deleted_account

These four day work week anecdotes are great. The pandemic may just kick off a renaissance for alternative work schedules. But these conversations seem to be stirring up the reality that so much of compensation calculation and productivity measurement is really, really arbitrary.

It still seems to come down to circumstance and whatever an employee manages to negotiate with their employer. "I'll take a 20% pay cut to work 4 days a week!" could just as easily be met with "No, our investors won't be happy with a longer roadmap."

As some point in the past decade, front-end development tipped over into feeling like GUI programming. The modern webpack-react-typescript boilerplate manages to capture all the early-2000's suck of Swing/AWT with none of the self-aware nostalgia.

I'm crossing my fingers that "Transpiler Free" becomes the new "W3C XHTML Valid" and a trend of minimalist, hipster bravado ushers in a simpler era of web development.

Mission Concept Review is a milestone in NASA's Program/Project Lifecycle: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_sy....

It sits between the "Concept Studies" and "Concept and Technology Development" phases.

Contextual advertising doesn't imply the system's completely ignorant of the device's detected language or geolocation. It simply means you're not employing a series of correlated requests across a stable identifier (browser cookie, IDFA, etc.) to model some outcome, e.g. probability to purchase, for a given advertisement.

Instead you infer a set of user features based on the domain/content _and_ attributes of the single request: device, geo, time of day, language, etc.

Who tags though, publishers? I mean, you're right; I'm not being a contrarian for the sake of argument.

Contextual targeting probably will have a more interesting pitch in a post-third-party cookie Internet, but it's not going to be _the_ solution. There are already proposals for targeted advertising that may be more compelling/cheaper-to-implement, see TURTLEDOVE: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove.

"what does "Scale" even mean here?"

I meant in context of the number of publishers that advertisers need to deal with to purchase impressions.

Cutting out the ad networks probably makes sense for Ster and NPO. I know nothing about Dutch media, but I'm guessing they're big enough to court large brands with big marketing budgets on their own.

[edit: The "Mass media in the Netherlands" Wikipedia page is bananas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_the_Netherlands. I'm gathering advertising on NPO is regulated by a public body; the STER from the article.]

...'cause _historically_ contextual advertising doesn't work better than targeted. And contextual targeting is hard, because determining context is hard and it can fail catastrophically (I recall the apocryphal story about a washing machine manufacturer's banner smack dab in the middle of a macabre news story about a toddler abandoned in a clothes dryer. Brand safety FTL.)

Your example on the "car hatches" is a really simple case and there's only so many niche publishers out there catering to specific audiences. That's how you end up with media companies like Vox and Gizmodo. And in terms of scale...well, go look at the Digital Media comscore rankings: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings

As for "advertisers get higher intent traffic", that simply isn't true. I'm not refuting your intuition 'cause it absolutely sounds right, but in terms of tracking and targeted ads knowing stuff like, "You left product in your checkout cart." is a waaay higher signal of intent.

This article discusses the Dutch national broadcaster NPO's switch from targeted ads to _contextual_ advertising, placing advertisements based on the content of the publisher site instead of user features of the person reading the page.

STER mentioned in the article is NPO's ad agency. The whitepaper is available on STER's site: https://www.ster.nl/onderzoek/een-toekomst-zonder-advertenti...

I haven't read the whitepaper (waiting on the English language version.) Where the increased revenue is coming from isn't really clear. It seems really unlikely they're increasing revenue by charging more per impression.

Cutting out the ad network could make up for it, but then this seems like a case of STER setting itself up as supply platform. It works great for large publishers, but doesn't really scale.

Totally related: expect to see more if these articles. The demise of third-party cookies is coming and groups like W3C's Web Advertising Business Group [https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/] and efforts like Chromium's privacy sandbox [https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...] are picking up steam.

In the United States, I think we're living in an era of remarkably _little_ censorship; compare Hays Code-era Hollywood to today (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code)

Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" (https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...) touches on censorship in the context of information systems.

Almost nobody considers how much the "censorship" discussion lags behind what media conglomerates were willing to broadcast to begin with, see Wu's comparisons between media standards in the States vs. the British Broadcasting Company's.

Explicit in your original question "Why do so many people need to be so extreme?" is the presumption that standing against police brutality is an extreme position to have. It preserves the status quo. It preserves a world where literal Nazis are accepted as "very fine people".

To answer your question directly, to address systemic racism in America we need to shift the Overton window of discourse. That _requires_ dissemination of values and ideas which many consider radical or unthinkable.

Beyond that, to say someone is dumb and naive because they don't think cops should be allowed to kill people is callous and ignorant when you consider blacks are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites. [https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/]

"Zero is impossible" is implicitly saying, "Cops should be allowed to kill people." Easy to say when it's not your community in the crosshairs.

My dude, that ain’t even remotely why people are out in the streets. You’re sitting on the sidelines confused why everyone is shouting.

Stop. Think. You're making a "perfect is the enemy of the good" argument which ultimately supports police brutality and systemic racism.

(I'll also point out that 8cantwait.org is a Campaign Zero project. Thank you for linking it.)

Sweet! Can you get me signed photos from the Skullcap Crew?!

Look at it this way, what would you think of a development team that shipped bugs to production and had...no code reviews...no unit tests...no bug tracking system?

And every time they shipped a bug someone died?

You might be inclined to improve the process, right?

I won't belabor the analogy. Campaign Zero has a great summary of the policy changes that can help: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions

Thin Blue Line is a myth. A symptom of people who have fallen victim to mean world syndrome.

The article is part of Vox's The Rehab Racket series [1].

"America is facing a harrowing opioid epidemic, one that kills thousands of people each year. But the rehab system that could help combat the crisis is failing. It is far too expensive for typical families and often provides addiction treatments that aren’t proven or actually have evidence against them."

In other words, the system is encouraging a reckless amount of money spent on solutions known to not work while evidence-based interventions exist.

We are living in the "leeches and trepanation" era of addiction treatment.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/30/20833549/v...

The indictment[1] sheds some light on the difference: "On or about December 11,2015, he downloaded approximately 14,000 files from SVN. These files contained critical engineering information about the hardware used on Project Chauffeur self-driving vehicles, including schematics for the printed circuit boards used in various custom LiDAR products."

In other words, the accusation is that he stole technology that was the output of the entire Project Chauffeur team, not simply stuff of his own creation. Presumably, those materials were non-trivial and represent the combined effort of many engineers over many years.

Imagine you're toiling on a team for years and your absurdly compensated boss decides they want the whole pie, clones the repo their laptop, and dips out to found their own start up based on everyone's work.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/press-release/file/1197991...

"Chesterton's fence".

"Technology companies often choose to gender technology believing it will make people more comfortable adopting it.

Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress.

As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.

Q is an example of what we hope the future holds; a future of ideas, inclusion, positions and diverse representation in technology."

This is the actual report: https://www.asyousow.org/report/the-100-most-overpaid-ceos-2...

The methodology "lists the 25 most overpaid CEOs, identifying the company, the CEO and his pay as reported at the annual shareholder meeting, and the pay of the company’s median employee."

Activision Blizzard's Kotick's $25M comes in at 306:1; Electronic Arts' Andrew Wilson's $35M is 371:1 .

Ronald F. Clarke of Fleetcor Technologies Inc is a generous 1517:1.

Oof, talk about burying the lede:

My personality today isn’t my disease. It’s a disease of the whole industry, at least in Russia. Our mentality is predicated on the cult of power and superiority. And that’s what we need to fix: just stop being that. It’s quite easy, actually.

A bit of irony in the, "It’s quite easy, actually," given the thesis. I can't imagine a harder talent to learn than emotional intelligence. I would rather teach someone...I dunno...concurrent programming than how to stop being an asshole.

Sorry I lost you. I understood you believe titles rarely align with skill and companies disingenuously use "leader" to justify a ratio of employees to managers. A company is as likely to promote on the basis of "hire somebody sexy" as anything else.

This mindset seems corrosive. I assume you had good managers, but I cannot imagine a career in which that was the norm would result in such cynicism.

My point was only this: in my experience, healthy organizations have a better value systems.

You believe there are qualities that good leader would exhibit — in the abstract — but experience has never offered mentor, teacher, motivator you respect thus all promotions must be based on facets unrelated to merit: ignorance, nepotism, and sexism.

You may want to ask yourself if your viewpoints are a case of WYSIATI bias or a generalizable fact about how businesses are run.

I think you very much understand a leader can be something more than a buzzword: "If you’re a leader in an organization, you need to be aware of the stories that occupy the minds you oversee."

Or maybe more succinctly: "If a great manager screws up, he should lay awake at night until he fixes it, just as a great engineer would wake up to fix a production issue."

These traits combined with a scope of influence is what I was referencing.

These and the parent's examples are very team-centric. The heuristic I use when thinking about these engineering roles is, "Where is this person expected to be a leader?"

The progression is usually: Team, Cross-team, Organization, Industry. Competent technical decisions are table stakes. The real differentiator is at what level can they effect change.

I wouldn't cling to the narrative that it was those bureaucrats and their food safety regulations that killed Chowdy. Long listed three reasons they failed before he got to, "the Toronto health department did not approve of our distribution model."

Take a look at one of their hubs: https://imgur.com/a/PQJB09X. Maybe around 300+ meals stuffed in there? Back-of-the-enveloping the amount of time people are opening and closing those doors, I'm a little dubious they're staying at refrigerator temperature the whole time. I'm not surprised someone looked at this and thought, "That's an e. coli outbreak waiting to happen."

I feel like I'm coming across more of these "exit, then atone" profiles and none of them seem to have any teeth. They read like self-help articles for the ultra-rich: "Broken moral compass keeping you up at night? Try driving a Honda Odyssey."

I get it; you took the money. I'd sure as hell take the money. One anecdote about sniping at Sheryl Sandberg is washed away by this milquetoast sentiment:

“It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don’t want to do,” Acton says. “It’s better if I get out of your way. And I did.”

This pg quote has an r/LateStageCapitalism vibe to me: "They just arrived back from NYC, and when I asked them what was the most significant thing they'd observed, it was how many of their users actually needed to do these rentals to pay their rents."

"Internet persona(s) who happens to follow you and you happen to follow them..."