maxrmk

Very cool Dan, thanks for the details!

Thanks Dan, this is very interesting. From someone deeply involved in privacy I see the benefits of the auditability and risk mitigation in cases like SQL injection.

What does the risk profile look like in a full leak of the encrypted database?

If you had a column of integers are you able to order them without decrypting? Check that values are the same? Identify null values?

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around what guarantees this does and does not make.

If you can run “select * where secret_col == 10”… why does it matter that the column is encrypted?

Right! Everything from word to the calculator app uses .NET these days. Even many games!

I ran into this (or a similar service) when cancelling comcast a few weeks ago. It worked _really_ well. It was slightly uncanny, but I think most people wouldn’t notice anything. It was only some awkward phrasing that made it obvious to me.

It’s easy to opt out of being indexed by Google.

I don't think this is a correct explanation of how things work these days. RL has really changed things.

Fair enough. It reads as extremely AI generated to me. But that isn’t completely reliable.

Ironic coming from the Guardian. One of their journalists consistently publishes ai slop and the paper is in denial about it.

https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/2023089526445371777?s=46

If a company relies on self reported ages, they don't "know" it well enough to satisfy COPPA. Probably. I'm not a lawyer but I do keep up with the latest in privacy enforcement and I think this is the way things are headed.

For the record, I'm against age verification laws. But I think companies are pushing for them because of liabilities they face under other laws, not because they would actually like to have the data.

Those exist! People choose to use gmail because of the scale, stability, and feature set paid for by targeted advertising.

My desire is to be able to use those products without paying for them. And to use them with friends and family members that can't pay for them.

The bill bans making access to a service contingent on consent. This would kill Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram and basically every other ad supported service. Making subscriptions the only consumer business model would be bad imo.

Yeah fair, I was being a bit lazy here when writing my comment. I've used nosql professionally quite a bit, but always set up by others. When working on personal projects I reach for SQL first because I can throw something together and don't need ideal performance. You're absolutely right that they both have their place.

That being said the question was genuine - because I don't keep up with the ecosystem, I don't know it's ever valid practice to have a nosql db exposed to the internet.

How often are mongo instances exposed to the internet? I'm more of an SQL person and for those I know it's pretty uncommon, but does happen.

Google (currently) pays Mozilla $400-500 million a year to be the default search engine in firefox.

edit: in 2023 they took in $653M in total, $555M of which was from Google. They spent $260M on software development, and $236M on other things.

Took more than a minute to load on my macbook. Ouch!

I really love C# and the .net ecosystem, but they just haven't made it work for web.

What do you see as net negative about it? I’m familiar with the product but not that aware of how it’s been used.

Do you think there _should_ be a legal mechanism for enforcing the kind of rules they're trying to create here? I have mixed feelings about it.

Evil feels strong? Small companies benefit from having the basic feature set subsidized by big cos. It's kind of hard for me to imagine a scenario where pricing of a saas product could be _evil_. you can just choose not to do business with them!

Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in this comment haha

Very cool. Do you do anything to mitigate ordering bias in the evaluation function, or do you just expect it to average out over time?

> While the specific internal workings of DeepSeek LLM are still being elucidated, it appears to maintain or approximate the self-attention paradigm to some extent.

Totally nonsensical. Deepseeks architecture is well documented, multiple implementations are available online.

I love to hate on google, but I suspect this is strategic enough that they wont kill it.

Like graviton at AWS its as much of a negotiation tool as it is a technical solution, letting them push harder with NVIDIA on pricing because they have a backup option.

I used to use one but when I started working on ads it felt hypocritical. I want to support the sites that I use, especially those that don't paywall content. I don't work on ads anymore but have stuck with it.

Yeah I think about this model weirdly often.

I think it could show up in those other places, but probably isn't fully captured?

Imagine an airbnb that's great for most guests but absolutely terrible for 1 in every 5, so bad that they quit airbnb. Maybe it's next to a music venue, so every once in a while it's very loud.

It's possible it could maintain a decent average star rating and LTV as described in the article but actually have negative (real) lifetime value for airbnb if the 1 in five that they lose would have spent a lot of money on the platform otherwise.

I feel like this is missing a really important factor: how likely are guests to use airbnb again after staying at a listing?

A listing could look great online and receive a lot of bookings (so high LTV), but ultimately drive users away from the platform.

A certain ad platform I worked on cared a lot about this - offensive ads could get you to quit the site altogether. You might want to count every ad as positive for the company since you make money, but some might actually be negative expected value! As a side note, I think this is a really undermeasured problem. There are many sites I won't use because the ads are so overwhelming or are often offensive.

I can only speak for myself, but I would absolutely rather work burned out in tech than work in the trades again.

Drywalling was absolutely destroying my body, mind, and will to live.

Mobility is also a factor - I’ve had high stress tech jobs, but always had the option to quit and do something else if I felt close to burnout. That mobility doesn’t exist in many other jobs.

I feel very fortunate to have worked other jobs before my first in tech. My last was hanging drywall and I will never forget how awful it was. I haven’t loved every part of every tech job I’ve worked, but I’ve always chosen to be there.

I think the author is missing perspective on what the alternatives are like, and seems to have a lack of agency when they say things like:

> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?

There’s incredible mobility within tech - more so than almost any other industry. Vote with your feet! I’ve taken major pay cuts to have more choice over my work, and have never regretted it.