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You can define the charger to include the cable, and I can define the phone to include the cable. Either way it doesn’t provide much insight into the definitions with legal force.

I’ve been using lightning happily since my non-Apple devices were coming with broken micro USB cables. As a consumer I’ve been very happy with this. There’s nothing malicious about it.

Is this any better than the cables that come with non-Apple devices? I’m skeptical.

Relocating HQ means laying off all your employees. This is not a figure of speech or analogy, it’s literally true. You are laying off all of your employees in the current location when you move the jobs away. The question is whether those employees are going to choose to uproot themselves to go work for you at the new HQ, or stay behind and find another job. Most will stay put instead of moving away. People generally don’t take kindly to forced moves. Many ethnic groups have legendary historical calamities that consist of being forced to move en masse.

If a software company did this, my guess is all development would cease for a long time and you may exceed the “bus factor” and permanently kill a large portion of projects. In fact I’m aware of management at one company winding down projects by moving the skeleton crew who agrees to leave to a lower COL city.

This is not much different from outsourcing to a lower COL country.

When Facebook gets sued for all that other wrongdoing, they can pay out for it. Maybe you boost the fines by weighing the probability of getting caught. Facebook has been fined before and many other legal conflicts are ongoing, so it’s not as though they are getting a pass.

If Facebook gets a company-destroying fine for each act of wrongdoing, then it’s just a race where the first victims to prosecute get compensated. The slowpokes are screwed because the company has nothing left to pay out. This seems like a less fair system than one where fines are proportional to the value extracted or damages caused by the illegal conduct.

I’m not worried about photos of myself that I upload, but am somewhat worried about photos of me that other people took. For example, there exist photos of me hanging out with my friends who are wearing kink gear, and some of those photos have been posted online. Everyone involved is having a good time and everything’s legal. Some of my coworkers might find the photos offensive, but those people aren’t browsing through kink photo galleries, so they aren’t going to see them. But I don’t want these photos to come up if you search for my name online. I also don’t want to engage in some censorship war trying to get them taken down.

Facial recognition tech, used in this way, seems to throw a bomb into a fragile peace where people can coexist with each other despite having incompatible values.

I find it weird how people compare a fine for some specific conduct to the revenue or profit of an entire company. In this case, the illegal use of facial recognition probably slightly increased engagement for photo sharing features. That’s worth something but it obviously only accounts for a very small portion of the company’s revenues.

If the story was “judge declares entirety of Facebook enterprise illegal, punishment is $550M fine” I would get the outrage.

Do you have any data on the true prevalence of cell data coverage in Africa? A coverage map would be cool, but an estimate of the % of people who live in a covered location would also be useful.

Assets don’t need to be completely independent for their combination to provide an improved risk-adjusted return. In fact, all asset prices are correlated, but we still diversify. I don’t think the financial crisis happened because nobody heard of conditional probability. Derivative structuring is one of the places where people who are good at math go to get rich.

Here is an old paper from 2001 that talks about how ratings agencies were using this math: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4480294?seq=1

The devil is in the details - even if you understand the math, you have a lot of choices to make. Ultimately you are going to have to set parameters on your model where the data to estimate the parameter accurately doesn’t exist. And at that point, math suddenly turns into opinion.

Programming has a fixed one-time cost to produce while subscription revenue scales with number of subscribers and is recurring. This means that as Netflix grows, they can keep producing more expensive content and grow their catalog faster. There is a feedback loop here:

The same money spent on content has higher ROI the bigger the subscriber count is -> the more/better content they produce, they more subscribers they can get -> the more subscribers, the more money they get to play with.

The mix of lower and higher-end content probably makes sense because the low end content is cheap to produce and caters to people with niche interests, or people who watch constantly and just want something new to watch.

People who are looking for VC funding for their business consider it a slur, because VCs will use it as a reason not to fund.

To give an analogy: “family car” is a good way of describing a safe car that fits a lot of passengers. But if you set up your SUV for rock-crawling and somebody calls it “a nice family car” you might consider it a slur.

To be clear, I think self-driving cars beat busses on quality of service. There simply isn’t a bus that exists that will take most people from where they are where they want to go. Dynamically generated routes beat fixed routes, because they get people to their destination. UberPool accomplishes the same thing, but uses more drivers per passenger than a bus, which leads to labor exploitation. Self-driving fixes that problem.

And no, I don’t want to shut down the busses. I’m describing why so few people are using them, and why self-driving cars have a better chance of success. In fact, I think self-driving is a necessary ingredient for a public transit system that meets everyone’s needs in the US. I think buses are a natural park of a self-driving network - a dynamic dispatch system can use them on the most in-demand routes.

Right now in America, the vast majority of people are driving solo to work. Even if self-driving vehicles merely double the capacity those vehicles handle, that seems enough to fix our transit problem.

What I hope for, is that as the information economy continues to grow, its political power will eventually exceed that of physical industry. At that point, it will be possible to put in place policies like a carbon tax that will reduce environmental harms while further weakening the political power of the harmful industries. Ultimately we could cap and tax or cap and trade all sorts of environmental harms, not just carbon emissions. Wealth would accrue to companies that generate economic value while society determines the total level of allowable environmental harm (which could be negative).

I think other approaches like “rise up and destroy capitalism” would protect the environment faster if successful but have less chance of success.

Indeed, such mechanisms exist in the form of raises, promotions, bonuses, etc.

What about information and quality? I see no reason why a species couldn’t sit around coming up with increasingly fashionable jokes until the heat death of the universe. I think that’s where we are headed.

The natural conclusion to this argument is that everyone on earth is speaking the same language, because they all descended from the Mitochondrial Eve’s utterances 150000 years ago.

If we can modify our desires for growth to be oriented toward metrics that don’t scale with physical resource consumption, we can solve this problem. Such sustainable growth metrics could include miniaturization or quality increases in physical goods, or even changes in some information good. And the happy news is many parts of the economy are already undergoing this transformation. You can read about the decoupling of GDP and carbon emissions for some interesting research on this topic.

I’ve had some great experiences with public transit in some of the cities you listed, and I would never suggest trying to replace those well-working systems. However a lot of cities have really broken public transit that almost nobody uses, and are dominated by people driving solo in gasoline-fueled cars.

I’m wondering if you have ever ridden a bus, and also a shared Uber? The car gets you where you are going a lot faster than the bus, because you need to wait for at most 2 other stops instead of 17 or whatever, and you never need a transfer. Whether or not this argument convinces you, experiencing it yourself makes the difference obvious. It’s one of those things where you can actually do an experiment to find out the answer instead of just arguing about it. You could also try entering a destination into google maps and compare the estimated arrival time with bus vs Uber.

The self-driving car will presumably be a similar experience to the Uber, but addresses the labor issues that are the main problem with that model.

Shares are often halted for major news. I think it’s meant to protect sellers from situation where many sell with a market order and the price goes near 0. This would result in a wealth transfer from more naive “Main Street” traders to “Wall Street” market makers. Although if the market makers are effective enough, you wouldn’t need the halt at all.

If you care about being exploited, it’s worthwhile to know when it’s happening, so you can consider your return on effort for avoiding it.

They’re also using your labor to train models by serving you pages and checking which links you click. No js required.

I believe you that the HVAC isn’t designed for such a filter. But a few months back my home was in the path of smoke from some wildfires. The AQI went from 200 to 0 after I installed a filter and ran the house fan for an hour. Also, the furnace doesn’t have to work very hard here because of the mild climate, so I never have much of a heat bill anyway. It would be a bummer if the furnace died because of it running out of spec, but I’m skeptical that the risk-adjusted cost of that is higher than the cost of standalone filtration units.

Sounds kind of goofy. Ideally, I could distrust the computer and consider it keylogged, and the phone would transfer already encrypted data to it.

This is why I don’t use iCloud. I don’t think the benefit is worth making my phone subject to search. But when I lost my phone, I was a little disappointed to lose some of the photos I had never moved. A local backup with zero-effort automation does sound promising, if it’s secure.

What is this backup encrypted with? If I lose my phone, what do I need to restore it to a new phone?

One of the main ways Facebook succeeded was that it started at Harvard and expanded to other elite schools, then gradually opened to more people. The platform was rationed such that it was something you just got access to, that the cool kids were already using. I’d argue that social justice organically grew through a similar pathway.

Top schools are full of high class young adults. That includes wealthy kids and lower-income kids who nevertheless have high status in their own communities. Many thousand such people studied social justice in humanities classes in the 90’s. They spread those ideas to their classmates, and after graduating, moved on to lead successful careers in law, education, politics etc. where they spread those ideas to more people until they filtered out to society at large.

The missing link you are asking about between academic papers and mass media articles is that the journalists who wrote the mass media articles studied the academic articles in college. I know this firsthand, I went to college with some of these people.

For me personally, a big part of the appeal of the social justice mindset is that it helps me feel like I’m on the good team while earning gobs of money for doing easy work in the tech industry while a lot of others are working hard and struggling. I imagine it’s similar to the popularity of communism in intellectual circles many decades ago, before that ideology was discredited by practical failures.

I think when a service provides its own status page, the customers are less likely to build their own status monitoring, so the service can get away with more downtime.

If you find out about a bug in MCAS, you definitely should complain about it.

I think this is an artifact of how SLAs are tied to billing. Anyone who had ever billed a corporation knows how they will jerk you around. It’s obvious that you won’t get a straight answer if you go and ask a company how much they owe you. That’s what a status page is. It’s the company’s first offer in the negotiation on how much they owe you for the outage. You need to calculate your own number in response.

Maybe a more scalable solution would be a third-party company that sells this information. I think there’s a lot of money to be made there.