nathanlied

No ambiguity there, although it doesn't adequately explain how that came about, but that's why there's an article.

I'm a "WFH Apologist", really, but I'll readily admit it's not for everyone. Many people genuinely like in-person socialisation at the office, others can't separate 'work' from 'home life', and we could go on forever on potential issues. Which is why no one will ever see me advocate for all tech companies to go as remote as possible normally - that would exclude a pretty wide pool of potential candidates.

This is likely why she had that level of nagging doubt. "Am I not winning enough to warrant extra scrutiny? Certainly if I was that good they'd have figured out what I'm doing and busted me?"

If we imagine that a large percentage of the population doing work that can be done from home is doing so, there will be less traffic on the roads, more time for people to go down to their local coffee shop or restaurant to grab a bite, more real estate for non-WFH companies to rent (possibly with lower costs), or even office buildings that could be converted into habitation (and thus allowing the people whose work has physical components to live closer and lessen their commutes).

Not to mention pollution, quality of life, and a healthier society. Sure, it's not a monumental impact at a global level, but I'd count it as a positive change for the most part.

There's states in the US with similar densities; I'd imagine those would be spared most of the deaths, even if stricter measures weren't implemented, but what about the coasts?

Honestly, the US, large and heterogenous as it is, should implement different measures per state. It's obvious to me that what works for some places may not work for others so well.

No, thanks.

Once reality sets in, only the absolute idiots that don't care for being socially ostracized (or in some cases even legal consequences) will continue that behaviour. And luckily those are normally a minority.

I don't know if you've ever had that experience in your OllyDbg-using days, but did you ever try to analyse software that was using some form of hashing function, or cryptography (ECDSA, for instance) with OllyDbg, without knowing what it was? The idea is kind of like that. While it's easy to get a concrete idea of what that block of code is doing (feed it an ASCII string and some memory structures, it spits gobledygook out), it's not so easy to look at it and conclude "Ha! This implements AES-CBC!" without some strong intuition or experience.

You mean, as opposed to office-work 8 hours a day, where it's extremely common to hear people talk about browsing Facebook and other social media a lot of the time because there's not enough cognitive capacity to be working the full 8 hours? Or, often enough, just not enough work?

> co-workers

I'm assuming you view it as bad for coworkers because they can't just get up and interrupt you at any time they need something from you; for me, that's a feature, not a bug. Asynchronous communication allows you to have an uninterrupted productive streak without worrying someone's going to need something that really isn't that urgent.

> customers, society.

I'm at a loss for those, though. Why would it be bad for customers and society?

ToS are subservient to the law; you can (probably) terminate a service account from a user that breaks your ToS, but if the user does not have a service account (as is the case for HiQ, it doesn't seem they were using accounts for it), then your ToS does not apply, since you've technically not entered a binding legal contract with them.

> This is almost weirder. If LinkedIn wanted to force users to sign in to view profile info, would they be not allowed to do that because some company had signed a contract that implicitly assumed access to that data? If someone writes a web scraper for my site, and I unknowingly change my site in a way that breaks that scraper, can a court force me to revert the change?

IANAL, but I believe that'd fall on intent, and intent is often difficult to prove at a personal level, but not necessarily at a company level. If your intent for putting up barriers that happen to impact scraping, whatever they may be, was indeed to knowingly prevent scraping from a particular company, then you may be liable under this decision. This is the only part of the decision I'm torn on, since it's a bit messy to really prove such things. I'd be much more comfortable with allowing companies to take whatever measures they feel necessary to prevent scraping, and also allowing scrapers to legally circumvent those measures without threat of prosecution, assuming they didn't actually hack into anything.

In order to solve this whole kerfuffle, we'll have to tackle that head-on. That people are misinformed, disinterested, and downright apathetic. You can ban political ads on Facebook tomorrow, and it won't solve those fundamental problems. It's just kicking the can down the road.

For instance, if your company visibly and heavily promotes LGBT causes, civil rights, etc., and goes so far as to seek employees who are actively involved in such fights, don't be surprised if they turn around and form unions, or advocate for a more left-friendly workplace hierarchy. When you get a politically-motivated workforce, you can't pick and choose which parts of their politics they'll bring to the workplace.

This is the first thing I found; take-out is, the flak they get over the whole political ads controversy isn't worth how much they make on them, comparatively. I'm inclined to believe them.

My issue with this is that I've never been with an ISP that had a faster response time than Cloudflare/Google - and one would think they should, after all, my ISP should be able to reach me as quickly (or quicker) than any other corporation.

My current ISP has the fastest DNS benchmarks I've seen, and they're at 81ms for an uncached response, vs Cloudflare's 63ms and Google's 69ms. Cached response is similar (since I have a local cache).

In addition, my ISP does not provide DoH/DNSCrypt/DNSSec. None. Just 'vanilla' DNS. Furthermore, they also don't provide an unaltered DNS service: they block some websites from resolving, the list isn't made available, and is decided via extrajudicial means. You cannot opt-out, and all ISPs in the country adhere to this. They're not forced by law to do so. I'm also not in a normally thought of as a repressive country: it's a member state of the European Union, after all.

There are very good reasons for people to be outright hostile to ISPs and their shady underhanded practices, as you're seeing in this discussion. I feel that it is in any mostly online-based organisation's best interests to expose those practices.

Investigate all crimes uncovered, and prosecute everyone to the full extent of the law.

However, if our universe is a simulation, I'd posit that whoever created it has a reasonable assumption that self-aware life could arise from the experiment. Now, whether "self-aware life" is as important an achievement, or something to be preserved, to them as our current society... No one can answer that without being completely speculative - even if we do prove we're a simulation.

And then getting defensive about removing it if you're told by an expert you've contacting yourself that <App> is (part of) the cause of your woes.

Not exactly the same scenario as you posited.

(EU citizen here): I would prefer corporations (especially ones with such depth of funds and breadth of influence) be kept entirely outside the electoral process. If that's not feasible, then the second best option is, indeed, that they provide the same service to all candidates, no matter who those candidates are.

Am I getting it right that you'd prefer they pick some candidates to help in detriment of others? Because that option does not sound very healthy to me, personally.

I'm not sure I buy it.

I postulate that we cannot build non-determinism out of deterministic pieces - we can just get it complex enough that we can't accurately pre-determine what will happen. With enough data, and a system of sufficient predictive complexity, we can still predict everything, I'd wager.

I'm a CS/Engineering grad that had some of those, and my colleagues in other STEM degrees had requirements that weren't dissimilar from what you describe. We were required to take classes in philosophy (with emphasis on ethics), history, as well as required to take some electives that could be in all sorts of areas, some in other scientific areas, others in arts, theatre, music. Effectively, it was required of us to at least be cognizant of the goings-on in other fields, even if just the conversational basics.

As for colleagues of mine in humanities degrees, most of them didn't see a single STEM class, and if they did, they were very superficial one-semester courses on Excel spreadsheeting, LaTeX, or very basic physics/probability mathematics, which were effectively a rehashing of high school, but with easier exams.

I echo your sentiment, maybe at some point in the distant past, STEM degrees were isolated in their own bubble and only had very theoretical classes, but I don't know anyone who experienced that, and that's most certainly not been a reality for the past couple of decades.

This topic opened my eyes a bit - and that feature is definitely something I'd push for, if ever given the opportunity to work in that kind of system.

Perhaps a solution would be for these school portal systems to take this into consideration, allowing students to pick how they prefer their grades to be 'released'/delivered - 'unexpectedly', or on a timed schedule.

At my Alma Mater, we were always "mass-mailed" when grades were released. The email didn't have our grade specifically, but we could go on the University's portal, navigate to that class, and see whatever grade just got released - tests, exams, projects, anything we could be graded on, really. I loved this system, because the alternative was the grades being released and me not knowing about it, which would result in either having to check every X period of time, or, most likely, coding my own script to do it for me.

I've been told by family that my old High School also works similarly nowadays, as well as other high schools and middle schools in the same district. I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology.

I'd like to know, though, isn't it just as anxiety-inducing to go in every morning after an assignment, knowing this could be the day it's delivered? Mine were delivered that way back in HS, sometimes at the beginning of class, others in the middle, sometimes we thought we weren't getting it that day, and the teacher would remember at the very end of class, or be reminded by someone. Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule?