karllager

> That is preferable to the society which underproduces things and where large part of your survival depends on you skill in finding how to satisfy basic needs - food, shelter, etc. I'd rather watch ads than be hungry.

And that is perfectly correct. One thing I might add is that capitalism looks much like communism in the long run as companies merge, fuse and become bigger and bigger, because centralisation and control are the key for efficiency. Wasn't it in the news recently? One of the biggest companies on this planet on a mission to get a share of every transaction on this planet.

As a kid, I grew up in a country with almost no advertising. Repeat after me: No ads in the streets, in the TV, in the radio, nowhere.

One day we found a magazine (from another country), which contained ads. Two people smoking cigarettes in a strangely alien world, some kind of jungle - or a safari, maybe.

This image was so strange in many ways: Why is it there in a magazine, that was about something completely different? Who does it speak to? What is this strange world depicted there? Why does it feel a so - unreal? And why do the people smile in the picture, even though it is unreal?

Image a day in your life without coming across an ad. Or a week. Or a year.

Take a breath and imagine what the world would feel like.

The need for advertising is deeply rooted in a society, that overproduces things and where a large part of your survival depends on your skill to sell. My deepest hope is that this world will be regarded just as strange as my kids eyes stopped before the strange picture of the two smokers.

You are good, if you question and revisit your assumptions on a regular basis, because you instinctively know, that there is a simpler and cleaner approach - it is just (with good reason) buried under business matters and deadlines.

If some % of changes you make to your code are towards a simplification, I believe you are on the right track.

Not so good programmers fix their assumptions (because they need some ground to stand on) and then let a project ossify - these become legacy systems, burden, technical debt, and so on.

Another angle: A good programmer will save you from problems you didn't even know you are going to have (and you will probably never noticy it, because she or he will have your back).

Yet another take: A good programmer will find a solution to a program which is either perfect or not perfect but so clear, that another person can use it as a basis for a better solution. A good programmer shortens the way to the things you want to achieve, in any way (perfect solution, good solution and clear problem picture, communication, better documentation, explanation, more performance, rethinking, disruption, calm night shifts, and so on).

Besides: Programming and development is actually very hard, many brilliant and curious minds haven't searched for another occuption after they started programming.

I keep offline notebooks where I basically take notes of hopefully most things, that I read or think about. Ideas for programs, proofs of theorems, lecture notes and so on.

I also start small git repos with projects, e.g. for a set of algorithms I explore.

Haven't found a good system though, a hierarchy or learn graph or mind map (mind map programs kind of bore me).

My hope is that most of what I write down will compile (so to speak) into my brain, at least a little bit. And that the mind map will emerge actually in my mind as I move along.

This system is not perfect, but I haven't started to optimize it (maybe I should).

One next step that I think about is to product short texts in a top-down fashion. That is, start with some high-level idea to express or illustrate. Then descend into special concepts and so on. Writing is to thinking, what walking is to a map.

I read a lot of both Horkheimer and Adorno. It has shaped my view on capitalism and society in a profound way.

Be careful, reading them is like choosing the red pill.

I once turned down an excellent offer in order to avoid working in AdTech. It was a lot of money and probably fun work, too. Not everybody can do this, and most people would consider me crazy for having turned done that kind of money. After all: it isn't illegal, right?

One other day I met with a guy from a company, that branded itself a social startup. Do you know what social means? Social, like in society, like in living and working together? It means, I employ people to think about the best way to monetise your relationships with others.

I admire technological progress and I believe it's the only chance we have. But the corporate, SV or VC double speak and the weak and irresistant minds of maybe 90% of the population makes western societies an awkward place to live.

> Anyone even remotely close to fields like infosec, cyber security, or data engineering know that Facebook is quickly becoming a giant spider web for its users.

Exactly. Everytime I see a person using Facebook (so basically every day) I think: Gosh, again a guy or girl not getting paid and yet eager to work. What a world do we live in?

Yes, I love tuning my /etc/hosts as well. In case anyone is curious: https://pastebin.com/raw/4cUS8r8W

> I use facebook

> I am sensitive to privacy and secrecy.

I do not want to be rude, but unfortunately those options are mutual exclusive.

> Like it or not there is a social stigma around NOT having a FB account.

Yes of course there is. Please do not take it personal, but the problem described in the article still exists, even if most people don't care. In Germany in the last century, most people cheered for a mass-murdering psychopath. Those who did not cheer, were surely stigmatised - right up to annihilation. Did this invalidate the stigmatised standpoint? On the contrary.

No, not worried about that, particularly. But there are few other options, that might be worrying to some:

The routine tasks will more and more go away. Still amazed how much is done by hand today (like research, data preparation, communication, marketing, business to business processes, scheduling, HR).

Just as with every profession over the past decades, if you want to stay employable, you will have to level up your game significantly because the simple software stuff (of which there is a huge amounts today) will go away, let's say in the next ten years.

In 2030 software related employment will look more like in the 1960s. A highly selected and highly self selective group of borderline asperger guys having a blast thinking, proving theorems, playing piano and writing code.

Why I believe that? Because we see the 80-20 rule play out in so many fields. And in 2030 the leverage you get from technology will just a tad more intense that in is today.

I hope I am not down-voted. I want to grab the opportunity to sum up my impressions on snap, so I can come back a year later and read up, how stupid they have been.

Snap is neither twitter nor fb, which of course is a source of uncertainty. It's not twitter, because snap's data consists of a lot of internet dark matter - so to speak - pixels, that is. Let hell break loose and buy up machine learning engineers and researchers in bulk and let them poke around in it. There sure will be some way to optimize ads, and then just sell it off: the perfect blended ad to the right audience at the right time and space.

Is there anything more substantial beside fun? Yes, a nice social pressure signal, millions of tiny celebrity effects playing out every day, together with all the drama, gossip and emotion - which should have a positive effect on ads. The score-rich - I mean the poor teen talent - gets a discount on a product, that has been seen on other influencers (but not too many). The poor pool of losers and in-betweens might buy a burger to get over the pain.

This social game is so much fun, it's even fun to just write about it. All this drama, all this pain, captured on tape and stored on a shelve. Ready for a smart machine to look at it and ask: I saw your face before, and the look of yours on someone else, you look sad, you're mostly inside, I have the perfect product to cheer you up, may I? And, oh, I make it fun for you to acquire it, too.

You think this is scary? You think it's borderline exploitation, because the data generators can be kept sad, if their score is too low?

Which brings me to my conclusion for the record. Snap will thrive part because people just do not care about these things anymore and part because the majority has not much choice. Stronger and more resistant individuals will just reject the instant gratification and focus softening. People, who kind of see through the hype and the value propositions, that maybe matter too you and maybe matter, because somebody would like to make it matter for more people, so I have to adjust. Maybe 80% of a population, according to some estimates, does things, because everybody does them - no or few questions asked. And hey, if all it takes to be accepted is a push of a button, what's the problem?

And so the story continues. Snap will thrive. One thing that would kill both facebook and twitter (and snap) would be Moore's law, in the sense, that a social network of friends can be held completely on the interactors devices, because, well in few years, 128GB per phone is ok, text and messages are cheap and can be routed without being stored and scanned and images can be stored and cached locally.

But there is no money in letting people alone. No money, if I cannot distract them. No money if I cannot read what they read and see what they see. No money, if I cannot control them and their experience.

A general question to parents: Is it possible to raise a kid without a smartphone today?

Go is just the current incarnation of the so-called New Jersey approach.

> I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing.

> not with the data you willingly give them by using their service.

Imagine I am a producer of sugared water. Do I want you to delve into health issue associated with that? Not necessarily. As a owner of a site that lives from user interaction, do I want my users to go out without their phone and have fun without me? Well, do it, but only if you really must.

There is a conflict of interest here, but that's too disturbing to communicate. Period.

Most people don't have the time and money to check facts anyway, so let's just claim facebook is the internet (for example) - because, you know, without all this livestock, our investors get unhappy. Business as usual, I would say.

An observation: I recently watched a presentation from a developer who works at a random adtech company. He was a nice, albeit naive guy. In order to explain the technical topic he gave a bit of context about the business. It was so creepy, you could feel the audience thinking - Oh-kay. He didn't even notice.

Now. I watched hundreds of technical presentations from Google and Facebook engineers. Did a presenter ever got into the details on how they track the user for what metric, and so on. Not a single freaking time.

Andrew Ng recently told in a presentation, that all data must be accessible in one place. Did he came across creepy? Not at all. He is such a professional person, that he can even weave in a remark about privacy just right beside the talk about the uber-data-warehouse.

That is professionalism. I expect Facebook to have a silent policy about talking about things developers and admins see on the inside.

Apart from this complex issue. Who inducts ethics for managers? Why do people come up with bad ideas (track all users all the time, or buying such data for that matter) in the first place? Hint: The problem is not developer ethics.

I always wonder, how people can associate effectiveness, success and other positive things with the current developments. The price of the progress, as we experience it today, is enormous. Exhaustion of natural resources, severe climate change, not to mention societal costs. We see a rapid rise in violence across continents and this seems to be just the beginning. I can easily see the western world turning into totalitarian cyber-police states within the next ten years, just to protect against all those humans who are left disillusioned, without jobs, perspectives or with bullshit jobs and basically a life, that some of them will happily trade away for some moments of meaning, when they detonate themselves in a crowded place.

May I ask, is this what you call success?