slackstation

Makes me feel better about my rents. I pay about the same here in Los Angeles except I'm walking distance from work and have the beach and sunny weather.

$3400 is the median for the high end there, here is about the higher end of the high end unless you start counting the ridiculous places near the beach. But, then if you want an ocean view in Santa Monica, be prepared to shell out $10k/mo or more.

IBM needs to look past all this goofy theatrics if they want to be a household name for AI. Being a household name for AI is tough in that eventually AI will mean and do just about everything. Already, it's strained. Does Watson play chess? Yes. Does Watson do cancer stuff? Yes. Does Watson help that tennis chick do better in tennis? Yes, kinda.

The marketing is so muddled as to kinda not be anything distinct. If you were going to sell a product to people using Watson, you'd probably want to brand it as something other than Watson.

Anyways, this is the kind of all over the place, "we don't know what to do with this" marketing that will make Watson the equivalent of PS/2. It might be a standard that used universally but, invisible to the common consumer.

Newspapers used to make a healthy profit from tiny ads. Network news used to be run at a loss by the tv networks. The introduction of CNN made news into a huge money maker. Craigslist ate the lunch of most newspapers.

Now, the internet (especially social networks) has made everything a race for attention. Now the New York Times has to compete and worry about Buzzfeed.

All of these trends now just reward attention more than anything. The standards for journalism are eroded when outlets like Buzzfeed allow anyone to write content, get it indexed by Google and then track how popular that piece of content gets and automatically promote it.

In a world like that, we get the loudest, angriest, most emotionally wrenching things; context, nuance and facts be damned.

Whatever you think of his politics, Donald Trump wouldn't be where he is without his savvy use of the media. He has exploited the weakness in our current system all the way to top of one of the two major parties in the most powerful country in the free world. All to the horror, shock and dismay of the vast majority of people who work in the media disagreeing with Trump's politics.

If we replaced every car in America with a Tesla with Autopilot, do you think we would see more road fatalites or less?

Less by a long shot. We ignore tens of thousands of deaths per year and focus the one fatality of someone who was using autopilot incorrectly.

People are much better at killing themselves and each other than autopilot is.

How does one make you primary artistic medium the internet for a decade and yet don't know how it works enough to have backups of your work?

It's as if I worked in artistic welding but, never learned anything about the dangers of highly pressurized tanks of gas and then get surprised when leaving the tank valve open causes a fire and ruins your artwork.

He didn't have any backups anywhere else. He just completely relied on Google to do it for free forever just because. After a decade of making work that controversial, you never just save that stuff to jump drive?

This person is incompetent and irresponsible. Google owes him nothing.

It's always amazed me how much England is a polic state with information and the internet while being firmly in West as far as democracy and in the line of history that that extends back to the Greeks.

Seriously, banning End-to-End Encryption? That's just a barrier to businesses operating in your borders and entrepreneurs starting up in your garages (or sheds rather).

It's not that there would be no work or that there would be no jobs or companies staffed with people.

The point is that the average median person might not be good enough to get a job. If automation makes it so that only 20% of people are employed in any traditional sense that we recognize today; that world would be drastically different than the one we have.

In that world, we have a path where we don't get rid of money but, just use taxes on large mega companies and redistibute that money as a basic income to people without a job. This keeps capitalism and the efficiencies it brings.

With basic income, you still have advertising, you still have companies and you still have consumers buying things. There is still competition to push quality up and prices down. There is still the invisible hand of the market.

It's elegant in that it achieves the goals of eliminating both poverty and forced labor to survive without eliminating the competition that makes the world so damned efficient and effective.

A high percentage of unemployed young men roaming the streets of your civilization is a dangerous thing.

But, if those young men aren't angry for not having a job and are entertained by things like video games all day. I don't think you'll have much trouble.

People might take a generation or two to adapt but, we will adapt.

Eventually, doing "nothing" with your life will be socially frowned upon so people will try to find interesting, unique bohemian pursuits if only to appear like an interesting and well rounded person at dinner parties.

Men will certainly do this. Without the ability to make lots of money, men will have to have something to attract women. Men have been doing this for literally thousands of generations. It's not going to change any time soon.

Also, I see a future where people will work out alot more. It's incredible how cheap and easy lifting something heavy repeatedly decreases stress, makes one more attractive to the opposite sex and makes one happy.

In a post scarcity world, I see alot of gyms and not people too fat to get out of their chair. Even without the capital markets or paying rent to spur competition, there will always be the sexual market to spur competition. In a Wall-E world, the one guy who works out would get more women. The woman who worked out would get access to the best men. If both of these groups had nothing but free time, mating market competition alone would lead to an explosion of attractive people. If one was raised not to over-eat or was constantly stressed out from work (in order to survive) then the chances of being obese would drop.

People today are fat because they sit all day, get stressed from work. Poor people are stressed because they don't have enough money. Rich people are stressed (maybe less so) because they are competing to get more money.

If you have massive unemployment from technology, you won't have the social stigma of not having a job. Or to put it another way, you can surround yourself with people who are jobless and you'll compare yourselves in other ways.

We already see this with hipsters. Millennials already are in the first generation of post-Work thinking. They already demand more from a job than just a steady paycheck (often because finding and getting one is so hard). They look for fulfillment, work/life balance and opportunities to change the world for the better.

This will only continue and deepen. Despite media that competes for attention by making more and more dire predictions and alarming rhetoric, the world is largely getting better. More diseases are being eradicated, billions are being lifted out of poverty, billions more are gaining access to the entirety of the world's information.

There are interesting problems to solve and they will be solved quickly in our lifetimes. It will be extremely pleasing to be a part of the world as we eliminate poverty and bring the global standard of living up to where the poorest of us will still be able to live a decent life.

The optimal path could usher in the greatest climb and heights humanity has ever seen. We could make a world better than people 200 years ago could have even imagined.

We could potentially make basically Heaven on Earth if we play this right.

> Edited for grammar and clarity. It's still a bit rambly

I enjoyed Serial but, later read critiques of how the Serial podcast was making entertainment out of someone's actual life and another person's actual murder.

As much as I enjoy fictional murder in various mediums, it started to turn my stomach a bit. These are real lives. People actually died.

It's hard for me to find any kind of entertainment out of the idea that what seemed like a kind, gentle young person was actually murdered. Whether Adnan was actually guilty or not, is a matter of the court and maybe the victim's family. It shouldn't be my entertainment.

Why is it that there is a cultural meme and expectation for an Employee to give notice to an Employer but, none the other way around?

In fact, it largely happens only because it's mandated by law.

If I have loyalty to an organization and I don't want to hurt the people who keeping that organization running, then yeah, I'll give notice but, that is a gift.

No one has ever told me that the company is going to be downsizing in two weeks; an exit interview and an escort out of the building is the only thing I've gotten.

>> How often do adult women actually share clothes? >I've seen my wife share clothes with her best friend in the last week. (They have similar size/tastes and frequently shop together.)

If they already know each other and are friends, why would they need another entity in the trade?

Facebook manages the public and private lives of over a billion people and is publicly traded. They will use the former every way legal plausibly deniable to help the latter.

This much power, I'm surprised that people are surprised. At this scale, I'd put a high estimation that there are multiple abuses from: 1) Private citizens who work there 2) Hackers with undisclosed access to their infrastructure 3) Governments around the world that have jurisdiction to suboena them 4) Governments that they want curry favor with (ie Germany, EU, USA)

I would guess that there were breaches that would be a scandal but, were caught quietly and handled internally and never made it out.

They have billions of dollars in the bank, some of the smartest people on the planet and a CEO that wants to change the world.

It's not like a conspiracy. It's just simple math. With software written by humans being as fragile and imperfect as it is and that much information as centralized as it is, it's crazy to trust that it's always stayed safe in the hands of Facebook and that your view of the world through Facebook's filter isn't being changed at all.

These are startup problems. Larger mature tech companies (there are many of them) shouldn't be that hostile. I work at one with 1000+ employees and while it's not 50/50, I can't imagine it being that bad.

Also, I'm a black person. All of the horror stories they say about POC in tech, I have never experienced one. I've had individual jerks but, I haven't had things like the company passing me up or ever felt that I wasn't getting a promotion, ever.

So, mapping that to what they say about women, I would say it's unlikely to be as bad as they say. Now, that's completely and utterly subjective but, attitudes concerning your perceptions of how others treat you is subjective.

Women tend to prefer men that are higher status than themselves. For a working woman (especially one in tech that earns alot) they tend find partners who are also employed.

This makes a dichotomy where if a man makes $100k+ in most places in the US, they can one-income support a family. Where as women tend not to look favorably to men who take time off of to stay at home.

Women's desire for high status men is something that comes to us from being primates. It's at best a mixture of nature and society. Even if we had a radically egalitarian society, there is a part of many couples that would be unsettled by it.

All that said, there is nothing about that should stop women from pursuing careers in tech. Of all work, ours is one that is really friendly to working remotely and with flexible hours.

Man, Forbes and others just keep hammering her with hit pieces. We get it, you don't like her. Her company's tech didn't pan out. Everyone wanted so desperately for her to succeed that they praised her as a fully formed, late stage Steve Jobs in a dress. It's as if they want to hurt her feelings more than report any actual substantive news.

I think this is a bridge until the driver-less car can be developed. Once they hit the market, automation will take over but, that same automation will allow for a company with hyper-thin margins or people to loan out their car to a service that transports people.

Uber wants to be that company but, there's nothing really stopping the market from having 50+ companies like Uber in it.

There will probably be marketplaces that aggregate these smaller services into larger competitive exchanges with spot prices for a ride.

If that's the case, it seems like it might take an awful long to make back the billions that Uber is pumping to make markets around the world.

On the bright side, everyone has cheaper transportation.

This is a direct consequence of the world wide web turning from a self-publishing culture (blogging + RSS) to a posting culture (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.)

It's trivial to exert political and social pressure globally. I'm not trying to be polemic nor alarmist but, when you centralize the primary social exchange for almost 2 billion people on one network, these are the effects.

People need to start thinking for themselves and see that by using a service like these they are only seeing part of the whole.

To be fair, most people probably won't care too much about what's outside the walls of the garden. And further, the walls of the garden aren't terribly high nor hard to come over. It's easier and simpler than ever to start a blog. It's easier still to make a Facebook account.

People who care enough to make the trivial amount of effort to publish outside the system should and we as developers should make it even easier, safer and lower friction. Let's Encrypt, cheap and easy static hosting, static site generators, etc.

Snapchat and the like are low hanging fruit. Someone should start a DAO where users can either see ads or pay a small annual fee to pay for the service and also invest in their own security and sanity.

There are programmers who are interested, there is a public that could be convinced. All we need really is to solve the human problem or aligning money with incentives.

There should be a high quality social network where you use personal filters rather than relying on central intelligence to do the heavy lifting.

Rather than be beholden to people who are willing to invest billions in a free product so that they can traffic ads and/or data mine.

> ...he was making sure that Makinde wouldn't be too politically assertive about race issues.

Well, if he were truely politically assertive, he would answer smoothly and to the interviewers full satisfaction, take the job, wear a microphone and follow up on the interview questions on tape and then sue the everliving shit out of the company.

It's strategically stupid in addition to being an asshole move.

The only people who really suffer are the ones that you actually want; reasonable, smart developers with options will wisely avoid this company like the plague.

The risk that your manager will continue to act this way or that they will have a deep-seeded bias against black people is high. The chance that they are merely good-intentioned but, inarticulate and socially awkward are low.

Even in that best case scenario, those are terrible qualities to have in a manager.

What possible purpose could it serve to ask that question in a job interview?

I always believe that job interviews are two ways; the applicant interviews the company as much as the company interviews the applicant.

Also, he didn't whine. He rationally explained as well as he could in a few minutes and moved on. Ultimately, the company liked him but, he wisely didn't go with a company that would have such terrible interviewers and allow such terrible questions in the interview.

While in general, there are sometimes people who feel put upon and don't feel like answering questions and/or having that difficult discussion of race, a job interview isn't the place to have it.

The power dynamic is too skewed for you get anything like a real answer to your question. If the question was designed to see how the interviewee handles pressure than that's a shit move to do.

Either way it's a terrible question. Also, it's an unfair one because other white applicants aren't getting this question. By definition, there really isn't a way for a white interviewer to be able to judge how well the interviewee responded to "Why isn't it OK to say nr". It can easily end up feeling like a personal judgement or worse a judgement on a person's entire race of which there is no way they could represent every perspective.

The fact that it was in a job interview just shows the that interviewee either didn't understand the context of the question which is strong evidence that they are probably a bad manager or they didn't care, which is even stronger evidence of a bad manager.

I was implying the Western First World. Large swathes of the world still teem with violence as common and inescapable as daybreak.

The real meta problem is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Who cares if they have a job or they just sit at home and play videogames.

Basic Income would allow people the freedom to pursue the things that truly interest them. It will be a golden era of video games and movies and art. A huge percentage of the population will be only concerned with pleasure.

Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. It's not just factory workers and cashiers either. Many white collar tasks, bookkeeping, simple accounting, simple contracts, simple law are being swallowed by automation too.

I see a future where everyone is in a play or a movie, making a game, working on a novel, reading a metric ton of fan-fiction.

What's probably true is alot more porn, video games and arguing on Reddit about porn and video games.

Either way, it's better than millions doing jobs they hate, badly as they watch automation swallow them up like an ocean does an exhausted overboard sailor.

The greatest luxury we live in today is a freedom from violence so total we barely even register it. In antiquity, violence was so common, so total and such a fact of life that we can't even imagine it.

> come over and eat us if we said hello

It's so expensive in energy to do this that it's unlikely.

Even the moon, if it was made of gold bars stacked at the ready to be picked up and brought back to Earth, it wouldn't be worth it.

Even if you had technology to transport a significant force across the span of light years, why endanger that with the risk of resistance? Just go to one of the billions of habitable planets that don't have complex, radio transmitting intelligences on it.

No, the newspaper or magazine has clear editorial. It's very clear that this is what Fox News or The New York Times or Wall Street Journal is saying.

People think that Facebook is a place where their friends, and family post things. By extension, they think that Facebook trends are just "what's popular" not, what Facebook as a company is saying or endorsing.

No one holds Facebook responsible for a topic that is trending. Actually, I take that back, a bunch of people do but, they are dismissed out of hand as idiots.

Facebook really doesn't want to be in the publishing of ideas business. Their responsibility would be higher.

The air shouldn't have an opinion on the sound traveling through it.

Facebook has the means to manipulate ideas at scale. They have researched it. We are just supposed to blindly trust them because of a vaguely worded Facebook post? A post where to respond, I have to log in and identify myself?

I mean, it's hard to not to see this as Orwellian or just plain stupid. Other than choosing (and then doubling down on) PHP, I don't see Facebook as run by stupid people.

Either they think this thing will just blow over and no one will care. This much trust in something that isn't transparent is just bad for democracy. Facebook isn't the TV station, it's the airwaves. They have to be held to different standards.

Their use of contractors is subtle. I'm sure employees manipulated the feed. The research they did in 2012 with Cornell had Facebook directly manipulating feeds to illicit emotional outcomes and they measured how those emotions propagated out to the rest of the subject's network.

Again, the question is not if but, how much they manipulate. Calling it an "Algorithm" that is staffed by "Quality Editors" who can group tags and things together to make trending topics bigger is just a defense mechanism. Facebook can say or make anything they want to appear or disappear in your feed.

The crazy thing is that you don't need to do any "intense indoctrination". Facebook has both numbers and time on their side.

The same large numbers that makes A/B testing and "growth hacking" so effective for a marketing message can be learned and automatically applied here on a scale that dwarfs even Google.

All of the messages between people on Facebook in a country? In the US, I'm sure it's probably 80%+ of the American electorate at this point. Just subtle suppression of a few stories is enough. Even manipulating trending topics might be enough to have a statistical effect. Facebook was researching emotional effects as far back as 2012 and they never said that they stopped nor did they close that part of the company.

With Facebook it's not if, it's how much manipulation is going on. Not just in America but, around most of the Western world.

It should be relatively easy to detect bias if Facebook is open with their algorithm.

Facebook has conducted research on how even small changes to the overall system can materially affect the mood and how that mood was contagious to a given subject's social network. (“Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks”)

The public was disturbed. The university partner in all of this had put out a press-release saying that it passed their ethics board only because the University researchers themselves weren't doing it directly but, merely helped design the experiment.

This says that Facebook has people on staff that have been conducting this sort of thing at scale since 2012. They have no one to answer to. They have everything to gain. If they stay secret, they have nothing to lose.

An individual has no way to detect this because like the proverbial frog in lukewarm water slowly brought to a boil, the filtering on our social network never was so alarming that we jumped out en-masse.

Now Zuckerberg and company could be listening in and manipulating the social discourse of almost all of the free world. We wouldn't know.

People highly suspect that Twitter has a leftist agenda with pushing certain speech and suppressing other speech. Even if you completely agree with Twitter or Facebook's political stance, it should disturb you.

It's like getting on a soapbox in the town square and the air only carrying certain ideas to the town people's ears and refusing to vibrate for others but, you hear all of them just as loud. Over time you'd think that people just aren't responsive to your ideas, get down off your soap box and go home, thinking that democracy was done and that people just didn't like your ideas.

So, Facebook has the means, has the technology, has the research to know how effective it is, has had practice in (publicly) as far back as 2012.

The question isn't if they are going to manipulate the 2016 election, the question is how and to what degree. Even if they deny it, there's really no outside body to know at this point without any inside information.

Granted, Google also has this power to a certain degree and bears responsibility for demonstrating that they aren't manipulating politics. Google has more transparency and their products are to the end of being the library of the world.

Facebook manipulates the messages sent between friends and family. They step into trust relationships. There is a world of difference between the politics of a site on the internet as a search result and an impassioned plea by one of my friends or a family member. The idea that Facebook would suppress those ideas from me is the most disgusting, despicable and detestable thing I can think of. I hold Facebook to a much, much higher standard than Google. Their transparency is much, much poorer.

Ultimately, Google indexes the open internet and I can test their results against other search engines and research projects. Facebook owns both the network and messages. It is impossible for an outside party to verify anything that Facebook says about this at this point. We know that what they do can be significant; that they have researched how effective it can be since 2012.

I don't think it's overly cautious nor paranoid to ask them for transparency on this.

Two main takeaways here:

1. Community doesn't scale well.

Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit. As I grow older, the best communities and sources online are small. I love watching youtube videos with less than a thousand views. My favorite sites and communities online I share selectively. They are so easily ruined. The magic is lost so easily (and by people who genuinely enthusiastic about things but, aren't in the same mindset as the people already there).

2. The smart thing financially would have been to let the community die but, he didn't and paid the price

Maybe it's just the internet changing but, he arguably should have just let it die (or rather change into what Reddit eventually became). Metafilter, SomethingAweful, 4Chan and Reddit all suffer from the reality of very few people creating and the vast majority consuming.