la_barba

Those are some nice ideas. Another one I thought of was to be a host in a student exchange program.

Most people have two weeks of vacation a year. What other practical ways do you propose then?

I've wondered a bit about that when Google blocks companies from emailing their customers for free because its "spam", but readily accepts money to show them ads.

Well, okay you don't like their politics, but I was talking about money. It doesn't seem like Google is passing up any opportunities for making money. People might be tempted to think that they could be much more evil, sure, any company could, but you end up killing the golden goose. With google the goose is public trust, and they are clearly stretching whatever trust they have left. I wonder how many Google employees actually believe that ads are anything but an annoyance that nobody wants, or even that what they're doing is ethical.

Its also nice to not be forced to pay the Apple tax to repair your device. Apple is trying their darnedest to prevent independent repair shops from extending the life of Apple products, while Apple tosses boards out, and generates more e-waste, instead of actually repairing components. But yeah, it is certainly nice to have Apple tell you that Apple thinks your Apple authorized battery, that was installed in an Apple authorized store, by an Apple trained and Apple authorized Genius is working just fine. Priorities.

Well, then why complain about anything companies do? Its all buried in some Terms of Service document that people agreed to anyway.

>It is pure luck that Rupert Murdoch or Larry Ellison etc didn't end up owning search.

Why would that be any different?

The other thing is, programmers love re-inventing things. Its the standard programmer mindset of wanting to work on problems that are one or two levels of difficulty over their currently capability. And so, they fuck shit up, because only someone whose been in the weeds, knows the ins, outs and the corner cases, is capable actually doing a good job. (IMHO, $0.02, YMMV etc)

That's a bit like asking, how do you know we won't have another world war? If there was a way to know the future, we'd all be doing ___.

Then you would have excess money supply, and if demand for the currency stays the same, it will devalue the currency, which causes inflation. That might be OK, as long as its below your economic growth rate.

With the US, the treasury uses the fact that the US dollar is one of the reserve currencies (the euro is catching up), and the US government demands payment for their security services to Japan/Korea/etc in USD, etc,etc helping maintain the demand for the USD.

Hmm, don't you need SeDebugPrivilege to access the process space of another process launched by the same user account?

I think we all realize that you don't need admin privileges to do harm. Simply having any kind of access is sufficient. But if you want to install a system wide keylogger to get access to bank/finance logins, for e.g.. admin privs help.

No one is forced to do anything, its not a public utility. The company is free to implement their service in whatever way they want, and you as the consumer or user can ignore it and move on to something else. If you feel strongly about it, write them a letter. Sorry, what you're saying is not resonating at all, and frankly sounds a bit entitled to me. I don't think this conversation is productive for either of us. Bye!

That is just a simplistic caricature of what actually happens. Any company has to first accept the tax breaks and business incentives (land resources, loans, no red-tape, easier access to market etc) that the Chinese government employs to attract foreign businesses in specific markets. China has structured those incentives to benefit them - which include setting up a joint venture with a Chinese company. If the company is a state owned enterprise, your benefits might increase even further. You have to obviously transfer the IP for the factory to actually make the thing you want. China, with its communist past has their own understanding of property rights. I believe even its citizens cannot own land - everything belongs to the government. I'm not an IP law expert, so I don't know what international laws China is or isn't violating, but I don't expect China to respect US laws, without a treaty.

>When an entity does not honour their commitments, the money starts going to another entity that appears more trustworthy.

Sure, but when in crises, people heavily favor the short term gains of reneging or violating an agreement over the loss of potential future opportunities.

Also using your logic, Chinese companies appear to be quite a bit trustworthy since businesses and individuals continue to do repeat business in China, continue to open up new businesses in China/sign new contracts etc, etc, etc. As you can imagine, the real-world is a lot more complex.

>I'm not sure what kind of timelines you have in mind, but the above is clear if you look at the past few hundred of years of European history. Wars, in particular, have been funded by honoured business commitments.

I'm talking about things like the confiscation of wealth/property, as happened under Edward I or Phillip IV, or the Stuart period (where the crown sold off lands to fund wars, and did not honor agreements for borrowed funds) for e.g.

Certainly nation states with their constitutions and laws have helped stem this unilateral 'dictatorial' approach to governance, but I think that its a bit too early to say that nation states will always be rational actors. Certainly the US, for e.g. has violated a lot of treaties that were signed with the native americans.

> The argument is that making it difficult for users not to use your mobile app is hostile.

It isn't hostile - because as I stated, websites are often janky when used in a mobile browser, especially interactive websites, in which case the app is a net positive. This is my experience and opinion, and I don't hide behind "many people think __".

Everyone is free to have their opinion, but I hope you realize that passing it off as fact, and then forcing someone to agree with it is silly.

Its hard to say what makes nations great. The sovereign will always honor their commitments, until they don't :) Because how far back are we willing to go? Most states/kingdoms in Europe have always been at war and there is a long history of reneging under economic strain. (especially wars)

First and foremost, every country looks out for themselves, and who can fault one for doing that? All this shows is that the US isn't the only country that has asymmetric foreign policies and treaties. The "me no like China" chest-thumping is purely based on emotions, unless someone has actually found an actual backdoor in the 5g chips that are being considered for purchase here.

I simply don't agree with your opinion. Hopefully thats still allowed here, and we can shake hands on that. Have a nice day..

Well, as long as you're dealing with accusations and alleged behavior, why stop there? You need to inflate that list, yo! (Devils advocate and all that jazz.. ;) )

Sure, and different people make different trade-offs. I don't like using mobile websites, because to me, the interactivity when it comes to touch/swipe/zoom interactions, or edge-swipes etc is always a little janky compared to a proper app. If its a website that I use a lot, I'd rather just have the app than deal with the mobile website.

I guess it depends on your POV. I haven't found a mobile website that I liked using. The touch/swipe/double-tap experience is always janky, sometimes you want to zoom in on a map, but it zooms the entire page, etc, etc. Maybe if it was just text with no interactivity, then being a mobile website wouldn't matter. Personally I don't mind spending a couple of minutes installing an app if its useful.

I suppose if the app provided a better experience, then it wouldn't be user-hostile.

> No RAII, so you have to explicitly handle cleanup at every point you may have to early-return an error (goto fail etc...).

I think RAII can be useful, but I've never found any use for it in systems level code that I write. Most of the time I'm dealing with resources that were allocated inside a systems library or an external component which just gives me a handle to the resource. I think this is a common enough scenario in systems code that I don't think its just me.

e.g.

    1. X = CreateResource()
    2. Y = TransformResource(X)
    3. ProcessNewResource(Y)
    4. Z = TransformResource(Y)
    5. etc. etc.

And so as you transform that resource, you will have multiple ways to unwind the resource depending on where the failure occurs. Even if you wrap X in some RAII container, you don't know what your destructor is going to look like.

Another con to RAII, especially when paired with shared-ownership smart pointers, is you lose predictability over your resource deallocs. You never know when the last pointer is going go out of scope, and if its a 'heavy' resource with a complicated unwind, you're going to get a CPU spike at an indeterminate time. I deal primarily with industrial automation code and I much prefer to have a smooth/even CPU graph. I think this issue is more relevant to systems code which is the context of this thread.

Also motive isn't a global immutable state. One person saying something one time, doesn't make everything that person does in every situation fall into the same context. Maybe its because I hang out in programming nerd circles, but I've seen otherwise intelligent people fall into this trap of using some kind of propositional logic to "prove" things.

Agreed, Any telemetry that touches personal documents or data should be an opt-in.

Okay, you got me. Farming and agriculture is not my wheelhouse, so I can't really discuss it with a high level of confidence or familiarity. But AFAIK the gates foundation doesn't make anyone buy anything, they issue grants. They have identified the root cause of yields in agriculture is the soil/seeds. Maybe the problem can be solved without pest/soil resistant GM seeds, but the fact remains that the food supply situation is getting worse on that continent. I'm sure there are other aspects to it like distribution/infrastructure/government investment/etc.

Also to your specific point - according to their own website https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755

"AGRA has never taken a monocropping approach to agricultural development. We have invested millions of dollars in breeding minor crops grown by smallholder farmers in order to help them maintain diversity even as agricultural systems intensify."

I'm not going to blindly believe them, I'll give them a chance to make their case...

I have no love for Google (nor should anyone.. :) ), but I agree with the parent that it was a bit misleading because the implication from that statement is that google just turns on the mic and records everything.

Yeah, that is a bit of a stretch, but still, there are a number of problems here. Google trumpets its artificial "intelligence" capabilities as they always do, and it eventually comes out that that its not "just a harmless computer algorithm" thats looking at your email or photos or whatnot, they give access to humans too. Oh, but only in a small tiny negligible, really just forget about this tiny tiny number, of cases.

"[...] confirmed that he worked for a sub-contractor, paid by Google, to transcribe and annotate recordings, including presumptions of the speaker's age and other demographics."[1]

We don't collect any personal data. Its just non-personal stuff to feed into our algorithm. Promise!

Also Google: "We partner with language experts around the world to improve speech technology by transcribing a small set of queries - this work is critical to developing technology that powers products like the Google Assistant"[1]

Seriously? What kind of BS logic is that. Let me just snoop on everyone so that we can improve our products to make more money, after we just made money selling you the product. They should be paying people to sign up for a study where they put in a listening device in their home to train their algorithm. Or purchase voice data from a corpus. Now they can ethically listen in on whatever they want and whenever they want. Instead, they just bury this under some opaque lawyerly language and spy on everyone. Is this the same company that purports to employ the smartest genius level talent?

[1] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3078773/google-ass...

Can you provide some more information instead of just muddying the waters? What are these "lot of bad calls". What are you referring to exactly?

>I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not.

Its not good just because its philanthropic, its good because they are investing money fighting diseases that nobody is interested in curing because there is no money in it (because the victims are from poor countries). A prime example is tuberculosis.