Agreed, users who don't work in tech generally lack awareness, understanding, and appreciation for the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance.
Think of it this way. Instead of a lengthy and weasely "privacy policy" suppose every web site popped up a modal dialog saying "Alert! everything you enter or click on this web site will be permanently recorded and can be shared with anyone, now or 50 years in the future: NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, Russian intelligence services, your employer, your ex-spouse, your health insurance company, your current and next landlord, local police, and anyone else we feel like, without telling you. Do you agree (Yes/No). " Then whoever clicked "Yes" would deserve the blame GP assigns to them.
I actually read the "privacy" policies. They say nothing that contradicts the preceding paragraph, but they contain only sunshine and platitudes: "your privacy is important to us." The entire industry actively hides their tracking behind vague and misleading language. I would say it's the reason "typical" users don't much care about privacy. They're being deceived into not caring.
I was backpacking in the Adirondack mountains long ago near an army base and was awakened by a sonic boom at 5 am. It sounded like a shotgun going off inside my tent. So I think one's perception of the loudness of a sonic boom depends on how far away it is.
As to why I heard a sonic boom inland in the United States, I guess that the army must have had a special exception for planned exercises over the sparsely-inhabited Adirondack Park. This was during the Cold War when air defense readiness was super important.
I would definitely be in favor of requiring national and, in the US, state authorization for autonomous vehicles to be tested on public roads. I believe the objection is that a "bureaucratic process" would "stifle innovation" and preventable deaths are a preferred alternative. Heaven forbid we let engineers use their engineering expertise to minimize loss of human life when there's a mad rush to be first to market.
The benefit of requiring licensing and government oversight is that every developer will be working to the same safety standards. Otherwise I don't see a way around the short-term financial incentive that the company who skimps on safety but gets lucky (for a while) wins the race to market.
Because this time it's the liberal spin doctors who got lucky. Don't worry, there is plenty of dirt to go around and some of it will stick to your political enemies soon enough.
There are many people who just want to use technology and are actively disinterested in how it works. I call this "willful ignorance." They lack the background to see how data mining could be a problem. As long as most of our legislators and regulators remain willfully ignorant, there will be no meaningful safeguards on privacy.
It's sleazy to frame this is "here is how Trump cheated at the election" because AFAIK anyone could have and would have done the same thing. But if that's what it takes to get politicians to think about privacy, bring on the sleaze.
Whoa, depends on how you define achievement! I think there's been quite a lot of progress in the past couple of decades. For my part, I measure achievement based on how far you've come from where you were 5 and 10 years ago.
Thank you, Vatican, for using the word "hacking" in the original sense as hackers themselves defined it. Before the mainstream press appropriated it and turned it into a perjorative.
I'm with you except for the part about the general rules underlying prejudices being usually correct. I don't believe that is a requirement for human beings to accept the rule. So I would say the "pre" in "prejudice" really means the rule doesn't get tested for accuracy or revised.
Fundamentally, thinking of deep learning as machine-generated prejudice changes one's enthusiasm for the technology.
Speaking as an employer, my perspective is that some work is parallelizable, where productivity scales approximately linearly with the number of employees assigned to it, and other work is inherently collaborative, to put it positively, or entangled in a hairball of ambiguity and unresolved dependencies, to more accurately describe how I feel about managing it. I believe the euphemism for it is "white-collar" or "professional" work. =)
The classic example of parallelizable work I've seen in management books is cleaning hotel rooms, where if you want it done in half the time "all" you have to do is double your cleaning staff. I am not sure what tech jobs are parallelizable but when I hear people grumble about how tedious web app development can be, I guess that would be the place to look.
The value of an urban work site is that it's centralized and easier *in aggregate* to get your employees physically co-located so they can collaborate. People whose work is well-defined and well-structured don't generally appreciate how valuable physical presence is to collaboration, especially across departmental boundaries. Email and Skype just don't substitute for stepping out to get a coffee with a manager from Marketing or QA -- and I say this an an introvert for whom striking up a conversation with a stranger feels as comfortable as fingernails scraping on a blackboard. I learned to do it none the less: relationships are how work professional gets done.
When you've determined (through reasoned analysis or just force of habit) that you need a collaborative workspace, an urban location has powerful benefits because there's a large talent pool willing to commute to downtown compared to the number of people willing to commute to some outlying village.
For work that's parallelizable, the costs of an office and making everyone endure the commute outweigh the benefits. It makes perfect sense to me that workers who can be productive independently should be allowed to live where they want and not spend two hours a day just getting to and from their work site.
So that's why companies (or at least my company) are willing to pay more to be located in an urban center.
I don't think California is on track to become an economic wasteland, but if market forces are causing companies to start up in other areas, that's a sign of a healthy {labor, real estate} market.
"This ultimately begs the question -- how do you maintain trust in a digital-based economy when you may not be able to believe your own eyes anymore?" he asked rhetorically.
Umm, how about digital signatures?
The idea of fake news isn't new. It's been easy to print complete fabrications since Gutenberg. The real problem is uncritical consumption of "information."
Logic fail. Taking the vaccine doesn't prevent you from washing your hands, so arguing for hand-washing is not arguing against vaccine. A sensible person would do both.
I have also heard that this year's vaccine is less effective than it should be. All medication is a trade-off between risks,
side effects, and benefits, and this year the benefits are falling way short. If side effects or risks are normally something you have to think about, this is a year when you may want to think twice. But if you're blessed with the privilege of not normally having to worry about taking the vaccine, it is still, as they say, "worth a shot."
What most people want from financial products is a fail-safe get-rich-quick scheme. They'll turn a blind eye to a lot of problems as long as they think they're getting rich.
I don't know about "most people," but I do think you've identified a population. As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. And I'm sure there is a legion of financial "service" firms ready to take advantage of an easy mark.
"After careful consideration, we have decided to temporarily suspend ads on Logan Paul's YouTube channels," a spokesperson said to TechCrunch in an emailed statement elaborating on the Tweet. "This is not a decision we made lightly, however, we believe he has exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers, but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community."
If Mr. Paul is as much of a douchebag as TFA's summary of his recent videos implies, I don't see how a slap on the wrist is near enough.
Reading between the lines, it seems like this spokesperson for YouTube has a sense of decency and their contempt for Logan Paul is seeping through, but unfortunately they are in a position of articulating and defending a gutless, token penalty decided on by the suits.
Well, according to Einstein, you could simulate mass with a whole lot of energy. Oh wait. That would actually be mass. I think the only way to simulate mass would be by promising things that never actually go on the rocket.
Can you elaborate on what was wrong with DuckDuckGo's results? I have been using it for years. Certainly it's very different from Google's results but to me that is a benefit -- I am fundamentally offended by a company trying to control what information I find based on 1) what the unwashed masses seem to want and 2) what Google's predictive analytics have determined is the best approach for their customers to attempt to separate me from my money. If I wanted to consume whatever slop was put in front of me by the corporations, I'd watch TV.
</rant> I know it's hard to characterize what counts as "better" search results, but I really would like to know what the usage model is where Google's results count as "good." Is it that you have a specific question in mind and you want to find an answer? Because my approach is totally different: I have a specific topic in mind and I want to see the range of what has been written about it so I can decide which source is the least stupid, biased, and evil.
I think the idea Cook is advocating is that Swift isn't just a "toy" language to be used for kids' classroom projects.
I've taken an interest in human factors lately and realized in my reading that human limitations such as working memory are a big part of why programming is difficult, and an abundant source of programming errors. Those limitations can't be wished away. Neither is it necessarily a wise allocation of labor to demand exceptional working memory as an entry condition to the career of programming.
I haven't tried Swift myself but I'm open to the idea that the last 30 years since Java was developed have taught us a thing or two about patterns and abstractions that can make the complexity of software tractable.
At first my reaction was to dismiss Cook's position as "dumbing down" a fundamentally complex task. Then I realized that one could view C as a "dumbed down" version of assembly language. I do not enjoy programming in assembly and I feel no shame in admitting that it would not be my first choice of language to implement a smartphone app. Therefore I probably shouldn't judge someone who says the same thing about Objective-C or Java.
Andrew Carnegie didn't invent steel, or even the crucible steel process. He just made it commercially successful and founded an industry. Was that innovation? It depends on your definition.
What passes for innovation these days is "technology" like Uber, which is just an unlicensed taxi service loosely connected by a smartphone app. Or credit default swaps, there's an American innovation for you. The innovation two generations ago invented digital computers and sent men to the moon.
Oh, I hate the ribbon bar as much as the next person! But once I started working with LibreOffice heavily its shortcomings became clear -- lack of basic reliability in things like applying a text style and having it affect the selected text, and only the selected text, consistently. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the more I used MS Office the more I came to grudgingly accept it, while the more I used LibreOffice the more I cursed it for odd little glitches and stability problems.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA doesn't mention the obvious question: is Oregon sure that a carrier that doesn't preferentially throttle traffic even exists?
Agreed, users who don't work in tech generally lack awareness, understanding, and appreciation for the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance.
Think of it this way. Instead of a lengthy and weasely "privacy policy" suppose every web site popped up a modal dialog saying "Alert! everything you enter or click on this web site will be permanently recorded and can be shared with anyone, now or 50 years in the future: NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, Russian intelligence services, your employer, your ex-spouse, your health insurance company, your current and next landlord, local police, and anyone else we feel like, without telling you. Do you agree (Yes/No). " Then whoever clicked "Yes" would deserve the blame GP assigns to them.
I actually read the "privacy" policies. They say nothing that contradicts the preceding paragraph, but they contain only sunshine and platitudes: "your privacy is important to us." The entire industry actively hides their tracking behind vague and misleading language. I would say it's the reason "typical" users don't much care about privacy. They're being deceived into not caring.
I was backpacking in the Adirondack mountains long ago near an army base and was awakened by a sonic boom at 5 am. It sounded like a shotgun going off inside my tent. So I think one's perception of the loudness of a sonic boom depends on how far away it is.
As to why I heard a sonic boom inland in the United States, I guess that the army must have had a special exception for planned exercises over the sparsely-inhabited Adirondack Park. This was during the Cold War when air defense readiness was super important.
I would definitely be in favor of requiring national and, in the US, state authorization for autonomous vehicles to be tested on public roads. I believe the objection is that a "bureaucratic process" would "stifle innovation" and preventable deaths are a preferred alternative. Heaven forbid we let engineers use their engineering expertise to minimize loss of human life when there's a mad rush to be first to market.
The benefit of requiring licensing and government oversight is that every developer will be working to the same safety standards. Otherwise I don't see a way around the short-term financial incentive that the company who skimps on safety but gets lucky (for a while) wins the race to market.
Because this time it's the liberal spin doctors who got lucky. Don't worry, there is plenty of dirt to go around and some of it will stick to your political enemies soon enough.
There are many people who just want to use technology and are actively disinterested in how it works. I call this "willful ignorance." They lack the background to see how data mining could be a problem. As long as most of our legislators and regulators remain willfully ignorant, there will be no meaningful safeguards on privacy.
It's sleazy to frame this is "here is how Trump cheated at the election" because AFAIK anyone could have and would have done the same thing. But if that's what it takes to get politicians to think about privacy, bring on the sleaze.
Whoa, depends on how you define achievement! I think there's been quite a lot of progress in the past couple of decades. For my part, I measure achievement based on how far you've come from where you were 5 and 10 years ago.
I think it's the reporter who wrote TFA who didn't know the difference.
Thank you, Vatican, for using the word "hacking" in the original sense as hackers themselves defined it. Before the mainstream press appropriated it and turned it into a perjorative.
I'm with you except for the part about the general rules underlying prejudices being usually correct. I don't believe that is a requirement for human beings to accept the rule. So I would say the "pre" in "prejudice" really means the rule doesn't get tested for accuracy or revised.
Fundamentally, thinking of deep learning as machine-generated prejudice changes one's enthusiasm for the technology.
Speaking as an employer, my perspective is that some work is parallelizable, where productivity scales approximately linearly with the number of employees assigned to it, and other work is inherently collaborative, to put it positively, or entangled in a hairball of ambiguity and unresolved dependencies, to more accurately describe how I feel about managing it. I believe the euphemism for it is "white-collar" or "professional" work. =)
The classic example of parallelizable work I've seen in management books is cleaning hotel rooms, where if you want it done in half the time "all" you have to do is double your cleaning staff. I am not sure what tech jobs are parallelizable but when I hear people grumble about how tedious web app development can be, I guess that would be the place to look.
The value of an urban work site is that it's centralized and easier *in aggregate* to get your employees physically co-located so they can collaborate. People whose work is well-defined and well-structured don't generally appreciate how valuable physical presence is to collaboration, especially across departmental boundaries. Email and Skype just don't substitute for stepping out to get a coffee with a manager from Marketing or QA -- and I say this an an introvert for whom striking up a conversation with a stranger feels as comfortable as fingernails scraping on a blackboard. I learned to do it none the less: relationships are how work professional gets done.
When you've determined (through reasoned analysis or just force of habit) that you need a collaborative workspace, an urban location has powerful benefits because there's a large talent pool willing to commute to downtown compared to the number of people willing to commute to some outlying village.
For work that's parallelizable, the costs of an office and making everyone endure the commute outweigh the benefits. It makes perfect sense to me that workers who can be productive independently should be allowed to live where they want and not spend two hours a day just getting to and from their work site.
So that's why companies (or at least my company) are willing to pay more to be located in an urban center.
I don't think California is on track to become an economic wasteland, but if market forces are causing companies to start up in other areas, that's a sign of a healthy {labor, real estate} market.
Umm, how about digital signatures?
The idea of fake news isn't new. It's been easy to print complete fabrications since Gutenberg. The real problem is uncritical consumption of "information."
Logic fail. Taking the vaccine doesn't prevent you from washing your hands, so arguing for hand-washing is not arguing against vaccine. A sensible person would do both.
I have also heard that this year's vaccine is less effective than it should be. All medication is a trade-off between risks, side effects, and benefits, and this year the benefits are falling way short. If side effects or risks are normally something you have to think about, this is a year when you may want to think twice. But if you're blessed with the privilege of not normally having to worry about taking the vaccine, it is still, as they say, "worth a shot."
I don't know about "most people," but I do think you've identified a population. As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. And I'm sure there is a legion of financial "service" firms ready to take advantage of an easy mark.
If Mr. Paul is as much of a douchebag as TFA's summary of his recent videos implies, I don't see how a slap on the wrist is near enough.
Reading between the lines, it seems like this spokesperson for YouTube has a sense of decency and their contempt for Logan Paul is seeping through, but unfortunately they are in a position of articulating and defending a gutless, token penalty decided on by the suits.
Well, according to Einstein, you could simulate mass with a whole lot of energy. Oh wait. That would actually be mass. I think the only way to simulate mass would be by promising things that never actually go on the rocket.
Can you elaborate on what was wrong with DuckDuckGo's results? I have been using it for years. Certainly it's very different from Google's results but to me that is a benefit -- I am fundamentally offended by a company trying to control what information I find based on 1) what the unwashed masses seem to want and 2) what Google's predictive analytics have determined is the best approach for their customers to attempt to separate me from my money. If I wanted to consume whatever slop was put in front of me by the corporations, I'd watch TV.
</rant> I know it's hard to characterize what counts as "better" search results, but I really would like to know what the usage model is where Google's results count as "good." Is it that you have a specific question in mind and you want to find an answer? Because my approach is totally different: I have a specific topic in mind and I want to see the range of what has been written about it so I can decide which source is the least stupid, biased, and evil.
Yeah, I can tell from all the people on Slashdot saying we are better off being tracked. Not.
It ain't over till it's over.
I think the idea Cook is advocating is that Swift isn't just a "toy" language to be used for kids' classroom projects.
I've taken an interest in human factors lately and realized in my reading that human limitations such as working memory are a big part of why programming is difficult, and an abundant source of programming errors. Those limitations can't be wished away. Neither is it necessarily a wise allocation of labor to demand exceptional working memory as an entry condition to the career of programming.
I haven't tried Swift myself but I'm open to the idea that the last 30 years since Java was developed have taught us a thing or two about patterns and abstractions that can make the complexity of software tractable.
At first my reaction was to dismiss Cook's position as "dumbing down" a fundamentally complex task. Then I realized that one could view C as a "dumbed down" version of assembly language. I do not enjoy programming in assembly and I feel no shame in admitting that it would not be my first choice of language to implement a smartphone app. Therefore I probably shouldn't judge someone who says the same thing about Objective-C or Java.
Andrew Carnegie didn't invent steel, or even the crucible steel process. He just made it commercially successful and founded an industry. Was that innovation? It depends on your definition.
The cultural decline you're describing is attributable to television, or more generally, to an advertising-supported business model for media.
What passes for innovation these days is "technology" like Uber, which is just an unlicensed taxi service loosely connected by a smartphone app. Or credit default swaps, there's an American innovation for you. The innovation two generations ago invented digital computers and sent men to the moon.
Oh, I hate the ribbon bar as much as the next person! But once I started working with LibreOffice heavily its shortcomings became clear -- lack of basic reliability in things like applying a text style and having it affect the selected text, and only the selected text, consistently. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the more I used MS Office the more I came to grudgingly accept it, while the more I used LibreOffice the more I cursed it for odd little glitches and stability problems.
And here I thought it was like a dog park for autonomous vehicles, so they can get together and play.