trgv

I think you're way off base here.

Based on the story linked, this event was the result of a situation occurring that google engineers did not anticipate. It's just an edge case that was not handled properly.

There's nothing "AI specific" about that. Clearly google is going to continue using algorithms to rank pages, and clearly this will sometimes return bad results.

I don't think this is a moral question.

Whether or not this information should be collected at all may be a moral question, but how it's secured is about technical competence.

I also think we should keep in mind that, even if it was well-secured, there could have still been a breach. Would that have been less bad? The result would be the same.

I think there's already too much filtering.

People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid. If people can't handle this then we need to spend more money on education, or just accept that some people disagree with us.

I don't think aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net benefit.

> They have almost unfathomable amounts of cash, but complain about the lack of qualified American talent. If there really is a shortage of qualified American talent, then American tech companies should use some of the cash to train American citizens.

You believe that anyone can be trained to be an effective programmer. If that's true, then there's some truth to your argument: why not invest in education and training to meet the high demand for programmers?

But I disagree with that premise. I think "ability to be a great programmer" is generally something you're born with, or at least something that's been determined by the time you're ~18. Therefore it makes perfect sense to import programmers to meet the demand. The US population is just not big enough to meet the demand for programmers and it would be insane/damaging to the economy to refuse to employ non-Americans.

I think the reason for H1B workers is supply and demand. The demand for developers far, far exceeds the supply.

Ehhhh, up to a point.

The thing you're not mentioning is that these doctors don't live in Cuba. They live in capitalist countries in which the government doesn't (even try to) provide X, Y, and Z.

Sure, the doctors got a free education, and that's worth a lot. But at some point they'll have paid off the value of that education and after that point, they're still being taxed at some very high rate and they're seeing no benefit from those taxes because they live in Brazil. Seems like exploitation to me.

Is the web not salvageable? Look at web assembly. The browser vendors added a VM and a bytecode format that runs on it. And they did it pretty quickly. In my mind, this is the way things are going to improve in web-land. Not "throw it all out and start over."

If someone/a company wants to build an "app browser" and associated protocols and publish it then the market will decide how that goes. I think it's a cool idea, but I doubt it would gain traction because almost everything enumerated in this post is a developer concern, not a user concern.

In software, there's always going to be that temptation to start all over again due to fundamental mistakes that were made years ago. But I feel there are far too many entangled interests in the web for that strategy to make sense. Hey, if someone wants to work on it, god bless them.

> I'm a much bigger proponent of languages such as Rust or Haskell which give the developer the _tools_ to ensure their own data integrity, but I guess that says something about me as a developer and why I don't like Golang.

This is a little smarmy, don't you think?

You seem to come ever-so-close to hinting something like "Go isn't fit for writing real applications." Without getting into what exactly a "real application" is, I'll just say I think this suggestion is wrong, unhelpful, elitist, and just generally irritating.

It has occurred to me that the main "anticompetitive behavior" exhibited by these companies is "doing a better job than competitors."

At the same time, there is evidence of real anticompetitive behavior that crops up from time to time.

The headline is clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as is the article itself, at least to some degree.

The missile NK recently fired over Japan recently was launched at 5:58 AM. At 6:02 AM the Japanese government sent a text alert. At 6:12 it landed in the ocean. We know about NK missiles launches very quickly after they are fired. I wouldn't be surprised if we know about them before they're fired. This suggests to me that these missiles can be intercepted.

I don't know what kinds of interception technology is deployed in the area, but I would guess there is some and I would also guess that a (hypothetical) NK ICBM would not have significant countermeasures.

I think the real question here is what NK/Kim's aims are. When Iran was actively developing a nuclear capability, it seemed clear that their goal was to get as close to a weapon as possible without actually finishing a weapon. The closer they were, the more bargaining power they had in terms of getting the US/UN to lift sanctions.

With NK, I'm less clear about strategy. In the past, it seemed like NK actions had the aim of extorting aid money from the US/allies. That may still be the case. Here's a chart showing US humanitarian aid to NK since 2001: https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/PRK

Another thing to keep in mind here is that these kinds of review systems will often result in high amounts of polarization regardless of whether the topic is controversial. My feeling is that people often vote based on how they want the current average to change rather than based on how much they liked the movie.

E.G. Sometimes I'll watch a movie, I'll think it's an 8/10 but then see it has 4/10 on imdb, so I'll give it a 10.

Presumably this may affect another person's vote. Maybe someone saw the film, hated it, wondered why the review was so high, and gave it a 0 to bring the average down.

IMDB recognizes this and uses a "secret formula" (http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?ratingsexplanation) as a result.

Thanks for the advice, very helpful.

Right now, one of the projects I'm working on calls a wasm function which returns a pointer. I then do a lookup in the wasm buffer at the address specified by the pointer and pull out a few numbers with a float64array constructor. Is that an expensive operation?

> From what I understand, calling WebAssembly functions from JavaScript (and vice-versa) incur a runtime penalty that's way worse than calling JavaScript functions from JavaScript.

Can you provide a source for this? I've never heard it and, though it may be correct, this would make wasm much less useful to me.

I have heard that accessing the DOM from wasm will be quite expensive, but that's different from just calling a function.

The point that I meant to get across was that dollars have value as long as the government has power. You're right that it doesn't matter what the government says. Rather what matters is whether or not the government can back up what it says.

If you don't pay your taxes, you will be jailed. How do you pay your taxes? Well that's up the government, and they went with dollars.

I don't agree with your explanation of why dollars have value. You seem to have a bone to pick with every fiat currency, which I think is very silly.

I agree with you that there's no such thing as objective value. But my feeling is that there is still something important that differentiates "real" currencies (fiat or not) from bitcoin/gold/etc. Namely, there is a government backing the "real" currencies.

Dollars are "guaranteed" to have value because they are "legal tender," ie you can pay your taxes and buy things with them. As long as the US government has power, that will continue to be the case.

I can definitely see btc being a viable currency in situations where a government's power is limited but, for stable countries, it seems more like a commodity, and that's definitely (at least it seems to me) how people are treating it.

This is all so hyperbolic it's hard to do anything but laugh.

Google has made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. Evil? Nah.

I always assumed this is just the result of the people who design the site not knowing what the company does.

Morally perhaps, but not legally.

It's sad really. It seems to me that the whole Wells Fargo scandal is ultimately a lesson about how this company abused their employees and set them impossible tasks like "each customer should have X credit cards and Y accounts."

But that's not what people seem to have taken from it. Instead, the whole incident has been presented as "just another big bank defrauding its customers." In reality though, the goal of the fraud was not to enrich anyone, it was just for these employees to keep their jobs.

It feels like this whole incident could have spurred a conversation about the toxicity of these kind of unrealistic sales goals that provide no benefit to the customer, but it didn't.

I wonder if this isn't part of the games that prosecutors play. It seems like prosecutors might request the largest amount of data possible, knowing that someone will object and they'll get only a fraction of that.

In general the logic in the article doesn't follow. It says 200 people have been charged, so why not request information relating only to those 200 people? Regardless, internet messages can't prove participation in a violent riot, so I would assume the prosecutors have other, harder, evidence. if not they're just wasting everyone's time.

It seems fairly uncontroversial to me to state that the vast majority of people who own cryptocurrency are treating it like a commodity, not like a currency. There's nothing wrong with that, and these people have made a lot of money (dollars) so far, but there's certainly a distinction to be made.

I just don't believe there are enough sinister, competent people available to carry out a large conspiracy while keeping it quiet.

The post makes the argument that selling things is speech and that shopify is protecting free speech by not dropping controversial clients.

You claim that this argument is disingenuous, ie that the argument is not sincere. It seems sincere to me.

I think it's a pretty convincing argument. Free speech doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't buy pen and paper, or engage some web company to host your website, or sell merchandise (so this post argues).

> It's not a lie if you believe it.

-George Costanza

And even if it was a lie, lying is generally not illegal.

The courts generally uphold the right of these groups to express their ideologies. I think correctly.

My opinion is that the best way to deal with this stuff is not outrage. I think people who disagree should politely contradict these sorts of opinions when they're broached and otherwise ignore/disengage from this nonsense.

I don't think overtly or covertly trying to suppress this kind speech is good. Legally speaking these people have a right to express themselves and, pragmatically, I don't think trying to suppress their speech or loudly condemning it actually helps anything.