nhf

He's rightfully dunking on the Van Ness bus line for some reasons, but it's basically a major utilities infrastructure project disguised as a bus lane. They're overhead power and reconfiguring the street, but they're also replacing ~4 miles of 1800s water main, putting in a new earthquake-resistant sewer system, and redoing the fire hydrant water feeds.

I feel like it's more of a branding failure honestly. People would be much more understanding - if you heard "we're replacing 1800s utilities with 21st century tech built for the earthquake zone in SF and you get better transit along with that", I think the conversation would be much different than "it's taken a decade to build a new lane".

Some power user features of ITA aren't available on Google Flights still - for example, it lets you construct specific weird routings or layovers that Google will often optimize away. For instance, if you want a 24 hour layover in a city, or if you want to fly a less efficient direction to your destination to build mileage, or whatever.

You can use bookwithmatrix.com, though, which parses the output and will generate a ticket for booking on an online travel agency like Expedia.

There have also been numerous stories from those around him at MIT about inappropriate conduct with students and staff.

The flip side of diversity is inclusion and those actions ran counter to MIT's own policies on an inclusive workplace (if you want a legalistic justification for him needing to leave).

At the same time, though, diversity can't be a cover for actions that are harmful to the larger community. Many places in the world still have strict social pressures against other sexual orientations. Saying you want diversity and inclusion, but excluding gay people—that would be conformity. However, being around queer folks does not actively harm the workplace environment or social culture. However, asking new female students if they want to go out with you, or being grossly insensitive to the plight of sexual assault victims is harmful to a non-trivial portion of the lab.

I would argue that, while RMS is a rightfully accomplished activist and computer scientist, his removal at this point in time makes CSAIL a more inclusive place. Those who might stay away because they're worried about his reputation or hurtful insensitivity—say, young female students, often underrepresented in science—may be more willing to work there.

I only met him in passing when at MIT but some of my colleagues worked more closely with him. Everything I've heard is absolutely true. People sometimes get cynical and believe that nice people can't be that nice (á la Mr. Rogers), but he really was that kind.

I think the thing that speaks the most to his personality is how the brief friendship he struck up with Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas [0]:

> Will likes to see stuff at MIT whenever he is in town. This time I took him to see robots in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wearable computing in the Media Lab, and miscellaneous cool stuff in the Precision Engineering Research Group. It wasn't hard to find people to help out.

> We walked around for three hours. Then, he was off to do soundchecks. A few hours after he learned about energy-storing inverse lakes, he and his Black Eyed Peas played to a sold-out crowd at the TD Banknorth Garden.

> I always like amazing people, like Will, who is highly creative, does interesting things, and is interested in the future. MIT attracts amazing, highly creative, interesting, interested people like honey attracts bears.

> And on top of all that, Will is a fan of my field, Artificial Intelligence. Check out the Peas Imma Be Rocking That Body video.

> Anyway, when Will and his entourage were about to leave, and all the obligatory pictures were taken, he asked, as he generally does, if I could use a few tickets for the show. “Hey, that would be great,” I said. I like the Peas, and besides, I hadn't been to a good concert since the Rolling Stones were in town in '06.

> Alas, my daughter seized the tickets. “You're nowhere near cool enough to go,” she said, “and I have some friends.” Maybe I should find a new place to buy clothes.

RIP.

[0] https://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/favorites.html

Apple has done silent updates for Gatekeeper, the macOS code signing/file quarantine/light anti-malware framework ever since Yosemite. These are done silently unless you explicitly disable all updates and only show up as a visible item when you manually list updates using the softwareupdate command line tool, I think. AFAIK these are just config files and hash databases or similar.

You can view the history of these installs by running softwareupdate --history | grep -E "^MRT|^Gatekeeper"

I see an average of 2 updates per month.

FWIW Apple can also mark something as visible (but install automatically) with a certain config file key. A blog mentions this as being done for patching the NTP bug from a while back:

> Marking these updates as ConfigData cues the App Store to not display these as available software updates in the App Store’s list of software updates. These updates are meant to be under Apple’s control and to be as invisible as possible.

> Meanwhile, an automatically installed software update like OS X NTP Security Update 1.0 shows up as a normal software update, but has extra keys in its catalog listing to mark it as a critical update whose automatic installation is set to occur as soon as possible.

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/managing-automa...

I think that's just an (northeast) Asian bed thing. Preferences trend firm for mattresses and you can see this in traditional or luxury places that don't cater to Westerners. The most deluxe ryokans in Japan still have relatively thin mats on the floor, business hotels in China and Japan often have former mattresses, and so on.

Can't wait for the IETF standardization process to finish up! https://quicwg.org/base-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-transport.htm...

My new "only YouTube while on the treadmill or exercise bike" rule has been a life changer

This is part of the (recent-ish) history in psychology on the effects of choice. Maybe relevant: "When Choice is Demotivating".

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark_Lepper/publication...

For those who aren't FB insiders, what is the read on this? Do the two Chris' reputation in the company have any bearing on how this is read?

It's actually not that complicated. Most headless browser drivers have some global JavaScript functions in the `window` namespace that immediately identify themselves.

I once ran into a piece of code from the scammy advertising world that tried to redirect users to a phishing site. They cleverly tried to hide themselves from the automated quality checks some ad networks do, by checking for these functions and appearing benign if they saw them. One of the checks even created an exception and then inspected the stack trace for certain flags that apparently are only there on some type of headless browser. Clever!

An excellent demonstration of how there's often a big gap between having legal remedies available and actually enforcing them.

Same in aviation, the ICAO phonetic alphabet is meant to reduce uncertainty over historically poor radio communications. Plus readback to air traffic control and so on is relatively standardized to allow for a few chances to realize you got the wrong thing down.

See also:

* 18F and USDS (USA): https://18f.gsa.gov/ and https://www.usds.gov/

* GSA Technology Transformation Service: https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/organization/federal-acquisitio...

* US Web Design System: https://v2.designsystem.digital.gov/

* Government Digital Service (UK): https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...

* GOV.UK Design System: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

It's his job now (he makes money off of ticket booking commissions, plus probably some other stuff). I'm sure he also gets feedback from public information sources, travelers, and train enthusiasts.

Or try the A350, which is just full on glass: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RYQL4QdHzFA/maxresdefault.jpg

767s can be retrofit to that state though, and some airlines have done so. This is a rendering of a cockpit retrofit for a 767 freighter commissioned by UPS: https://www.rockwellcollins.com/sitecore/content/Data/News/2...

I feel like this is a common sentiment: San Francisco is beautiful in the abstract, but disgusting in detail. I feel like this is a pretty common trope for most "grade A" cities—someone will always hate it, people who love it will always explain it away.

- NYC is expensive and has failing transportation, but people love the unparalleled cultural diversity and gritty tenacity of the city

- Paris is dirty and unfriendly, but the city's romance and character make it a great place to live

- London is expensive and out of touch, but its job opportunities and multiculturalism make it a better place to live

...and so on and so forth.

Someone's always going to dislike SF for a valid reason and someone's always going to hit you back with a valid reason why it's a good place. They're probably both correct.

I think that's more of an economic incentives thing rather than any issue with this particular type of construction. You do a 1+5 building with soundproof doors, varied paint schemes for each unit, real wood flooring (not laminate), and so on. There's nothing about the building that prevents that. Developers have no incentive to do that stuff though because in most markets there's a big deficit in new construction and people will rent it, even if the doors are hollow and every wall is off-white.

Probably the closest thing in the US would be a Congressional subpoena. In contrast to the UK Parliament's shakier justification, both Congressional rules and the Supreme Court case Wilkinson v. United States have affirmed that committees can subpoena witnesses.

> And you can get a yearly subscription, giving you all-inclusive usage of the services for 1€/day, billed monthly.

This kind of thing is key - make it easy to use transit and lower the marginal cost of doing so. Yearly subscriptions are good. London's approach—unify almost all modes under the same payment system with automatically calculated caps and discounts—also works quite well as you don't have to think about buying passes, individual tickets, etc. Just tap and go and the system takes care of it for you.

Not many places in the US have this level of integration yet. For instance, the NYC Ferry, NYC Subway, LIRR, Metro North, PATH, and regional Amtrak service all use disjoint ticketing methods. It'll slowly get integrated over the next decade, but it greatly increases the mental effort needed to hop on transit. Perhaps the closest in the US is the Bay Area's Clipper Card - they managed to shoehorn over a dozen area agencies onto the same payment method - but it's still not quite as good as something like London's Oyster.

Both. Undergrads have certain humanities requirements to fulfill - obviously some are natural fans, others treat it like an "eat your broccoli" requirement. Independent of requirements, MIT also has a fairly good reputation for philosophy, political science, linguistics, media studies, and a few other areas.

It's still an interesting problem of division. Let's say the end result (bees in space!) is not science. However, in the process of getting those bees to space, her lab invents a novel 3D printing method [1]. Science in service of art?

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17452759.2012.73...

I'm at MIT and there are definitely people in other groups on campus that like to shit on the Media Lab for this reason. I think this actually raises an interesting question. If you want to position yourself at the intersection of science and art, what's the correct balance of practicality, rigor, and imagination?

The stereotypical person from the "hard science" communities will never totally buy into this kind of work being science. It's not exact, it's not rigorous. On the other hand, artists and designers more often inhabit this speculative, rapidly-prototyped, thought experiment-esque mode of creation and take it as a valid form of inquiry.

Personally, I love it. It's not hard science or hard engineering in the same way that someone in EECS or biology might treat those fields, but it's a wonderful way to root artistic exploration in current scientific technique.

Is that the right balance between the two? Is there a point along the spectrum where you need to stop calling yourself a scientist and start calling yourself an artist? I think that's an open question.

The society which represents U.S. amateur radio operators voted to have their board be much less transparent and members were not told about this. There is now a campaign to elect board members who are running on a transparency platform.

Honestly, I'm going to have to disagree with the first statement. Like any large project, it was planned, but all for separate reasons.

- Auto sign in and the "Google account indicator": this is almost certainly the result of discussions between the Chrome security team (security indicators, phishing, etc) and Google UX requests. Heck, they even say that the indicator was motivated by user research around session management.

- Tracking: I'm not sure what extra tracking was added to Chrome beyond the existing telemetry they've had since the beginning of the project.

- Google cookies: explained above - a reasonable idea at some manager or UX designer's local scope that got misinterpreted.

If they really wanted to sneak in goodies to supercharge their ad business, it would look a lot worse (and be a lot less obvious) than this. For instance, there's nothing stopping them* from automatically enabling Chrome Sync and removing the option for encrypted syncs tomorrow... which is another issue, but a different scope of discussion.

* Aside from their entire legal department, of course.

Based on what I know of the Chrome team, it was probably the conclusion of some UX manager or the result of a user study they did around Google authentication. If I had to guess: their end goal is not explicitly to collect more advertising data for Google, but it's to minimize friction around the use of Google services. This leads to decisions like the cookie one.

Thanks for the response. I'm in the technology and policy program within IDSS and we have discussions about these "politics of technology" issues a lot. I'm sure you could become a case study in one of our classes if you wanted :)

Hello from across campus!

Do you think more user and stakeholder engagement would have helped the public accept your research? I have no idea if BPS has the bandwidth for supporting this type of engagement, but I imagine a lot more fears would be assuaged if parents could have some role in "co-creation" of the algorithm, rather than just accepting results.

A lot of research from the fields of citizen science, public understanding of technology, and user experience show that participatory design techniques can enhance acceptance. E.g., https://www.bmj.com/content/319/7212/774.short

I'd guess that the vast majority of people who have Global Entry either paid for it using credit card benefits (most travel rewards cards have a Global Entry credit) or have it paid for by their workplace.

There are still marginal benefits of GE over Mobile Passport - more airports have GE, you get expedited service at land borders and at Canadian airports, and you can cut the standard line if the kiosks are broken. My favorite part of GE might be the reciprocal benefits you get in other countries though. For instance, you can sign up with the UK to use their automated border gates which is normally limited to EU citizens only.

Yeah. Stubbs sauce was produced in Texas for a long time but they were bought by McCormick* (the spice company) a few years ago. They have the same global distribution powers of any other large commercial food business, so I'm sure they could get Stubbs in whatever country they forecast good demand.

* https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccormick-buys-stubbs-sauce-mak...