This seems like it would be related to a broader shift (among tech parents, at least [0]) from digital to analog.
From my perspective, it seems like a pendulum. On the whole, baby boomers didn't adapt to the advent of computers very well. However, they generally recognized their value, and provided access to the devices in a mostly unstructured way. Thus, their Gen X/millennial children are overall more technically savvy than they.
Now, those children are becoming parents themselves, and reflecting on the potential negative aspects of unlimited screen access, social media, widespread gamification, etc. on their own children. Providing the same unrestricted access to their own children may seem unlikely to produce the same results that they themselves experienced. Thus, alternatives like reducing or restricting access at home/school become more common/popular.
Perhaps the next generation will resent their parents' restrictions, or feel left behind technically, and swing back the other way?
> Apple users seem far more willing to pay for small useful applications from indie developers so more indie developers put more effort into producing small useful and beautiful apps for Mac.
This rings true to me as well, but why is this the case? If we roughly assume that Mac users are 1 order of magnitude fewer than Windows users, they must be >1 OOM more likely to pay for these kinds of apps to generate this impression.
I struggled with this puzzle for quite a while when I switched from Mac to Windows. Utilities are simply not comparable, either in design, functionality, or simple quantity, for a market which is (on paper) both much larger and much older (if you restrict your view to the OS X era).
As an aside, it totally makes sense to me why Linux utilities are numerous and awesome, but have (usually) poor graphic design, because that Bauhaus-esque function over form describes how I prefer to work, too.
> If it fails, you know they aren't. And if it succeeds, well, then you know they are.
This problem is solved in an interesting way by Keybase Chat, in which messages sent to non-existing accounts are "delivered", and can then be read if that account is created later on. It requires re-keying of the message by the sender, so it's not exactly a "fire and forget" solution, but it's pretty neat anyway.
When I was running hiring at a previous startup, we ran into this issue often. When I proposed adding FizzBuzz to our screening process, I got a fair amount of pushback from the team that it was a waste of the candidates' time.
Once we'd actually started using it, though, we found it filtered between 20-30% of our applicant pool, even when we let them use literally any language they desired, presumably their strongest.
However, it usually only filtered fresh grads (CS students from top-10 schools). Those with previous work experience almost never had a problem.
If you replace "punish" with "control" I think that's an easily-extensible template, because isn't that ultimately tied to the personal ethics of the employee?
<Some Company>: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help manipulate and control people by violating their privacy through big data?
Engineer: sure! Just as long as it doesn't violate this very specific aspect of my personal ethics!
That could easily describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
> This is a horrible idea that breaks the idea of secret ballot and opens up all sorts of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.
Not at all; the parent said "taken into account in the final tally", not "see that their vote was counted as they intended".
This is very similar to the system for paper ballots, with a tear-off receipt. If you type in the ID number, you can verify that that ballot was counted. There is no association between identity, vote choice, or ballot ID.
From the article, it seems they're dealing with demand fluctuations of 1000-3000 MW within a given hour (2PM was the example), so I think it's really working on a totally different scale. Even 10x as many batteries wouldn't be able to smooth that load fluctuation.
I think this is a natural outcome of the peer review process; you're not targeting research papers at statistical models, you're targeting them at human reviewers. This kind of behavior is equally prevalent in many fields, including computer science.
I recently reviewed a paper from a research team in China, on a scalable and ubiquitous ad hoc sensing platform. The presented "spin" was that it could potentially be useful for monitoring power distribution networks, thereby reducing blackouts, which was certainly true. However, it could also have been used for an inescapable, totalitarian panopticon (this part was implicit and unstated).
As a reviewer with explicit instructions to evaluate the ethical implications of the work, is it my responsibility (A) to interpret the stated "spin", (B) extract and evaluate strictly the technical contributions of the work, or (C) all of the above, and the implicit "anti-spin" interpretation that was provided courtesy of my Western worldview?
And here's a twist - six months previously, a similar situation occurred with my own work, in which a technology that I envisioned (spun) being used for disaster relief caught the eye of an alphabet agency for low-cost, secure data collection in third world theaters. This was deeply shocking to me at the time, because I hadn't considered this potential use case when I was developing the system. I had spun its impact so effectively in my own mind, I didn't even see the negative alternative.
It's my observation that human brains will inject their own spin if it doesn't already exist, using the social and cultural norms to which that brain is accustomed. I don't hold a researcher's desire to sell their work as effectively as possible against them, especially if the person to whom they're selling most effectively is themselves.
Agreed. I don't object to company or founder exposés such as these, but I do find the article's focus on the founders' age to be misplaced and distasteful. I also think that these kinds of breathless adorations of the latest "wunderkind" to contribute to the widespread perception/reality of ageism within the industry.
I understand it makes for a more click-attracting title, but imagine if the title was "Silicon Valley's Latest Unicorn Is Run By an Asian" - it sounds offensive, at least to me. Preferably the articles would focus on something other than a protected class.
Note that age is not technically a protected class, only "advanced age", defined as 40+, but I personally think that making unbounded age a protected class would be beneficial for everyone. Refusing to hire someone because they're "too young" is equally as offensive as refusing because they're "too old".
In case anyone else was curious, it seems the penalties for being so labelled are enforced through the imposition of tariffs [0].
If the IMF / WTO agree with the Fed's characterization (which is doesn't currently look like will be the case, from what I read in the parent article), then it could have broader impacts, i.e. by the imposition of tariffs by companies which are not currently in a trade war with China.
However, since the US is already levying (heavier) tariffs against China, this is currently being viewed as more of a public / foreign relations move, as it seems unlikely that it will trigger even stronger tariffs.
FIOS wasn't actually why that market segment died; it was due to the FCC decision to re-classify DSL [0]. This was in response to a lawsuit resolved a few months earlier that did the same for cable internet connections. [1]
By re-classifying both cable and DSL as Title 1, rather than Title 2, that meant that they were no longer common carriers, and could kick all the competing ISPs off their network. This is why it seemed that most of the third-party providers went away nearly overnight.
> i've always wondered how companies get away with decrypting certain sites, i.e. Healthcare.
Often, through some kind of employee code of conduct; think along the lines of "I agree to refrain from using my work computer for personal business." or similar. Then, if something sensitive is decrypted, the employer has some legal cover.
> At best you have someone who is basically an idiot savant. At worst, you have someone who has forgotten basic life functions, but handles being a soldier like the best of them.
From both an industrial and military perspective, this seems like a feature, not a bug.
In fact, it really brings to mind a similar fictional concept, stylized Focus, from Vernon Vinge's Deepness in the Sky. Here, Vinge describes how teams of these "idiot savants", specialized in a certain area, are led by neurotypical managers who direct their output toward broader strategic goals.
If this was repeatably and broadly applicable in human learning, I could definitely imagine this achieving widespread usage, especially in developing countries willing to exchange personal well-being for collective (familial or societal) success.
> PCs made a lot of fast progress until sometime in the 90s and then things stagnated.
Transistor densities increased 2 orders of magnitude (~100x) between 1995 and 2005. Integer operations were a little less, maybe 1.5 oom, over the same period. When you say that PCs stagnated over that period, in what context did you mean?
In this case, I think that's especially true, but maybe not from the perspective you intended: they were sold on the idea of reduced costs, and they're marketing the changes to their employees (and the public) as retention-improving changes, despite the bald-faced absurdity of such a statement.
Pollution is a commonly-used example of a negative externality [0], or a way to shift business costs onto a third party.
In the parent example, the implication is that rather than investing money in reducing pollution, that money can instead by returned to the investors as dividends, and the global public must bear the impact of the unmitigated soot emissions.
The "wealth transfer" in this case is represented by the costs absorbed by the public (in terms of increased healthcare costs, endangered coastal real estate, disaster relief costs, etc which may result from pollution and/or anthropogenic climate change) being transferred to the investors/owners/operators of the polluting companies in the form of reduced spending on mitigation technology.
That was my interpretation of the parent's meaning, at least. At the time I posted this comment, there were three different interpretations of the same comment, which is very interesting.