Does anyone have any examples of what the author is referring to as "sludge music"? I use Spotify a lot, and listen a lot of recommended songs and generally I haven't encountered much of this type of content to my knowledge. (Even though I do listen to ambient music which I think would be rife with this type of sludge mood music the author seems to describe)
As far as I can see only the BBC article is claiming Twitter is trying to label bots as "good" or "bad". The actual system appears to be for linking bot accounts to real accounts (ie. who made this bot) or simply label an account as "automated" to give better transparency, which to me sounds like an overall positive feature.
It is true that hiding it for many years would make it less attractive for terrorists, however one could imagine another strategy where you wait 12 months before anonymously telling the authorities you did it, without telling them how. (While threatening to do it again)
Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases around that cannot be detected until way after it happens would be close to the perfect terrorist attack imo. You could probably keep the attack going for at least a year before authorities get their act together, all the while people would be scared shitless as it would be very hard to know how the original group got infected a year earlier if you choose the right product to contaminate. (Not even mentioning the difficulty finding who did the contamination even if the specific product is found)
Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon? It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions and have a close to 100% death-rate without anyone noticing until many years after the contamination started.
Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example.
They also "bulk up" food products, for example introducing filler into meat products such as water and salt [1] such that they can sell a smaller amount of meat for the same price without the consumer noticing.
Eventually a disease will evolve to target these bees or the victim bees themselves will evolve some countermeasure. At that point since they are all clones they cannot evolve a defense and will be wiped out.
I agree Facebook events could be a lot better, but have you considered the possibility that Facebook simply does not see any reason to put resources into improving the feature?
Instead of assuming some conspiratorial theory that Facebook is deliberately sabotaging their own product, I think the much simpler explanation is that Facebook events work "well enough" that Facebook does not see any reason to invest resources into improving it.
Facebook events are probably one of the oldest features on the site, and from my personal experience working in big product orgs, these old, "working" features are often left to rot until the org sees a reason to invest into them again. (Such as a competitor threatening to steal their marketshare) I assume the events team is quite "barebone" if it even exists and Facebook probably thinks their engineers/UX developers are better spent elsewhere.
So here is what I don't get about the "tether scam":
I remember these worries about Tether not being backed by real cash being a major concern all the way back in 2018(?), if I remember correctly the worry was exactly the same that Tether might not be backed by enough real $ and collapsing when people find this out. Now 3 or so years later we know this is a fact, yet there has been no prophesied collapse in Bitcoin value as a result. (It has lost value lately but to my knowledge for unrelated reasons)
So what is going on here? Is Tether not being backed by real $ not actually as big a deal? Or is the Bitcoin bubble so strong people still buy into it even when Tether is basically a scam?
I think I remember first getting déjà vu from websites with this style about two years ago. Fun that it is getting so overused now that more people are starting to notice. Below is a good article going into a bit more backstory on the style.
My first Apple product was a iPad Pro I got last year. I consider myself quite tech savvy, but the gestures was a huge pain-point when learning the device, to the point that it soured the whole experience for me:
When trying to find the WiFi toggle button (which is accomplished by "pinching" the screen) I basically just tried every possible gesture until I found the right one (I know that some gesture opened it from watching others). By far the worst and most memorable UX problem of the year.
I don't know how common this is in other countries but in Norway we have a common system called BankID which is pretty much the de-facto way to identify yourself when applying for government services, bank loans or basically anything else "important". It usually consists of a two-factor authenticator issued by your bank, a password and your "birth number" (basically SSN) if you have all three as far as any bank or the government is concerned you "are" the person. However since it is so robust I don't think it can be exploited unless you royally fuck up. I wonder how the per capita identity theft cases in Norway are compared to the US because of this system, I would think much lower.
Afaik it makes perfect sense in a third-world country: There is no social security net so your only security is your children taking care of you when you get old / become unable to work. Probably there is a high chance some of these children will either not grow up to take care of them, or not grow up at all. Solution: hedge your bet by having as many children as possible.
Interestingly my company is working on something that seeks to solve the same problem. It is called Podium and was recently open-sourced: https://podium-lib.io/
While it is still under active development we are using it in production for quite a lot of our new projects and it have worked very well for us so far!
I was kinda disappointed when I realized when you search it seems to basically only do a simple image search (ala Google) and return the primary color of the individual images, as can be seen by hovering over the small icon in each color result.
I would not really call that machine learning, since it's basically an image search engine with a color filter.
I felt that one addition could be "Many problems have trivial solutions, but they are of little practical value"
0 is often a trivial solution to many PDEs, but it is of little analytical value, so it is often discarded. In the same sense death is a trivial of many life problems: Dying would solve most (all?) problems in life, but it is not a solution you would typically consider :)
Too many teams I have worked in have way too little personal on-boarding in my opinion. At least with these presentations I know how the manager "wants" to present him/herself, if this turns out to be false, as you say, I'll know soon enough.
On the other hand there are managers that do not introduce themselves enough to new employees which forces you to effectively learn by trial and error how you should interact with them.
My point is I would appreciate an idealist sales pitch about a new manager more than just an unplanned, informal conversation.