okintheory

It's worth remembering that the Intercept hardly has a stellar reputation for protecting sources: they completely bungled the Reality Winner leak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

An important point about the technical meaning of "quantum supremacy": It is only the claim that a problem exists that can be solved on existing quantum computers and not on existing classical computers. The problem that Google used to demonstrate quantum supremacy has no practical uses, and no useful problem is known that can act as a witness for quantum supremacy. The practical implication: "Getting you problem solved" cannot be the motivation for buying quantum compute power from D-wave (unless you have no clue). Possible valid motations: "learning to work with quantum computers", "seeming cool", "donating money to companies that may build useful quantum computers in the future".

At various points in time, Facebook has made it possible to target political ads toward based on your known interest in pseudoscience or antisemitism [1]. Giving access to this degree of targeting (even if the categories are algorithmically generated) is inherently political.

[1] https://www.getrevue.co/profile/themarkup/issues/probing-fac...

There's a big thing missing from this picture: If you have $ 1 billion, then you will eventually have $ 10 billion (40 yrs of 6 % returns), and your kid could easily end their life with $ 100 billion (add 40 more yrs). Is that ok?

Just FYI, govt. dark patterns in the US have been around for a very long time. For example, you could read about the "literacy" tests for voting in Southern states. Robert Caro has a nice description in Master of the Senate, vol. 2 of his LBJ biography.

EDIT: (From Caro) Questions on these tests posed to Black people in Alabama have included: "Give the names of all sixty-seven county judges in the state", "State the date when Oklahoma was admitted to the Union", and "How many bubbles there are in a bar of soap".

No. That's what's happening in some American unions (not all!), but it's not true in Denmark (for any union!), by the sound of it from the above post, in Sweden.

There are much easier ways to fix this:

Option 1) You could make it easier to afford and raise children.

I realize this seems a little extreme in a US context, so here is a more affordable option:

Option 2) You could encourage women to get an abortion if they're pregnant with a boy.

All we need to maintain the population is that each woman on average produces one new woman. Plus a few men, perhaps acting as sperm donors.

I jest, of course, but my point is that there's more than one way to be authoritarian.

No, the comment above is correct, and your own links show this.

From link [2]: "SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)"

The previous comment was just making the point that the (new) virus is called SARS-CoV-2 and the associated disease is called COVID-19.

That is a fair point! I did mainly mean to focus on social and political issues. I guess the question is what counts as transparent. In my mind, it should not be as easy as creating a new "page" to hide the connection between different sources.

Perhaps I'm being cynical, but my impression is that FB is aiming to provide just enough information that people will say "they're doing that already", and not enough that people can really understand what's going on. But I might be wrong.

The Ad Library claims to show all active ads, not just political/social ones. That's presumably true, but hard to verify or make use of. The "Jellop" ad that I couldn't find was missing precisely because the page name was something else they'd created for that ad.

That's funny! Did you try it? I find it impossible to get any useful information out of it.

Literally the first ad that Facebook shows on my "newsfeed" is by "Jellop", but when I search for Jellop in their ad library, I get no results. In fact, I can't seem to get any results at all, regardless of what I search for, or what I select as the country.

It seems to me that there's an obvious alternative to checking facts, but it's one that scares FB much more than fact checking. Suppose they were transparent! Suppose it was easy to see unobfuscated statistics about who is paying for what on FB. Suppose journalists could easily look up how much white nationalists are spending on targeted advertising in each US state. Suppose we could see how much Exxon, Chevron, Koch Industries are spending, or health insurance companies, or anyone else for that matter. Suppose we could also see how much engagement there is with each post from Breitbart, NYTimes, Young Turks and so on. If we had these facts, as Facebook does, we'd be off to a good start.

You're basically admitting that getting this right is non-trivial. Do you expect everyone to do it? Your barista? Your doctor?

Similar argument: "Why do we even have doctors? Anyone can buy a medical textbook."

It's more complicated than that, as far as I understand. If you shift your money into a foundation, under some constructions, you can retain a lot of control over how it's spent, while avoiding taxes. Later you can pass control (and hence effectively wealth) along to your kids, this time avoiding inheritance taxes.

But you wrote "meaning that the graph of active hospitalizations should be a bell curve with a maximum value of ~10,000 on ~4/20."? You didn't mean that?

That makes you think it should be a bell curve? Are you arguing it will be a bell curve with such a peak, even if restrictions are weakened or removed? That is unlikely.

Is that true? I'm more worried about false negatives on connections. Two concerns (as a layperson):

1) Transmission via surfaces is thought to be important (afaik). You don't have to be in the same place at the same time to transmit.

2) My bluetooth seems pretty slow and unreliable when connecting to my headphones. Is it reliable for logging ~50 proximities during my trip to the supermarket?

Immediate reaction: I'm sorry they settled on blue-tooth induced proximity. It seems likely to be a poor approximation of "epidemiologically relevant proximity". I would like to see research supporting the efficacy of this approach. I suspect they would conclude they need a geolocation-based approach. This will make privacy even more difficult.

If you upvote me, I'll pay you!

This is also something the Koch's do -- they fund many astroturfing groups, e.g. Citizens for a Sound Economy.

The Koch brothers hired private investigators to trail, intimidate, and attempt to get dirt on Jane Mayer when she was writing Dark Money -- a book about how they covertly funded ultra-right wingers and climate sceptics to protect their hundreds of billions of dollars of oil investments. Charles Koch literally shoulders a non-trivial amount of responsibility for a possible coming semi-apocalypse, and he makes plenty of movie villains look laughably tame in comparison.

But this is a good step.

What a strange and bad way to "reflect" on the 2010s. This was not the decade that tech lost its way. It was the decade that more of mainstream media woke up to some of the issues with tech. NYTimes seems intent to prove they don't understand. Why else would you report rosy talking points from Thrun about self-driving without any countering viewpoints? Or include a long quote from the CEO of the company that developed Pokemon Go, without any talk of the issues surrounding the game?

Links?

Completely agree. It's a smoke screen, but probably one that holds up in court - for now.

From looking at Google's privacy policy for this product, it seems to me that if I have a file called all-my-deepest-secrets-fears-and-desires.txt stored in Google's cloud, then nothing stops Google from sharing what they learn from this file as long as it is "non-personally identifiable information". That sounds like they can do whatever they want, as long as they don't attach my actual name to it.

For sure, people who say stuff that sounds like they don't like any white men get a lot of attention. But, I suspect they form a very small minority, also on the Left.

Can I ask, what for you are some important examples of anti-"median-white-American-man" statements? I'm aware that there is a prevailing narrative in many parts of the media that this group is being singled out a lot, but personally I don't often see blanket statements of that sort.

This is the key point.

People in power would like to avoid divisions that are between them and people with less power. Instead they prefer divisions between different groups of people with less power, because that way these groups will be ineffective.

If the median white American man understood this, he would understand that he is siding with the wrong people.

---- PS: Yes, I know the labels for this might be "divide and conquer", and "false consciousness", but I think people have trouble relating to these terms.

Charles Koch and other billionaires and oil interests are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year funding the ultra-right wing US ecosystems of think tanks and academics, and a large part of the motivation is to prevent action to deal with climate change. They're fighting. But fighting back is wrong?

Dark Money by Jane Mayer is a good place to read more. Charles Koch hired private investigators to tail her back when she was working on the book. That's a strong endorsement!

As a working applied mathematician, I can tell you it's with pretty good reason. I learnt this stuff in high school and never used it since. It is one of the least useful things you could imagine. It is fun, though.

It's not the norm, but that is not the same as it being rare. When your money is dirty, you have to pay to launder it.

Indeed. But I also think that Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page & Brin all value their own privacy. They just don't value your privacy that much.

This is not a hypothetical question at all. Denmark is certainly asking this question, with the understanding that currently the US can tap anything they want in our communications infrastructure, and buying 5G from Huawei would instead give that power to the Chinese.

I think it is fortunate that Danish political consensus is converging toward avoiding Huawei infrastructure. American politicians might be as bad as Chinese leaders, but the former are sometimes held accountable, however meekly.