BickNowstrom

> “It’s highly possible to get infected a second time,” one of the doctors, who declined to be identified, told the outlet.

> The physician said that medication used to treat the virus can have negative side effects on patients’ heart tissue, making them more susceptible to cardiac arrest.

> “A few people recovered from the first time by their own immune system, but the meds they use are damaging their heart tissue, and when they get it the second time, the antibody doesn’t help but makes it worse, and they die a sudden death from heart failure,” the doctor said.

Add asymptomatic transmission in an incubation period of ~14 days and there is not much to check. Also, since China waited months, the virus was already left unchecked, resulting in an estimation ~1 million infected: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022434v...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...

From SARS we can guess at the long-term effects, including permanent fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, necrosis, breathing problems, chronic lung and kidney problems.

> The AI interview is too new, so job applicants don’t know what to prepare for and any preparations seem meaningless since the AI will read our faces if we make something up.

I strongly feel the market will work itself out: If AI interviews bias companies to hire hoop-jumping and actors, in half a decade, other, more traditional hiring companies will eat their lunch. If the AI interviews only deliver top notch candidates... it is working as intended, and who am I to complain about my own lack of prep or acting skills? Not like whiteboarding or being able to quickly think on your feet without access to StackOverflow is biased against me already, and companies who use these for hiring seem to be doing just fine.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-artificial-int...

Sharing military surveillance mitigation tricks is not unlike sharing 0-days against government systems, and can be seen as unethical and counterproductive: Military surveillance will try to improve their systems, and bad people will use it to avoid surveillance.

It is too simplistic to deem any and all surveillance as inherently bad and invasive. No country can ensure the safety of its tax payers if it cripples their counterintelligence, foreign intelligence, border security, counterterrorism.

People who deem national security as more important than individual security, or the security of anti-nation dissidents, or people living outside the legally approved modes, should be applauded. It is not very nice to decrease the security of me and my family to obtain an ideological goal.

That's a valid point, though it takes me a lot of energy to hold this view even for seconds. But I see where you are coming from now.

It does assume / hinges on: adding such legal and security notices without approval of higher-ups is the way security and legal compliance at Google is done. That would look bad on Google, because it is bad security practice (using a rapid code push meant for solving critical bugs, for something that could go live next week), bad culture practice (why not ask input from more experienced Googlers?), and bad legal practice (a legal notice is worth at least one meeting with someone hired to do / deal with law issues).

> She added this notice because as part of being legally compliant with the law people have to be informed of their right to unionize.

I do not believe this for a single moment. This was her "temporarily change the Linux background"-moment, not a "oh, let's be proactive and do legal requirements for Googlers who can't Google 'right to unionize'.". That is the one you use to cover your ass and turn this into a political hot potato. But then still, if true, you go to your supervisor and you can bring this up. You don't emergency push a legal notice.

> Acting like this was some severe security violation is out of line.

I think that what she did would be grounds for insta-firing a security engineer, even in very employee-friendly countries in the EU. It betrays trust of all colleagues (the message would be no different from a carefully vetted company policy, so she basically spoofed her colleagues). She played an activist prank using internal security tooling: I laugh when I think of the confused angry emails upper management must have been sending the Privacy Policy Notifier team lead, they got trolled hard. I also think all this backlash from the diversity crowd is something that Google has deserved: They are either hypocritical (they never meant it, and are now stuck babysitting 20+ genders), or supporting Damore's argument that the ideological echo chamber within Google does not really work, and in business terms is a very ugly beast (if this was an action movie, they fired the scientist for pointing out that the volcano is about to explode).

So for severity I would not go as far as a good wry laugh about this. The mask is coming off. I can understand not wanting to build government murder machines and stick to ads, or not wanting to be part of the deeply ingrained rapey culture and this being the reason to protest and organize. But an internal security tool that your colleagues trust you to run on their machines is just a very bad "murder baby hitler" way to go about it. Murders your trust, processes, and protocols. Some big nasty lawyers are going to push the "disrupt the workplace"-argument hard, Google is going to be even more careful to fire blue-haired employees, and the argument that Google is intentionally targeting on anything protected by law will make even less sense.

She will get work somewhere else, but, to me, it does not look good to be fired for abusing internal security tooling, with the huge responsibility that security engineers have. Burning bridges and making a stink about it was her own choice, and this should have consequences, like crying about any other unrelated protected status (I did this very bad thing, but my employer fired me for racism, unionizing, being a (trans) woman, being old, etc.). You poison the well for everyone with that crap. Your group identity becomes so important to you, that you start to label individuals as "old white men" and anything negative happening to you must be related to your group identity. I don't play that game, so don't handicap me with your stereotypical groupthink.

The only one being tarred and feathered here is Google, for union-busting and retaliatory firing (as if... some even argue these firings target transgenders). Your example misrepresents my argument: advocating increased security against management is harmless and part of your job. Trying to be cute and score brownie points with activist pals is a risk she thought worth taking. Good on her.

Performance does not matter: fire both the genius and the slacker for abuse. The factual content of the message does not matter: fire both those who lie, spam, or those who distribute relevant activist messages. Legally required company does not matter: if it is not your role, it is not your role (distributing these "facts" was never part of her job description, it has nothing to do with security. It is also naive to assume Googlers visiting that very website would be interested or unaware of this policy notice).

The controversy is because people have different opinions: those who feel activism trumps profession, and those who feel it don't. Like said, any company that employs security engineers who hold their activism as more important than their profession is a dangerous company worth avoiding. I am glad this firing happened.

The absolute autofellatio state of hype media these days. Ha-ha, look at how this autistic CEO looks like a robot, and shame on you for imagining what Charlize Theron looks like naked. Tune in next week where I try and fail to launch an ERC-token, and use that experience to argue that cryptocurrency adoption will be delayed.

Opponents mention that counter-terrorism is not effective for all cases of terrorism, in effect arguing for an increased and more efficient surveillance. "They were already on some watch-list.", of course, mass surveillance put them there successfully.

I hear of surveillance abuse, where privacy is violated (spying on ex-girlfriend). But, like the police has a monopoly on violence and can physically restrain your freedom, so has the government a monopoly on violence of privacy. If you deem your country incapable of holding that responsibility, I guess it is time to move to a country where the US government can gather even more than your telephone meta-data.

Finally, that we could end up in a totalitarian surveillance state, is a pessimistic projection akin to adversarial AGI or all police deciding to start abusing and shooting random citizens.

I am further under the impression that way more checks and balances are in place to make sure that government surveillance does not overstep its boundaries, where businesses don't really care, especially if the profit justifies the fines or stricter regulation.

Government surveillance is not a problem, it is a solution, and it helps save lives. Facebook tracking me without a profile and knowing that I am gay or religious is a problem, because the judge/courts is a room of unethical engineers drinking Red Bull.

So basically everyone on hackernews that worked for a modern data-driven consumer-target company participates in adversarial data gathering. Even if you just gave your data to a FANG company, in exchange for comfortable features, you helped them more effectively spy on people like you. So shame on you!

I know that you can't use just any old variable, but I tried enough to know that music genre would probably be an informative feature (dibs on providing loans to classical - and Judeo-Christian religious music lovers, you are free to underwrite the dubstep - and ghetto rap fans).

Do a search for "site:telegram.me" including a keyword from any illegal activity, such as carding, and you'll find hundreds of channels with interesting behavior.

And I work with credit risk models and can tell you there is a negligible chance that gender is causing a 20x credit limit increase. No protected variable will have so much influence, and Apple/GS are not even legally allowed to directly reference such variables.

It may be the most logical conclusion for the general public, but all they see is the output of a black box. DHH jumped to conclusions that it had to be something about gender, with n=1.

Who says there is a problem that needs fixing? Demanding that women and men always receive equal limits is not about fairness, it is a very radical notion that makes discriminative credit risk scoring almost impossible.

I am not saying that Apple/GS did not mess up here, and could have been more transparent, but, in their defense: Oftentimes you can't be more transparent (like when Google closes an account for posting something illegal, they have to keep mum, while the user loudly complains online that they got banned for doing nothing), an help desk person is never going to be able to give an explanation for a model decision (this is usually a good thing), and DHH seemed to be barking up the wrong tree all together (what if the different limits were the result of a, completely legal, influencer program or randomized trial?).

It really does matter how it got that way. If 20% of people of color vs. white people have a low income (a non-protected variable), I am perfectly allowed to use that variable to deny them a loan more often, even if the result is that 20% of people of color don't receive a loan. That's not a racist algorithm, however it would be racist if I start ignoring income of certain people as to achieve racial demographic parity in loans.

Similarly, as this is an ongoing investigation now, and they probably anticipated that, Google was probably legally very limited in what they could disclose. I bet some people with all the knowledge of the data - and colleague snooping are shaking their heads at some of the public perception of this case as union-busting.

The opposite of accepting a coincidence once in a while is viewing everything through the lens of intentional discrimination.

How would this technically work? I can see this only if you manually created rules for a website like Facebook. How could it know, besides some crude heuristics, that the url:

    example.com/user-profiles/bick-nowstrom?u_idx=556677

- Elizabeth Warren Ramps Up Attacks on Apple Card Bias Claims

- The four got public support from presidential front-runners Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who took to Twitter to bash Google for alleged “anti-union” actions.

What if this turns out to go out with a whimper? The Apple Card bias was something unrelated to gender that got blown up by someone popular, and these firings were carefully vetted and are legally justified?

Will these politicians apologize for jumping the gun? I bet they will point out they were the first when it turns out any other way...

Click link:

> Nasdaq North America Surveillance team monitors 3 equity markets, 6 options markets and one futures market with real-time surveillance and post-trade surveillance of unusual market activity. The surveillance department is monitoring the markets for Insider Trading, Fraud and Manipulation, including manipulation through trading—pump and dump—and order book manipulation—spoofing and layering, as well as handling events in the market such as clearly erroneous transactions.

> The surveillance program today is using algorithmic coding to detect unusual market behavior running over 40 different algorithms in real-time, looking for market abuse and manipulation. The patterns have sophisticated algorithms that use approximately 35,000 parameters. In addition to real-time surveillance, there are over 150 patterns covering post trade surveillance, which are used to identify a wide range of potential misconduct.

> The activity is monitored across equity and options markets, with some market-specific alerts and some alerts encompassing data from all markets.

So they have 40 different predictive models running in production (a lot!), and 150 hand-written (or single-pattern) rules. They also employ active learning with experts and this reduces their training data needs with 95%. 40 models using 35000 features, is 875 features per model on average. All this bickering is typical.

If you look at who is saying this, and follow the money (not disclosed here, but a short search away), you'll notice that this is a butcher grading his own meat. Without blinking he further suggests that the U.S. government hold tournaments on anonymized data to crowdsource market manipulation detection.

The bias in ML sections are all mealy-mouthed and elitist. Just because you hold a PhD in a technical field does not mean you understand economics, AI futurology, public policy, or ethics. It would be career suicide to stray from the path of the popular safe opinion. So you get language-imperialist terms like "Latinx" instead of "South Americans" to describe Brazilians, claims that automation will favor taking jobs from minorities, that the government should promote women in leadership positions at private companies, and that especially women of color have no access to study computer engineering.

But when you have to make a difficult decision (whether to ban a popular Youtuber for hate speech), make that decision based on precedent, the good of the company, and for the users. Don't view it as a personal attack to your political beliefs, and default to banning when the free speech happens to clash with your beliefs, while defaulting to complaining when people talking about LGBT+ rights get demonitized.

Also, if you are allowed to take your politics to work, accept that others may bring their opposing politics to work too. The vocal conservative-right Googlers are in the minority, and are mistreated as such by the political power brokers. A union should be for all the workers.

In this case, the intent seemed to be: to stalk political opponents. Unacceptable abuse of the open culture.

Most reporting and discussions I've seen about this, pose the firing as union-busting behavior by Google. I also disagree there. Just because it took aim at people wanting to organize and rally for their cause, does not mean their cause was the motivation. To me, it means these people took their cause too far, mixed it with work, and publicly attacked the decisions of their colleagues, because these were perceived as homophobic. Just because you are an LGBT+ in reliability engineering, does not mean you get to raise a fuzz anytime Youtube makes a (better informed, less biased) decision you don't agree with. That gets tedious and detrimental to work relations very fast.

It is "don't be evil". It was in their code of conduct, not mission statement. It is not removed from their code of conduct, in fact, it is the final conclusion of the document:

> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

The last edit is from 2018, not several years ago. And its updated cousin motto "Do the right thing" became more prominent.

I suspect a journalist had a diff bot running on the code of conduct, created a story around it about removal, because that would actually constitute a story worth paying journalist wages for, and then the media ran with it, without doing checks of their own. And now, here you are. And I am ignoring the fact that an evil company announcing its future plans by removing references to "evil" in their mission statements is downright James Bond-level of ridiculous.

Female sexuality is seen as responsible for the fall of humanity. The first wive of Adam was evil and did not listen, and Eve corrupted Adam into biting the apple. After that, female sexuality and will was something to be contained and cleaned:

> But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

> Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

> When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean.

For instance, the article mentions Cinderella Jewels, which has a new account showcasing her "pole journey". NSFW: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4xM_b4AtC-/ and her Youtube banner: https://yt3.ggpht.com/L6jM6xMK_QBRZieP8x8f8_f6x1BYQi30_K7WGL...

Here is Bloggeronpole showing "body positivity", while complaining they won't let her post a video of her working out in a bikini NSFW: https://www.instagram.com/p/B2td-HPgzDP/

Here is Ginger Banks' instagram, who claimed in the article: "I've never posted explicit images on Instagram. But even a picture of me wearing leggings could be extremely provocative to someone, and worthy of being reported": NSFW: https://www.instagram.com/thegingerbanks/ and here you can support her art, for just 100$ a month you can help end the stigma that is surrounding sex and view art that makes you question yourself: https://www.patreon.com/GingerBanks (NSFW).

It was a bad idea when the left applied it to popular right speakers, and it is a bad idea when the right applies it in their misguided quest/troll to make society more puritan, help a brother incel escape the clutches of e-prostitution and try for a real girlfriend.

Viewed in a certain light, these accounts are nothing more than fronts for digital prostitution, all carefully made to guide people to one of their profitable monetizations. Even Youtube allows "performers" to use their suitable-for-work videos to advertise their Patreon, where kids can buy the bath water or access to lewd Snapchat of their favorite cosplayer or ASMR star.

This is not about sexual liberation, and platforms shunning porn stars. It never was. It is all about trolling/culture hacking these very gameable report buttons. It is what happens when you allow a vocal activist minority to moderate your platform. The BBC reporting it as a crackdown by big evil business (completely ignorant of the real cause, or the 1000$ per month blowjobs these stars are offering one click away) tells you we still have a way to go with investigative journalism. Big evil site owners used to pay Ginger Banks (the first time I saw her, she was live streaming her vagina from a public library PC), they love all the attention and engagement these women bring.

If the owners kick them off their platform, it is because they risk breaking the law or have their hand forced by activism/trolls. Anything else is eating into their business.