When I was at LinkedIn we definitely cared about this. It probably wouldn't be enough to knock you down a peg during your review if you had none during a particular half/quarter, but if you never did anything in this bucket it would be a red flag during promotion consideration.
This isn't that hard. There are various employee groups around identities (Women in Tech, Asian Pacific, Black, LGBTQ, etc). Membership is not exclusive to those groups but also open to allies. As an example, I used to participate in the Women in Tech one at both Mozilla and at LinkedIn. Often I just listened, but I also helped organize a few events with them, contributed ideas for those events, and when they started a structured mentoring program I was one of the mentors.
There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.
But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.
I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.
Many blogs are completely dynamic and grab content out of a database on every request. The static site generation style fell out of early fashion when wordpress took over from moveable type, and didn't really return much until jekyll. Even today I think most blogs you see are mostly dynamic with the platforms using caching to avoid hitting the database every time.
Most people don't do performance tuning of their blogs because the average traffic is miniscule. This means that any configuration issues rear their heads when load happens. For example, having your max connections to the web server be far more than the database can support. Perhaps the machine could handle the load if properly configured, but no one did so because there was no need.
The money tends to be on one side of these things, and money amplifies the message substantially.
You can argue that the election was fair all you want, but who is going to pay to run all the ads to impress that message on everyone?
It's already the case that clickbait headlines and lies are naturally more engaging, so amplifying them with money seems to drown out any rational counter dialogue.
This is probably because of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) rules, which prevent personal data from leaving the device for ads without consent. This means YouTube on AppleTV can't target you at an individual level, and thus the ad inventory is less valuable. Maybe now they have more demand side budgets and are finding ways to spend it even on Apple devices. Or maybe their privatization technology is finally mature enough to make that inventory valuable enough to sell.
This isn't even the first time this has happened. Remember when they renamed Libra? I think they just assume it doesn't matter, and if it does, the settlement will be a blip. It doesn't always work out that way for them.
You can’t control who buys your mortgage from whatever bank you originally got a mortgage with. Even if you refinance to another bank, they can just resell it again. I assume this is true of other kinds of debt. Not all their customers are people who don’t know any better.
Also, I think people probably have some systemic trust that really bad actors will be eventually removed, but unfortunately that seems not to ever happen to Wells Fargo despite what is at this point hundreds of years of bad behavior.
While I'm happy to hear you are leaving Reddit, please consider reinstalling Apollo until Christian is able to shut down the app. He is planning to ask folks to forgo the refund much like Twitterific and Tweetbot did[1]. He will give refunds to anyone who takes no action I believe, but if you'd like to support him you'll need to opt-in once he asks, after which you can delete the app.
I think some important takeaways are: the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today. And the 30 day window apparently precludes any kind of orderly transition for the app developers who have been monetizing their apps on a yearly schedule.
How can you watch Ms Marvel and think this is copy paste or looks generic? The characters, culture, and art style are pretty unique and make the show quite enjoyable, and I am generally uninterested in the Marvel universe.
Loki was also very different and had a unique look.
Each one of these little series has been pretty enjoyable and different, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. The movies however are not my cup of tea and do seem repetitive and generic with some notable exceptions like Thor Ragnarok.
There is a long history of this including multi-protocol clients. You see this now for example as people want a single "chat" for the many places they publish live streams (twitch, youtube, discord, etc). Unfortunately, because you must ultimately support the lowest common denominator you end up with much of the nice features of particular platforms being unavailable or things like the youtube chat filled with comments like `@comment-copy-bot: James (Discord): That was a cool video!` and things like direct messages and emotes don't really work.
> In 2005 Google added XMPP support to Google Talk/GMail Chat and they were federated, but nobody federated back and they closed off its successor (Hangouts).
I don't think "lack of federation back" was a big driver in this decision. Everyone who used XMPP was able to chat with gchat folks and despite some weird changes Google made to their integration, it worked reasonably well. You didn't need to do anything special to federate with another XMPP server. It just worked like email does.
I expect either product complexity (like having to support non-gchat addressing which then requires full JIDs instead of short names) or de-prioritizing features that weren't directly driving their growth thesis were probably more relevant. Ie, why spend two engineers to fix integration concerns and deal with federation everywhere, when you can just retask those headcount onto some new feature that will drive growth.
> I am well aware (and have been for decades) that I've been the beneficiary of white male privilege
Excellent. Either you got this training at some point or you figured it out yourself. The point of such training is to make sure that all of us white men understand that benefits we've gotten from systemic racism.
This is not really different from other aspects of education. I spent plenty of time in computer science classes where I already understood the material. I had some exposure to this kind of education about systemic racism early in college, which I completely bounced off of and missed the point of. Future exposure eventually got the message through. Sometimes repetition is needed.
> But aside from treating all humans equally, I'm not sure what else I can really do.
That's a big "aside from". There are many times in my career where I have decision making power or influence on a decision that involves other humans. Being aware of systemic racism and unconscious and conscious biases help me make more equitable decisions. If you are doing similar things, then congratulations, you are probably helping solve the problem. I don't think anyone is asking you to do more than that.
It's hard to separate gut feeling from unconscious bias.
Those times you remember not listening to your gut and regretting it are susceptible to confirmation bias.
Personally, I've had great gut feelings about people that turned out to be terrible hires. I've had bad feelings about people who turned out great. I've had direct work experience with folks that were amazing, and then at a future job they performed quite poorly.
There's no removing subjectivity from interviews probably, but I highly recommend you turn down your gut feelings if you have an interest in unbiased or at least less biased hiring decisions.
Music rights are split into two traditionally, the songwriting copyright and the mechanical reproduction right. Previous to the internet, media sales mostly went to the labels who held hte mechanical rights and songwriting copyright was earned directly to the artist. So if you bought a CD the label gets paid, if you play a song on the radio an artist gets paid.
The music industry lawyers were incredibly smart when they passed the DMCA back before online music was much at all, and got internet streaming defined as mechanical reproduction so they got dealt in on streaming.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, et al, which give large blanket licenses to cover most copyrights for songs charged well known quantity for licenses, and early music streaming services paid those. Harry Fox (at least at the time) was the clearing house for mechanical rights and there was actually no set rate or anything. DMCA created a compulsory license that Harry FOx would have to give, but the rates were not known at the time, so everyone was getting VC funding without knowing what anything would cost.
That rate is probably much higher than the songwriting royalties, so the music industry has succeeding in getting ahold of most of the money in a new format that was poised to benefit the artists directly.
I guess we should just be glad it didn't happen like video streaming and there are actually rights clearing houses so companies like Spotify and others can make compelling streaming services with very large catalogs, unlike the city-state video steaming where you need 3-4 services combined to get access to most of the mainstream stuff.