I think burnout is about reducing the perceived world to a shallow mental model, getting locked in it voluntarily and getting depressed as a result. But it's a 3 wall prison cell: it works so long as the prisoner doesn't bother to look around to notice the missing wall.
My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.
But imagine the new frontiers it opens! Countries would exchange and trade massive amounts of user data like oil. Want to participate in air travel? Better to sign treaties to buy tracing data, as without it your country won't be compliant with the international safety laws. I see trillions of new wealth being built there. On a serious note, this reminds me of a quote from one book: "the fourth round will be remarked by a fierce battle between materialistic and spiritual forces in humanity". We're like being subjected by a high voltage electrolysis now: those with moral are being dragged to the right and those without it - to the left.
Interesting how it's turned around. A few weeks ago one of my HN accounts was banned for a neutral note that the lab hypothesis shouldn't be disregarded. Now it's openly talked about on WaPo.
Ubuntu has followed the same path of first building their user base on trust and quality and then monetizing it hard with various shady schemes.
Even coffee shops do it. First they sell high quality coffee for little margin and "don't expect or accept tips". Then they switch to the dark side to monetize the trust: they cut hard on materials, they pay $2/hour to employees and expect the customers to subsidize their minimum wages with tips (that are now accepted and very much expected).
Companies that cut half of the pay are unlikely to offer corporate housing or free food.
Even remote interns need to live somewhere and rent isn't cheap. On the other hand, interns might be ok with sharing a 2bd apt with 3 roommates and paying only 600 for rent and bills. That would leave them almost 2000 a month. Not bad for a 20 yo seeking independence, but humiliating for a 25 yo and a complete failure for a 30 yo.
If Lyft is open to hiring interns from abroad (unlikely) and pay them the same 4800 (very unlikely), then just 500 would get them a very decent 2bd apt. In countries like India, they would be borderline rich with this kind of money.
But it's not deadly enough to reverse the climate change. Humans are smart animals: they will adopt to the virus real quick, restart the dirty economy machine, get their previous life expectancy back and suffocate in dirty air, water and unbearable weather. But they will die on their terms, with pride and dignity.
Because there are multiple paths and the virus really spreads like a wave frontier in a 10 dimensional space of human to human contacts graph. The virus also spreads in a non uniform way: it's not about the distance between two interacted persons, but about the nature of their interaction, whether they weared masks and so on. The virus also really likes to stick to surfaces, like door handles or plastic wraps, and this vector of transmission is very difficult to trace even manually. Think of credit cards. The virus floats in the air like smoke if someone coughed and others may catch it this way. An app can't account for that and instead builds a social graph of interactions. The app would notice a lot of people crowded in a parking lot and would assume the virus was transmitted between those 50 people, but it wouldn't know that all those people sit in their cars, so the app just made the transmission chain 50x less useless. A few more such gatherings and the relevance of tracing drops to those sub quantum levels of homeopathic medicine.
They are doing well. The symptoms are the same as mild flu or allergy, and the effects are nearly non existent except in already old and sick. If half of infected got severe complications, it would be a blood bath with military on the streets already.
TBH, the real solution will be reopening the economy with masks on and social distancing. Vaccine is a pipe dream and by the time it might be created, everyone will have been infected a few times.
My conspiracy theory is that the government understands that very soon everyone will wear masks and sunglasses and all the face-recognition tracking will become useless, so to compensate for that, they are pushing hard for alternatives. Once masks get normalized and the infection rate drops to manageable levels, the opportunity to push this app surveillance will be lost.
Let's assume someone got bankrupted by a hospital over a severe coronavirus case. This means that someone has been wandering around for weeks infecting others. Let's assume there is a chain of 10 contacts between me and that someone. The probability of virus transmission is 1% (and I'm generous here) because more people wear masks, because people avoid talking and generally avoid interactions. Probability of transmission over 10 links is 10^-20 and we may stop right here, unless we plan to study quantum particles.
Now let's assume I get a notification that I might have been infected over the past few weeks. The probability that the app is correct is abysmally low. But even if I get infected, I'm unlikely to get sick and I'm unlikely to transmit the virus to others because masks, social distancing and because I already assume I'm infected.
So yeah, this app would be useless and is only good for surveillance.
With 95% infected not showing any symptoms, contact tracing is pointless, as it will be about tracing contacts of those few severely ill. With this in mind, contact tracing is really just a way to sell survelliance to people and then seal it in laws.
TBH, it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions. This happened because the CA's AG chose to be a good guy, leveraged his power and put a lot of effort into fighting the bad guys. I'm sure he's been offered fat kickbacks and received thinly veiled treats. After this stunt he won't be offered a high ranked corporate position to scheme shady things and won't be able to buy yachts and helicopters left and right. That's basically the price he's paid. I think attributing this win to some "voices" would be dishonest.
Does anybody need those 5.3 GHz at 300 watts? I believe the next big thing is "massively parallel distributed processing": thousands or maybe even millions of tiny processing units with their own memory and reasonable set of instructions run in parallel and communicate with each other over some sort of high bandwidth bus. It's like a datacenter on a chip. A bit like GPU, but bigger. I think this will take ML and various number crunching fields to the next level.
My approach is to find curiously unexplainable things. The moment our mind spots a glitch in the matrix, an odd difference between the well known mental model and observations, it becomes excited and tries to fix the model.