deong

Not really. I could spend time and energy building filters that matched current known patterns, but those filters probably won't be very good. Suppose instead of a stroke it had been a gun accident. I'm not confident I could successfully anticipate and build a filter good enough to recognize that it wasn't a political post about the NRA and gun rights.

Ultimately, that line of thought ends with me developing my own algorithmic feed, which I don't really want to do and isn't scalable anyway.

It's interesting that, to my eye at least, we've flipped that dynamic completely. Generalizing a bit from stereos, you're talking about government limiting the rights of individuals to maintain a common good. To the extent that either end of the political spectrum can be said to support that, it's the younger, more liberal side. Modern conservatives are flying their Gadsden flags.

There's a hard limit to what I as a user can reliably express in terms of explicit rules. I have a cousin I was pretty close to growing up. She mostly uses Facebook to post anti-vaccine nonsense and occasional bits of thinly-veiled pro-Trump propaganda and BS "stories" from the alt-right. I "unfollowed" her a long time ago, but it would have been nice to see all the updates she posted when her dad had a stroke.

I need an algorithm for that. There's no good way for me to say, "I don't want to see all the stupid shit she posts, but please show me important stuff" because I lack the ability to rigorously define "important stuff". And it's unreasonable to treat her unwillingness to personally text those updates to every single person she knows.

> Your statement that IBM could sue company using a clean-room developed re-implementation of IMB's BIOS if IBM owned a copyright to their BIOS is incorrect as a matter of law.

To the extent that it's relevant here, that appears to be untrue. This hinges on the fact that with an API, you have to match it exactly, and there's no reasonable way to argue that someone could sit down and do a clean room implementation of the Java APIs that perfectly matched all 3000 classes and all the public interfaces of all those classes.

You can do a clean room implementation of the Java Platform, but you can't do a clean room design of the Java APIs. The whole point you're trying to solve is to make something that's compatible with Java, and that requires knowing the Java APIs, i.e., it's not a clean room. If we extrapolate that back to IBM and clones, as long as the clone makers must come up with the same external API as the IBM BIOS, then this court would say that IBM absolutely could use copyright law to prohibit clones, because the clones would have to have copied the APIs -- not the code, but the names and types used in the APIs themselves, and IBM holds copyright to those names.

But Oracle vs. Google is the citation. Google previously won based on Fair Use. By definition, that court considered APIs to be copyrightable. If they weren't, the case would have been adjudicated on those grounds instead of the provisions of copyright law that govern fair use.

If it's actually someone attempting to make money on a short or to benefit from a working relationship with a competitor, then a bug bounty program does nothing. No one can run a bounty program that pays out anywhere near as much as the information is actually worth to an adversary. Bug bounties work to engender a bit of good will among researchers and to provide some incentive to an otherwise neutral party to play ball. They don't mean shit to a hedge fund or a competitor in a multi-billion dollar industry.

But that's the only practical thing it could be. Suppose you shoot yourself in the head. What's the doctor supposed to put down as the cause of death? All he knows is that a bullet destroyed part of your brain. He doesn't know if you were depressed. Hell, he doesn't even know if it was intentional. Was it the girlfriend that left you last month, or that promotion you thought you were going to get that went to someone else?

What do you put down for a drug overdose? Was he chasing the next good time or escaping the pain of being molested as a child?

I'm not sure you understand what differential privacy is. Apple still has your data. If there's a breach, an attacker gets your data. It's probably encrypted, just as it is with pretty much any modern system where user data is collected, but differential privacy doesn't have anything to do with what data is collected or stored. Differential privacy is just a method for limiting how much information can be reliably inferred about an entire dataset from limited queries on statistical properties of the data.

It's basically this. Imagine I have two data sets that are identical, except one has your specific data and the other doesn't. It's possible in some circumstances to infer information about you by asking for things like averages on the datasets. Differential privacy is a method for defeating attacks that rely on that type of "leakage" of information. It assures that if two datasets are close enough, queries on those datasets will not yield significant information about their differences (i.e., the presence or absence of one particular data point won't be detectable).

It's all about how queries of the data perform, and not at all about the data itself.

It's also conflating a bunch of stuff that goes into Google's valuation that isn't directly tied to ownership of your data. Once upon a time, Google just made a search engine, and that search engine quickly took over the world. Google made a lot of money plopping ads on search results long before you could create a Google account or store all your email there. Presumably, the technical ability to build products like that is worth actual money. If Google deleted all personal data, the company would not be worth $0.

Akureyri isn't really a "small town" by Icelandic standards though. Once you get into the actual small towns over on the eastern side of the country for example, English proficiency is much, much lower.

But yeah, certainly the more populated areas are extremely English-friendly. My folks in Arkansas probably see more non-English speakers in the average month than I did in Reykjavik.

The problem is that we generally rely on human intelligence to fill in gaps in specs that are really not stupid for a human. AI will exploit gaps that a human would basically say aren't there until they see evidence to the contrary.

So we can say that's a bad spec if we like, but what's the answer that leads to? I don't need an AI if I can just declare all users must be really good programmers spending their days writing unambiguous specs. That wasn't really the goal of the AI though.

You'll find pretty quickly that the exact techniques that worked so well in learning to play Atari games very often fail spectacularly when you have to introduce goal-steering.

Reinforcement learning turns out to be fantastically clever at finding really stupid solutions if you give it the tiniest opening to do so. You put a camera in a room to provide feedback for an agent to learn to move an object closer to the camera, and it will happily learn to knock the camera over.

I didn't lump him in with racists. I explicitly said the opposite. I just used racist views as an example of an opinion you're not allowed to share, even if asked for your opinion on racial matters.

Since you missed it, the point was this: it's irrelevant that he posted it on a company board that was asking for opinions, so stop trying to use that as a defense. If you want to defend what he said, go nuts. We can argue the merits and whether Google overreacted. Just don't whine, "but they asked his opinions!" as though that's some sort of shield.

I'm not sure why it seems so revelatory to people that there are some opinions you don't get to express out loud without consequence, even if you're asked about them.

If my boss says, "Hey deong, what do you think about black people?", that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card for me to start dropping n-bombs. There's one answer you're allowed to give to that question, and it's not because there's some conspiracy to oppress dissenting opinions. It's because there are extremely reasonable standards for employment that include not shouting racial epithets and white supremacist propaganda. Being asked your opinion doesn't change the rules.

Damore was certainly less inflammatory than that, but the point remains. You can argue that his opinions didn't warrant firing, but there's no reasonable way to argue that because he was responding to requests for comment, it's unethical or otherwise shady to hold him accountable for those comments.

Yes, like Marxism. Which is why no one is actually advocating for Marxism.

Exactly. I have nothing invested in the story some random guy on Reddit is telling. Why not take it at face value? If I'm going to go tell a bunch of friends about it or take some action myself based on it, then sure, I'm going to want to apply a little skepticism to save myself from making a mistake or looking foolish.

Microsoft hasn't been too different in that regard. In terms of interfaces with any real userbase to speak of, the only real Microsoft UI systems I can come up with could be characterized as

* MS-DOS/Windows 3.1-like * Windows 95-like * Windows 8-like

Windows 8 basically was born and died in a couple of years, to be replaced with Windows 10, which is very much the same basic set of metaphors as Windows 95. There's a start menu, a little dock of pinned icons next to it, a taskbar, a clock and some little icons for what are basically background processes. There's a maximize and minimize and close button on windows. There's a File/Edit/Whatever set of menus. You can right click for context items, many of which are consistent with Windows 95 20+ years ago. That basic system is now something like 21 years old now.

You can maybe argue that Microsoft forgot your message five or so years ago, but they obviously rediscovered it.

If you're already landless, Amazon coming in isn't going to help you become landed, outside of a handful of the earliest people to get in before the speculators hit. They'll create high paying jobs, but they'll create equally (or likely more) expensive houses.

Anyone wanting to live in Nashville (just to pick one city from the list) who's capable of working for Amazon is also capable of working for someone in Nashville today. And generally, the economics of being tech talent outside these hotbed markets like SV and Seattle are vastly favorable.

That is to say, you're probably better off buying the cheap house in a smaller market on the salary you can command in that market than you are buying a very expensive house on the salary that the very expensive market offers you. Google would pay me more than my current job, but my cost of living would go up by more than my salary -- massively so.

And I started using Google's phones because I could see the potential for things like B. Hell yes, I want my phone to be aware of things in my email inbox. I want it to be more aware.

It does seem like that is the problem a lot of people have.

Google does explicitly ask you for permission to do this. And whenever someone in this thread points that out, someone replies with some variation of "yeah, but they probably do it anyway". Well...OK then I guess. There's not much of a conversation that can happen after that, but you do you.

Some markets do. There are many examples of markets that don't -- enough that there's a recognized term for it ("Natural Monopoly").

I would argue that the level of knowledge, talent, and engineering and scientific resources required to do what Google does forms a pretty effective natural barrier to a bunch of small players being able to compete.

Well, he does talk about having too many PhD students to really mentor them well. For better or worse, TT professors at modern R1 universities aren't really there to contribute to undergraduate education. They're there to do research and to mentor graduate students.

"no known breach or defect"

Except for the many thousands that have been known, from every exploitable vulnerability that's allowed an iOS jailbreak to every security fix in every patch in the nearly two decades of OS X (and System 7/9/etc before that). These types of things are fairly complex pieces of software. It doesn't matter if the software is ultimately compiled to hardware circuitry or executed by a CPU -- bugs come from complexity, not from the medium.

If "upgradeable" matters at all, you're not buying Apple stuff anyway. You may as well assume everything they make is an iPhone and make your purchasing decisions from there.

That's just the way phone companies work. If I go to AT&T this morning and cancel my account, that number is gone. I get that Google owning two things that look like phone companies could confuse people, but under no circumstances would I ever cancel the service on a number I still needed. And like OP said, I know from my experience that Google almost crossed over into belligerence in trying to tell me the implications of porting my voice number. Even if I didn't understand the technical terms, the sheer urgency of the messaging should give you pause about taking any action lightly.

Their safety net is their lobbying power, which hasn't changed.

Most managers fail in the "knowledge of basic stats" and "access to decent tools" areas. And if they have the knowledge, most larger organizations don't have a ton of managers sitting around writing python code during the day. Their day is full of meetings.

Also, the idea that peer review is rife with people killing articles to save their "pet theory" is idiotic. Reviewers just want you to cite them.

Think of my comment as two separate statements. First, "overwhelmingly" is silly. Second, and more or less unrelated, it would have personally affected me. The second wasn't intended as support for the first.

I don't know that I'd say "overwhelmingly". I certainly wouldn't have been able to go to grad school under this system.