amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: 'Right to be forgotten' could threaten global free speech, say NGOs
Sure. But if European countries can insist on globally de-indexing truthful information because they feel its continued propagation is harmful, that seriously undercuts any moral high ground available when China tries to do the same.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Your Face Is Not a Bar Code (2003)
There's always a
reason for expanding government bureaucracies. Some worthy problem, which the government plausibly could solve if it had just a little bit more power to intervene.
That doesn't change the direct consequence of the intervention, that there's now yet another area where the government sits there telling everyone what to do. If we believe that government ought to be limited, at some point we have to balance against that.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Dumb Rules That Make Your Best People Want to Quit (2017)
Surely you understand how it creates bad incentives, if feedback about individual productivity can be delivered bluntly but feedback about prioritization can't be given at all.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M
Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare
I'm sure it's a nightmare for a professional journalist. And I don't mean that as an insult - it'd be a nightmare for me too.
But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30 mile radius, trying to convince them that you can be the most submissive and obedient out of the 200 applicants. It's hard to begrudge the gig economy for providing an alternative to that.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: MongoDB: How to Use the JSON Schema Validator
Schemaless databases are good for scenarios where the database
isn't a source of truth. If you have a table full of e.g. per-second heartbeats from a bunch of deployed services, there's no fundamental underlying truth anyone's trying to gather from it, and you can't afford to run a full schema migration every time someone adds a new metric.
I recognize some people do try to use schemaless databases in the way you're describing, and I agree that's weird and dangerous.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: MongoDB: How to Use the JSON Schema Validator
Certainly, but that doesn't mean the schema has to be a strict validation encoded into your storage format. It's a perfectly well-defined programming model to say "well, I'm reading query X with schema Y, and if some rows don't match Y give me nulls instead".
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Google's censored Chinese search engine: a catalogue of ethical violations?
Certainly not. But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: From Google to the world: the Kubernetes origin story
Most business ideas aren't rejected for any kind of compact reason. The decisionmaker typically has other things that are higher priority, or they just kinda avoid giving a green light until it's interpreted as a rejection.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Spotify GDPR data export: user receives 250MB containing every interaction
There's a sense in which summary views are the real data. If I asked Spotify to share my data, and they just sent me a 250 MB file of every interaction they've ever recorded, I would conclude they're trying to obfuscate which data they actually use and how they use it.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist
It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a Silicon Valley with
their politics. This article describes a bunch of concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't marginalized, bring local communities together, and don't provide mechanisms for creating echo chambers. But what neither Turner nor Khan discuss is how tech companies will realize they ought to do this.
What if Amazon politicizes in the direction of libertarianism, and decides its only social responsibility is to increase the world's GDP?
What if Facebook politicizes in the direction of social justice, and determines that segregating people into identity-based safe spaces is the way to go?
What if Google politicizes in the direction of some political party, and decides it's duty-bound to tweak its search algorithm to hurt opposing candidates?
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Bail reform could give justice to poor, minorities
When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of them go so far to make you worry you'll be taken out back and shot.
You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game
But arbitration didn't fail here. He never tried it in the first place.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System
The traditional American dream is that you change your status through making friends and simple hard work. If you're the hardest working and most dedicated Walmart sales associate, you'll quickly become a manager, and you can iterate on that at least until you're a regional director or something.
From that perspective, it's weird to look in on a typical Silicon Valley company, where it's understood that only people with specific technical knowledge are qualified to make important decisions. And it's downright scary to look at Uber, where the drivers have no internal mobility even in theory.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags
Most people aren't particularly tempted to shape their behavior to Facebook. They just use other channels for things they don't specifically want everyone to see. If some people are so uninvested in their thoughts that "open up a group chat" is an insurmountable barrier... well, they were going to be mind controlled by a stiff breeze, so it's hard to blame Facebook.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: The scooter company that raised 400M in 4 months is what is wrong with SV
Sure, I can imagine a world where scooters are as common as bikes. But is that enough to justify a $2B valuation for a scooter-sharing startup?
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: ‘Everyone is breaking the law right now’: GDPR compliance is falling short
If the GDPR was really intended to forbid business models which require collecting user data for ad targeting, why wouldn't it have just said that?
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case
How would Heller vs. DC have incorporated anything? DC is a federal district; there were no states involved in that case.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: The US startup is disappearing
That's generally exactly what they're trying to measure: statistics about people who follow the standard path society lays out for education. If something about getting an advanced degree is discouraging people from doing startups, that's important to know, whether or not some population of smart autodidacts also exists.
amarkov
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7 years ago
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on: A former Theranos employee's account of life inside the company
Not necessarily naturally, but it's reasonably easy to learn - it's ultimately the same underlying mechanism as singing different notes.
