grahn

Not to take a position in this debate as a whole, but I just want to interject that there is research suggesting that you actually are more likely to be affected if you are aware of the other person's conflict of interest. (Can't find a link right now...)

If memory serves me right, the theory is that it makes you overestimate your ability to stay objective and unaffected, so you're effectively lowering your guard, or something along those lines.

The point I was making by comparing to a pilot, which I realise I could have expressed a lot more clearly, is that it is perfectly possible to mitigate risks through proper training and procedures even if it's not possible technically. (I.e. all it takes for a plane to crash is to turn the flight controls a few centimetres in the wrong way at the wrong time, yet it almost never happens.)

Of course things fail and people screw up. What I don't agree with are arguments along the lines of this just being a slight oversight, and that those can easily happen. It should require serious failure on multiple levels for anything like this to happen at that scale, if they are implementing things properly, not minor oversight.

So here is the thing: It was presumably relatively easy for you to come up with that scenario, which you called "not-unlikely". Then what you do is you put that scenario into your risk analysis when you're designing the authentication architecture, and figure out mitigations to make sure that particular mistake becomes (very) unlikely.

The notion that "it could easily happen" that is being brought up throughout this thread should really only suggests that people aren't doing even rudimentary security assessments (or, hopefully, they're not working with security sensitive software).

If you can't solve it technically, you solve it through processes and training. Same goes for any other industry -- if a construction worker said that it's just one bad morning away from dropping a two tonne girder on a playground, we would never accept that. Or a pilot crashing an airliner into the waiting hall when they're supposed to land. Somehow it seems that large parts of the software industry simply hasn't reached the level of maturity we expect from pretty much all other industries.

Facebook is an enormous company. They should be able to have entire departments working on these topics. It's not a one-person hobby project we're talking about.

It's not tethered to the ground. It's a group of rotating "wings" tethered to each other in the centre, wherein the centrifugal force of the rotation give structural stability. That way they get away with using less structural material, which means more of the weight can be batteries or fuel.

You're right that the feet deform significantly when you stand on them. For that reason you usually measure them load-bearing (i.e. you stand up with even weight distribution on your feet).

I think it's more likely that it's the deformation of the shoe that is uneven than that the shoe affects the deformation of the foot much. An exception would be if it has a built-up sole with support for the arches, preventing the arches from collapsing.

Either way, it's a complex process that is hard to model, just like you say. The way we're getting around it is by collecting various data on what people end up liking and then infer the properties of the shoe, rather than trying to explicitly model it. So the solution is a combination of 3D scanning and machine learning.

Also worth mentioning, by the way: most people actually have slightly different size and shape on their left vs. right foot. For about 50% of the population the length differs by more than half a US size. Being perfectly symmetrical is the rare case.

That method is actually used by many shoemakers when you order a pair of bespoke shoes (in combination with a series of tape measurements). It's not accurate enough to produce a fitting shoe in a single attempt, however, so what usually happens is they make a "test shoe" based the measurements and drawing, then modify the last after having you try that on. This procedure can be repeated more than once if needed.

Knitted socks are quite a lot more forgiving than leather shoes, fortunately, since the material accommodates by stretching when you put it on. I'm not surprised it worked well for you and your aunt!

It's still very relevant for a couple of reasons.

Perhaps most obviously, you just can't try a shoe on if you buy online. You can if you buy five pairs and return four, as some do, but it's a lot of hassle and a waste of resources for all the shipping back and forth.

Secondly, a significant portion of the population (tens of precent) have "problems" enough that most shoes in a store don't fit, meaning you have to try on a lot before you find one that does. And even if you don't have such issues, sizing between brands (and even styles) is so inconsistent that you usually have to try multiple different sizes to decide which one fits you. Having a 3D model paired with an AI system that tells you which shoes fit and what sizes to pick saves a lot of time for a lot of people, both shoppers and staff.

Finally, if you ever want to order custom made footwear, there is really no way around measuring your feet. And arguably the only reliably well-defined and repeatable way of doing that is to do a 3D scan to capture the shape.

Not only are there technologies that could be used for this, there are working products in the market that do it already. I work for one of the technology providers in this area.

Having x-ray images or such would actually be somewhat helpful, as you could much more easily identify the metatarsophalangeal joints (the joint where the toe meets the foot), the locations of which do influence shoe fit to some extent.

However, the cost, safety, usability etc. of using x-ray machines in a retail setting makes it infeasible by a wide margin compared to optical measurement methods, and those generally take you far enough anyway. I'd rather go for dynamic analysis (i.e. scanning the foot while it is in motion taking a step) if more data on the skeletal structure is required.

Several well-known brands are working on this in various ways. Adidas has a cooperation with Carbon 3D to produce individualised soles for shoes you order, as one example[1]. Robotic knitting is another area I know some players are working on, for making custom uppers. You'll likely see offerings for customised footwear based on these technologies appear on the market in the next couple of years.

I'd expect it to take a number of years before the manufacturing processes have matured and evolved enough to get the price points down to the level that most people would consider an option when buying footwear, though.

[1] https://www.carbon3d.com/stories/adidas/

Technologies for mass scale customisation is being developed by several big players in the market. However, also consider that there are already hundreds of thousands of different shoe styles in the market, so finding a pair of perfectly fitting shoes can to a large degree be considered a search problem rather than a customisation problem. With appropriate 3D scanning technology, this can be done today.

Disclosure: I work for a technology provider in this field.

Well, you should have "avoid eating meat" on that safety list anyway, so that is almost helpful.

> No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.

You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.

That is not a very helpful comment.

Anyway, the quote from the article I was responding to above was talking about using swap to handle a situation where you have insufficient RAM, so you're off mark.

> As a last resort, the Kernel will deploy OOM killer to nuke high-memory process(es)

Yes! That is exactly what I want to happen!

When the system runs out of RAM, things will generally stop functioning, swap enabled or not. The only question is how you want it to stop functioning when that happens.

In almost every situation, I'll easily take the kernel killing whatever single process it thinks is most appropriate to get rid of, and keep everything else up and running smoothly, over grinding the the entire system to a halt by upping the effective memory access time by orders of magnitude.

Simply put: If everything doesn't fit in memory, then don't try to run everything!

Properly designed software nowadays is designed to be able to crash without corrupting data. As far as I'm concerned, it is almost always preferable to kill and restart instead of giving CPR to processes that don't fit in the working memory.

From the article:

GDPR applies to all companies storing information on EU citizens. Those citizens should be allowed to know what data is held, where it is being stored and who has access to it.

This is not correct, as far as I am aware. A bit of a nit, but depending on context it can be important: The GDPR applies to all companies with legal presence within the EU storing information on any person, regardless of whether they are EU citizens or not.

So even if you only store personal data on foreign (e.g. US) citizens, you still need to follow the regulation.

The irradiance is determined by the aperture, which is measured relative to the focal length. So with e.g. f/2 you get the same heating of a given area of the sensor regardless of the focal length (i.e. "zoom").

Put differently, longer lenses typically also have bigger absolute apertures, collecting incident light from a larger cross-section. This compensates for the fact that a given solid angle of incident light is spread over a larger area of the sensor.

My "most" claim was more generic, in that they are situational, triggered by emotions (and lack of emotional control), and most often between people that know each other. Him making a pass at her is merely my conjecture of how that might have happened in this particular case, based on the circumstances that have been reported.

Most likely for the same reasons almost all crimes of this sort happen. He made a pass on her that wasn't well received, things got out of hand, emotions took over and at some point he either injured or killed her in the heat of the moment, then panicked and tried to cover up the situation.

Violent crime is rarely based on rational, well reasoned acts. I wouldn't try to read too much logic into it.

> being forced to give your competitors more prominence

No, they are being forced to give their competitors equal prominence.

The press release literally says: "the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service"

If you want to understand the reasonings the Go maintainers have about generics, there is a GitHub issue[1] on it that is probably a better place to start than to argue with me. The thread references both recent academic research as well as other programming languages' take on the subject.

I don't think their crux is so much that generics "as such" needs more baking, but the specifics of how to implement them with the Go language. Mind you that some of the core goals of Go is to be simple, easy to parse, fast to compile, support good tooling, etc. so the question they're battling with is how to add generics to that mix without sacrificing any of those goals, and without making some mistake you can never go back from once every code base out there starts depending on it.

Now, by all means, we can argue that those priorities are wrong, or that yours would have been different. But I think it is disingenuous to suggest that they are effectively idiots who don't understand how to apply basic concepts, or are unaware of other programming languages.

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292

But Go does have polymorphism. It is achieved through the "interface" concept, which allows dynamic binding of any statically typed objects that match a given set of function signatures. In my experience, with the way it's been done it actually gets you pretty far in terms of problems you typically solve with generics in other languages.

That said, personally I'd love to have generics on top of that. Consequently, I have been following some of the discussions on the topic, and so far I haven't seen anything suggesting that the language developers have an aversion to it. What they do have, however, is a fear that an improperly designed generics concept could badly screw up the language in a way that can't be reversed by any practical means once it is launched.

They are basically very careful about adding stuff, without fully understanding the consequences at all levels. You (or I) can disagree with that approach, but it's not accurate to say that they have an aversion for generics, or even to say that they don't want it.

The Go people don't have an aversion for generics, just a very conservative approach to adding language features. To quote their FAQ:

"Generics may well be added at some point. We don't feel an urgency for them, although we understand some programmers do."[1]

[1] http://golang-jp.org/doc/faq#generics

I would assume that there is otherwise generally information asymmetry in the labour market, in the sense that employers usually have more knowledge of salaries than employees. Making good information openly available to both parties should benefit the party with less information more: the employee.