wegs

I won't argue whether it's accurate, but I think you missed the point. You can swap words around, and get the same for any demographic.

The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."

I think what this needs is a proper scan and vectorization.

Author has a nice repo with other doodles:

https://github.com/girliemac/a-picture-is-worth-a-1000-words

I really wish there were some way to find and navigate good OERs like these.

No. This is not true, and I think I provided a good reference to that effect (it's really quite a good documentary too). A US surgeon engaging in child abuse is a statistical anomaly in the world of child sexual abuse. The best way to find child sexual abuse is to hop onto an airplane, and go to a region of the developing world where child sexual abuse is rampant.

It's not all hard to find such places. Many children are abused at scale, globally. I think few of those kids are getting filmed or turned in CSAM.

I'm also not at all sold on your claim that hands-on offenders tend to collect CSAM materials either, but we have no way to know.

I am sold on the best way of reducing actual abuse involves some combination of measures such as:

1) Fighting poverty; a huge amount of exploitation is for simple economic reasons; people need to eat

2) Providing social supports, where kids know what's not okay, and have trusted individuals they can report it to

3) Effective enforcement everywhere (not just rich countries)

4) Places for such kids to escape to, which are safe and decent. Kids won't report if the alternative is worse

... and so on. In other words, building out a basic social net for everyone.

I think one of the problems here is a reality and perception don't align:

- Apple has over a billion devices out there.

- Child abuse is a rare problem, but with over a billion devices, there will be enough of it for a lot of newsworthy stories.

- Child pornography takes just one abused child for an arbitrary number of viewers. Arguably, by the time you're limiting the number of viewers, most of the harm has been done.

On the whole, I'm not quite sure how the Apple plan will protect actual children from rape (except to somewhat reduce the secondary harm of distribution). I can clearly see how it will protect Apple from bad press, though -- people won't use iPhones to record that.

On the other hand, an investment in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement could significantly reduce the amount of child abuse, but with 7 billion people in the world, no expense would bring it to zero. So long as it's not zero, the potential for bad press is there. Indeed, usually if something happens a few times per year, it receives more bad press than if it happens a few times per day.

Apple has every incentive to be (1) seen as doing something (2) do things which protect its brand value. Apple has no incentive to invest in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement. Those seem like good things to do, but if anything, if a scandal comes up, those sorts of things are used to say "See, Apple new, and was trying to buy an out."

As a footnote, if we value all children equally, a lot of this is super-cheap. This is a good movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_into_Brothels

And the problem it portrays could probably be solved with the same finances as the salaries of a few Apple engineers, and a focused, targeted effort to identify child prostitutes, help their families with the economics which force those kids to become child prostitutes, and get those kids into schools instead.

I'm guessing the $100k raised from this film will do more to protect kids than this whole Apple initiative will do.

I think we'll see more globalization, but I think people overstate the level of the transition:

1) Done well, remote work is at least as effective as office-based. However, my experience is that most companies aren't doing remote work remotely well, even 15 months in.

2) Globalization has to do with more than just being remote. An issue we still haven't solved are time zones.

I think the first move we'll see is from San Fran, Mountain View, etc. to cheaper parts of the US, closer to food production, and with more available land.

For the Olympics, this impression is incorrect. It's at least as much a show as an athletics competition.

Billions of dollars are on the line in the Olympics, and that's what it's about, from countries competing with billion-dollar incentives, to news networks, to bribes.

Any capitalist enterprise is driven to make money.

If the athletes don't show up, there are plenty of others who will. Expecting athlete pushback to solve this is a doomed strategy.

Sex sells. The Olympics is fundamentally about eyeballs.

Is it okay to have strip clubs? Is it okay to hire scantily-clad women for ads? In movies? Where are the lines?

I'm not sure where we want the lines, but:

* I don't like the lines drawn based on one-off issues going viral. I'd like a consistent set of lines.

* I feel like it's unreasonable to expect organizations to not follow the Smith's free hand of capitalism. "Good" organizations are out-competed by "bad" ones.

Is this a place where we might have a serious discussion about a new regulatory regime, or otherwise changing market forces and incentive structures?

I feel like that might be a slower, but more comprehensive, more equitable, and more sustainable way of landing on fair ground.

- More comprehensive: Reworking structures effects everyone, and not just Olympics. I'm at least as concerned about thousands of "Hooters girls" as about elite actresses and athletes.

- More equitable: Good businesses don't get punished. Bad ones don't get rewarded.

- More sustainable: Market forces should push for the behavior we want. Otherwise, it's like fighting the ocean.

Perhaps not.

1) "Potential readers" is limited to people who can afford newspapers. NY Times runs around $520 per year in paper, at 2020 printing and delivery costs, and around $100 digitally. Printing and delivery costs, as portion of GDP-per-capita, were much higher in 1921. In 1921, the audience was extremely exclusive. An online audience is more democratic, and ergo, less educated.

2) Newspapers aren't driven by selling papers, so much as by organizational dynamics. I need to satisfy my boss and my peers to keep my job. Sales is one aspect of that, and as organizations grow in size, a decreasing aspect. As far as I can tell, NY Times has hired a bunch of idiots, and a lot of the most competent reporters are heading fast for the door.

Many companies which go under do so because of bad culture, often resulting from wildly misaligned incentives, good people leaving, bad people failing to bring in new good people, and so on. I think NY Times is slowly heading that way. I've seen few organizations able to claw back from where it is. Facebook and Google are moving in that direction too, for that matter.

I'd compare to other industries.

My experience is perceptions of abuse and abuse are very different. What passes for abuse in software engineering would be a dream job in e.g. retail, education, construction, or many other segments of the economy.

Jerks and nice people are everywhere, but the underlying baseline is set by power dynamics.

GOP isn't a person. It's a loose confederacy of people. For small government freedom-loving Republicans, go to e.g. parts of Texas.

Utah is a religious conservative. That's an entirely different sort of person. It's a demographic which, in many ways, would align better with Democrats, if not for a few wings of the DNC such as:

* Dawkins-toting militant atheist wing

* Pro-choice feminist wing

That's a big part of why Mitt Romney so often sides with Democrats on key votes, and takes so much flack from other parts of the GOP. He was also governor of Massachusetts, which is about as blue as you get. It take a special kind of Republican to win there.

I don't agree with a lot of what Utah Republicans stand for, but I don't see much hypocrisy there. It's pretty consistent:

* Against: Porn, anti-abortion, homosexuality, drinking, smoking, drugs

* For: Helping poor people (although with a complex split of private charity, church, and government), good education, clean strong neighborhoods, community, families, churches

COVID19 went a bit wonky, but with a few exceptions like that, it's mostly straight-line honest Mormon views.

Curiously, pre-Romney, who seems among the least corrupt politicians in government, Utah was represented by Orrin Hatch, who seemed to be among the most corrupt of the senators at the time.

I cringed on every third sentence in the Google post.

E.g. "People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising."

This sounded a lot like: "Chickens shouldn't have to accept lower-quality feed in order to get the benefits of a more efficient slaughterhouse."

I don't want the "benefits" of relevant advertising.

I hope Google's moves are too little too late to avoid regulation. We really need regulation.

Yes, but I guess I wouldn’t label them as scientific processes, which I would assume be in line with the scientific method.

It's that exact assumption which is common, incorrect, and which I'd like to see addressed in K-12 education.

The scientific process in my discipline works as:

1) Graduate students come in to do research

2) Ones which align with hot topics have venues to be published, people to cite them, sources of funding, etc.

3) Some people do diligent work, and write a publication a year. Those don't go anywhere. Some people write 12 publications per year, often based on poor scientific methodology and buggy analysis algorithms.

4) The highest-impact results often come from methodological errors, and never replicate. Most errors are never found, but even if they are, by that point, the people who wrote those papers have found tenure.

5) No one has time for good peer reviews, so reviewers glance at the abstract, sometimes to see if they were cited, and skim the paper.

6) Press picks up the sexiest results, which almost always are nonsense. People also cite the sexiest results.

Increasingly, this has moved from sloppiness to intentional gaming of the system. About half of academics I saw hired in the past decade had some level of intentional sketchiness going on.

This doesn't align well with scientific methods.

In the same way, I think high school civics courses should talk about issues like buying influence, polarization, and corruption as part of civics.

This was not what I expected. I expected the standard line about how the general public should trust scientists, and a fight for a greater role of scientists in decision-making.

It was a good read.

I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes:

* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes

* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines

* Impact over integrity in hiring

* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone)

... and so on.

As well as a clearer understanding of how we go from hypothesis to fact. In many policy discussions, I see individual scientific papers cited which is a nonsense way to use science. One can find a paper which says anything and most results are false. That's still part of the process. Once a result has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a theory and then an fact. Connecting the hypothetical process to empirical process would be awesome to see in schools.

If they release 3D CAD models, connector part numbers, and circuit schematics, I'm buying one as my next laptop (when my current one fails or goes obsolete; not as soon as it's released). I expect, if history is any indicator, that they'll be out-of-business by then, though. I'd want to know:

- How parts connect at a modular level (e.g. pinout and signalling between LCD and motherboard, how the battery communicates, etc.). I don't need to know e.g. motherboard schematic / layout

- Mechanicals (enough to 3d print things which fit)

- Ideally, as much firmware open as possible (esp. places like battery)

.. and so on. I'd pay a pretty good markup too.

I do agree with many posts. I'm not obsessive about laptop size and weight. I want something sturdy and which works well for work. Battery life, cooling, robustness, etc. all matter a lot more than weight.

I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's, but I don't encourage folks to use GCP the way that I used to.

I trust virtually anyone's security over Google's. I've never had issues with AWS. I've consistently run into serious Google security failures. Google has airtight security for its own data, but not for its customers.

Examples range from Chromebook and Android security update policies (tons of expired machines on the public internet, in the case of Android, usually without people knowing), to pay-for-security on GSuite, to really difficult-to-audit Google Drive security (there's no convenient way to track and audit what was shared with whom or where data went), to just a ton of other things.

I've never seen Amazon be callous with my data. I've seen Google do things that even nineties "we don't need security" Microsoft wouldn't have imagined....

The only people I know who really trust Google security worked for or are close to people who worked at Google. There's a reality-distortion field based on how much Google invests in its own security that people fail to notice very basic failures, like millions of expired Android devices, or a lack of audit logs if someone physically accesses your machine to rifle through your gmail....

Maybe I went at the wrong time.... I went once, and decided to never come back again. Perhaps things improved.

No, I don't, and I advise other people not to. The baseline dozen-or-so services are awesome (EC2, RDS, S3, etc.).

The massive number of newer services are propriety, often buggy, and poorly documented.

I don't use any AWS services introduced past 2015 or so.

I haven't found AWS to be predatory. Or Azure for that matter.

GCE also isn't so much predatory as incompetent and apathetic. If a Google failure wipes out your startup, you're a statistic and it's okay.

Yeah. AWS is probably "losing" tens of dollars per month hosting my personal account. They've made a few million dollars in sales as a result. I've personally started several projects on top of AWS which spend that much now. That started with the free tier back when AWS was young.

Google has treated me so badly so many times now on my personal account (as well as on business accounts, for that matter) in so many different ways that they've, conversely, lost MANY million dollars in business sales. It's hard to even count; a lot of people ask me for advise on decisions, and whenever someone even thinks about using Google Cloud in a business setting....

This is not a hole I see Google getting out of, except by eventually shutting down the Google cloud. Too many people have had too many bad experiences, and reputations take a long time to recover.

And the failures just keep on piling up.

Google is great for personal use, but I think they're diversifying in all the wrong directions. They're not structured for success there.

I think a lot of this discussion hinges on two roles of HR:

1) Risk management and mitigation, in which it acts like a police department. There are few checks or balances on HR power, and having police often outweighs the benefits of that police. I've heard of organizations where HR was more than a little bit toxic

2) Support and help. As a manager:

* I don't know what to do if e.g. a high-performing employee with high-level access to confidential information embezzled the company. A manager will run into situations like that one perhaps once in their career. I'd like to turn that over to professionals who know when to call the police, when to turn off the keycard and shut off IT access, or when to have a stern conversation.

* If there's a sexual assault accusation, do I want to be the person who fires someone who might be innocent and has their kids lose their livelihood? Do I want to be the person who tells a potential victim there's not enough evidence.

* There's the daily load of questions about vacation policies, health benefits, disabilities, or complex immigration issues. Quite frankly, I have no idea here, and I really don't want to have an idea.

My experience is that I run into once-a-career issues perhaps every 6-24 months at my rung of the management ladder, and it's helpful to have people who have been through them several times. I definitely don't want to be in a position of making Tough Choices when Bad Things happen. I'm good at mentorship and tech leadership, not e.g. fraud investigations, and I don't want the emotional load those entail.

A good HR department is incredibly helpful (just so long as everyone remembers they work for the company; they're not your agent or some kind of neutral party).

Same-day shopping, returns, being able to look at things, and talk to people count for something too.

I can't count the number of times when I bought a motherboard, and didn't realize my old AT power supply no longer worked with an ATX motherboard, or some other random standard, connector, or form factor changed. You can ask an employee "Will these five parts make a computer?" and get an answer, or even configure one up on their web site.

Plus, sometimes there are defective parts. You buy a part that doesn't work. You plug together motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply, hit the power switch, and very little happens, with no real way to debug. I won't say that's easy or seamless with Microcenter, but if you have five parts from Newegg and Amazon, you're basically SOL.

And if you forgot something -- and I've never built a computer where I didn't forget something -- you can pick it up. All the little things are just easier. Building a PC requires a ton of screws, cables, and adapters. I've never had the right set come with parts. Sometimes, the motherboard, case, and peripheral will all come with the same $0.50 part (Yay! I have two extra I don't need), or none will.

With COVID19, I've missed Microcenter; they don't do curbside pickup, and generally have avoided taking any sorts of basic safety measures. It's odd.

Usually it's a win win, unless you value keeping control (which can be quite valuable)

My experience is that it's usually overvalued. An external, focused company will usually do a better job than an internal project. It's emotionally hard to give up control, but successful companies tend to focus on a few things, do them really well (areas of competitive advantage), and outsource everything else.

A best-of-breed external solution almost always beats an in-house solution.

I'd just never do something like this with Oracle. Their business model seems to consist of locking companies in, and then milking them.

You don't read Frozen. You watch Frozen.

You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie.

As much as I understand the more nuanced messages which could be taken out by a more sophisticated audience, much more so, I see the impact the movie has on actual real-world little kids.

I both read and watched Starship Troopers as an adult.

Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself.

"Let it Go" is like an ode to everything I dislike about American culture. It's so very American.

Best animated movie I've seen in the past decade was probably Moana, but I can't say I've seen many.

I wouldn't pay $36/year.

I kinda feel like the price point for these things is set wrong, though. What you want is a higher price point which gets you /everything/. I pay $1200 per year for bandwidth. If I needed to pay a couple hundred bucks more for access to everything (online newspapers, LastPass, online office suites, etc.), I'd gladly do so.

LastPass should have 250 million customers, not 25 million, each paying $3.60 each, not $36. Most should be inactive, as part of some kind of subscription bundle.

Kinda like a more democratic, decentralized version of Prime.

From posts here, though, Bitwarden seems more reasonable. I trust open source more, and it's cheaper.

It ebbs and flows. There was a low point in the late nineties and early 2000's:

* Windows 95 removed all thought of the user as a programmer, killing things like QBasic.

* Apple was doing likewise, even killing Hypercard.

* The web wasn't in its prime yet, limited to HTML 2.0 and 3.2, and really lousy JavaScript.

* Even electronics was tough, since DIP parts were being replaced with SMT, and the service manual was starting to become a relic, but things like Arduino and RPi didn't exist yet, and making PCBs was $$$$$.

* Shop classes were on the decline in schools, but makerspaces weren't in yet.

I feel bad for kids growing up then. Short of installing a Linux distribution, kids were left out in the cold for being anything other than consumers of technology.

There was really a golden age in the eighties and early nineties, and we seem to be in another golden age right now.

My philosophy isn't to wait for /better/ hardware, so much as to wait for /tested/ hardware. I've been burned often enough buying first-gen technologies.

Second generation usually has the bugs worked out.

Apple has done an impressive enough job with the M1 that if I really needed a new computer right now, I might make exception -- the reviews have been phenomenal -- but barring that, I'd wait for M2.

Perhaps irrelevant to this discussion, but with non-critical things, I also often buy used. It's eco-friendly. I wouldn't buy a used /work/ computer, but for something like school or entertainment, there's a lot of upside to buying used:

* You can find teardowns on iFixit if you need to fix something.

* Someone has figured magical Linux kernel commands to disable NCQ to prevent some oddball crash.

* All the bleeding-edge stuff is supported; drivers are in mainline.

* If there's a keyboard design issue, fan failure, etc. people will have discovered it.

* In a lot of domains, you can also get upgraded/off-lease corporate/industrial equipment, which tends to be cheap and a few quality brackets up. Companies will offload old AV equipment, off-lease laptops, lab equipment (oscilloscopes, etc.), etc. A 5-year-old professional 1080 camcorder will wipe the floor with consumer 4k equipment.

Buying older stuff, you also spend around 1/2 to 1/3, and it's no different from having been born 2-5 years earlier. If you were born in 1990, you'll get the same equipment at the same age as someone far wealthier than you born in 1985.

Except for expiring Android phones and Chromebooks. Google like landfills.

That's kinda the point. AWS can't count their Office 365 subscriptions, because it doesn't have any. It's a question of where on draws lines. Neither is an apples-to-apples comparison.

Microsoft's moat play is to integrate with Office, Teams, github, and similar. If Azure integrates into my business processes, that's huge. And if github has a pipeline straight into cloud deployment with one click, that's huge too.

AWS' moat play might be to integrate with business logistics. Amazon has business services like fulfillment which could be part of AWS. It's a deeper moat, but not as wide. No one can compete with Amazon here without dropping billions, but many businesses don't need those services (mine doesn't).

Google Workspace has a better UX than Office 365, but is not at all enterprise-ready, and is barely b2b-ready. That doesn't look likely to change soon. Google might be able to build up some kind of moat around advertising integration, in both directions, but it seems harder.

For branding, right now:

* AWS > Microsoft > Google among developers.

* Microsoft > AWS > Google among non-tech businesses.

I make my own abstractions. I might have a file called 'kvs' which implements a key-value-store abstraction, or one called 'friendnet' which implements a graph of social relations.

* Those files have all the SQL. I never have raw SQL in my main application.

* Those files never e.g. call into my web framework, have HTML, or otherwise. They're a stand-along abstraction.

An ORM mutates a good abstraction (SQL) into a not-as-good one. Making a generic abstraction which works everywhere is hard, and SQL is the best one we've got. By making it domain-specific, we can mutate it into a good one.

One of the key principles I use is to try to have more than one back-end. For some (like a kvs), that might be Elasticache AND in-memory AND postgres. For something relational, it might be postgres and sqlite.