deminature

It's a conspiracy to stop you from dying from an incurable disease until treatment is available, how sinister!

If I had to guess, their account creation metrics are flattening out and some product manager had the idea of implementing this restriction to restart growth. If your performance reviews depend on growth, restrictions like this seem rational even if they're obviously anti-user to anyone outside the company.

There's also reputation issues with a "hire them back later" attitude. Engineers are likely to become skeptical of recruiters from companies with a policy like that, and then you start struggling to hire anyone.

Middle managers have nothing to do with the approvals I was talking about. It's entirely eng-driven.

Yes, you're probably right to some extent. A lot of efficiency and velocity is exchanged in these large scale environments for risk-aversion in the form of heavy testing, supporting the ability to revert changes and requiring approvals.

I'm not personally a fan of it, but I get why it works this way. The financial loss if you break something adds up in an excruciating fashion on a per hour basis.

The approvals usually come from other engineers. It stems from having to modify highly-sensitive code which usually has an owner you need to work with to get an approval.

I wondered this before joining a large tech company. As it turns out, a lot of engineering is done on experimentation to optimize the product. Only a small portion of users might see the experiment, and many don't succeed.

An example might be complying with food and alcohol law in a single region, which you would never see unless you lived there. Another example might be a complete experimentally gated refactor that shaves 1 second off loading time. A lot of effort would go into simply making sure the change can be turned off, and verifying with unit tests, which takes time and effort.

These projects might be pointless on a small app, but in a large business might be worth millions to the company.

Another aspect is your changes often have to be approved by a lot of people, which is not the case on small projects. Your projects are also analyzed by data scientists, to make sure they're not harming the business - and if they are, your work might be thrown out, which contributes to even less visible change to outsiders.

All of these in concert slow things down, and necessitate staff.

Oops, you're right on the deprecation point. CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent is not itself deprecated but every method associated with it is [1].

Also CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent explicitly calls out that it isn't guaranteed to only increase. CACurrentMediaTime is monotonic though.

CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent also returns seconds since 2001 and is not monotonic, so there's really no reason to use it instead of Date().timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate. The most idiomatic equivalent to the Python time method is definitely some usage of Date(), as time in Python doesn't have monotonic guarantees either.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corefoundation/154...

CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent is a long deprecated API, so I'm not sure where that's coming from.

A current and more readable way of expressing this would be

  let start = Date().timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate

If you don't need exact seconds right away, you can simplify further to just:

  let start = Date()

which is easily as simple as the Python example.

Isn't that a problem with any video conferencing service then, if the credentials to enter are shared by participants?

Fair argument, I just think it's rather 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater', getting rid of a tool that teachers are familiar with, works well and can handle 200MM customers because of an easily changed setting, which is already present in the software.

I know your argument is the correct one, but it's frustrating to see Zoom caught up in a furore of media-driven controversy.

It's incredibly straightforward to prevent zoombombing, you simply set a password on your room. I would be surprised if Zoom hadn't made this the default by Monday.

Prior to the age of 'zoombombing', frictionless entry to every meeting was a nice feature, and meeting IDs are difficult enough to guess (11 digit number) that entry of uninvited guests basically never happened.

Now that everyone has so much spare time, the worst elements of society are using it to try to harass children. I guess the tragedy of the commons kicks into full swing and we must have passwords going forward.

Jitsi is the primarily recommended alternative video conferencing tool here, which hasn't had anywhere near the security scrutiny that Zoom has had. I'd prefer to use the tool that we understand is moderately secure, though flawed, rather than the tool that is a security unknown.

It seems a little much to recommend Jitsi as 'better', when nobody is really sure of that.

This is a knee-jerk reaction. Zoom was indirectly sending information to Facebook as part of their Facebook SDK integration to enable login, not directly as part of explicit information gathering. Any app that integrates with the Facebook SDK does this, and they've also patched it already [1].

The supposed root exploit found in Zoom also requires physical, logged-in access to the machine, at which point a Zoom exploit is the least of your problems [2].

Zoom is a solid piece of software, and the developers are responsive and seem to care. I'm disappointed to see it getting dumped on during the past few days. A cynic might even suspect a co-ordinated campaign by Cisco, considering Zoom was started by frustrated ex-Cisco employees and has had runaway growth during the viral crisis, while the same cannot be said for Cisco's competitor product WebEx.

[1] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebo...

[2] https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/01/new-zoom-bugs-takeover-macs-c...

The TARP is still projected to net a $121bn profit for the taxpayer. Only a portion of loans have been returned to the government currently.

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

>In Australia almost no one with some or most of the symptoms is being tested. General Practitioners are basically telling people to fuck off, self isolate and call the hospital if symptoms worsen.

This is simply false:

>Here, testing is free and widely available, thanks to early and coordinated planning for a pandemic. On Thursday, Mr. Hanks said he and his wife had seen the efforts firsthand, as they tested positive for the virus.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/australia/tom-hanks...

There's a good argument to be made that Elliot Management is right simply based on absence of stock growth over the past few years. Facebook has grown 200% while Twitter has had incredibly modest gains. That much of Twitter's little growth might be bot-related just compounds the validity of their argument.

Twitter can't even fall back on being a public good, as it is has supposedly been a large vector for foreign political interference, and they haven't taken nearly the drastic manual moderation steps that Facebook has to combat this (hiring 15k manual content reviewers [1]). Facebook received huge pushback from investors over this decision, but it looks pretty savvy in retrospect.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

They have conflicting incentives, it's the same problem all social networks have. Bot accounts qualitatively detract from the real user experience, but substantially inflate quantitative activity metrics, if artificially.

Policing bot accounts improves the quality of the site, but hands Elliot Management and others more ammunition that social isn't growing to expectations. Unfortunately these sites continue to pick to optimize the latter rather than the former.

It's possible some really drink the kool-aid, but most are just compensated too well to care. The only companies that will try to compete with Facebook on pay are financial institutions like Citadel.

Suggesting this model is short-lived is ignoring history. Grubhub has been running this model in the US since 1999 (originally as Seamless in NYC) [1]. It's very unlikely that its going anywhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grubhub

The majority of employment opportunities in certain fields are in "major cosmopolitan cities", so being skilled in these fields obliges people to live there, whether it's financially comfortable or not.

Seems great, but gating the demo behind an email signup seems like it would bounce a lot of potential customers. It certainly killed my interest in looking at the demo.

I made exactly this transition and don't regret it. Having a native debugger is hugely luxurious, and the Apple developer ecosystem is for the most part, an extremely nice walled garden. The platform is progressive and quick to deprecate legacy features, which keeps things interesting.

In my anecdotal experience however, frontend (React) and backend (Go, Java) devs are in much greater demand broadly across the market, rather than mobile devs.

Facebook received enormous pressure after the 2016 election to get their platform under control and hired over 30,000 manual moderators to try to prevent their platform from being leveraged by malicious actors to spread misinformation. [1]

It's reasonable that Twitter should begin to be less permissive on their platform too, to get ahead of controversies that might occur on their platform in the upcoming election. Twitter political threads are still lawless wastelands full of incendiary comments from suspiciously bot-like accounts, so clearly something has to be done.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/12/17/google-fac...

>Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no - Ian Betteridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Instagram has very limited parts of the application written in RN, like 'Edit Profile'. [1]

The vast majority of the app is implemented natively.

[1] https://instagram-engineering.com/react-native-at-instagram-...

It's popular to hate Softbank-backed companies at the moment, so even an extremely thin article that is basically gossip and anecdotal character assassination strung together into a narrative can get eyeballs.

Yes, I'm sure implementing this feature was as simple as modifying the ownership column in the database. How are dismissive, unthinking comments like this upvoted?

Sounds like you're right:

>Apple is additionally charging Williams with luring away other Apple engineers, also allegedly in breach of his contract.

Yet another virus for OSX that you have to manually download a DMG and install to be vulnerable to. Not to be obnoxious, but I'm still waiting for a Windows-style virus that can proliferate with no action on the user's behalf. That would be legitimate cause for concern.