express@4.17.1
    ├── UNMET PEER DEPENDENCY graphql@15.0.0
    ├── graphql-request@1.8.2
    ├── graphql-tag@2.10.3
    ├── helmet@3.22.0
    ├── isomorphic-unfetch@3.0.0
    ├── UNMET PEER DEPENDENCY jquery@1.9.1 - 3
    ├── lodash@4.17.15
    ├── mobx@5.15.4
    ├── mobx-react@6.1.8
    ├── next@9.3.4
    ├── next-fonts@1.0.3
    ├── node-sass@4.13.1
    ├── nodemon@2.0.2
    ├── react@16.13.1
    ├── react-dom@16.13.1
    ├── reactstrap@8.4.1
    ├── styled-components@5.0.1
    ├── styled-icons@10.2.1
    ├── ts-node@8.8.2
    └── typescript@3.8.3

SSD on a 2018 MBP with an i7

npm is still a disaster, but for other reasons:

    $ time rm -rf node_modules/

    real 1m2.969s 
    user 0m0.409s
    sys  0m15.853s

Unconfirmed, but there's a suggestion the "hack" was an SMS spoof on Cloudhopper, an SMS-to-Tweet platform Twitter acquired 10 years ago:

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1167533000592109568

So no sponsored content from the BBC or NPR then?

And they called it Sistine, which flabbergastingly shows that coming up with a good name for something is indeed possible.

Chris Hughes sure has turned being randomly assigned as Zuck's room mate into a lucrative career.

I was struck, reading this, of the analogous situation at Boeing: a company founded on engineering talent and propelled to stardom by a string of successful moonshots, merges with McDonnell Douglas, a government contractor par excellence. At first, it seems synergistic: the dynamic Boeing can build amazing planes and MD can secure a steady defence revenue stream.

But then the moonshots quietly end. Boeing makes cost effective tweaks to its current lineup, and lands fat defence contracts that pad the bottom line and drive the stock to stratospheric prices. It gets comfortable, it gets efficient, and it stops being what made it great in the first place.

Apple post-Jobs will likely be an extremely profitable company for many years to come. But it will never again be the pioneering company that forged whole markets from vision and belief.

And that's sad.

Europe sure managed to slay the dragon of those evil cookies what with the banners plastered all over every site forcing you to click a button to close them.

Cookies have been around for 25 years and are dead simple, and Brussels failed spectacularly to understand, let alone sensibly regulate, them. Colour me skeptical they'll manage to wrangle something that even the people working on it barely understand, and that's changing on a yearly basis.

Now this is Fuck You Money.

In all honesty, it's more like, "my people skills need work, so I got a CS degree"

Thank you for this reply. You got what I was getting at but didn't articulate. I appreciate it.

The fact that California is nearly ungovernable due to it?

Part of it is almost certainly due to fear of reprisal, but consider also that many people of Chinese descent simply may not agree with the letter. I grew up in a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, and one thing you come to realize is that while many Chinese expats have very complicated feelings about the Party, they still tend to be intensely nationalistic and are very sensitive towards perceived slights directed at China.

They may not want to sign the letter simply because they're offended by singling out China for opprobrium.

If you're big enough, Google provides excellent support. I was once responsible for a product that generated $30k/month in adsense revenue. It got banned due to adult content and my attempts to clean everything up weren't entirely successful. I ended up on chat with someone from adsense and they essentially held my hand for an hour as we found and removed every bit of porn in the product.

Not appropriate.

I don't remember Steve Jobs calling random people pedophiles or committing a little light securities fraud while high.

Elon brings incredible value to his companies. He also brings incredible risk. The error his fans make is in assuming the two are inseparable--that you can't have the space visionary without the libel, or the automotive and energy revolutionary without the fraud.

I think this is a mistake. You could solve most of Elon's problems by giving someone the ability to preview his tweets before he sends them. I can't see how putting a broadcast delay on his twitter feed would stop him from building cars and rockets.

Unfortunately, the extent to which these sorts of guidelines will ever be followed is at most the extent to which programmers feel like putting in extra effort over and above that required to meet business requirements, and will usually require programmers to push back against business requirements in order to achieve any headway.

Those little social buttons that track every user and nobody ever clicks? You're going to have to spend as much time making the case to your boss why they're a bad idea as you would simply implementing them. Ditto ad spam, interstitials, sticky banners, and the like. And if the UX is bad but conversions increase, good luck.

These sorts of guidelines are great for small sites you control yourself. The chances of being able to follow them, even if you give a shit, on a corporate site where conversions put food on the table, is essentially nil.

He didn't give any indication of being a danger to others. He was obviously someone who was dealing with a mental health crisis, while still being present and coherent. The ATCs were trying to talk him down and get him to land; shooting the plane down would have been a last resort, only ordered if he demonstrated he was going to do harm to others.

I'm curious about their decision to push original content as hard as they have. In some cases, like comedy specials, it's a clear win. But their original dramas are really hit or miss, and for every Altered Carbon you have a half dozen utterly forgettable shows. It makes the "Netflix Original" badge pretty meaningless as an indicator of quality, so I still have to wait for a buzz to develop to commit to trying a show. I don't end up watching Netflix nearly as much as I'd like to.

Also, the diminishment of the back catalogue (and the fact that so much of it is SD--not their fault) is negating one of their biggest selling points.

So let's be clear about what happened, here.

During a meeting about offensive words in comedy, Friedland said the word "nigger". We don't know the context, but we do know that people who were in the room with him were uncomfortable with his using it.

Later, he met with two black employees to talk about his use of the word during the meeting about offensive words. During this meeting, he used the word again.

Now, I can appreciate the incandescent radioactivity of that word. I can, I think, begin to imagine what a black person might feel upon hearing a white person say it.

But at some point we have to be able to talk about words as words. If you're having a discussion about offensive language, the demand that one word be euphemized is infantile. So, too, if you're having a discussion about some people's reaction to the use of that word. We have to be able to recognize that the discussion of a word as a word, and the use of that word as an epithet, are completely separate phenomena.

By way of illustration, if a sociologist were to conduct a study about the use of racial epithets among various groups of people, would you expect them to publish a paper that analyzed the use of "the N-word", or would you expect them to analyze the use of the word "nigger"? If the former, why? Of what stuff is built this wall of timid prevarication?

Network effects are powerful. But beyond the original secondary tech centres of Seattle, Boston, and NYC, there are now thriving tech scenes in all sorts of smaller markets--Portland, Denver, Austin, etc.

It's easy to see every major tech company having a base in SFBA for the foreseeable future, but it's also easy to see being a working programmer living in one of those smaller markets and actually being a homeowner being a much bigger thing going forward.

No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a right.

No, but they do have a right to vote for policies and politicians that defend their interests.

What is far more likely is that people will simply leave the Bay Area, and demand will fall. It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities than it is to convince a bunch of NIMBY boomers that other people need places to live, too.