amarkov

Sure. But if European countries can insist on globally de-indexing truthful information because they feel its continued propagation is harmful, that seriously undercuts any moral high ground available when China tries to do the same.

There's always a reason for expanding government bureaucracies. Some worthy problem, which the government plausibly could solve if it had just a little bit more power to intervene.

That doesn't change the direct consequence of the intervention, that there's now yet another area where the government sits there telling everyone what to do. If we believe that government ought to be limited, at some point we have to balance against that.

Surely you understand how it creates bad incentives, if feedback about individual productivity can be delivered bluntly but feedback about prioritization can't be given at all.

Fingers crossed for sure, but there's such a thing as growing too fast for your own good. Github famously stopped being profitable the year after it got a $250M round.

I'm sure it's a nightmare for a professional journalist. And I don't mean that as an insult - it'd be a nightmare for me too.

But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30 mile radius, trying to convince them that you can be the most submissive and obedient out of the 200 applicants. It's hard to begrudge the gig economy for providing an alternative to that.

Schemaless databases are good for scenarios where the database isn't a source of truth. If you have a table full of e.g. per-second heartbeats from a bunch of deployed services, there's no fundamental underlying truth anyone's trying to gather from it, and you can't afford to run a full schema migration every time someone adds a new metric.

I recognize some people do try to use schemaless databases in the way you're describing, and I agree that's weird and dangerous.

Certainly, but that doesn't mean the schema has to be a strict validation encoded into your storage format. It's a perfectly well-defined programming model to say "well, I'm reading query X with schema Y, and if some rows don't match Y give me nulls instead".

Certainly not. But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information.

Most business ideas aren't rejected for any kind of compact reason. The decisionmaker typically has other things that are higher priority, or they just kinda avoid giving a green light until it's interpreted as a rejection.

There's a sense in which summary views are the real data. If I asked Spotify to share my data, and they just sent me a 250 MB file of every interaction they've ever recorded, I would conclude they're trying to obfuscate which data they actually use and how they use it.

It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a Silicon Valley with their politics. This article describes a bunch of concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't marginalized, bring local communities together, and don't provide mechanisms for creating echo chambers. But what neither Turner nor Khan discuss is how tech companies will realize they ought to do this.

What if Amazon politicizes in the direction of libertarianism, and decides its only social responsibility is to increase the world's GDP?

What if Facebook politicizes in the direction of social justice, and determines that segregating people into identity-based safe spaces is the way to go?

What if Google politicizes in the direction of some political party, and decides it's duty-bound to tweak its search algorithm to hurt opposing candidates?

When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of them go so far to make you worry you'll be taken out back and shot.

You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.

But arbitration didn't fail here. He never tried it in the first place.

The traditional American dream is that you change your status through making friends and simple hard work. If you're the hardest working and most dedicated Walmart sales associate, you'll quickly become a manager, and you can iterate on that at least until you're a regional director or something.

From that perspective, it's weird to look in on a typical Silicon Valley company, where it's understood that only people with specific technical knowledge are qualified to make important decisions. And it's downright scary to look at Uber, where the drivers have no internal mobility even in theory.

Most people aren't particularly tempted to shape their behavior to Facebook. They just use other channels for things they don't specifically want everyone to see. If some people are so uninvested in their thoughts that "open up a group chat" is an insurmountable barrier... well, they were going to be mind controlled by a stiff breeze, so it's hard to blame Facebook.

Sure, I can imagine a world where scooters are as common as bikes. But is that enough to justify a $2B valuation for a scooter-sharing startup?

If the GDPR was really intended to forbid business models which require collecting user data for ad targeting, why wouldn't it have just said that?

How would Heller vs. DC have incorporated anything? DC is a federal district; there were no states involved in that case.

That's generally exactly what they're trying to measure: statistics about people who follow the standard path society lays out for education. If something about getting an advanced degree is discouraging people from doing startups, that's important to know, whether or not some population of smart autodidacts also exists.

Not necessarily naturally, but it's reasonably easy to learn - it's ultimately the same underlying mechanism as singing different notes.

Being incidentally rejected might not be worth a lawsuit. But the plaintiffs claim, in part, that Harvard is specifically trying to discriminate against Asian applicants to keep Asians out of the student body. I think that's worth litigating over if it's true.

GitHub, Inc. is a for-profit organization too, as are its biggest competitors. If you're concerned about the interaction between profit and code hosting, that doesn't have much to do with this acquisition.

Google tried to do code hosting before, so they must see some value in it.

As Facebook learned recently, people aren't willing to give much benefit of the doubt to solutions involving human review. Can you imagine a creator saying "I don’t think YouTube is doing this on purpose", as they did in this article, if some actual Youtube employee had clicked a button to demonetize?

It's not obvious that they would have won. Zuckerberg hasn't actually forced ads into WhatsApp yet, and WhatsApp remains ad-free today. He just (allegedly, according to anonymous sources) is suggesting that WhatsApp leadership should do it.

But it seems like decentralization would be a mortal blow to privacy. If we struggle to get a monolithic Facebook to treat our data responsibly, how could we possibly convince 500 decentralized Facebook nodes? (And why isn't it trivial for the NSA or FSB to copy the world's data by standing up node #238 under an alias?)

I don't like that my data is exploited to target ads. But I also wouldn't like it if Facebook charged 25 cents per friend request, or threatened to cut me off from my social groups if I didn't pay the monthly fee. Similar problems apply to Facebook's platform standards and data handling.

I don't mean to claim that Facebook's done nothing wrong. But ultimately, there are uncomfortable tradeoffs involved in friendship-as-a-service. Expecting an completely non-creepy version of Facebook is like expecting a completely non-controversial version of government.

But copyleft licenses do end up preventing software from running on some platforms. For example, none of the work that goes into the Linux kernel can be made available to Windows users.

I'm sure the FSF sees this as a tradeoff that has to be made in order to keep free software viable. But that's a very different story than "user freedom is everything".

The question is why those are legitimate things to insist on protection against. Surely a free software license couldn't say "it's forbidden to run this program on iOS" or "nobody affiliated with the US government may modify the code", even though the free software community has real concerns about walled gardens and government backdoors.

"Software which respects the moral positions of people like those in the Free Software Foundation" seems like an inherently complicated concept, that's not really amenable to a one or two word summary.