3,162 karma · joined September 28, 2012
It's entirely possible to hire more engineers of color and pay them fairly, but it turns out that pitting workers against each other by introducing a handful of inconsequential process and standards changes is much cheaper and hinders the solidarity that enables coordinated advocacy for better working conditions.
I found that, after tinkering with blocklists for a bit, I turned off logging altogether and just let it run. The one thing that gives us grief occasionally is (unsurprisingly) tracking links from promo emails and social media. These are usually easy enough to bypass, but it can be a pain for non-tech-savvy people.
But, instead of acknowledging that, for some reason a large group of Science Defenders have chosen this hill to die on where actually theory means infallible truth that mustn't be challenged, especially not from the likes of the common man.
There is such a drive to prove the religious wrong that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and created some kind of anti-religion where all skepticism is immediately put down and skeptics are excommunicated.
If it's not obvious, these Facebook libraries are trojan malware, full stop. And, even though iOS apps are sandboxed, if 50% of a user's apps have the same Facebook library baked into them, it's not hard for Facebook to link all that data together to determine usage patterns across apps.
The reason why they're fighting with Apple now is that it used to be much easier for Facebook to obtain a device-unique identifier that each app could forward along to Facebook, giving them device-level usage data. Apple now sees the privacy flaws in device-unique ids, and has either started or plans to start rotating those device ids and making them unique at the app-level only, which reduces the resolution of its tracking from the device level to the network level.
After reading, I almost laughed out loud that the author apparently felt the need to relitigate the rise of SPAs, throw in a shoutout to SEO, dunk on Java developers, tug on our heartstrings thinking of the kids in Africa with iPhone 4s crying while Safari parses 100kB of JSON (in 2005, this would have been a story about grandmas surfing the web on IE5), and, as a special treat, throw out a recommendation for Ruby on Rails in 2021.
A List Apart appears to have pivoted to a sort of digital Renaissance fair, but for the year 2007.