283 karma · joined October 7, 2015
yeah, this is kind of a tough one, though... because people need to be able to talk about the hegemony of the group that identifies itself as white at the expense of the groups that are excluded from that identification. and always saying something like "the cartel that calls itself white, where some members aren't even consciously colluding" is kind of a clunker. esp for people who don't think/read about this stuff on their own, and who just think of "white" as a simple and natural ethnic delineation, to the degree that any ethnic delineation can be thought of as simple or natural =)
race, including "whiteness" is a scientific and biological fiction invented and accepted to maintain (and hide) a caste system. but through the assiduous maintenance of that lie, it has become a different sort of social reality. not using the term "white" makes it incredibly hard to talk with most people about the issue. but using the term "white" as most people (superficially) think of it also helps cement its pernicious effects.
pretty difficult jam our society has gotten into there.
"the people who call themselves white" is the best terminology approach i've seen to dealing with this, but even that is still quite clunky, and may still make the speaker sound like a hand-wringing liberal to anyone who's not already on board with the viewpoint that race is a pernicious and unscientific lie.
i think people in general can often have too much of a move fast and break things attitude, and i tend to be the opposite, but my default tendency toward risk aversion can definitely go to far. balance is important.
i think explicitly reminding myself to think about the realistic cost of failure can be helpful. e.g. 15 minutes or an hour starting in an uncertain approach to implementing a software feature, or writing something, or trying to sketch out a proof probably isn't a huge deal. 15 minutes or an hour trying some novel approach to fixing a production bug that's writing bad data when there's some known tedious thing that'd staunch the bleeding in a few minutes, or sinking many hours and/or much money into an uncertain hobby or activity, those might be less worth the risk =) (but i didn't get the impression you were including that sort of thing, just rambling)
yeah, i was slightly surprised that jerry lawson (inventor of the game cartridge) wasn't mentioned.
correlation does not equal causation.
how is it not apparent that typosquatting is possible regardless of whether namespacing is in play?
for example, URLs are namespaced, and are the classic example of typosquatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting
i think the wording of this is insufficiently nuanced. consider that many issues involve more than two clear dominant points of view, and that for many issues most people would not consider all points of view to be equally credible.
> Why is Google deciding why that specific Hillary query is taboo?
because, as another poster pointed out in another subthread, any search engine that is usable (at the level of time and technical skill that most people have) will necessarily have to make essentially editorial judgements. after almost a lifetime of being the sort of nerd that likes to make lists, categorize things, geek out over philosophical classifications, etc, and after a few years of working in the library world, i'm convinced that coming up with any system of abstraction or classification necessarily implies making editorial judgements and value judgements. i think objectivity is a great and important thing to strive for (in reporting and in information classification), but i think achieving it perfectly is definitely not possible, especially on divisive issues, and especially where lots of people disagree (or claim to disagree) on the basic facts.
> And who gave them that right?
i don't know about right, but effectively they have the ability because: 1) they built a really good search engine, 2) they built a really successful ad business on top of that to monetize it, 3) through ignorance and laziness we let them hoover up our data and use it to greatly improve their ad business, which let them provide us even more free services that everyone got hooked on, 4) everyone seems too apathetic to make the effort to move away and no one seems interested in competing with them as a search or email provider for most people. and here we are.
is the logic here that as a software developer, your quality of life should certainly be better than that of the people waiting on you? that seems wrong to me. i mean, i know this is a common sort of latent assumption in our society, but it is one that's worth examining.
regardless, you need to find a more sane and human dev job.
clever trick with the infra cam, but i don't think you've showed the equivalence of the situations in any practical sense. maybe that wasn't your point, and you were just offering a sorta-similar-but-not-really detection technique?
> You may not think those cameras matter, but let's be honest, many people have access to the data feed through those cameras. From the near-minimum-wage "security" guard (or loss prevention) employee to the corporate security teams storing the backed up footage.
yeah, this is a thought that has crossed my mind a lot the last couple years, and i find it really unnerving. i now consciously try to keep my typing out of the sight line of cameras, though i don't always remember to do that, and i'm sure there are tons of cameras i don't notice.
this also feels true of most of the industry's business models.
but yeah, the mantra's just a mantra. i think lots of people repeat that and think it sounds like a good goal, but they never really examine whether they're contributing to it. people can bullshit themselves pretty easily. and a lot of other folks just pay lip service to that mantra so they can make money.
* you're trying to focus on being data-driven, but then you posit that i should watch a bunch of anecdotes collected in a non-scientific way to get perspective? would it be valid for me to ask you to talk to everyone who got a flu shot and then didn't catch the flu? because those two things seem about equally scientific to me, and i doubt you'd go for the latter from everything i've seen in this thread.
* if you're making a case for hard data analysis, i think you'll get people to listen more if you address everything systematically instead of falling back on "That's such a complete, outright lie - I guess my brain didn't even register it" for a point you didn't cover.
* under the benefits, have you considered the benefits of herd immunity? because there are some people who really can't vaccinate. and as many people as can should, to protect the ones who can't.
>> Before the vaccine, measles infected more than 3 million Americans and killed more than 400 of them each year. One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized and one or two in 1,000 are likely to die
> Anyone here gots math.. 400/3,000,000 is ~1/10,000. And note that this is the rate given 1950's medical care - I can't fathom the numbers would be like this today.
why'd you divide 400 by 3M? the article says, per your quote, that there were 400 american deaths per year. but 3M infected americans _total_. there is no per year qualifier on that part.
also you forgot to address the part about:
> One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized
i don't know about you, but i'll take a vaccination over a hospitalization in most realistic situations i can imagine.
also, while i can see how adverse events might be grossly underreported, i imagine the ones that _do_ get reported skew the data set towards the worst of the events. it seems to me that a really bad adverse event is much more likely to be reported than one that's mild.
another point of view is that freedom to tinker and repair shouldn't be limited to the super-rich, and that what you're describing isn't practical for the vast majority of the population.
i have exactly zero problems with society collectively pushing for the right to repair against greedy companies who'd rather not give it.
which is to say, we should legislate a strong right to repair, so that denying it is clearly illegal, so that we can take companies to task using something other than the invisible hand of the market.
i mean, i don't doubt that the concern you mention might be part of it. but it sure is also a convenient way to lock people out of servicing their own stuff. and i doubt they're eager to give people the ability to service their own equipment without a strong public demand for that ability.
so the public should keep demanding that (as opposed to relying on the altruism of a large corporation).
i think i would really like that law.
so, if their experiment was designed such that reproduction is inherently difficult, they should have designed it in a better way, and they should've used a toolset that wouldn't run into that problem.
a non-reproducible experiment isn't necessarily completely without value, but it's a thing that everyone should look askance at till it proves its worth.
(apologies if my comments don't apply to this experiment and if it is reproducible -- i didn't have time to read through the OP, but i thought this reply was still a worthwhile response to its specific parent comment)
if we're all whistleblowers, people high up the chain will fear having the whistle blown on them. don't just leak illegal things, leak immoral things.
grassroots transparency. do it anonymously if you have to. hold your bosses accountable.
if the protections that sandboxing offered were so flimsy as to be a false sense of security, that would be an argument against sandboxing. but that does not seem to be the situation we're in.
(usually stuff i want to save has already been crawled, but i always find it satisfying when something i plug in there hasn't been archived yet)
i imagine this will be true for a while (i.e. the practical throughput of sneakernet in many cases will keep outpacing the practical throughput of wired and wireless networks, probably for a long time).
also i find the "rabbit hole" metaphor and a username beginning with "dbased" to be pretty "on the nose" in the context of this thread (sorry, i couldn't resist any of that, and i only realized i ended with a pun after typing it out).
in the situation you describe, or any urgent situation where speed of communication is paramount, what about bombardment through multiple channels? like, i'll often leave my phone out of my pocket, and not pay super close attention to it. and if it lights up with one text message, or one signal message, or whatever, i might not look at it. but if it's buzzing like crazy, or someone starts calling, i'd pick it up.
i guess what i'm saying is, "urgent" to me means signal/text/call/call someone that might be around the person/whatever, until the message gets through. if something is urgent, i would not send it solely by text. i've certainly had SMS messages get dropped or delayed many many times over the years.
can you really only use one messaging app at a time? signal is my primary messaging app, but i don't really find it bothersome to use whatsapp and regular SMS also. different people i communicate with prefer different channels, and often the same person will use different channels with me depending on the purpose (e.g., my dad mostly chats with me by SMS, and most of my immediate family's group chat is on SMS, but when my dad is texting with me about some sensitive personal financial info, it's over signal).
also, i hope that whatever the urgent issue was, it was resolved in an ok way. like i said, not trying to shortchange the urgency of a medical emergency or second guess your decision making or frustration at the time.
maybe other variations on that search come up with much more risque results?
i (and many others) believe that surveillance is like this. the effort that it takes to do what your describing does not scale, and cannot be used to implement dragnet surveillance and data collection (unless it's a police state and you have a lot of notetakers). lots of people (myself and many others) think dragnet surveillance (whether by private entities or governments) is a thing to be avoided (because it creates really bad power asymmetries, which i think are inherently a bad thing).
also, i don't think that large companies should be granted the same rights as individuals. just because a person can do a thing on their own doesn't mean that a large entity should be able to do something similar in spirit at thousands or millions of times the scale.
that doesn't mean you can't try to mitigate the worst aspects of it. here are some suggestions to start:
* saner hours
* better pay, so that you can live on 40 hours a week or less of this work.
* comprehensive medical insurance including good mental health care
* free on-site confidential psychological counseling
programmers and other usually direct employees of software companies can have it bad, but they usually don't have it nearly as bad as the content screeners.
> I'm not sure what could be done.
me either, really, but there are some reasonable things we can try. i don't think we should just abdicate responsibility on this because it's hard and those people don't have much power.