quarkral's comments

The reason it's difficult to differentiate is because currently media backlash is actually the only accountability any of these tech companies have for doing the right thing. For example, there's basically no government regulation for making sure companies encrypt your passwords properly; the only incentive to do so is because the media would make a joke out of the company if unencrypted passwords were ever leaked.

So you can ban advertisements from political organizations, but if a third-party or the Russians start running misinformation ads on climate change and pro-life, the media won't exactly recognize it as a "non political advertisement" and leave off.

In the election of 2016, most of the misinformation was not directly initiated by the political candidates. Your suggestion wouldn't affect any of the misinformation spread in 2016.

When we're talking about whether Facebook should be fact-checking the lies of public servants, we're missing the point. We shouldn't be having public servants that are lying to us in the first place. By the way this isn't just referring to one political party, the other party lies or blatantly dodges around truths as well. I think our government is in much deeper shit than the tech industry is, and even though I agree Facebook needs some regulation, I wouldn't trust the government to do it.

sounds easy but in practice hard. You can run ads on political and social issues that directly correlate with one candidate's campaign. What about those ads?

But then you could also be running ads to push a public issue such as climate change independent of anyone's campaign.

How do you differentiate between the two?

I don't think Twitter actually hade much political advertising at all before tbh. It's like Bing traffic compared to Google.

But the answer you get isn't necessarily the truth, because humans don't make decisions based on reason. 90% of the time, decision-making is based on emotion, and the reasoning comes afterwards to try and justify why the decision was made. Thus, when you ask the person for justification, you're getting post-hoc reasons.

There's a great book written on this - "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion"

even for a consumer, file synchronization is very painful without a filesystem. I usually use Resilio Sync between my devices, but I couldn't get it to work properly on an iPad without manually copying files between apps every time I wanted to update a file.

most iPhone consumers I know of are constantly complaining about their phone running out of memory from photos and whatnot, and they don't understand how to transfer between devices.

Yea I would like it if the author offered a one-time purchase for the app without sync functionality at say $60.

I mean if you are having trouble with server space for hosting text files, then maybe you shouldn't be building your own cloud storage service.

There are lots of existing sync solutions without server space limitations, and you can still have end-to-end encryption by just saving the encrypted text file to local storage and decrypting it only in memory.

Regardless of how people feel about Facebook in general, I think this is a step forward. Groups and messenger are what I primarily use, and both of those are completely in my control with no mysterious recommender algorithm deciding what I get to look at today. I bookmark my Facebook to go straight into Messenger and get notifications from groups that I care about.

Strange, I have yet to meet a single Google interviewer who was looking for perfect syntax during the interview. Last year I forgot the syntax for a data structure, told my interviewer "something like this," and he just said "that's fine." Got the internship later on. I even had one interviewer who was ok with me writing out matrix algebra mathematically instead of using np.matmul and all that.

I definitely agree with this for mathematical notes. Writing LaTeX is so mechanically different from writing down actual mathematical expressions and proofs that I feel like it distracts more than it helps me absorb.

On the other hand for something like a psychology class where the material is mostly in English prose, then I feel like typing does help. Typing English is not so mechanically different than writing down English since each letter is still in a one-to-one correspondence.

Doesn't work. Spammers still manage to blind call my actual cell phone number even though I've given it to absolutely not a single person, dead or alive.

I think recommender systems are the biggest culprit in this. Most recommender systems are probably trained with a simple objective of maximizing the amount of time the user spends browsing through the list of recommended items.

The whole idea of continuously giving your users content so that they can passively scroll down and be entertained is just like putting users in a box where they can pull a lever to get food. When users are given all these options without having to think and to actively search for them, they just become vegetables.

I used to watch tons of Starcraft, but I feel like at least half the reason was to find inspiration for new strategies and playstyles whenever I got bored of playing standard. For example I pretty much never watched the matchup between the other two races I played.

Whereas I feel like the same can hardly be said for traditional sports. I don't see how you gain any strategical insight into the game of soccer by watching the world cup, at least on the level that a normal viewer could implement.

"sophisticated" here could be as simple as buying a mass-produced 3d filter sized for the dual lens on the iPhone, installing a companion computer program, running it, uploading a video, and then pointing the phone at the screen. If I were your nosy relative, that certainly wouldn't stop me.

As with any security break, the first research prototypes may sound sophisticated, but they might not be that far off from practical mass-production.

How would you implement 2FA without making your personal phone number publicly available for anyone to attempt to authenticate with? It's not the same as your bank calling you when you already have an account with them - we're talking about a new bank, who you have no relationship with, trying to call you to verify your identity.

A true public key system opens up each individual user to malicious spam. Given the current prevalence of phone, mail, and email spammers, such a system would create more problems than solve.

SSNs could technically be passwords. The problem then is that data servers need to not store SSNs in plaintext, but rather store hashes of them, just like passwords should not be stored in plaintext.