wegs

In the US, we have currently about 40+ million people unemployed, and trillion+ dollars of stimulus. That's 1 in 4 workers. Many more have pay cuts, demotions, or other economic harm. Kids are learning a lot less with school shutdowns (many are learning nothing), which has more economic impact down-the-line. R&D isn't in great shape either in many industries, cutting into the US' technological edge.

That's not to mention secondary effects, such as how that level of unemployment feeds into anxiety which inflames the current riots.

You can work the numbers however you like, but the number I gave is VERY conservative. The economic harm of COVID19 is astronomical here.

Much of that could have been mitigated with good policy, but in the US, it wasn't.

If a public health measure has even a slim chance of e.g. shortening the need for lockdowns by a few days, and costs several times more what vitamin D pills do, it's already economically worthwhile. The cost-benefit here (and in many other measures of possible benefit) is so incredibly ridiculously obvious that it's not even funny.

What was wrong with CamTwist? I've been using OBS+CamTwist to do this for years now. I mean, this will save a couple minutes setup time, but it's not like that wasn't decent.

Disclaimer: I've used these tools.

Google is really good about takeout. It's really bad about maintaining my privacy. The opt-outs are limited in scope to the point of being almost meaningless. I don't mind ads being targeted as data being collected about me. Google's privacy tools are a joke.

Google's security tools are a joke too. Google silently drops security support for Android phones after two years, and people unwittingly walk around with zero-day exploitable phones. Chromebooks are similar. If you want to maintain a secure Google Apps domain, you need to pay Google huge bucks. It benefits everyone, especially Google, if the Internet is safe, and Google's attitude here will come back to bite it.

How about: "Websites shouldn't do digital fingerprinting to intentionally circumvent incognito mode." Does this make sense to you as a legal argument?

And yes, this does mean that if it comes to litigation, a lot of this will depend not just on what you did but why you did it.

If you write analytics, unaware of incognito mode, you're probably okay.

If you write that same exact code because your boss comes in and says "shad, we're losing A LOT of user data to users in incognito mode. Could you do some kind of digital fingerprinting so we can still track them?" then you might be criminally liable for digital trespass -- you've intentionally bypassed my security mechanism.

That's not quite how the law works. If I tell you to get off of my property, and you stand on my lawn, you're trespassing, even if I didn't put up a military-grade wall. Or if I have a basic chain link fence, and you climb over it, you're clearly trespassing in situations where without the fence, if you were to incidentally walk across my lawn, you'd be okay.

The point of digital trespass laws is very similar. Just because your technological measures are imperfect (as the bullets say) doesn't authorize you to circumvent them.

What's damaging in this case is that Google created the signalling mechanism, gave it to users, and then intentionally chose to circumvent it.

Courts are also not machines. A lot of this comes down to intent and reasonableness. If you're fingerprinting my browser when I'm in incognito, that feels like an intentional digital trespass which courts would probably recognize. If you're incidentally collecting my IP in your server logs, that feels okay. Programmers get caught up in this all the time -- they read laws and contracts like code (strict literal meaning). Lawyers read them looking at things like impact, intent, whether things are substantially similar, and so on.

Lawyers generally copy each other. There is standard text which has gone through hundreds or thousands of litigations and hasn't done harm, and that's almost always used going forward.

A lot of oddball conventions, such as THE USE OF ALL-CAPS in specific places, which have no reason to be legally meaningful, but are always done.

Some of them do turn out to be important. Standard clauses build up over time.

I think plaintiffs are right in this case. Google is openly breaking a number of laws, including CFAA. This constitutes unauthorized access. CFAA is a broken law with an overly-broad definition of unauthorized access, which the tech industry abuses all the time. It will be nice to see them get abused back. Perhaps they'll have incentive to fix it.

I agree the evidence is weak. That's very different from no evidence (your walking in circles example).

Vitamin D pills cost $12 per bottle where I live. I would guess the economic damage from COVID19 is going conservatively going to be $10,000-$20,000 for a typical family. We can do the math.

If vitamin D has a 3% chance of reducing the economic impact by 3%, even health implications aside, we're best off with everyone taking it.

The evidence isn't strong enough to support even 50% odds of it working, but it's definitely strong enough to support greater than 3% odds.

Similar economics apply for in-hospital use, only even more so.

And yes, I'm aware of all the other correlations. Exercise, sunlight, time outdoors, wealth, and vitamin D all correlate pretty well. We need a robust set of RCTs.

This is a question of decision-making in the face of uncertainty. We have evidence this helps. It's not conclusive evidence.

The odds of turning round in a circle three times helping are 0.000000001%. The odds of DMB helping are probably less than 50%, but more than 5% at this point. The cost is minimal.

Generally, one does an ROI calculation. To mix units and otherwise have zero rigor:

Return: P(treatment helps) * how much

Investment: P(treatment hurts) * how much + financial cost

My math on most cheap interventions, including vitamin D, are that they're obvious no-brainers, if done competently (e.g. not taking 600,000 IU per day, or sunburning oneself on a crowded beach -- dumb stuff like that always comes up in counterarguments).

Without math: There's evidence (although not proof) that they might help. They can't hurt.

I do a lot of things like that. When COVID19 first showed up, I was super-careful about contact transmission, large droplet, and aerosol, although I had no evidence which of those dominated. Were some of the things I did a waste? Indubitably. Was it a good idea to do that together? Without a doubt.

This is mostly obnoxious. Coding is a great way to build logical thinking, mathematical maturity, and creativity.

Perhaps OP is confusing teaching syntax with teaching coding. At least on my end working with kids, it got creative almost immediately, and mathematical not long there-after.

It's fun.

"Applied Cryptography" is the best-written book on this topic that I know of. Author is a brilliant communicator. Esp. the section on cryptographic protocols should be required reading for any computer scientist. It's not overly rigorous or mathematical, and has a lot of informality and humor, so it's a fairly light read. You don't need a lot of mathematical maturity to read it (and reading things like this helps develop mathematical maturity).

Unfortunately, the 2nd edition adds "50% more words, 7 more chapters, and over 1600 new references." I thought the first edition was better in length. It was novel-length, and reads as well as a novel. Going from long-ish novel to short-ish trilogy makes this somewhat less readable. But c'est la vie.

I can sometimes be dumb with Google/apt-cache search/DDG like that :)

Nah.

(1) For open source, out early is better than out later. v0 (or v1 or where ever you start numbering) shouldn't be perfect. If it's perfect, you're sharing too late.

(2) All this is volunteer work and a gift to the community. It's a fallacy to think the person who writes the code is also responsible for doing everything else. Some people code well. Others write well. Others do both well. That's okay.

(3) My comment was on the dexed ecosystem; not just on this piece

(4) All that said, what would be awesome is if

- There were sample audio files we could listen to. Ideally, these would be for the generated patches, but even if there was just a half-dozen example WAV or MP3 files.

- If the README file on github had a link to the web page, or at the very least, if the current text (thisdx7cartdoesnotexit.com) said "exist" at the end instead of "exit"

Well, I have to say:

(1) This looks interesting. I had no idea any of this existed.

(2) For the level of awesome, this is the worst-documented ecosystem I've stepped into in a long while. I hope some random user volunteers to make really nice documentation at some point. This could go from awesome to a lot awesomer.

I looked for MIDI synthesizer a while back, and never ran into dexed. I suspect I'll have a lot of fun with this at some point.

I predicted we'd see rising prices for anything provided by essential workers: food, shipping, etc. I think if the lockdowns and pandemic continues, we'll continue to see that.

The limit case is everyone stays home. We print money to allow people to buy food and medicine. Only essential workers contribute to the economy and do productive work. In the limit case, we see high inflation, large economic gains to essential workers, and a big hit to everyone else.

We're no where close to the limit case yet, but a modest rise is expected. With a big chunk of our economy shut down, the food sector is bigger, in relative terms.

In abstract, it doesn't take a huge amount of time and resources to do that. But, there are probably around a hundred higher-priority ideas achievable with the same resources which would take priority over this on the projects I'm working on right now.

On projects I've worked on before, I think this would have made sense /technically/, given project priorities, but so did many other things which weren't done. It's a lot easier to make the case for resources for customer-facing features than for technical debt or infrastructure. So there's the political component too, which varies organization-by-organization.

This is already done in a lot of projects with hardware. The Linux kernel will run on a thousand hardware and software configurations before integrating features.

If I did this, I'd probably want at least three builds:

* my pinned deployment versions (sometimes a release or two behind, sometimes bleeding-edge)

* latest released version; and

* HEAD

If an upstream project is introducing a breaking change, I'd know immediately. That'd be super-helpful, probably both to me and to those projects.

Come to think of it, the right way to do this might be to have three virtualenvs on my local machine, rather than just different targets in CI/CD....

There's a spectrum of agreement.

(1) I want builds to be 100% reproducible on deployment servers and on CI/CD pipelines. Otherwise, you can undebuggable Heisenbugs. On the other hand, I don't want builds to be reproducible between developer machines. If I'm running Python 3.6 on Ubuntu, and another developer is running Python 3.7 on a Mac, and we have slightly different versions of numpy, that makes sure the system is not too brittle. Come to think of it, if I had infinite resources, I'd have several build machines with different (reproducible) configurations.

(2) I'm a lot more spartan about dependencies than other developers I've met.

(3) I'd never use apt to manage Python packages myself in something I'm working on. The constraint is in the other direction. If I build a tool, a user ought to be able to install it using apt in some future version of Debian, and likewise for other systems. Even if that's an abstract user.

I've found that if I develop this way, the upsides outweigh the downsides, especially over extended periods. A lot of software gets built like a system which can only live in one places. There's a set of AWS machines, code on them, and that's the system. There might be a few copies of it (stage+dev+etc.), but you can't move it somewhere else. I like systems I build to be portable. Someone can bring them up-and-running on their own machine, ideally in a few minutes. I've always found that to be cheaper, in the long term.

We definitely use virtualenv and pip. But:

1) There's a world of difference between that and docker, and especially docker with containers for not just postgresql, but a half-dozen specialized data stores, queuing systems, MTAs, etc.

2) There's also a world of difference between having numpy / pandas / etc. in your requirements.txt, and having those pinned to a specific version. I'm okay with one or two pinned dependencies on any specific project (for example, if there's an overall project built on Django).

But if you're using the corners of standard libraries in ways where version 1.65 works and 1.73 doesn't, you're probably doing something wrong. You're probably using features which are too bleeding-edge. I'm okay with a few conditionals in code too (if library is 1.65, do X, and if it's 1.73, do Y).

When I've seen systems that to depend on nuances of specific versions, upgrades turn into "migration to [library] 1.73" and eat up weeks of developer time. It gets worse when you have cascades (upgrading library X means upgrading Y, etc.).

And goodness help you if you want to integrate two systems built in docker with pinned everything and fine-grained dependencies.

A lot of this also comes back to willing and able to say "no" to features which take 15 minutes to introduce, but cost time down the line to maintain.

Systems which install on Ubuntu without virtualenv or pip (just apt-get installing packages) are an ideal I strive for. It's usually one I don't hit (and it's also not how I develop, obviously -- it's not for me, but for my users, as well as for the discipline).

When I run teams doing Python development, I'm hyper-disciplined about avoiding unnecessary or bleeding-edge dependencies. My experience is that dependencies save time in the short term, but lead to exponential maintenance costs in the long term. I view each dependency the same way as technical debt.

I also generally don't lock versions on dev machines; code should use the core, supported API, and not break on bleeding-edge functionality and API changes. I lock version on deploy machines, obviously.

Smart people on my teams don't like this approach, though, so I could be wrong.

But you can do Python this way. And beginners definitely should start by doing Python this way.

I don't think this is for a newcomer. Newcomer, here you go:

print("Hello World!")

This is for someone who has done Python for many years, but might have fallen behind on the latest and greatest trends. It collects a series of promising, bleeding-edge tools and gives an overview of what makes them clever and how to use them.

Oddly, I don't find WA to be great. WA can do complex math, but it's slow. To give a good example of what I've come to expect from all three, type "2 feet + 2 meters" into:

* WA: You'll get a correct result, but it takes 4 seconds.

* Google: 0.185806 square meters, obviously (instantly)

* DDG: Search results

Curiously, I find Google's to be the most helpful. I see the obviously incorrect result and instantly fix it. DDG gives me nothing. WA is too slow to e.g. play around with numbers.

My last computation was trying to figure out which bolt to get for a hole (with McMaster's selections for both bolts and, at some level, holes). I was converting hole sizes / bolt sizes between metric and imperial, and between fraction and decimals, playing around until I found a combo which worked. Once I had Google giving the right answers, I could play around until it worked. With WA, I would have had to wait 4 seconds each time.

By the time I'm doing anything beyond that, it's generally in numpy. There isn't really a spot for WA in between.

DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG.

a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale.

b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%.

c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

d) If DDG can't target advertising as well as Google, they'll still have enough revenue to survive at their current level of quality. Their CPM is likely lower than Google's with less data and optimization, but I'd guess at worst 2x lower, not 1000x lower.

I'm glad they're doing well. On paper, it seems like a sound business model, and it's a heck of a lot more customer-friendly.

Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.

(1) Phones have your data, settings, apps, etc. on them. Syncing things sucks.

(2) The ARM in your phone is probably faster than a $250 laptop CPU. It can be plenty fine for most tasks.

(3) Many of us aren't CPU-bound in the first place. The only thing holding our phones back are software, keyboard, and display.

Done well, it'd be awesome. I definitely want something like the NexDock. However, I'll probably wait for V2 or V3. I think V1 will be good for people who would use it like a Chromebook.

My V5 NexDock would look like an actual dock, and plug my phone into:

* a pair of 4k monitors

* a keyboard, a mouse

* a pair of external HDDs (keeping my data backed up in RAID, and holding larger files)

And have good software / application support.

Your username suggests you shouldn't read these books. You should skim notes about these books and write obnoxious posts based on those, claiming the person you're talking to is lying based on no evidence at all.

Indeed, Dictator's Handbook has a nice summary someone posted in this thread. Your link wasn't even a summary, but someone's take-home notes for their own career.

> So your initial claims don't apply to CEOs of corporations with less than 1000 people? Moving the goalpost much?

That's where the goalposts started. They haven't moved an inch. The article was talking about Reed Hastings and Netflix. We were talking about publicly-traded companies with shareholders. "Power" talks about ... power. CEO of a 5-man shop isn't power. It talks about how people climb to the top of corporate ladders at big organizations, and the selection mechanism for who makes CEO. Dictator's Handbook is about big organizations too. It's a game-theoretic treatment.

Obviously some context went over your head. Maybe that goes with digital communications, or maybe that goes with not being interested in longer texts, so much as in skimming summaries.

No, I can point you to reading the books.

If you're don't read books, I don't think this is a bridge you'll cross. And I'm sorry you find two respected professors, one at NYU and one at Stanford, to be of dubious authenticity. I'm not quite sure where to go from there in the conversation. There are many individuals who find Pfeffer dubious, but de Mesquita is extremely highly regarded.

I'm not going to share my background on the internet, but ex-CEO doesn't make you qualified to talk about much of anything. It depends on the organization. I've virtually never seen these sorts of dynamics at organizations below 100 people, and they don't become universal until around 1000-10,000 people. You need to reach a certain scale of competition before people start acting in ways which are game-theoretically optimal. If you have 10 people, it's easy to keep alignment on mission, vision, community, and business. If you have e.g. 10,000 people, and 1% are gunning for CEO, the only way to get to the top is to out-gun the other 99. That competition is what leads to these dynamics.

They don't amount to an attack. They amount to a threat.

Threats to our democracy need to be checked.

This isn't about Trump or about giving or not giving someone the benefit-of-the-doubt. If it were Obama, Warren, Bush, or whomever else, I wouldn't want to give a path to cancelling an election either. The PoTUS doesn't have that kind of power, and it the PoTUS is making moves suggesting that kind of power grab, they need to be checked on it by the rest of the system, whoever it is, and regardless of intent.

That's the point of checks-and-balances: they're something we should be able to agree on regardless of whether we trust the individual. They're about the system and not about the person.

... to the extent you consider one of the most influential and best-researched management books a "cliche and conspiracy."

I'll mention I didn't claim that a CEO rarely knows something a critic doesn't; just that things like the CEO's greater understanding of something like market dynamics are rarely the basis of what is externally perceived to be a "bad" decision by an armchair critic. The basis is usually political dynamics (which most armchair critics have far less insight into than the CEO -- the information gap is greater).

And as a shareholder, I can say I don't think my intelligence matters very much in this story. The amount of time and thought I can put into each company in my portfolio is what matters. That's both especially true because I have index funds, and why I have index funds.

As a footnote, if you'd like a more extreme take on this, Pfeffer's Power is a good read (but quite controversial -- the book basically makes the claim that CEOs are fundamentally psychopaths). Pfeffer is at Stanford.

Dictator's Handbook is considered hardly controversial at all. It's a game-theoretic argument, backed by pretty good data. The author is at New York University.

I'll also mention that simply insulting the poster of an argument ("just exists in the imagination of people whose involvement with business decisions consists of reading Dilbert cartoons") doesn't strengthen your point. You know nothing about my background. It just makes you look like you're either a jerk, or ran out of sound arguments.

Your postulate is generally correct on a quarterly time span. It's generally incorrect on a 5-year time-span. Good examples are Carly Fiorina gutting HP in ways which weren't immediately externally visible, or Bezos / Jobs pursuing tactics which took years to show value.

Key differences between the Board / shareholders and the CEO include:

(1) Amount of time available. Boards meet a few times, and it's exceptionally hard to get buy-in for something which doesn't have a concise executive summary. Shareholders have even less time.

(2) Insider information. Shareholders (and, to some extent, Boards) have far less inside information than the CEO.

If you'd like good evidence, the book "The Dictator's Handbook" builds a pretty good case that mirrors my experience operating at both executive and board levels. It's not a complete explanation, but I think it accounts for 50% of the types of dynamics described.

If full-length academic texts aren't your thing, CGP Grey has a nice summary on Youtube too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

>> The key skill CEOs need to be CEOs can be summarized as: "How to become a CEO."

> That's a very cynical and reductionist view

It may be cynical, but it mirrors my experience. It's definitely not reductionist. "How to become a CEO." is an incredible complex, intertwined set of skills. Some of those skills include effectively leading companies, but others do not.

If there's a public health crisis, and people can't safely leave homes and can't vote by mail, there is no meaningful election.

Right now, he's:

* Doing everything in his power to have a public health crisis (which means people can't go out to vote)

* Working to bankrupt the USPS so people can't vote by mail

* Threatening to go after states which support vote-by-mail (that's the tweet and similar statements -- withholding federal funding to states which vote by mail)

That's a concerning set of signals.

That's not a verbal threat like a declaration of war, if that's the link you're looking for. It's a threat like when a country conducts military drills on your border, or like when there's a new virus outbreak on the other side of the world. Problems might or might not materialize, but you should take actions to be ready both to minimize the odds of problems, and in case they do.

Our current PoTUS is an opportunist. He hedges and hangs out ideas to see if they'll get traction. If he gets any traction on an idea, he exploits it very effectively. If he doesn't get traction, he moves on. That has upsides and downsides, but in this case, it's to everyone's advantage that he doesn't get traction.

And the response should be very similar. If a country appears to be preparing to invade, you prepare to defend yourself. That doesn't mean you need to be obnoxious about it or try to provoke a war (politeness pays), but you do want to respond to the threat.

I apologize if I was imprecise in my wording. The word 'threat' has multiple meanings. I don't want to vilify the PoTUS, but I do want to make sure the checks-and-balances stay in place. That take vigilance against threats, both real and potential.

For the most part, I support platform neutrality. I don't agree with all the Google censorship of misinformation and "misinformation" on their platforms. I think Facebook should have less evil algorithms (it seems designed to encourage polarization), but I wouldn't want censorship or commentary their either.

This case is an exception. Twitter drew a line in the sand. It is in exactly the right place.

The PoTUS is threatening to shut down elections in November: he seems to be doing everything in his power to have a national emergency then when people can't vote, to shut down post offices, and to ban voting by mail. Any other problems with the PoTUS, we should address in the ballot box and through citizen activism (not through corporate activism). But when the PoTUS tries to shut down the ballot box or shut down citizen activism, that's different.

I don't think he's likely to be successful, but I didn't think coronavirus would hit us this hard either. In January, it was a manageable billion-dollar problem. We did nothing. Now, it's a multi-trillion dollar problem. Right now, Trump trying to cancel the election is a manageable problem too; by his personality, if he doesn't get traction, we're done. He'll move on. But if he does get traction, we'll have a completely different scale of problem on our hands.

A much more thoughtful treatment of this problem is "The Dictator's Handbook." There are three possible explanations:

1) The CEO knows something I don't.

2) The CEO is dumb.

Those are rarely it. The third one is:

3) The CEO is optimizing for personal wealth / fame / success, and there are political considerations.

Most CEOs can recognize that a business decision can be absolutely the right thing to do for the business and not make that decision if it either would cost them (1) their standing with shareholders (2) their annual bonus (3) their standing with the board (4) their standing with internal constituents.

The key skill CEOs need to be CEOs can be summarized as: "How to become a CEO." That involves a lot more management of politics than it does business success (but still a fair measure of both). Furthermore, if a strategy leads to business success but costs a CEO their job, they cannot take that strategy.