chronotis

I still remember the moment I hit the Yahoo! home page and saw a banner ad for the first time, and said to myself, "here they come." I didn't project out to surveillance capitalism though, was still a bit too young for such thoughts.

True, and (so far for me, anyway) it's usually been a slow-motion transition so there's been enough time to get ahead of the wave. Or at least keep up with it...as long as you're paying attention.

Bringing this point back closer to home: I've been a "software professional" of one shape or another for over 20 years now. In my case, that's come with a never-ending need to constantly retool: new languages, new SDKs, new device types, new APIs, etc., etc. I'm sure this sounds familiar. There are a LOT of jobs out there that don't have any continuing education requirement, or where the idea of learning some new computer interface for doing the same work you were doing before adds a lot of friction.

I enjoy the constant learning curve, but not everybody does. Professions that used to last a lifetime, don't any more, but we aren't given those expectations at the beginning of our journeys. Additionally, even though I enjoy the act of learning I'm starting to notice that it takes a little bit more effort year by year to learn the new tricks. And yet our earning potential (which directly drives a wide range of personal and family decisions) is dependent on staying on the treadmill.

I can see the day, eventually, where I'm not as fast a learner as the latest round of college graduates and where whatever wisdom I may have gained isn't of any value or relevance. I hope I am wrong about that.

IANAL, but the closest I could see (with a friendly interpretation) would be:

investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States;

So, a factory in China is the "property in which any foreign country...has any interest", and the President could block any transactions involving that property.

I wasn't exhaustive in my storytelling. Most of that growth came from M&A activity. Financial engineering.

I'm not sure whether to feel vindicated to see someone else echoing my own internal thoughts, or to feel nauseous about reliving those years. I was fortunate enough to have been at a company that was making money, but I still remember growing from 500 employees to 4000 or so in 2 years...and then dropping back down to 1500 two years later. We bought a small software company for the talent, and 3 months later was told to layoff the entire team.

Many great colleagues left tech at that point to become Realtors, landscapers, accountants. This is not to say that we are destined to relive exactly the same fate, but it's good to remember that rapid change is always a possibility.

This entire thread is a perfect example of confirmation bias.

I was living in Orange County (CA) when my son was born. It would have been _very_ easy to find a midwife and a pediatrician that were totally fine and all-in on "alternative vaccination schedules." I can't speak for all other metros where this has played out, but I suspect the same is true in many places. Lack of knowledge (or holding on to provably false beliefs) isn't something that physicians are immune to.

Yes, but that's also a torpedo to the way programmatic ads are currently bought and sold. (FWIW I am in favor of such a change, but there are a lot of very large tech companies selling data management platforms whose core value prop is being able to stitch together audiences from this sort of data and precisely target them everywhere their browser cookie or device ID goes.)

Setting aside penalties for a moment, what is the minimum set of changes to programmatic advertising practices that would bring it into compliance with GDPR? Would removing the targeting categories that relate to intimate data be sufficient? Or is something deeper, more structural in the crosshairs?

To this day, I can say "doompa choompa doompa choompa doompa choompa choompa choompa" and my brothers and father will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Why is this article popping again now? It's from over 2 years ago.

This was what was particularly interesting to me - that they went to the effort of writing a purely technical article on the particulars of how parts of their environment operate, and to publish it on their platform even when that's not the sort of content they're known for.

Unbelievable, no. I'm making a meta-observation about a pattern of social commenting on this particular subject that spans many sites.

Sometimes I feel like there's a bot-army monitoring all channels for new articles invoking the words "climate" or "global warming" and forwarding those pages to a waiting battalion of troll-soldiers.

My family has always made jokes about or accused me of being unusually lucky. I didn't really believe that was the case; over time, my standard response to these suggestions is that we can manufacture luck. That wasn't based on any actual research, though, so it's refreshing to see some data back me up.