twright0

The reason that sports dictate school start times isn't difficulty in scheduling practices (since you could, at least on paper, put those practices before school starts rather than after). The problem is that sports are competitive between school districts, so you need shared non-school but school-adjacent time blocks between neighboring districts to schedule games in. Shifting one district much later (to run 9-5, for example) would make it impossible for that school to compete with others after school, which is going to be a practical nonstarter.

In my mind, this is one of the biggest obstacles to changing school timing significantly. Most other objections are internal to a school district, so a single motivated school board could tackle and fix them, but this problem requires coordination between many different school districts all at once.

Just to be clear, it gave an essay answer about fictional teams playing in the 1850-1859 time range. It was absolutely more informative, but the information was not accurate

That answer is also wrong - there are four different leagues that used the name American Soccer League, and the time period 1913-1983 covers two of those four but not the other two - the last game was played 2017 - per wikipedia.

As far as I can tell, ChatGPT will satisfy the basic prompt with any format like "in the form of...", not just creative ones like a poem.

"please give me a history of the best teams in the American Soccer League from 1850-1859 in the form of an academically rigorous, historically accurate, five paragraph essay"

> The American Soccer League, established in the mid-19th century, was a defining period in the history of American soccer. (rest of essay snipped)

There are specific things it knows that it doesn't know, like explicitly current information. But you can ask it for information that doesn't exist at all and it will happily generate nonsense without a hint that the question might be somehow wrong:

"please give me a history of the best teams in the American Soccer League from 1850-1859 in the form of a short epic poem"

> In 1850, a league was born, The best of soccer to adorn. From '50 to '59, teams did play, with strength and skill, each match a display.

(more verses follow...)

The American Soccer League is a real thing, but it didn't exist until the 1900s, and the snipped poem goes on to describe teams that never existed competing during a time period where the league didn't exist.

> I spent a good few hours trying to get a feed that was interesting to me by searching for various keywords... If anybody has any tips about how to get a better feed, I'm willing to give it another go.

The whole magic sauce is that you don't/can't shape your FYP ("for you page": feed) by searching or otherwise sending deliberate signals to the algorithm. Instead you just flip through the videos it sends you and it reads into how long you watch, which videos you skip, where you like/comment, who you follow etc. If you don't consciously try to influence it and just mindlessly, organically consume you'll end up with a very accurate FYP of videos remarkably quickly. I'm not surprised that trying to drive your FYP in a specific direction backfired; I suspect they make search deliberately bad and don't take it into account in a meaningful way when constructing the FYP for a user.

It is, of course, up to you whether that sounds like a media experience that you want to participate in. I installed it skeptically but in literally less than an hour my FYP was nothing but videos I found engaging or fun, and several years later it's my most used phone app by a significant margin. Some of it is obviously low calorie entertainment but there's a lot of depth as well, and I continue to be struck by how accurately the FYP can identify what content I want to see and what I don't.

Only five minutes! - Here's the source, show us. https://github.com/jes/nightdrive

> The principle dev reviewed every single commit and enforced a consistency across the code base that was better than what any tools ever could have done.

How was it so much better that it justified that level of busywork on the part of the senior member of the team (and busywork for everyone else, to fix the style nits they enforced in review)? I would have guessed that taking a few hours to install and configure a formatting linter to free up the principal dev's time to focus on other things would have been hugely high leverage.

I made that leap too (moved from a company that used Pagerduty to a company that used Opsgenie) and it is the same feature set but not the same quality. Pagerduty in my experience is rock solid - I used it on various high-page-frequency rotations for something like seven straight years and literally never saw a dropped alert/notification once.

On the flip side in the 8ish months I used Opsgenie I saw a litany of issues, like the mobile app silently logging people out (and thus not delivering push notifications) and the app failing to send SMS notifications. We had pages get dropped by the primary because they never got a notification.

I want exactly one feature from my pager, delivering 100% of my pages. It's not a situation where I'm ok with 99% success rate, and that seemed to be the tradeoff and what you are paying for with Pagerduty.

This is super interesting work!

One thing I was curious about - the ACPT is a crossword speed-solving competition, with time spent solving a major aspect of total score. How did you approach leveling the playing field between the human and computer competitors?

I don't disagree that some library systems are pretty tech illiterate and might share email addresses without understanding the consequences.

However, I feel the need to assert my opinion that librarians are generally pretty fierce defenders of privacy in the specific context of lending/reading history, so your assumption does not ring true at all to me. Libraries/librarians have been consistent defenders of lending history privacy in the face of the Patriot Act[1][2] and I would be shocked to see a pattern of libraries anywhere in the US giving out lending history data in the context of anything but the most direct of legal requirements.

I was employed by a public library once upon a time and received specific training on when to share lending data ("never, and if asked, lock the computer and go get the Director, even if the person asking has a badge").

[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/librarians-speak-out-fir... [2] https://sfpl.org/about-us/confidentiality-and-usa-patriot-ac...

> The district should supply the Chromebook for school work. They will manage that as they see fit.

I haven't been a student for a while, but the closest analogous technology they had when I was in high school was my graphing calculator for math classes. The school district mandated individual students each obtain a specific graphing calculator, which was a fully programmable computing environment (the TI-83). But the teachers/administration could and would wield a lot of power over those devices (which the the families owned in the legal sense) - looking through it, requiring students to wipe its storage with no warning, etc. Requiring families to buy a Chromebook and still use a school-managed account with invasive management on it feels largely analogous.

Buying a separate personal laptop is the correct workaround, but unfortunately I don't think the "the school should supply the schoolwork computer" line of reasoning holds up. The hardware/software has become more powerful in the graduation from TI-83 to Chromebook but the principles are the same.

My favorite line of reasoning about eugenics[0]: let's just accept that eugenics is a good thing; so good, in fact, we can go back in time and give a past society the ability to decide on the physical and mental attributes of their future, our present. Who would you pick? Would you go back 50, 100, 200, 500 years to gift this power?

If you're uncomfortable with people several hundred years ago making decisions about your genetics, why should people several hundred years from now be comfortable with you making decisions about theirs?

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/eugenics-is-a-great-idea

Starlink requires hardware on the ground that cannot easily be hidden, which enables corrupt governments to tear that hardware down or put pressure on the maintainers of that hardware in other ways.

> Then TikTok came along and it's kind of disproven that? ... none of the algorithmically generated content is as polarizing as what I would find on the other apps.

I don't think this is fully accurate. The big differentiator for Tik Tok's algorithmic feed from FB's or Youtube's (in my mind) is not its accuracy or lack of polarization, it's actually that it draws much firmer and harder to cross lines between the parts of its userbase with an (IMO intentionally) nerfed search capability, so it's very difficult to break out of the demographic/interest bubble it decides you are in for feed purposes. So you, personally, probably receive literally no polarizing, political, etc content that you aren't happy to see. But that doesn't mean it's not there!

Here's an example: a researcher set up a new account, interacted with transphobic content, and was very quickly (in a few hours of viewing) seeing far-right conspiracy theory, antisemitic, white supremacy (and so on) content, some of which was endorsing violence. https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1445888305997000705

This is additionally confusing because different prominent platforms use different systems - eg, 1500ish is the 50th percentile on lichess (used in the blog post), but chess.com (which many streamers / online commentators use) has more like an 1100 midpoint for its ELO-approximating system, and 1500 is reasonably high there (it also varies with time control I believe). And USCF+FIDE use other systems altogether.

It's basically impossible to discuss chess ratings or changes in them without "type" information :)

I believe Megacrit, which built Slay the Spire, is two people, Casey Yano and Anthony Giovannetti. But to the broader point I knew the name of the studio off the top of my head while I needed to look up the names of the individuals.

Strongly agree! And if Google closing your account is a big part of your threat model, that's something to hedge against.

But I suspect that for the average consumer - people using their gmail to send and receive emails, and doing stuff like watching Youtube and installing Android apps - the odds of that are quite small, especially if they don't have a business or developer context associated with their personal gmail. Account loss/takeover due to password re-use is a much bigger threat for the average person.

Firm agree on mixing work/personal contexts.

However, in practice, using "Sign in with Google" by default dramatically increases resilience to most failure modes for almost everyone without a sophisticated threat model.

> To save what? An additional password?

The average person does not manage their passwords in a sophisticated way; if someone is signing up for many different services, they are probably using the same password everywhere, or some simple enumeration scheme. Then, when some random forum or web service gets compromised (as they inevitably are), their password to everything is compromised - including Google! On the opposite end of the spectrum, if Google is the only service with a password, and everything else is driven by Google-owned SSO, that person is essentially immune to compromise; whatever I think about the company, I do believe in Google's security team to keep passwords safe and block dictionary attacks more than any other service on the internet.

And while we can evangelize setting up password managers and using strong random passwords everywhere, the truth of the matter is that many people simply cannot accomplish this. "Sign in with {Google, Facebook, Microsoft}" gets them 95% of the benefit at much higher reliability.

The end of the post is extremely specifically and carefully not describing a framework for rolling out files to exploit these vulnerabilities; those files as described do nothing, and serve only aesthetic purposes. While it's easy to read that as a wink that they are exploiting the vulnerabilities they found while maintaining plausible deniability that they aren't, it's equally possible it's the other way around: they aren't rolling out exploits but want people reading the blog post to believe that they are. Or that they want to lay out the framework so that others can do so, but aren't actually going to follow through themselves. As written it's essentially unverifiable, obviously on purpose.

Wikipedia gives credit to Dawkins for coining "meme" in 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

I dislike finding myself defending Apple, but these complaints are essentially unfounded.

The butterfly keyboard issue is so noteworthy because it is a dramatic departure from the normal quality levels of Apple products. The only other major (modern) hardware quality issue in an Apple product I can think of is the iPhone 4 antenna thing from 2010; I would be hard-pressed to find another hardware company that's shipped as few problematic products on that time frame, and for many companies a butterfly keyboard style quality issue would be unremarkable! Can you name a company that does consistently better than Apple on hardware quality?

The Apple root password bypass was not good (four years ago), but the set of people with a threat model such that this really mattered is not large (I think it was only ever proven to work with physical access to the device, for example). The "goto fail" bug[1] was also quite bad, in fairness. But on the same time frame neither of those really registers as a vulnerability on the same level of impact as Heartbleed[2], Cloudbleed[3], Spectre[4] and related issues, or even the more recent Solarwinds[5] or Exchange[6] hacks. Every software company has security incidents; Apple is absolutely not an outlier or unusually insecure.

[1] https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html [2] https://heartbleed.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_gov... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Microsoft_Exchange_Server...

Dropbox does not have client-side encryption; its servers have full access to the content of synced files. You can verify this yourself by uploading a common image filetype like jpeg and seeing that the website shows you compressed file thumbnails.

(I'm a former Dropbox employee who worked on related things, though not specifically the linked paper)

Watching the original video, do you legitimately believe that any of the police officers are in danger? Do you believe that a single (unsubstantiated claim, without any evidence of a) thrown object justifies pepper spraying reporters and attacking bystanders with batons?

I originally shared the video claiming that police were interfering with a peaceful protest. You disputed that the police were interfering, saying they were marching past. When I shared further evidence that the police were in fact disrupting the protest and hurting people who were participating, you found reason to instead believe that the protest was not peaceful. Consider your biases.

Here [0] [1] [2] [3] are more examples of and news articles discussing police attacking peaceful protesters.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-keep-using-fo...

[1] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2020/07/20/new-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/police-viole...

[3] https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1268716877355810818

The parent claimed that it was a misconception that police were "quelling" peaceful protest and I shared a video of police disrupting a very obviously peaceful protest - feels relatively straightforward?

If you're looking for more information, https://twitter.com/MarcSallinger/status/1277063130523348995 is a Twitter thread showing the police using pepper spray and batons to disrupt and clear out said vigil.

It's not a misconception. As an example, here's a video of riot-gear-clad police marching on a crowd that is peacefully listening to a violin vigil for a man murdered by that same police department: https://twitter.com/jessiedesigngal/status/12771260192462602...

This resonates... from mine:

  alias emcas='emacs'

  alias emac='emacs'

  alias emasc='emacs'

  alias enacs='emacs'

  alias emas='emacs'

  alias emascs='emacs'

  alias eamcs='emacs'

  alias eemacs='emacs'

Alternate model for how I would guess this works: Facebook CDN urls are unauthed (in the sense that the CDN probably doesn't know how to evaluate the entirety of Facebook's permissions model). Instead, the web/api server that enforces permissions checks will hand an authorized client a signed CDN url that expires in some bounded time. If that url leaks, anyone can view the underlying image, but only for a short window, after which a client would have to go back to the auth-aware web/api server to get a new signed CDN url.

You're right, sorry. Edited my post.

To be frank, this is bad advice [EDIT: parent wasn't giving advice, so instead this should read as something like "Talking to police without your attorney present is a very risky idea..."] that probably literally every criminal defense attorney in the United States will disagree with (I am not a lawyer, however, to be clear). A better framing perhaps is that there are two scenarios if you are being interrogated by the police:

(1) The police have enough evidence to charge you with a crime

(2) The police do not have enough evidence to charge you with a crime

They do not have to tell you (and can actively lie!) which scenario you are in, and these scenarios are only loosely correlated with whether or not you actually recently committed a crime.

In scenario (1), they're going to charge you with a crime no matter what you say - they already have enough evidence. And anything you say to the police in this scenario can only be used as evidence against you to further strengthen the police's case, it cannot be used in your own defense in court. So it's better to remain silent.

In scenario (2), if you remain silent, they cannot charge you with a crime - they don't have enough evidence and you're not giving them any (asserting your right to remain silent is not evidence). If you answer their questions, you might accidentally give them enough evidence to charge you with a crime, like contradicting your own story because your memory is fallible. The police are allowed to lie to you, ask you trick questions, wear you down, and in general do anything they can to get a confession or other evidence against you. The things you say here can only be used against you to strengthen the police's case. So it's better to remain silent.

If you are being interrogated by the police, they are not your friends and nothing you say can help you. The only person on your side is your lawyer. Stay silent until your lawyer is in the room, and then do exactly what your lawyer says.

It's been linked elsewhere, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE is a real-life law professor and a police officer both saying exactly the same thing. American TV often includes narratives about the behavior of police officers that do not align with reality or the best interests of people accused of crimes.

The argument in favor of this generally goes: if there wasn't a government lottery, there would be privately-run lotteries, and attempts to ban lotteries would just push them into the hands of organized crime. At least a government-run lottery will publish honest odds and pay out to winners, which private/criminal lotteries would less reliably do, and that minimizes the harm done by the lottery.

You can apply basically this argument to similar things which the government doesn't do and people typically don't support (like running casinos or selling drugs), though.