temp99990

My understanding is this is actually what’s exacerbating the “two-class” system at big tech cos like Google where something like half of all workers are contractors. Like it was bad before, but from what I hear it’s even worse now because companies want to make you look as little like an FTE as possible.

Just because your impact on the world is not as huge or consequential as Facebook doesn’t give you free range to exploit user data as you please and protect you from legitimate criticism for doing so. That is classic “whataboutism”

You can google for it...both the lawsuits around misuse of user data and their notorious use of dark patterns

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth that Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, DJ Patil et al get to live their day to day without the reputation hit or scrutiny of FB because LinkedIn is not as “sexy” a media target despite being notorious for using the shadiest dark patterns in the industry and almost certainly historically more cavalier with user data than either FB or Goog with the lawsuits to back it up.

Edit: I added DJ Patil because he’s built a post-LinkedIn image as a champion of data for good but as the chief data person at LinkedIn almost certainly was the mastermind behind all the shady things LinkedIn ever did with user data.

I’m a fan of the Chinese-style captchas where you just move a puzzle piece with a slider. I have no idea how defeatable it is vs reCaptcha but it’s far far less painful.

Interesting. I’ve gotten two offers from two European tech cos, one in London and one in Amsterdam though did not end up accepting either. In both situations I felt they were pretty eager/open to hiring.

The biggest hurdle they face in hiring non-Europeans is that I believe they must somehow prove that you possess skills that are uncommon in the local talent pool in order to get you a work visa. I think SWE, other technical skill set, or having an advanced degree all would help there...

Increasingly very common? Without religion and people going unmarried/without kids, your career has become the thing that you pay more attention to.

I don’t agree with it at all, mostly because too often a job looks like a toxic relationship more than anything else, meaning you as an employee are expected to be fully emotionally invested in your work, while at the same time your company can fire you in the blink of an eye and not think twice about it.

Utterly depressing to see how much damage we can cause in 30-40 years, basically only since older “millennials” were born.

Knowing flexbox, positions, pseudoselectors, media queries, and how specificity works will get you very far with CSS.

I mean food delivery is becoming massively more popular each year w DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub, Postmates, etc. collectively worth tens of billions. The trend is up and to the right. I believe in terms of annual deliveries the US is probably smaller but not that much smaller.

Why just China? Wouldn’t the same be true in the US too?

I’ve had a lot of success using flexbox personally, and at least on my own projects I develop features on a page in 1D vs 2D...

This is partially why I like shopping at Costco. Usually there is only one or at most a few of one thing, and usually it’s of good quality.

I’m surprised a year of runway could mean a house...?

We live in a world where Michael Pollen, a widely known author, wrote a best selling novel on his experience taking illegal drugs while in the US.

Are you really citing a paper from 1995?

I mean I’m a user of illegal drugs and would rather be safe than sorry. If you look at the mechanics of MDMA, it’s basically forcing your brain to release serotonin from the floodgates in a way that can damage neurons.

Drug tolerance is real. Personally I’d rather be safe than sorry.

There’s a ton of research online...

https://dancesafe.org/drug-information/is-mdma-neurotoxic/

I’m a fan of MDMA but be warned you need to know what you’re doing and be well-prepared before and after due to the neurotoxic side effects which may permanently lower your ability to produce serotonin. Also cannot/should not take it more than a few times a year with at least 3-4 months between doses.

Hard to be surprised. I am nowhere near the top of any corporate ladder, but having worked in several large well-known unicorns in SF I am more confident than ever that it takes a certain person capable of playing political games, pushing others down, taking credit for others work, etc. in order to climb the ladder.

This is interesting though I remember seeing a ted talk on covering the corpse in fungi to detoxify the corpse while composting because human bodies are generally highly toxic...

Maybe this is a bit cynical but is this not like if the CEO of Pepsi spoke out against sugar?

He and his VC partner are both YC-insiders. I don’t necessarily follow his tweets as much as his partner’s but his partner tweets are what I’d call classical hustle porn tweets that he spews all the time. And YC is almost certainly the epi-center of hustle porn.

AI based religions will be the next multi-bil institutions in less than a decade

Is there a “Marie Kondo” for the digital world? Seems like something or someone that could be just as relevant if not more than organizing your physical world.

I’ve been fortunate to have landed in a financial position where I’m not scraping by as a millennial but having worked for several years in SF tech one thing that I have felt increasing unease with is the feeling that the companies I’ve worked for might not actually be a net positive for the world. My problem is more existential than economic, which is very much a first world problem but a problem for me nonetheless.

I suspect the loneliness epidemic will be a catalyst for worshipping of AI gods in the not so distant future, which is a bit unsettling but seems inevitable.

Do you actually believe the profiles CA created were accurate or much more insightful over whatever demographic data FB or Goog let you target with?

I did a very similar project for a CS/stats class in 2011. They did some basic k-means clustering on likes and basic sentiment analysis on posts.

If there is one company I hope gets the spotlight in this debate it is Plaid. I think there are among the least transparent when it comes to what data they collect, have zero way of auditing/ensuring compliance among devs, and arguably dealing with some of the most sensitive personal data (banking, transactional).

People are freaking out about CA because it maybe helped Trump target people political ads based on demographic information even though every candidate does the exact same thing and no one seems to mind when others do it.

I don’t think so, but isn’t the entire Cambridge Analytica debacle an issue of using Facebook data to target political ads to users based on demographic information?

The point is he’s buying a ton of ads that purposefully cross Facebook’s own policy on political ad spend to force them to either take action so he can claim victim status or keep them up and look like hypocrites.