amarkov

Respectfully, I'm not sure the author understands what he's talking about. He's arguing for the no-op process where engineers determine all their own tasks and priorities - and I mean, I'd like that too. But there's a fundamental difficulty in aligning each engineer's personal goals with those of the company, and some amount of management or organizational design has to go towards addressing it. Engineers won't just naturally align with the organization if nobody rewards us for doing so.

> Do managers or Product Owners track and estimate every task they engage in with little or no say in what they work on?

> Are they required to present burn down charts that show that they are on target to finish?

> Are they required to do bi-weekly sell-off meeting to justify their activities?

These things are in fact the primary responsibilities of managers and product owners.

Again, it'd definitely be possible to write a document more narrowly describing what they need a license to do. But that doesn't solve the problem. The updated version would be more readable for network engineers, less readable for lawyers, and still incomprehensible to the average person who just wants to upload a meme.

It's precisely what the legalese means, and carries connotations which are absolutely nothing like what Imgur intends. They claim unlimited rights not because they don't want to be bothered to restrict them, but because the structure of the Internet makes it impossible to write a simple description of when copies will be made.

They could try going into detail:

> We can send copies of your image to anyone who, following standard Internet routing protocols, says that someone has requested to see the image and promises to forward the copy onwards to the original requester. Anyone we send the image to can also create copies themselves following this rule, and can temporarily store the copies as needed to make further copies.

But then neither the average Joe nor lawyers are going to be able to understand it.

The problem is that legal terminology doesn't always match conventional descriptions of what's happening.

Copyright is actually a perfect example of this. In order to send my photo over the Internet to other people who want to view it, you need much more than the legal right to display my picture. Sending a picture over the Internet involves copying, distributing, and sublicensing the image countless numbers of times. So any site with user-uploaded content will have something very close to (Imgur's for reference):

> With regard to any file or content you upload to the public portions of our site, you grant Imgur a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable worldwide license (with sublicense and assignment rights) to use, to display online and in any present or future media, to create derivative works of, to allow downloads of, and/or distribute any such file or content.

There's no way the typical user will understand this, but that's not because it's obfuscated. The typical user just doesn't have the background to understand what all these rights are or why Imgur requires them. It would be severely misleading to write the literal meaning in layperson's terms:

> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.

> Telegram has no authority to ban anything so it cannot be at fault. Trying to make your service work cannot be called "malicious activity".

Telegram knew the Russian government was trying to censor them. So they disguised their traffic as Google traffic. Now, because Telegram did this and Russia called their bluff, some Google clients who have nothing to do with Telegram can no longer reach the Russian market.

Why isn't this just as malicious as any other denial of service attack? It sucks for Telegram, but it's not reasonable or sustainable to let anyone who needs to evade censorship impersonate Google.

When you say Facebook is "selling data", I think most people would understand it to mean that advertisers can go to Facebook and buy a list of people who eat at McDonalds. That's very different from the opaque ad targeting Facebook actually sells.

Facebook sent forensic auditors to investigate CA. There was a general public perception that this was sketchy (what if they're really trying to destroy evidence implicating themselves?), and they were asked to stand down by British law enforcement.

Facebook's position is that they should have done more to stop companies like CA from being in a position to abuse user data - and implicitly, that there's no need for strong regulations to make them do it. Suing everyone in sight would make it seem like they're trying to create a narrative where they did nothing wrong.

They did suffer from a similar network effect, which was only broken when AT&T accepted a consent decree to spin off all its regional providers.

CA told Facebook that they did delete the data set. FB (if you believe their timeline) only discovered they lied when the scandal started circulating in the news.

Is that really the world we want, though? If Google is liable for third-party defamation, aren't they likely to deindex any negative news about anyone who threatens to sue them?

Because someone has to. We can't have a world where I can just declare any search result violates my privacy, and Google isn't allowed to say I'm wrong.

Well, two responses to that:

* Is this what you actually want? Would it be proper for Google to say "we've conclusively decided that climate change is real, so from now on we will delist all climate change denial content"?

* What do you think the chances are that a newspaper editorial board would delete an article, just because you wrote them a letter saying it was false?

The Supreme Court had noted in their ruling that, if Google were to show that it is in fact illegal in their home jurisdiction to comply with the order, that would change the analysis. Courts are generally pretty willing to engage in comity analysis; they understand there's a problem when a Canadian court orders an American company to violate American law.

Why must they be?

Imagine the mirror image scenario, where a man's done something wrong, and he has a $100k budget to stop me from telling people about it. Should he really be able to say "hey Google, I'm not going to prove this, but he's totally defaming me so you have to censor him"?

When national legislatures call people to testify, that's not a neutral information-gathering exercise. The MPs are going into that panel with a very clear idea of what the witness is going to say, and how they can spin it towards their preferred talking points. Zuckerberg isn't a UK citizen and didn't authorize any misconduct specific to the UK; why should he personally participate in Parliament's ritual shaming of Facebook?

Sure, but isn't that the point for Rust? You can rule out huge classes of problems with a clear dataflow architecture - thus, the language should enforce one, rather than requiring programmers to hand-roll one correctly.

The problem is that lots of people find lots of different things morally repugnant. If it's normalized for people to leak things that they consider morally repugnant, that means there are serious costs to engaging in any controversial discussion. There's no way I'm going to talk about diversity at my company if I think someone might go tell a reporter what I said; there's no viewpoint on the issue which isn't offensive to someone.

Any large organization can have its reputation seriously damaged by strategic leaks. If tens of thousands of people get together for years and years, someone is going to do something that looks terrible when amplified in the national media.

One of the important qualities of a great place to work is that decisions are made based on sober analysis rather than reflexive corrections. Maybe you're right, and Facebook is just too important to allow that, but I think it's fair for Facebook employees to be unhappy about this.

Certainly, but not in the direction I think you're implying. Open source means that you know how to solve all the problems MySQL has solved, even if you don't actually know how to implement a good database engine.

It was my understanding that Netflix wanted to show their movies in French cinemas, but French regulations would prevent them from doing that while also streaming the movies for subscribers.

The issue isn't whether the company has the answers to the questions, but what it costs to assemble those answers in the requested form. You can't respond to detailed legal inquiries by just having customer support copy-paste from documentation; they don't have the expertise required to guarantee a complete and correct answer.

The motivation is that both kinds of "on-premise" create roughly similar engineering challenges. (Your app has to be adaptable to heterogenous execution environments, all your code changes will be in a partially released state for indefinite periods of time, it's hard to immediately diagnose whether a reported problem is your fault or user error...)

That doesn't seem like a sufficient story to explain most kinds of advertising. What perks do all the local grocery stores get from mailing me leaflets about what's on sale?

What I'm thinking of are things like "a paying customer can DoS you with a carefully constructed malicious input". That usually won't be practical issue if you're small enough to know all your customers - but it has the potential to be very problematic if you incentivize people to find it.

The advantage of making the string type immutable is that you can do what's known as "string interning": if the same string shows up multiple times in your program, only one copy has to be kept in memory. This is particularly useful for compile-time constant strings.

C and C++ actually do a similar thing with their string literals, which are immutable even though normal strings aren't.

What do you do when the response to a bug bounty is "yeah, we already knew about that, and we're not planning to fix it soon because the consequences aren't high"? In my experience that's a pretty common scenario for early to medium stage startups.

Your basic premise, that society as a whole ought to approve of new technologies before anyone is allowed to use them, seems very strange.

Well, I mean, what counts as exploitation? If I learn a lot about what shoes people like in my job as a shoe salesman, and I use that experience when new people come in to make recommendations, I think everyone would call that just good customer service. But when Amazon sets up an ML model to do the same thing, many people argue they're exploiting your personal data for the sake of profit.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a widespread web-based ML application that some people don't consider exploitative. But is that a property of the ML or the people?

GDPR only requires erasure of personal data on request, where "personal data" is defined as information relating to some identified or identifiable person. Machine learning models trained on personal data aren't going to be personal data themselves.