otakucode

It's easier than that. If she's posting all 5-star reviews on products that don't get rated 5-stars by other customers, those other customers shouldn't be seeing her reviews. Preferentially weight the visibility of reviews from reviewers who match the individual customers reviews on other products. This incentivizes users posting honest reviews and makes 'gaming' the system almost impossible.

I've never understood why online reviews, at least on sites as large as Amazon with a competent technical team behind the company, aren't better. First step, if I review a product, then you should immediately be weighting the visibility of all reviews by reviewers who posted a review which agrees with my own. So if I rate Avengers: Endgame bluray a single star, guess that I have similar opinions to the others that rated it the same, and when I go look at some other Marvel film bluray, if those others have reviewed it, push them to the top. As I review more and more things, the weightings should get better and better. And gaming it would be basically impossible unless you managed to tailor bot posts to match the way I rated dishware, movies, books, videogames, food products, and the dozens of other things I've rated. Fake reviews would get pushed to the bottom with almost instantaneous speed if they would do this. If they cheap out and decide to aggregate and 'bucket' reviewers rather than training a recommender engine per-customer, its performance will fall short and still be gamed, but even that would be better (and seems to be the way big companies handle the computational load per-user systems would incur... personally I'd prefer they push the calculations clientside, but they haven't gone that way).

It has never, at any point since the introduction of electronic transfers, made the slightest bit of sense for 'payment processing' services to charge a fee which scales based upon the amount being transacted. Yet, every means of transferring money has always come with a percentage-based fee. This isn't just a simple matter of rent-seeking on the part of the financial class. It's outright dangerous, and really shouldn't be tolerated by any government. The cost to transfer money does not scale based upon the size of the numbers involved. And as the vast majority of transactions overall in our economy are now electronic, this puts payment processors essentially in the role of taxing authorities. They have the power to counteract the monetary policies of the government should they feel like doing so. Imagine if the Federal Reserve decided to print more money in order to encourage lending or something like that, but the CEOs of the largest payment processors disagreed. They could simply raise their processing fees, making it more expensive for money to be used, compensating and making the actions of the Fed ineffective. There is no law preventing them from doing this, as far as I know, and it would have immediate monumental impact on the economy.

That's a juicy target. Any company willing to clear those regulatory hurdle gets to become not just a company, but effectively a taxing authority.

Is the coating food-safe without the lubricant? I have wanted a superhydrophobic+superoligophobic coating for dishes since I learned of the existence of such nanocoatings, but I haven't seen any that are durable and/or regarded as food safe.

Prejudice based upon age is the last remaining socially acceptable form of prejudice. Most articles about adolescents read exactly like opinions about various races, women, etc in the past. The arguments are the same, and the conclusions are the same. The lack of scientific evidence is, also, the same. Repeatedly they observe some limitation and conclude, without any evidence at all, that the limitation is not due to lack of education or socially-inflicted lack of experience but endemic and unavoidable.

One of the most popular misunderstandings of neuroscience going around recently is the "brain isn't fully developed until age 25" idea. This is often parroted and repeated, often by otherwise quite knowledgeable people, without any understanding of what brain development is, or how it occurs. The idea is used to support notions of restriction and sheltering, which is totally at odds with every understanding of how brain development actually occurs. The brain develops in response to novel experience, and solely in response to novel experience. Lack of novel experiences leads to lack of brain development. When an infants visual cortex is immature and incapable of stereoscopic vision, the exactly wrong course of action would be to cover one eye. Doing so would prevent the brain from developing the ability to integrate vision from both eyes into a coherent single image. The issue is even more problematic when you look at what criteria is used to judge the brains "immaturity" in the material supporting the "immature until 25" claim. What they examine is neuroplasticity. They observe that neuroplasticity reduces substantially after age 25. They interpret that as a sign that the brain is 'done' with it's primary development, but that's a bit of an arguable point. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that neuroplasticity in a high state is the desirable condition and that its reduction is a consequence of the end of introduction of large quantities of new experiences due to most people entering the working world and settling into a 'routine' life.

On a lighter note, just imagine if this perspective were to change, socially. If in 10 or 20 years time prejudice against teens were viewed with as much disgust as racism and sexism are now. Old tweets griping about teens being surfaced and people being 'cancelled' over them, etc. It would be quite different. But, there would probably be markedly less school shootings.

I would love to hear the original audio from that game between a precoscious 6 year old and Garfield. It sounds like it would be totally adorable and also informative. I got the Magic bug in junior high school in the early 90s and it was a blast that definitely enhanced my life and expanded my friend circle throughout high school. I vividly remember going to a small local tournament, meeting a ton of people and very much having a feeling of 'these are my people'. It was amazing.

That was back in 4th edition days I think (I know it was during release of The Dark expansion, I bought a box of boosters for that... was a bit disappointed). It seems the rules have changed a bit since then and the game itself is quite a bit more complicated. Lots of counters and tokens and such that weren't so much of a thing back then.

As a person who prefers profanity and hyperbolic exaggeration and over-reaction when dealing with technical topics (about which no sane person would do things like threaten violence, so it becomes funny for someone you know to do so), I entirely understand the need for policies like these. I am fully aware that I am not all people or even necessarily normal. Reviews inherently involve other people, and unless you are in a closed and close-knit social group, it is very easy for people to misunderstand things and be unaware of the subtext a person might be intending to communicate with.

I don't really understand why (at least not enough that I could effectively change the situation) some folks conduct themselves as if everyone else is their best friend and knows them intimately, knowing when they are joking, etc. Is it a matter of stereotypical 'social awkwardness' that society derides intellectuals with? Or something different? I haven't personally come across people that are earnestly writing code review comments with malice, but have certainly seen some that could be seen as overly negative/aggressive/etc by an outsider (they were written in a very close-knit team amongst friends, though). I presume most all problematic comments come down to misunderstandings.

I was not aware of this at all. How did Backcountry get the trademark in the first place? It should definitely fail on the first challenge if backcountry is literally a subtype of ski and pre-existed. I know nothing about skis, and all the comments here and in the article made it sound like the furor was all over the generic adjective of 'backcountry' which I took to just be a synonym for 'rustic'.

>They're not required to choose a word already ubiquitous in their industry and trademark it.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with the comment you replied to.

>They're taking "defense" to a ridiculous, douchy extreme.

Unless they did not send letters prior to filing their cases (of which I am unaware and the article did not mention), then everything mentioned is neither ridiculous nor douchey except as far as trademark law in business always is. If the term actually does not indicate to consumers what company manufactured it due to its common usage, all that needs to happen is one of the challenged companies put up a defense claiming genericization or lack of validity of the original trademark (that one is probably more suitable in this case) and a court will decide if that's so. With trademark, as a company you do not get a choice.

If they choose not to fight a small business using the name, that is a 100% legitimate defense for Walmart to use when they release Walmart Backcountry Skis that have nothing whatsoever to do with Backcountry.com.

The EFF article provided by another commenter does not 'debunk' anything. We're not talking about a company suing people for talking about the company. We're talking about a company suing other companies for promoting products in the exact same space with the trademarked name. This is what trademark law was kind of created for in the first place. If you can convince a court that if you walked into a Walmart and saw Walmart Backcountry Skis on sale that it would never cross the mind of either you or any other consumers that the Backcountry company might have been involved in their production, that is your defense and the trademark will be nullified and the lawsuit will be won.

Correct. This article reads like someone who has no knowledge of, or familiarity with, trademark law. Trademarks have to be defended or they are lost, and additionally almost all trademarks are applied to a very broad list of things just as standard practice. Even if your company is only making T-shirts, for instance, it would be very common to also have your trademarks cover toys, dishes, tools, and all kinds of other products just in case you might want to plaster your trademark on those in the future.

That being said, the fundamental purpose of trademarks is to eliminate consumer confusion. In order to defend against a challenge, you would need to present to the court strong evidence that there is very little chance a consumer might be confused as to the maker or origin of the goods due to the name. For instance, if you made a line of frozen pizzas and called them 'backcountry style' pizzas, is there a chance that some consumers might think those pizzas were made by Backcountry.com? You've got to be able to show that this is not a likely scenario even if Backcountry.com starts manufacturing frozen foods (assuming the trademark covers frozen foods, I have no idea if it does, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did).

I developed a website for reserving parking near airports and seaports years ago and the site launched under the name BookParkFly.com. Shortly thereafter, the business (I was just a contracted web developer) received a letter from a lawyer representing the people who owned a sorta-similar trademark in the same space for a company called, if I remember correctly, Park 'N Fly. I personally thought we might have been able to win a challenge in court, but the company didn't want to fight it so changed the name and rebranded everything. (It's Book2Park now if you're curious, but I severed ties with them years ago. Before they were featured on Krebs after getting someone else to slap in an insecure Wordpress blog after I told them if Wordpress was going to be used it had to be watched closely for security concerns...)

Trademark challenges aren't "bullying" or "aggressive". They're basic law 101 and really shouldn't surprise anyone in business. That's why you pay an attorney to do a trademark search if you really want to use a certain name.

So it's not just me. I've considered developing a toy OS as a fun project for a long time, but I was always mystified about what to do about graphics. The whole reason I wanted to do an OS was to do a sort of 'start fresh' thing where I looked at the hardware we have now and designed for THAT instead of designing to support 1970s era software. The first step is if it's a 4K monitor, the first graphics mode is 4K, not 80x25 text. Fonts are vector by default, not raster. Graphical compositing of the display, even when its the initial 'text mode' terminal would be rendered on a 3D isometric projection surface using a hardware accelerated graphics card. And how do you do that exactly? Even if you are willing to limit yourself to a single nVidia or ATi card supported to start? Ah...

That doesn't make any sense. The reason SDI is suicide to build is because the countermeasures are ridiculously cheap and compensating for them is ridiculously expensive. It will always be an order of magnitude (or ten) cheaper to build more almost-free decoy warheads than it will be to expand the tracking, targetting, and interception capability of the system shooting down the 'warheads'. You just deployed a system that can handle 100 warheads at once? Next month I'll roll out 100 decoys and 50 legitimate warheads. It'll cost me $2 million and for you to handle an extra 50 will take you years and cost $2 billion. If you want your system to be effective, you have to agree to your own death by economic attrition.

That is a stupendously dangerous question to ask, and that the answer is not crystal clear from the outset is terrifying. When humanity and computers collide, the computer is always in the wrong. Every single time, forever. At no point is it acceptable to ask that any human being alter their culture, lifestyle, or thinking because it fits the boxes the developers were asked to put in place. Doing so would make stupid bureaucractic policy mistakes into cultural catastrophes. I legitimately fear two agents of oppression: 'Sorry, it's policy' used to excuse cruelty, and 'the software doesn't have a place for me to put that.'

The way I have thought about software's necessary complexity for a long time is by considering what software IS. Software, no matter what it does or how it is written, boils down to instructions and data that operate on transistor gates in a computers processor and memory. We must write code which orchestrates the flipping of millions or billions of switches, millions or billions of times a second, in exact perfect synchronicity. The machines these run on, if transistors are considered a 'part' are the most complex machines in terms of part count ever created by humanity, packing up to around a billion parts into about a square inch of space. Also, our software isn't the only thing running. It must coexist with an unknowable number of other pieces of software flipping the gates in unknowable ways. Also, we do not interact with the gates directly. We do so at a level which is many layers of abstraction removed from them, like building a car the size of North America from the moon with chopsticks long enough to reach. Oh, and if we, at that level of gates, get one thing out of sync or make a single mistake, it can effectively instantly cascade into taking the entire system down.

So, yes, software is complex. And it will always remain complex. It is doing monstrously complex things under the hood, all abstractions are leaky, and we are definitely past the point at which one person can even reasonably understand the entire stack from transistors all the way up through OS, compiler, language, etc. We must accept this fact of complexity and formulate ways to deal with it, to contain it and reduce it when we can, but it will always be with us.

I think they're just being honest. All of the features they boast were completely possible in the 90s. The only reason we didn't get them in the 90s was people not realizing they were so possible, or perhaps not wanting to leave their 70s style behind. A great deal of computing, especially on the *nixy side of things, is stuck in the past. Stepping back and looking at what you're used to and saying 'but how would it work if we were designing it from scratch today with all the hardware and knowledge we have now' doesn't often come up. And it's often seen as an attack on the older way of doing things for no good reason.

Not to mention something that almost all NLP systems are resounding terrible at - short-term memory. If we've been talking about corporate financials for an hour and I say 'Justify the margins', it should be crystal clear what I mean. But most automated systems try to operate without a hint of memory or 'state' being tracked.

Every action has a consequence, and intentions do not matter. What will the consequences of millions of non-life-saving interventions be? We need to keep in mind that we are rolling these technologies out in an entirely blanket fashion, affecting millions of children and adolescents, and we are doing it to prevent exceptionally rare events. In the aftermath of Columbine, schools received lists of "warning signs" derived from nothing objective or accurate. These lists painted targets on the back of dozens of kids. At every single school. Every single year. The lists claimed to assist in identifying potential school shooters. Shooters who were students we know for a fact were present at only a single school, and only one or two every couple years. Why weren't these lists discarded immediately as they were very visibly and provably wrong? The answer to that question is what will support the continued expansion of surveillance in schools relentlessly, even in the face of evidence that it does more harm than good.

What children can do at what age is a direct function of how they are raised. Americans, unfortunately, have been sold on the notion that what a child is capable of is instead somehow a biological limitation. There are some biological limitations, of course, such as the inability for average children before around age 10 to perform abstract reasoning, etc, but they are very few. And those limitations are misunderstood, as well. While the truth is that a child exposed to something 'before they can understand it' will experience confusion (or misunderstanding... 'kid logic' can be amazing in the lengths to which it stretches to attempt to integrate new knowledge), it is assumed they will instead experience intense, damaging trauma. I think there is also a component involved of 'doing something is better than doing nothing' when, in many cases, doing nothing would definitely be the better solution. I don't believe there are hardly any parents who, for instance, could come across a string of 'dead baby' jokes in a group chat their 11 year old is participating in and conclude 'my child is developing a sense of humor and fitting in with a peer group.' They would instead conclude 'my child is uncaring, incapable of empathy, foul-mouthed, and I need to make them understand how serious this is.' A reaction like that, from your parent, would be devastating. They know you better than anyone. If they tell you that you are an uncaring, unkind, vicious person, you are not going to be able to step back and see that your parent is being ridiculous in most cases. You will simply be hurt, and that parent has certainly not prepared you for how to handle emotions like that. It ends up with an immature person (the parent) inflicting distress on another immature person (the child) and no one benefits.

Usually surveillance is something parents aren't mature enough to handle. It wouldn't be a big problem if the parents were mature enough to step back and say 'is there any actual probability of actual harm here?' Unfortunately, most parents use surveillance to actively do harm. Not intentionally, of course, but parents lack a basic understanding that change and growth in maturity and capability in their children is a GOOD thing. They typically see it as their primary responsibility to prevent their children from changing, to "protect" them against the exact experiences which are completely necessary and required to induce development. Brain development does not occur automatically. It is not a function of growth of new neurons or a function of age. It is purely a function of experience, with novel experiences and intense experiences being the primary drivers. Most parents (certainly not all, luckily) are so focused on blocking things their children aren't "ready for" that they never once stop to ask themselves what they need to do to make their child ready for the thing they're blocking.

I think that is the main sticking point people have with parents surveilling their children when concerns are expressed. Especially when doing things like reviewing all of their childs text messages, web browsing history, etc, the worry is that the parent will likely seek to moderate almost every interaction their child has with another person which is a very scary overstepping of boundaries that has never even been possible before. This rises to a level that concerns everyone in society, really, as they will be interacting with those children as they grow and when they reach a premature adulthood, having been robbed of many formative experiences 'for their own good.'

I would never expect a company that did log to refuse to give those logs to a court. That would be corporate suicide and executives would end up in actual prisons. I also wouldn't expect a VPN provider to refuse a court ordered warrant to begin logging your particular traffic or something like that. So if a company has appeared in court and failed to produce any logs and the court has accepted that information as not existing, it's hard to get stronger verification than that. And that has occurred with at least a few VPN providers (while a few have provided logs to the courts, proving they log).

>There is no way for you to verify that, and of course this is what a malicious VPN provider would claim as well. In short: the only safe assumption is that every VPN provider logs.

If the VPN provider has been ordered by a US court to produce log information, and they have appeared in court responding that it is not possible for them to do so as such logs do not exist, and the court has accepted this as true, that is adequate 'proof' in my eyes. It is something which puts them in the position of being extremely legally liable for in a way that advertising 'no logs' does not, since prosecution for false advertising is a joke.

I do think there are certainly problems, but I don't agree what you describe is any rational conclusion of the principles of a free market. No one wants to live in a world where all resources are consumed to make widgets. Therefore, those people will not pay to buy that many widgets if they're informed enough to understand the true price of things. Most models of capitalism have weaknesses like this surrounding the need for information to be universally and equally available for their conclusions to hold, which can produce some incentives to obscure or hide information that makes exploitation easier. The issue with modern day overwork, though, isn't a lack of information but more a change in cultural values which needs to take place. Currently, the 'work hard and you will be rewarded' mindset which was productive (and often honest) in the factory-oriented past is being misapplied in modern environments where it is both counter-productive and false. 'Salary' doesn't mean 'paid for completing the work' as it was supposed to when legally created as a category, it means nothing more than 'required to perform large quantities of unpaid work'.

I don't know if it's to coerce loyalty. I would presume that the main motivation is that they know that you are what generates profit. So if they can exploit you as a profit-generating resource, and get away with it, they will do so. This isn't novel. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was common for entire families, children included, to work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and barely earn enough to survive. That was not done out of economic necessity. When the government stepped in and required companies to pay 1 person enough to raise a family for 40 hours of work in a week, that essentially amounted to requiring them to give a greater than 960% wage increase. (Going from getting 384hr of work out of a family of 4 in a week to getting 40hrs of work from that same family, just to keep that family at the same subsistence level would require paying 960% more for that 40 hours.) And they survived. In fact, they thrived, as did all of society when they were forced to do that. But, the type of people who created that situation in the first place are still being born. They're still running companies. And they will still attempt to wring every valuable moment out of the lives of human beings to take for themselves. If we let them.

Legally speaking, age discrimination can not exist if you are under 40. There is zero protection with respect to age discrimination prior to 40 years of age, and the younger you get, the more enthusiastically age discrimination is accepted. Get under 18 and discrimination based on age is fully supported and actively encouraged.

Just an observation, frat houses do focus very heavily on mob mentality, while hipsters are just a trend group. No one is going to get lectured by their fellow hipsters about being insufficiently loyal to the hipster brotherhood. Hipsters don't organize and intentionally seek to forge mob mentality and loyalty obsession. That is a significant difference just considering human psychology.

This is pretty brilliant. I hadn't accounted for this, despite doing a lot of thinking in this area, but this sort of issue, where the business focuses upon forming itself around the mentality of the employee rather than the other way around, makes total sense. As we move away from repetitive physical labor to mental work (I prefer that to the term 'knowledge work' because very often the work has very little to do with actual knowledge which can be explicitly codified but instead relies upon workers mental faculties), it's obvious that we will need to change a lot of the structures and practices of business. Many of the things that businesses have focused on are derived from things that were very important in factory work. The ability to reduce your work to a checklist of verifiable, quantifiable, and (very importantly) transferrable tasks, the ability to 'sell' (not always actual sales, but extroversion, self-promotion, etc), and things like that are all very possible and beneficial when a business consists of a factory floor, a front office, a sales force, and a back room with accountants and the like. When the factory floor disappears and instead the business is tackling intellectual challenges that require different strategies for every one, problems that are poorly defined, etc... the difference is so substantial that any adequate changes will have to be similarly substantial.

It's a big change. It impacts far more than the company office. It affects what society views as valuable. It changes what society sees as success. It basically shoots off in an orthogonal direction from everything society has been structured around for the entire 20th century. I am reminded of things like the recent book 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking' and the documentary 'The Century of the Self.' It really is a sea change and social changes of that magnitude are messy, slow, and usually come with a good amount of strife. Substantial changes like these being tried by this company are stressful and induce anxiety most especially in anyone who has invested in or succeeded in the older model, so the psychological hurdles are high. But, substantial changes are necessary and since this is a novel situation, our best chance of finding the successful solutions are trying and evaluating substantial changes.

The same is true of cash. Almost all of the complaints I have seen with regards to cryptocurrency limitations are in the ways in which it resembles cash. The transactions are untraceable and permit criminals to hide transactions - same as cash. If lost to fraud or theft, no one will replace it - same as cash. If you are in legal trouble, the government cannot freeze the assets - same as cash. Compare cryptocurrencies to cash, rather than a balance claim made by a bank. With a credit card it's even closer, as nothing whatsoever would prevent someone offering credit backed by cryptocurrency rather than backed by USD offering a credit card with the same capabilities. Your credit card isn't 'your money' and you're not transferring money when you make a purchase with it. You are requesting a loan from a company, and that company is handling paying for the transaction. You then later settle that debt. It's quite different from cash in many ways.

My concern with fiat money and the benefits that cryptocurrency provides align very well. My concern with fiat currency is that it is entirely possible that tomorrow we will wake up to discover that the digital systems banks use to trace and account for money, systems we know are antiquated and maintained and expanded with the least effort and expense physically possible, are meaningless. The discovery of a persistent system of exploitation which has made the balance numbers held by all banks into nonsense is entirely possible. If it is discovered that large economic players or criminals have EVER manipulated the values recorded as an 'account balance' to represent instead pure fiction - game over. I would expect this observation to be announced first by a nation foreign to the US, followed by that nation no longer accepting digital transfers of any kind in US dollar denominations, as their basis for value, solely trust in the digital accounting systems of US banks, evaporated overnight.

There is no possible way for a bank to 'prove' that the billion-dollar balance of a Walmart account represents anything of value. They can show that their systems reflect it, but it ends there. They can not prove that, say, $500 million of that balance is invented 'funny money' that represents absolutely nothing. Cryptocurrencies can not have this happen, as they manage their reliance on trust. I can prove a bitcoin is legitimate mathematically, and I need ask nothing of the other party for them to be able to verify it themselves. I can not prove a dollar displayed as part of my account balance at a bank is legitimate. And, as far as I understand matters, neither can anyone else. I must ask the other party to trust my bank, or trust the FDIC, or trust the US governments computer systems, or something along those lines.

The ideal situation, of course, would be a government-backed cryptocurrency with the government guaranteeing that the cryptocurrency would be honored as legal tender. But the political clout of banks makes such a thing very difficult. It would place banks in a position of actually earning their profits through the lending and borrowing of money, rather than actually profiting from garnering nearly every single monetary transaction which occurs (solely those which are conducted purely in cash exempted) in the economy in an act of cryptotaxation (the crypto prefix here meaning 'hidden', not related to cryptography).

I would like to suggest a tremendously simple (4) : Every day, each employee spends no more than 5 minutes reporting what they did the prior day, and what they are planning to work on that day. If they're blocked by anything, they can mention that and ask for assistance.

I just finished working on a fully remote contract that worked that way, every day at noon there was a conference call that never took longer than 15 minutes. It worked great. A couple manager types were on the call, and they'd share any developments on the contract side of things, feedback from the customer, things like that, but mostly they just listened and took note of potential issues and made sure they got resolved (so like if you mentioned a problem one day then didn't the next, they'd ask if it got dealt with).

I find it hard to imagine that viewing such videos in the context of a society which vociferously opposes sexual violence could result in anyone thinking the videos are depicting reality. Are we meant to believe that a significant number of adolescents see the vast overabundance of non-abusive pornography, the wider messages about sex they've received every day of their life from their parents and society and peers, and a tiny number of abusive pornographic videos and then conclude that the abusive ones are the actual realistic ones?