One can find this content easily by disabling Safe Search in Google search. Or opening Incognito tab in Chrome. So will this option be Enabled by default and require a person to prove they are an adult before turning it off?
Or is Google restricted from indexing this content in the UK?
What does it mean when the biggest feature the tech world covets is Dark Mode. The leading title is "Dark Mode" and probably "new emojis" oooh. Tech is dead because people expect so little.
iOS is missing a basic "HUD" There no longer exists way to see the day's schedule, or reminders, or todo lists. Everything is a pop-up task on the home screen that goes away once you unlock the screen. I like to pick up my device and see a continual list of "things coming up that you haven't done yet" Apple still hasn't come up with a way to display important information vs "all notifications"
iOS still has icons ala Windows 3.1. It is time to merge apps and data and provide a single overview. That's hard I know. But I watch my friends with Android and they can see all kinds of things while texting in the middle of the screen - all from the lock screen. UI Envy is what it is.
Billboards are illegal in my state - outlawed back in the 1970's. How will these laws stand up against the out-law space region?
This is the ultimate in light pollution preventing astronomers from seeing the night sky. As a person with a small backyard telescope it might be interesting to view them. But for those multi-hour images I just hope these don't drift into my view. It'd be like that annoying mime at the park who keep trying to photo-bomb.
Something like this was provided in my home state. Fraud allegations are flying. Smart business or poor management of funds? you decide.
A local phone/internet provider VTEL received $116 million in state money to provide Wireless Internet to all the undeserved (aka the last mile). They built the Wireless towers but only 1200 people have service. Why? Just because there's a tower doesn't mean the signal reaches a house. The home may be 'round the edge of a mountain ridge or in a forest. Of those 1200 with service, many report okay quality until it rains or snows which causes quality to be more like dial-up.
A federal program to do the same will line the pockets of the smart corps. The incentive needs to be paid for each customer signed up. In the VTEL case they were awarded money to build the infrastructure, and around here $116 million is a lot of $$ per person. There's just barely 600k people in the whole state and this corner of state in question has very very low population. I can see needing investment money to build the infrastructure because it is expensive. However, the goal of the program is to get people online. And I think that needs to be a large part of the stick/carrot.
Me neither. But for $6.99 I will probably sign up. I already have Amazon and Netflix - plus cable TV (because I have too to get Internet). So I need another streaming fee like I need a hole my head.
For $7 - I will probably splurge for the kids. If it goes up much I'll have to seriously consider which one to keep and which to drop. Does "Disney Only" have enough content to win that contest? I don't know.
I for one hope that FCA doesn't buy Tesla. FCA doesn't have the best track record regarding quality and I think "they don't get it" - it would kill Tesla as they try to move from Jogging to Running.
People down the middle don't care about your (valid) arguments, many don't know who Tesla is. The two ends are fighting against each other to an unknown end. You can say "told you so" when the water in NYC is knee deep.
One side feels that it's all about government control. Raising taxes (carbon tax) and trying to control your life - therefore they fight back at every attempt to suggest we need to go clean because it's seen as nothing more than propaganda to drive the first concern. "Liberals want your tax dollars and will do anything to get them. Even construct fake environmental concerns." The earth is flat! Flat I tell you! All of the bickering and lack of trust has lead to a basic disbelief in knowledge.
Obviously they lack a secure life cycle process. Why not just send the password to Troy Hunt?! He's collecting them too. I haven't read their statement, but I'm sure its something like "don't worry, your data was safe with us, nobody else had access to it (except that TXT file on the internal share). But to make you'all feel more comfortable we've decided to sunset the feature. Why, it wasn't even our long term direction and was already on the retirement list."
Who could have possibly thought this was a good idea?! There must be a lot of autonomy in the lower ranks to create something like this. I see how the feature possibly came about - making verification easier. But Seriously -- WTF?! The message isn't making it down from the big Zucker himself OR this is how his ship runs.
The story that they were logging passwords in a file share, and now this, shows how unconnected they are. So what other piece of your privacy are they not-keeping around?!
Exactly. Humans can be fooled - sure. But if the paint has peeled off the roadway, or is covered with snow, or somebody shot holes in the speed limit sign, or something else "out of the ordinary" our brains immediately detect "situation not normal" and we quickly come up with plan B. Computers though apparently stay on plan A until they hit a wall.
The story was put forward as a security event. I think in the end though that "machine is still a *lot* dumber" holds true. These autopilot systems are novel and point to the future, but have a long long way to go. Exception processing is difficult.
I hate the time change. It does NOT save energy (I never understood that argument). I live near the 45th parallel and it is damn dark in the morning & afternoon during the winter. Around here the excuse is to have light in the morning to make school bus pickup safer - see the reason isn't even universal. Experience says, it don't make much difference. The bus comes around 6:50am and the sun doesn't rise until 7:30. And for those in Seattle or Montreal its even worse(8 am?! holy-moly). But its fast period in the middle of December and January, a big difference is noticed by Feb. Longer nights in the summer promotes business (outdoor events, concerts on the green etc).
And summer time - The sun is up by a bit after 5 and sets around 9, we still have light at 10pm. A plenty long day.
So - why not split the difference by 30 minutes. We get "30" minutes of extra light in the winter. And it doesn't make a difference in the summer. I'd hate to have summer sunset occur before 8pm with a whole-sale switch. Lots of outdoor stuff goes on in the summer evenings - outdoor music, riding bikes.
But we'd all be awake and not have to listen to constant complaining 2 weeks a year.
It has been noted multiple times that the copyright infringement claims are bogus. Sometimes people are indeed copying music - that goes without saying (I am aware of at least one person who has a multi TB horde of illegal downloads that they represent as their personal collection).
However, the "complaint" still needs to be proven or at least strong evidence shown. We're all aware of the stories from years back where automated software was sending take-downs, and in many cases fair-use was a legitimate defense.
So as an ISP I'd require more "court orders" than arbitrary take-down "requests." I tend to put weight on the innocent until proven guilty.
Do all of them require court orders? No - I'm sure there are examples where strong evidence is shown that a person is probably guilty. At least pass them notice as a proxy "This giant multi-national has strong evidence, you have 90-days to respond or your service will be shutdown"
I wonder how many are "native" Canadians? I worked with several Russian H1B holders (and Green card) who first went to Toronto, Canada waiting for permanent work in the USA. They then worked as contractors on jobs or entered the lottery, or filed for H1B after successful contract work.
But my last company hired a whole batch of graduates from a tech school in NS and gave them all H1B. The whole class. It was part of a special program, the school helped cross train them in specific tech and we hired them (about 20 years ago). Most of them reached green card status.
I'm not sure they do. The phone industry group/alliance (can't remember their name) has warned that most people don't answer the phone - which means they don't use them. And if we don't need them - we'll stop buying. And legit businesses will stop spending too and try finding their customers using a different technology (aka "Reminder - you have a doctor's appt tomorrow" or "I'd like to schedule time to fix your appliances"). This discussion was during a news conference on STIR/SHAKEN.
The spammers are bulk buying on the secondary market. I can't believe the phone companies are making money, more likely costing them to connect the call, plus build out spam tools. Many calls are originating outside the USA via VoIP.
My friend lived in San Jose area back in the 80'/90's. I'd visit him every few years and remember driving through the mountains and seeing the reservoirs. The trees kept growing and getting taller each year -- from the bottom of the reservoir! There was no water back then. And a stray wildfire up the backside.
I wonder about the water tables though. Have those recovered? Otherwise any success will be short lived if/when CA goes through this cycle again.
My wife used to live in San Diego and talked about the yearly fires. What a different world. I used to travel to Pasadena on business and had to contend with smoke and fire on many occasions. I look out the windows of the office building and see smoke all the way to LA and it always smelled like a giant campfire. We'll see when the Santa Ana winds (fire) come back.
I know... I'm suddenly nervous about a redesign. It'll be like FB's create post button. You can't just type and publish anymore. Nope, instead it pops up another dialog "you want that on your timeline or news feed?"
Alt-Tab of the future "do you want to see a list of icons or pictures, or how about a history of tabs" (which is Windows-Tab btw).
Although - were'd the Mac like carousel tab view go? (or was that Win7 only?!). It was cool - but that shows you how much I used it.:-P
I feel this is an opportunity for technology. Years ago I watched a show about a car crushing center (junk yard) that had developed an automated dis-assembly line. They had lots of "secret" (patent pending) technology that they had engineered. It was really cool.
First the car was shredded in a coarse fashion. Then the parts were shot through the air. Foam and plastic fell to the ground and the heavier metal parts landed in a shoot. This sorted several things. Then the metal was ground up even more and dumped onto a conveyor belt and ran through an x-ray device that figured out "brass, steel, other" and finally at the end of the line the parts ran off the belt and were hit by high-pressure blasts of air and diverted into an appropriate bucket.
Meanwhile the locally recycling center is hiring more pickers and placing ads on FB describing how problematic (and dangerous) it can be when we all throw plastic bags into the bucket. And complaining that we're all putting more junk into the bucket. My wife is "hopeful" that these items will be recycled and they have people to figure this out. For us upstream to know the technical details of recycling seems a fallacy.
I've begun throwing more stuff in the trash. It's easier.
You are absolutely correct. I think there are two semi-conflicting powers at play here. One is opinion and the other is education. An author writes a book/blog/article and offers his/her opinion and attempts to share their beliefs.
But the other (and maybe I've miscategorized it) is teaching the unwashed masses. It's one thing to show up to a rally and listen to the voices of people sharing. In this world though an Algorithm starts sharing content with you - possibly misrepresenting the level of truthfulness / believably of a particular subject. There's no human for you to judge ("gosh that person sounds unhinged").
Sure, some people don't want to vaccinate on religious (or other like) grounds. And they can write about it, share their ideals. But for some far out wacky ideas - conspiracies that even the conspiracy leaders call wacko -- the algorithm will start providing you unbalanced info about. Such that the "ignorant" will be unable to discern a trust level. "Gee - Youtube showed me 100 videos on this topic, it must be true"
The earth is flat. How many others don't vaccinate, not due to shared beliefs, but rather misinformation shared with them while traveling down the Google-Algorithm rabbit hole?
But we can't be burning books to stomp out ideas we don't like.
I can appreciate the value of using the comments to weigh/score the content of the video. BUT -- they need to give the content owner the ability to delete offending comments and keep it clean.
I want my ads and I can't have a bunch of @#$ of a **!$&! ruining it for me. So $!&$-off. [delete] [delete] [delete]. ^H^H^H^H^H
People need to see their scores and understand why ads aren't appearing. Plus have the tools to do something about it. Otherwise publishers will leave. "gee I'm not making money on this platform. I wonder why?!. oh well - I give up, let me try another platform"
It's easy to marry, difficult and expensive to divorce. Maybe we're solving the wrong problem:-)
Hiring good people is a common problem that good answers are difficult to come by. I was trained once to (basically) ask "5 whys" whenever somebody said they could do something --- in order to determine how much THEY did vs they were present when somebody else did the work. Each level down was intended to determine whether this person what making crap up or had really worked on the task.
I also knew a guy who gave logic/thought questions - he wanted to see if the person could think. He later recanted his line of attack as being useless as judging skill level. He'd ask "how many quarters stacked does it take to be as tall as the Empire State building?" To which he expected questions such as "on their side, end to end, how wide is a quarter, how tall is the building?" Did they seek requirements clarification and how did they solve the puzzle?! (its a problem in estimation, there is no exact answer--the goal was to understand how they arrived at it). But many people could solve it and still not write working code.
But I've learned recently that asking somebody to write a program in the language they claim to know is important. Why? Because there are a lot of script people who cut/paste and ferry modifications/customization and have a cursory understanding of Coding, Logic, and Problem solving. Just because you can copy somebody else's code and make it compile does not mean you can code. You know Java? great, so do I. Write a simple program that solves something domain specific (don't worry - I'm not here to see if know J2E or ask trick questions). C#? even better, that's what we use here.. Write a simple program....
If you have the skills - we'll train you and help you grow beyond where you're at today. No trick questions. You know Java and we need C#? Fine - want to learn C# --- we'll train you.
I think it's a bad thing. This is a form of radicalization.
The marketing ad-gorithm it designed to keep you engaged. It will show you anything and keep you interested. You like flat-earth topics - let's make it your world and absorb you. Think the government is out to get you? "They" blow up buildings? Religious sect X out to get you? Religious sect X is evil? Free energy?
The system is designed to suck you in. And hey - if you end up being a terrorist they got their ad dollars. In this case radicalization is ridiculed instead - nobody is taking it seriously because it seems like harmless silliness that you'll outgrow. But I think it's a leading indicator of something unknown. Fake news, political ads, persuading you using alternate facts. In the long run I think it could harm the very businesses that allow it today. Someday people won't believe anything and will stop interacting with "the google."
Slashdot Mirror
One can find this content easily by disabling Safe Search in Google search. Or opening Incognito tab in Chrome. So will this option be Enabled by default and require a person to prove they are an adult before turning it off?
Or is Google restricted from indexing this content in the UK?
What does it mean when the biggest feature the tech world covets is Dark Mode. The leading title is "Dark Mode" and probably "new emojis" oooh. Tech is dead because people expect so little.
iOS is missing a basic "HUD" There no longer exists way to see the day's schedule, or reminders, or todo lists. Everything is a pop-up task on the home screen that goes away once you unlock the screen. I like to pick up my device and see a continual list of "things coming up that you haven't done yet" Apple still hasn't come up with a way to display important information vs "all notifications"
iOS still has icons ala Windows 3.1. It is time to merge apps and data and provide a single overview. That's hard I know. But I watch my friends with Android and they can see all kinds of things while texting in the middle of the screen - all from the lock screen. UI Envy is what it is.
Dark mode - I could give a rats ass.
Billboards are illegal in my state - outlawed back in the 1970's. How will these laws stand up against the out-law space region?
This is the ultimate in light pollution preventing astronomers from seeing the night sky. As a person with a small backyard telescope it might be interesting to view them. But for those multi-hour images I just hope these don't drift into my view. It'd be like that annoying mime at the park who keep trying to photo-bomb.
Something like this was provided in my home state. Fraud allegations are flying. Smart business or poor management of funds? you decide.
A local phone/internet provider VTEL received $116 million in state money to provide Wireless Internet to all the undeserved (aka the last mile). They built the Wireless towers but only 1200 people have service. Why? Just because there's a tower doesn't mean the signal reaches a house. The home may be 'round the edge of a mountain ridge or in a forest. Of those 1200 with service, many report okay quality until it rains or snows which causes quality to be more like dial-up.
A federal program to do the same will line the pockets of the smart corps. The incentive needs to be paid for each customer signed up. In the VTEL case they were awarded money to build the infrastructure, and around here $116 million is a lot of $$ per person. There's just barely 600k people in the whole state and this corner of state in question has very very low population. I can see needing investment money to build the infrastructure because it is expensive. However, the goal of the program is to get people online. And I think that needs to be a large part of the stick/carrot.
https://www.vnews.com/Money-Is...
Me neither. But for $6.99 I will probably sign up. I already have Amazon and Netflix - plus cable TV (because I have too to get Internet). So I need another streaming fee like I need a hole my head.
For $7 - I will probably splurge for the kids. If it goes up much I'll have to seriously consider which one to keep and which to drop. Does "Disney Only" have enough content to win that contest? I don't know.
I for one hope that FCA doesn't buy Tesla. FCA doesn't have the best track record regarding quality and I think "they don't get it" - it would kill Tesla as they try to move from Jogging to Running.
People down the middle don't care about your (valid) arguments, many don't know who Tesla is. The two ends are fighting against each other to an unknown end. You can say "told you so" when the water in NYC is knee deep.
One side feels that it's all about government control. Raising taxes (carbon tax) and trying to control your life - therefore they fight back at every attempt to suggest we need to go clean because it's seen as nothing more than propaganda to drive the first concern. "Liberals want your tax dollars and will do anything to get them. Even construct fake environmental concerns." The earth is flat! Flat I tell you! All of the bickering and lack of trust has lead to a basic disbelief in knowledge.
Depends upon how large the item is that this balloon carries. However, if something goes wrong it could be a real stinker.
Obviously they lack a secure life cycle process. Why not just send the password to Troy Hunt?! He's collecting them too. I haven't read their statement, but I'm sure its something like "don't worry, your data was safe with us, nobody else had access to it (except that TXT file on the internal share). But to make you'all feel more comfortable we've decided to sunset the feature. Why, it wasn't even our long term direction and was already on the retirement list."
Who could have possibly thought this was a good idea?! There must be a lot of autonomy in the lower ranks to create something like this. I see how the feature possibly came about - making verification easier. But Seriously -- WTF?! The message isn't making it down from the big Zucker himself OR this is how his ship runs.
The story that they were logging passwords in a file share, and now this, shows how unconnected they are. So what other piece of your privacy are they not-keeping around?!
Exactly. Humans can be fooled - sure. But if the paint has peeled off the roadway, or is covered with snow, or somebody shot holes in the speed limit sign, or something else "out of the ordinary" our brains immediately detect "situation not normal" and we quickly come up with plan B. Computers though apparently stay on plan A until they hit a wall.
Situation Normal, Situation Normal, Situation Normal .... Deploy Airbags!
The story was put forward as a security event. I think in the end though that "machine is still a *lot* dumber" holds true. These autopilot systems are novel and point to the future, but have a long long way to go. Exception processing is difficult.
I hate the time change. It does NOT save energy (I never understood that argument). I live near the 45th parallel and it is damn dark in the morning & afternoon during the winter. Around here the excuse is to have light in the morning to make school bus pickup safer - see the reason isn't even universal. Experience says, it don't make much difference. The bus comes around 6:50am and the sun doesn't rise until 7:30. And for those in Seattle or Montreal its even worse(8 am?! holy-moly). But its fast period in the middle of December and January, a big difference is noticed by Feb. Longer nights in the summer promotes business (outdoor events, concerts on the green etc).
And summer time - The sun is up by a bit after 5 and sets around 9, we still have light at 10pm. A plenty long day.
So - why not split the difference by 30 minutes. We get "30" minutes of extra light in the winter. And it doesn't make a difference in the summer. I'd hate to have summer sunset occur before 8pm with a whole-sale switch. Lots of outdoor stuff goes on in the summer evenings - outdoor music, riding bikes.
But we'd all be awake and not have to listen to constant complaining 2 weeks a year.
It has been noted multiple times that the copyright infringement claims are bogus. Sometimes people are indeed copying music - that goes without saying (I am aware of at least one person who has a multi TB horde of illegal downloads that they represent as their personal collection).
However, the "complaint" still needs to be proven or at least strong evidence shown. We're all aware of the stories from years back where automated software was sending take-downs, and in many cases fair-use was a legitimate defense.
So as an ISP I'd require more "court orders" than arbitrary take-down "requests." I tend to put weight on the innocent until proven guilty.
Do all of them require court orders? No - I'm sure there are examples where strong evidence is shown that a person is probably guilty. At least pass them notice as a proxy "This giant multi-national has strong evidence, you have 90-days to respond or your service will be shutdown"
I wonder how many are "native" Canadians? I worked with several Russian H1B holders (and Green card) who first went to Toronto, Canada waiting for permanent work in the USA. They then worked as contractors on jobs or entered the lottery, or filed for H1B after successful contract work.
But my last company hired a whole batch of graduates from a tech school in NS and gave them all H1B. The whole class. It was part of a special program, the school helped cross train them in specific tech and we hired them (about 20 years ago). Most of them reached green card status.
Facebook privacy statement "we store your data in safe ways"
Yet again - this isn't true. Passwords in plain text, giving data to others, psychology experiments on your timeline.
Half the crap in those documents is obviously not true. I will continue to provide fake information to them in my profile. I'm as honest as they are.
I'm not sure they do. The phone industry group/alliance (can't remember their name) has warned that most people don't answer the phone - which means they don't use them. And if we don't need them - we'll stop buying. And legit businesses will stop spending too and try finding their customers using a different technology (aka "Reminder - you have a doctor's appt tomorrow" or "I'd like to schedule time to fix your appliances"). This discussion was during a news conference on STIR/SHAKEN.
The spammers are bulk buying on the secondary market. I can't believe the phone companies are making money, more likely costing them to connect the call, plus build out spam tools. Many calls are originating outside the USA via VoIP.
Is this, Cost of Business or nails in the coffin?
If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down?!
I have all kinds of water saving ideas. There's more if you need them, just ask.
My friend lived in San Jose area back in the 80'/90's. I'd visit him every few years and remember driving through the mountains and seeing the reservoirs. The trees kept growing and getting taller each year -- from the bottom of the reservoir! There was no water back then. And a stray wildfire up the backside.
I wonder about the water tables though. Have those recovered? Otherwise any success will be short lived if/when CA goes through this cycle again.
My wife used to live in San Diego and talked about the yearly fires. What a different world. I used to travel to Pasadena on business and had to contend with smoke and fire on many occasions. I look out the windows of the office building and see smoke all the way to LA and it always smelled like a giant campfire. We'll see when the Santa Ana winds (fire) come back.
I can't wait to see if this was a IEEE floating point rounding problem.
I know... I'm suddenly nervous about a redesign. It'll be like FB's create post button. You can't just type and publish anymore. Nope, instead it pops up another dialog "you want that on your timeline or news feed?"
Alt-Tab of the future "do you want to see a list of icons or pictures, or how about a history of tabs" (which is Windows-Tab btw).
Although - were'd the Mac like carousel tab view go? (or was that Win7 only?!). It was cool - but that shows you how much I used it. :-P
well -- People may press the button many times a day. But they doesn't tell them WHY you press the button.
Telemetry tells you that an even occurred. Talking to customers allows you to find out WHY and WHAT they are trying to achieve.
For example, I tap on my phone all day and never achieve what I WANTED to do. Spell check for example. That is NOT what I was trying to type.
I feel this is an opportunity for technology. Years ago I watched a show about a car crushing center (junk yard) that had developed an automated dis-assembly line. They had lots of "secret" (patent pending) technology that they had engineered. It was really cool.
First the car was shredded in a coarse fashion. Then the parts were shot through the air. Foam and plastic fell to the ground and the heavier metal parts landed in a shoot. This sorted several things. Then the metal was ground up even more and dumped onto a conveyor belt and ran through an x-ray device that figured out "brass, steel, other" and finally at the end of the line the parts ran off the belt and were hit by high-pressure blasts of air and diverted into an appropriate bucket.
Meanwhile the locally recycling center is hiring more pickers and placing ads on FB describing how problematic (and dangerous) it can be when we all throw plastic bags into the bucket. And complaining that we're all putting more junk into the bucket. My wife is "hopeful" that these items will be recycled and they have people to figure this out. For us upstream to know the technical details of recycling seems a fallacy.
I've begun throwing more stuff in the trash. It's easier.
You are absolutely correct. I think there are two semi-conflicting powers at play here. One is opinion and the other is education. An author writes a book/blog/article and offers his/her opinion and attempts to share their beliefs.
But the other (and maybe I've miscategorized it) is teaching the unwashed masses. It's one thing to show up to a rally and listen to the voices of people sharing. In this world though an Algorithm starts sharing content with you - possibly misrepresenting the level of truthfulness / believably of a particular subject. There's no human for you to judge ("gosh that person sounds unhinged").
Sure, some people don't want to vaccinate on religious (or other like) grounds. And they can write about it, share their ideals. But for some far out wacky ideas - conspiracies that even the conspiracy leaders call wacko -- the algorithm will start providing you unbalanced info about. Such that the "ignorant" will be unable to discern a trust level. "Gee - Youtube showed me 100 videos on this topic, it must be true"
The earth is flat. How many others don't vaccinate, not due to shared beliefs, but rather misinformation shared with them while traveling down the Google-Algorithm rabbit hole?
But we can't be burning books to stomp out ideas we don't like.
And they rarely call to get them back. Unless somebody else needed them....they were on permanent loan.
I can appreciate the value of using the comments to weigh/score the content of the video. BUT -- they need to give the content owner the ability to delete offending comments and keep it clean.
I want my ads and I can't have a bunch of @#$ of a **!$&! ruining it for me. So $!&$-off. [delete] [delete] [delete]. ^H^H^H^H^H
People need to see their scores and understand why ads aren't appearing. Plus have the tools to do something about it. Otherwise publishers will leave. "gee I'm not making money on this platform. I wonder why?!. oh well - I give up, let me try another platform"
It's easy to marry, difficult and expensive to divorce. Maybe we're solving the wrong problem :-)
Hiring good people is a common problem that good answers are difficult to come by. I was trained once to (basically) ask "5 whys" whenever somebody said they could do something --- in order to determine how much THEY did vs they were present when somebody else did the work. Each level down was intended to determine whether this person what making crap up or had really worked on the task.
I also knew a guy who gave logic/thought questions - he wanted to see if the person could think. He later recanted his line of attack as being useless as judging skill level. He'd ask "how many quarters stacked does it take to be as tall as the Empire State building?" To which he expected questions such as "on their side, end to end, how wide is a quarter, how tall is the building?" Did they seek requirements clarification and how did they solve the puzzle?! (its a problem in estimation, there is no exact answer--the goal was to understand how they arrived at it). But many people could solve it and still not write working code.
But I've learned recently that asking somebody to write a program in the language they claim to know is important. Why? Because there are a lot of script people who cut/paste and ferry modifications/customization and have a cursory understanding of Coding, Logic, and Problem solving. Just because you can copy somebody else's code and make it compile does not mean you can code. You know Java? great, so do I. Write a simple program that solves something domain specific (don't worry - I'm not here to see if know J2E or ask trick questions). C#? even better, that's what we use here.. Write a simple program....
If you have the skills - we'll train you and help you grow beyond where you're at today. No trick questions. You know Java and we need C#? Fine - want to learn C# --- we'll train you.
I think it's a bad thing. This is a form of radicalization.
The marketing ad-gorithm it designed to keep you engaged. It will show you anything and keep you interested. You like flat-earth topics - let's make it your world and absorb you. Think the government is out to get you? "They" blow up buildings? Religious sect X out to get you? Religious sect X is evil? Free energy?
The system is designed to suck you in. And hey - if you end up being a terrorist they got their ad dollars. In this case radicalization is ridiculed instead - nobody is taking it seriously because it seems like harmless silliness that you'll outgrow. But I think it's a leading indicator of something unknown. Fake news, political ads, persuading you using alternate facts. In the long run I think it could harm the very businesses that allow it today. Someday people won't believe anything and will stop interacting with "the google."
This is "the man." You are the product.