stubbedtoe

- Respect the user: We serve far too many ads for what is needed to achieve our goal, and our Cloud division does not always provide the support our users crave when they cannot use the amazing tools we create. - Respect the opportunity: Some of us (myself included) have not always felt able to bring our best self to Google, preventing us from making the decisions that matter. - Respect each other: Some of us do not share freely with each other (myself included from time to time), some of us do not respect ourselves enough (we put up with letting others and ourselves make suboptimal discussions). We are more and more hiding things from each other

This brings me to the point of this essay, which is that right now we are in a dangerous and divided world, with many democratic countries pushed to the edge by harsh dictatorships. We are in a world where individual expression is decreasing, not increasing, which is incredibly sad considering the technology we have available to us. Somewhat concerningly, AI is being developed not by a stable democracy making rational decisions, but a barely functioning corrupt democracy. Worse, the technology is being developed by a company whose interests are not to spread love and connection for humans, but to maximize shareholder return to emotionally stunted billionaires. These are the people who I feel most sorry for. They can happily inflict so much pain on people for they must truly be missing so much love in their life.

My call to Google and the world is that we do the right thing, and put AI into the hands of the right people. That is, this powerful but dangerous tool must be developed responsibly and safely by a stable democracy, such as the UK. We don’t promise that we will always get it right. But we will learn from our mistakes. That’s all that humans can do. I’m risking everything by sending this memo.

I’m risking my job, my family and even risking my life. But I accept anything I’ve done in the past and will talk about it openly and honestly.

I trust in humanity to do the right thing. Please help me share my message of hope. Thank you.

My theory is that software engineering is fundamentally a lonely activity.

Loading up the context required to solve a problem and hold that state for the several hours to write the code means to be alone with the computer and no one else. To think about abstract ideas and concepts instead of people and feelings. As a social animal, that's not what humans evolved to do.

Software engineers need to prioritise connecting with people during their free time since they are unlikely to experience much of this during their job.

This story reminds me of when I was a teenager and delivered a weekly free newspaper to the neighbouring houses. The newspaper company would call up a few houses to check if they'd received the paper. Except they never connected the employee database and the "mystery shopper" database, so would call our house phone every few months and ask if we'd received the newspaper. It was always a source of amusement for us!

For those interested in looking at the raw data, https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map is a useful visualisation of cases by region, over time.

Same :( Darksky was excellent in that you could put any coordinates and any date in the past and then it would give you hourly weather data. I also am struggling to find an alternative.

I feel like this solves a problem which shouldn't really exist - In a perfect world a free trial really should be free and should allow you a choice afterwards to either cancel or continue.

That said I think the concept of using essentially fake bank accounts seems somewhat legally dubious. Surely when you start the subscription you are entering a contract with the company, so when the company is unable to retrieve any money I would assume the individual would be the one liable to legal action? Would make pretty bad press though so I can't imagine any company actually doing this.

The problem I have with tipping is the idea that if you don't tip you are stingy and ungenerous - surely me choosing to be at your establishment and paying for your product is enough of a contribution to your business and your workers. If you need more cash to pay your workers, make the product more expensive.

It's not like people who do tip are even tipping everyone underpaid who helps them live their life - no one is sending extra cash over to the kid that made their phone or the poor worker who picks their food.

And specifically for counter service as described in the article, tipping makes even less sense. How can you possibly know what service you will receive before you receive the service? If the tip isn't conditional on the quality of the service, surely it just becomes a tax.