After reading these charges it sounds like less of a spy situation and more of an unfortunate past she was knew would conflict with her current goal of getting the F out of China. I'm pretty skeptical because like most cases involving state security, this one involves a desperate rube and a grandiose story that'll bolster some agents' careers. Maybe she didn't think her service was that relevant to working in neurology, but destroying a hard drive would make it seem like she was really a spy? Like she'd rather everyone forget about it because it never should have been of concern to begin with. I have neglected to check the, "Have you ever been charged with a crime?" box on job applications and if for some reason my mug shots were hanging about my workstation I'd throw them in the trash. Maybe I can or can't relate but I see why someone would go to some effort to keep something like that from coming to light without committing to the foregone conclusion implied by the charges. To be honest this story seems barely newsworthy, I have known a lot of grad students who lie on their Visa documents. But in this day and age people want to read news about Chinese spies being deported, so god help her that's what the news is going to report.
I spent a lot of energy and time studying applied ML in university. After competing in several contests I realized in most cases a simple linear equation threw shade on the whole carnival. Don't get me wrong there are amazing applications for ML, image recognition, simulated physics, the list goes on. But most of the commercial applications I've seen render a ML model wholly unnecessary. You don't need a heavy handed big data machine learning model to figure out, "people who bought also bought", nor does a crime prediction system need to be more complicated than, "where the cops and poor people were last year". FFS a national convenience store contracted one of our classes to do analysis on 10 years of data and the shocking conclusion most groups arrived at was, "people smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer". A revelation. Maybe if it were required curriculum people would realize you don't need to a hire a warlock to do basic statistics...
The comparison of cloud platforms truly is heavily distorted at a startup. Most companies aren't comparing AWS and MS in a vacuum when presented with the decision. How much of the world's software runs on dotnet? Windows, Office, and Active Directory command their own predominant shares, not to mention other tools like CRM. MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc. Suppose the CTO for an insurance claims company is presented with the decision of migrating a legacy platform which already runs on a fat stack of MS products. They don't even need a salesperson to convince them Azure is the obvious first choice, because to them it's just another cannon on the battleship.
In my experience the tribal evangelism for AWS is... intense... and they've somehow convinced people to proselytize unpaid on their behalf. Having worked with both I'll occasionally mention Azure if only to revel at the spicy takes. Honestly though, I worked at that claims company I mentioned. Likewise the startup I work at today threw their hats in with AWS. Both were respectively good decisions, both bad in their own right. As ever, try to do everything and something is going to give.
Stay at home orders are selective. Focused primarily on industries and jobs where minorities overwhelmingly find themselves. School closures favor children from households that can afford a computer for each child; requiring a parent to stay home, namely a responsibility falling upon women who are dropping out of the workplace at an unprecedented rate. So what then happens to those households who don't have that privilege? Do you care?
The people paying the cost of public health are children, women, poor, and minorities.
Meanwhile I haven't given anything up, so it's very easy for people like us to sit here while earning our full income from home and say, "Yes, this makes sense. It is totally worth it." It's worth it to us because we aren't paying the cost. These stay at home orders and quarantines have overwhelmingly and profoundly impacted people who were already struggling without offering them a path forward. Rest assured the economic uncertainty from shut down was a catalyst behind the BLM protests. The people impacted by shut down are predominantly poor and minorities, and the fact we haven't considered how to share that burden before stabbing in the dark is what makes them racist.
At the global level, malaria kills almost a million people every single year, mostly children under 4. There's no herd immunity and it has and will continue to happen for decades. The WHO anticipates due to new covid travel restrictions on malaria relief workers an additional 3 to 4 hundred thousand deaths due to malaria will occur in Sub Sahara Africa alone. Surely malaria is a pandemic that shadows covid by any measure, except the measure where it overwhelmingly affects poor black people. Meanwhile the second our society is faced with something which mostly kills old white people, the average age of which exceeds the average human lifespan, we're cancelling school and creating a generation of illiterate 2nd grade children while their parents are left with no way to feed them.
So yeah the reaction to covid has been first and foremost selfish, and given the government is a historic institution of race, these orders are themselves the children of our racism.
This has bothered me for a long time and the fact it still drags on blows my mind. Predominantly white protesters in Portland misappropriated protests over racial inequality for their own disphoric amalgamation of social issues. There's little agreement among them about the goal of the protests or even why they're protesting. I know many of those people. Many have no idea why they're there, it's just drama to them, something they can do in the face of the most socially regressive times of our generation. On the other side people see this, point and say, "See? Told you I was right about those people."
Nobody seems to give a shit about issues racial minorities and poor face, in the same breath ravenously supporting covid policies and their unprecedented impacts on income and social inequality along mostly racial lines. I'm surprised they aren't chanting, "black lives are essential."
This is not helpful for racial equality. It's not helpful for anybody except the psychopathic industry of military oppression of civilian populations. Of course they're walking all over our social contracts, the continued protests have opened the door for them.
Disruption of systematic inequality is needed, but this ain't the way it's going to happen. As a privileged work-from-homer, white person, whatever, our first obligation is to listen to what racial minorities are saying to understand the nature their struggles. Otherwise you can tell yourself you're a virtuous champion of wokeness, but you're really just a part of the same problem.
Covid reporting is rife with statistical murder for the sake of hyperbole. If someone paid attention to the first week of a statistics course they'd learn about sample bias, false causality, cherry picking, Simpson's paradox, etc. Ahem, publication bias. Small wonder mental illness is up with a constant news cycle abusing fallacy to monopolize the public's attention and a status quo of blaming whomever strikes convenience for the disease. Let's just pull some data from this cohort of people who had Covid... and there we have it - Covid causes mental illness.
In my state deaths from child abuse outstripped deaths from Covid until a recent outbreak in a couple of nursing homes. Guess we can conclude it causes deaths by child abuse. What's the tragedy reported in the newspapers? School closures forcing children from broken homes out of the only place people cared about their safety and success are now dying from abuse? The generation of poor and minority illiterate 3rd graders who will never catch up? Nope. People literally waiting to die in a nursing home are dying. A tragedy.
Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept from person to person. Shit, I bet half of the hacker news crowd thinks anything less than an A is a failing grade. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. Kinda like the students who got a couple bad grades in college probably had more interesting lives. ;)
Jokes on them, I never look at 5 or 1 star reviews. By convention I think rating systems are fundamentally flawed in that they are anything but a ubiquitous concept. The people struggling to piece together how they feel about something in a binary construct generally have the most insightful comments. There's no way to stop someone from gaming the system though. If the economic incentive is to cheat, cheaters gonna cheat. Eventually plugins like FakeSpot will become as common as ad blockers, imo.
Good point. A downturn in the urban center could very well mean a boon for other neighborhoods. I'm imagining a place like Arcata, Ca would become more desirable than living in the Bay Area for a professional, so they move. Sure, it means the coffee shop across the street from their old downtown office closes, and someone in their early 20's cant find work in SF. But then that young person moves back to Arcata. They bring their indie band and contribute to the local culture. Having graduated few years later that young person runs into that same professional from across the street, they get around to talking and find a shoe in the door at that same formerly impenetrable wall of glass on the Bay's skyline. The downfall of the urban center isn't necessarily a bad thing if it means the economic and cultural boons of city life are spread to other wanting communities.
The only thing the public wants is a scapegoat. An evil face to jeer at, some one or group of people to blame for a problem before moving onto the next hyperbolic issue. Otherwise perception of a problem is too diffuse, complicated, and nuanced to process in an iota of thought. Don't bother considering the fact this company acted in good faith with the law, or the blind faith people put into a medical system fundamentally designed to profiteer from peoples' lives, and dismal support for the mental or physical health of our nation's poor and struggling. Because if you look hard enough for someone to blame and it'll eventually come full circle, because we collectively decided to co-opt a society based purely on self-interest.
What could go wrong from empowering biased corporations with the ability to control a national narrative of what constitutes misinformation and hyperbole? I'm noticing a wide spread lack of the ability to weigh the pros and cons of policy in order to arrive at a rational decision based on due consideration of legitimate data analysis. I guess we should've been concerned when today's young adults couldn't discern real from fake news sources. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK284782/
Makes me wonder how well equipped the next generation of underprivileged and minority children will be, among whom illiteracy will be a serious issue because they and their parents were never able to catch-up socially after being thrown to the wolves of self preservation and unchecked puritanical shaming. Sure a website like hacker news is well-moderated and I am appreciative, but it's a matter of scale. A for-profit corporation granted with the ability to control the political narrative of an entire country is neither, "moderated content", nor, "news". If time has anything to tell it works fine, until the narrative is wrong.
I'm envisioning a world where Germany won the war and Facebook finds itself removing fringe content proclaiming the war was a horrific genocide and not the triumph of free society that the mainstream accepts as factual rationality. For Facebook to outright remove this content puts them into the awkward position of policing rationality on a platform built proliferating bullshit. It seems odd they chose to go down the route of outright removing the content opposed to quietly preventing flagged topics from aggregation on its recommendation algorithms. That said it does make sense considering the status quo these days seems to be using ideas and opinions, often to which our commitment is at best lackadaisical, as a basis for esteeming ourselves above others.
People are always going to have ideas which conflict with the mainstream, ideas that incite outrage and seem totally absurd. If history has anything to say about the matter it's that some of these absurd ideas have proven themselves correct despite mainstream acceptance, even outrage, to the contrary. If these ideas were silenced because they clashed with the mainstream then societies would seldom have progressed beyond dogmatic belief. What immediately comes to mind is viral FB content proclaiming masks as a panacea for Coronavirus and the government will abduct your children if you test positive. God forbid Facebook won't be removing that content though, because it doesn't clash with the mainstream zeitgeist that our reaction to the outbreak hasn't caused more long term harm than good at this point.
Good grief, I never thought I'd find myself defending the existence of Holocaust denial content on the internet, but it blows my mind how in the age of the internet we STILL don't understand how to deal with trolls.
No kidding. This is going to be the first search result for, "PS5 teardown" after the release of the console. There's a lot of value in that when you think about what people would look for when they're considering buying a major purchase. Especially since I imagine the alternative as something to the effect of this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VarmzG1Y-og
So what is your take? In the same sentence you've both advocated and dissented on the issue of employers discriminating against resolved charges not pertaining to the job. Is that what you mean by, "no horse in this race"? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so to speak.
So a low chances of being fired is better than a zero chance of being hired? If it isn't immediately pertinent to the applicant's ability to do the job, for example if a convicted sex offender were applying for a position as a child caretaker, and the offender has paid their due to society then the employer has no right to ask. Everything but that type of conflict of interest should be treated as personal information. It's the justice system's job to serve justice, not the responsibility of HR.
I also have a felony on my record and struggled immensely because of a long wrap sheet of misdemeanor crimes that seemed to cascade from that single mistake. My record has caused me to be fired from and denied several jobs, and at my lowest point I was kicked out of an education program despite succeeding otherwise. "None of my charges are violent or sexual. There's no reason to conclude I'd be a danger to children. Look at them. Failure to appear. Disorderly conduct. Criminal mischief..." "It doesn't matter, look how many there are. Parents will find this, you, the school, and our program will be held accountable."
Bottom line is people are absolutely horrible to each other if they're given even the slightest pretense. It's just a disgusting facet of our psyche, I guess. Those convicted of a crime are condemned to continued punishment by anybody who cares to look at their record, long after they've repaid any debts. I remember asking a police officer when I was in my early 20's why every time I handed my Id to an officer I was searched, arrested, or charged with something. She replied simply, "Because you have a yellow stripe painted down your back."
The fact I had an outstanding warrant for a speeding ticket in another state and doing stupid and illegal things aside, once you have a record it is very hard to escape it. Most are relegated to menial minimum wage jobs. I was lucky, I have a social safety net, confidence, I knew I could get around it. Decided to focus my studies on something so specialized an employer wouldn't try looking for reasons not to hire me. I don't think anybody has actually checked my record since I graduated. The only applications I've been handed were basically a token for HR and I simply mark, "No" under the, "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" question. Because it doesn't matter. It should be illegal for anybody to access resolved criminal records if they don't have a direct reason pertaining to the safety or security of others. It's not your job as an employer or hiring manager to judge someone's mistakes, only their aptitude to perform a job.
It blows my mind how much of the internet economy is built on sucking up user data, some of which makes sense, but I'd imagine the majority of 3rd party tracker data is used for recommending ads. Ads a solid constituent of users ignore entirely. I have personally clicked on an ad in earnest maybe once or twice in my entire life. I know a lot of this data is poured into recommendation engines but it seems like those I use aggregate results mainly based on the product seller's contract with the site and anonymous user data. If you could observe the gross cost of aggregating all of my data would the net of purchases swayed by the results of tracker data aggregation exceed the cost if excluding purchases which would've been made without any intervention based on that data? I just don't understand the economics of, "data is the new oil" because it seems like the number of profitable conclusions that can be made on mass aggregation are limited to a small handful of huge companies, and those selling data snake oil to political campaigns or whatnot.
Not trying to jump on you, I recognize you're carrying on with your life and that's more than many can say, but is it really proper to be, "paranoid", opposed to taking reasonable precautions and moving forward based on a fair assessment of cost and benefit? This article and many comments paint police or medical personnel not self-isolating as if its a problem for which they should be ashamed. My wife is one of those working directly with Covid patients. Of course wearing a soaking wet mask in a closed room is skeptically effective. Sure when she suits up with real PPE it's effective, but that takes a lot of time she doesn't have, not to mention creates a ton of garbage. So if a patient isn't a known case, they don't bother. And the fact our whole family has the antibodies aside, of course she doesn't self-isolate when one of her patients is Covid positive. That would be absurd. Nobody else would be able to do her job. We need doctors, police officers, teachers, etc to carry on. We need to stop trying to shame them. These exceptions, like those pertaining to, "safe" lead levels in drinking water, are born of practicality. I wish people would try to think about Covid more pragmatically instead of dignifying paranoia as if it doesn't present a cost. Fact is - "Flatten the curve" means the same number of people will inevitably get Covid. Look, I know shaming each other is REALLY appealing but... We should probably start trying to weigh that universally recognized epidemiological fact against the perceived benefit of requiring public servants to self isolate, depriving children of an education, plunging millions into economic depression, or whatever.
Two days ago I heard a loud, "SQUEE! Bock bock bock bock." from our back yard. Two (Flicker) woodpeckers were fighting in the branches of a maple, our chickens standing around foot of the tree seemingly captivated by the spectacle. I assume the cause of the commotion was the tussle finding its way to the ground, startling the chickens.
When I realized what was going on my daughter and I crept outside to watch. The woodpeckers and chickens ignored us as we sat down at the tree. The contenders hopping from branch to branch, diving at each other, dodging, and trying to get an angle on the other. They landed together on the roof of the nearby coop jumped up in the air and locked together in a flurry of feathers. Again the loud, "SQUEEE!" right before they hit the ground, both of them alighting on their feet, one with two of the other's breast feathers in its beak. The apparent victor of the clash exaggeratedly held the feathers above its head and gently placed them on the ground before the two of them zipped away to a power line where they remained for a while, seemingly calm. My daughter recovered the two feathers, both a downy orange quill extending up to a stark black dot, and shared her experience the next morning with her class mates.
Funny I came across this article now, I'll have to share it with her when she returns from school.
And here I was thinking we were living in the future when I could print out a pdf, fill out the fields with a pencil, take a picture of it, then email it to myself, change the file type back to pdf, and send it to whomever requested it...
There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people. There will always be more games released every year by middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games. As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal sized heads.
The company I work at follows that queue. Engineering might not build anything custom for new clients, since it's a software platform product, but Sales Engineers invest heavily into building turn-key solutions to their clients' problems using our platform. I just finished a project allowing our own sales people to duplicate their efforts into the actual system once the customer is converted and they estimated that simple copy operation would save them 500 hours a quarter. That's a ton of investment for a company of my employer's size. If we're talking about a company like Plantir, whose primary engineering workforce is, "Implementations Consultants", then that absolutely makes sense. Especially since those are government contracts, which can attach strings to the proposal requiring proof the bidder is capable of doing what they promise.
Identifying a gap in our understanding of something can be as conversely significant as a given finding. I take umbrage with allowing reductionism to prevent consideration of other ideas where it fails to explain something. I know it's not scientific to suppose the balance of life's complex systems is deterministic, but if you look at population dynamics a possible explanation is homeostasis as the destination state. The motivations of the individual be damned, life seems to find a balance. Perhaps our understanding of what's really going on in the biosphere is as limited as the perspective of an immune cell in the human body. Just saying, determinism might not be terribly scientific, but it's still worth considering in the context of what we can't explain with reductionism. You have to admit, what we're all experiencing right now, life, is pretty flippin' remarkable.
The decommissioned mail sorting machines are part of a long-term plan to respond to reduced demand for paper mail. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/20/postal-se...
The USPS has been saddled with a series of unfortunate events and in my opinion should be full-backed by the US government. That said, this article seemed apt focus on hyperbole rather than attempt to articulate an accurate story. Dead animals, bugs, ballots... The same brand of doom and gloom so popular in the media these days. I suspect the problems reflects the capacity to accommodate increased demand but I wouldn't know because I have to read between the lines of several articles intended to get me riled up instead of telling me the real story of cause and effect.
Seems the point of the paper is an improvment upon a technique for computing a quaternion Julia from 2015. They found a way to compute the rendering algorithm for the mesh within the limits of 64 bit precision, enabling massively multi-threaded computation. I admit it is a lot of pure math for a casual read, but I think the intent was rendering the set as demonstration of why their finding is significant. Not necessarily that they found a better way to render the set.