themarkn

I don't consider it a tall order, it's exactly what I'd expect advertisers to do with these tools, if there was no specific process to prevent them from doing so.

I think this is key. Used to do it, then didn't need it!

Thanks for expanding! Yes with the spec being in draft who knows what will change. I'm really interested in seeing what the Firefox implementation turns out to be. Hopefully close enough to Chrome's that everything still works.

Are you on Twitter or is there some other way for me to know about your progress?

Here's a video demo of what we are working on: https://youtu.be/xcUxd9sOkaM

There are a few features not listed (like exporting a correctly-formatted subtitle file) but you'll get the general idea. There's a link to an old demo in the video description.

Could you tell me some more about this? I have used the web speech recognition API in Chrome (coming soon to Firefox also) to create a free project for real-time, editable, transcriptions in the browser that could be projected on a screen or subscribed to on a person's own device.

I am frustrated by:

- lack of cross-browser support on whatever device is generating the transcript. It will work from any Android phone but not from iOS

- No offline functionality, because the work is actually not done locally

- Poor accuracy.. we can correct this on the fly with the live editing, but it feels like it is not using the latest & greatest Google has to offer in terms of STT

I don't know much about Docker or how to "use" a Docker image. Not asking you to teach me, but do you think your project would be useful for what I'm talking about? Currently using Firebase for the backend but it's really just exploratory at this point.

Not sure who downvoted you because yes I should have used commas not only in the above comment but also in this one.

Man if we shampooed our hair before eating our hands would be extremely clean.

> My first intuition when facing unexpected billing would be to figure out what the major contributor to the bill is (in this case, massive reads from FireStore), not update my frontend packages.

They didn’t upgrade packages to solve the mystery billing. They upgraded packages before they checked what was going on with the database. When they saw the high billing that pointed them to the problem and they fixed it.

There was some questionable judgement shown by not checking db requests first, sure, but in no way did someone think “our google billing is high, we better upgrade angular”.

Your points about these things are right in that you can’t just randomly apply a quota anywhere in the process and expect a good result. Eg the solution to discrimination in the justice system is probably not to put more white people in jail for no reason. But if everybody received the same punishment for the same crime, that would actually happen.

“Blindness” is ideal once people get into the stages of the process where they are being evaluated on an individual level. It should be the goal.

Quotas are not targeted at those problems.

The important piece that a lot of us people seem to miss is that the ongoing effect of historical racism and sexism messes things up and creates unfairness before people even get in the room. Massive unfairness. Compounded in a thousand different ways over somebody’s life. Creating pressure away from one kind of life and towards another simply through historical inertia, because for most of history people like them did not have full rights as human beings.

Quotas seem bad at solving the problems you point out because they are not for that. They are an attempt to measure, and correct for, much bigger trends.

Well-designed quotas at the right places in processes could let the pool of people (who are then evaluated blindly) be a much more representative group. Quotas (or some other measurement) would let you know if some proxies for discrimination were still getting through the process.

Insurance companies my not use race, but a zip code can be a proxy for race, and the kind of neighborhood a person lives in can make them more likely to suffer a break-in or make a claim for some other reason.

I really do believe that it’s impossible to treat people as individuals with 100% certainty that that’s what you are doing. No matter how hard you try. Even in all the examples you gave, there is progress but things are not done.

Hopefully this makes my point more clear.

You are right - I should have written more carefully. I strongly disagree with the statement, but you are still a person and the fact that we don't currently agree on this doesn't mean I should insult you. It was bad writing. I did mean to target the statement, not the person.

However your questions in this reply, and the idea that I think the "old ways" are better ... I mean that's not in my argument. That's creating a false binary and trying to contort my statements into something that you can readily dismiss. You are insisting that somehow continuing to improve things means returning to the old ways.

It also seems to be a common tactic used by people with power to justify the status quo. I'm ok with dropping it here since we're apparently talking right past each other.

> Give people freedom and the opportunity to do what they want, and then the result will naturally be the fairest possible.

If we all started with the same options, this would be true. Our limits would only be reflections of our preferences and natural abilities. Like in an RPG where we pick wether to be a warrior or mage or whatever - you go down a skills path by choice based on what you want to achieve and what resources (xp etc) you have.

Unfortunately people are born into an active system wherein millions of events from before they were born are exerting pressures on their lives, pressures that we are mostly unaware of until it’s too late.

There’s no neutral “fair” option. This sucks. It’s bad. It’s stupid. People’s location or race or sex at birth should not bless them or condemn them. It should just be an interesting detail. But those things have real effects.

Ignoring this means accepting the current biases as somehow natural, and continues rewarding those already born with advantages. Fighting it means adding NEW biases, and reducing the advantages inherited by people with privilege. Which naturally seems unreasonable if you currently enjoy the benefits of those advantages.

Solutions like yours, which require no work be done to change things by the privileged, and ask the less privileged to reinterpret the status quo so that they realize things are fine as they are, should be suspect. They are not all definitely wrong, but they are especially attractive because of their convenience. And that pretty exterior can mask their lack of actual substance.

> Banks lend out money based on it. Courts make judgement based on it. Government gives out social support based on it. Insurance rates and medical care is all about individual assessment.

... these are all examples of places where bias is rampant. Banks, courts, government assistance, insurance premiums, and even medical care are not delivered to all individuals equally. Not at all. Not remotely.

Through activism and lawsuits that these areas have made strides towards fairness... but you seem to be holding them up as an example of treating people as individuals “done right” or “done successfully”.

To briefly take these one by one:

> Banks lend out money based on it.

- banks had to be forced to do this.

> Courts make judgement based on it.

- this is laughable. The legal system in the US punishes African Americans more strongly that Caucasians for the same crimes.

> Government gives out social support based on it.

- maybe?

> Insurance rates and medical care is all about individual assesment

- doctors provide more medication for pain at the same level to white patients vs black patients. Proxies for race are all over insurance. Women had to pay more for healthcare until very recent.

Without active efforts that were made over many years to tip the scales and correct these bad outcomes, all of this would be much much worse.

> History does not dictate the future and it doesn't create any benefits and drawbacks unless we treat people based on category and class rather then individuals.

I respectfully suggest that the above statement is completely incoherent with reality, and represents weird wishful thinking.

I guess quotas is such a vague term maybe it’s pointless to argue this. There can me more or less effective/fair implementations of a quota system. I’m not sure what better ideas are out there that don’t involve measuring the result in terms of diversity in a certain field, and optimizing to increase that result... which is in effect a quota.

Thank you for this perspective. I’m not going to argue. It sounds like this experience sucks mightily and I need to give it some thought.

We are very far away from the inherent limitations of measurement in this case though. Eventually we will hit those limits and have to throw up our hands and say “we’ve done our best”, but there are lots of big, well-documented effects of individual biases, which end up aggregated into systems and institutions in various ways, the effects of which are readily measurable.

> Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?

This is an equally impossible goal. The system is already unfair. You want to preserve the current unfairness. I think we should instead calibrate the unfairness to optimize for undoing the weirdness caused by humanity’s awful history of subjugating, robbing, and denying the rights of various kinds of people over many centuries. People born today experience various benefits and drawbacks related to conditions completely beyond their control.

If we have privilege this is the god damn least we can do.

I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.)

What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination and measure our success. Of course arbitrary targets sometimes lead to suboptimal outcomes in specific cases. But, in aggregate, they are better than no measurement at all and I believe they do improve things.

There are many forms of institutional discrimination that alter the candidate pool before people even apply. Your blind process can be perfect but that's the last link in the chain. Quotas are a blunt tool to force us to compensate for unfairness that occurred before our process for which we are not responsible in order to build stronger teams.

As such I believe quotas are a good thing, because institutional bias and discrimination are bullshit and need to be eradicated. When they are, we can drop the quotas. If we come up with anything better than quotas, we can drop the quotas.

I agree we should follow the preference. That's what I'm saying to do. My understanding from the link I posted is that EE Cummings did not want to always have his name lowercased: he chose to do it in certain contexts for specific artistic reasons. When we lowercase the name as though he intended to communicate something by having his name always be lowercase, we're creating an artistic statement for him that he never intended to make in the first place.

I like the poem. I also like this take on what we should do about capitalizing his name, it feels like it's as close as we can get to a rule: http://eecpoem.pbworks.com/w/page/9068325/Decapitalization ... Where he changed it, keep it changed, everywhere else, use standard capitalization.

I was a vegetarian for years and it fell apart when I spent 6 months as a music tour manager. When you are on the road you need to work with what's available. I support being vegetarian and even encouraging this among employees somehow, but maybe there's a way that's more considerate and practical.

The article seems to suggest that religious needs etc would be met.

Not inherently, but in this case all positives are matched to the same wording, and that wording expresses 100% certainty to the user that something in the file will harm their computer. That's a lie, because that is not what has been determined at all.

I agree that finer classification is needed. However: if you decide to declare to a user that every individual file that might contain a virus does contain a virus, that's intentionally deceiving them. It's deciding "X% of the time, this statement will not be true, and we are ok with that" instead of building the uncertainty into the statement itself. So I don't see how this can not be considered lying, unless they believed there would be no false positives.

I really love free code camp, but I had watched all of CS50 a year before and found it to be incredibly useful context. I didn't feel the need to dig in and do the exercises but just to take the time to understand what the CS people might have been talking about.

I completely disagree with this sentiment. Everything in a UI that you can do with a mouse should be tolerant of disabilities that people who use a mouse might be going throug (tremors etc). A user shouldn't have to try to do something and become frustrated in order to discover that it is "not for people with poor motor skills". We should do better. What you describe as "well worthwhile" still strikes me as woefully incomplete and annoying. Every user could potentially have poor motor skills at some point due to temporary causes.

It's not the end of the world of course. I just wouldn't think of "I have used it before and it was just fine for me" as a good reason to not strive for a more universal approach to interface design.

For me I'm ok with this in certain situations. If the time taken increases the clarity about what is going on or what has just happened (in the case of the ripple effect confirming a button was clicked or tapped), I don't find it disrespectful. I'm more irritated by flashes of loaders or messages that disappears before we can evaluate whether they are relevant. Different strokes, I guess.

I usually say this to my direct reports- "we have to do the review, but I promise there won't be any surprises!" And then I focus the review on how I value their contribution, how they positively influence their coworkers and clients. And if we are in-progress on improving something, we set those things as written goals for the next year.

It's fair to say that, because it's true, but it's not in and of itself a reason to write somebody off as a nut, or assume they have not found any other way to gain expertise on the thing they are talking about. I think OP's point was just that people used her unrelated qualifications as a way to dismiss her without reference to her actual argument.

> In a discussion of 'native apps vs web apps' it absolutely makes a difference that Electron apps are rendered by a browser's web view - they're basically a web page rendered by a local source not remote, but without any of the sandboxing that proper browsers employ for security.

Those are also reasons not to call them web apps though: web apps run in your browser of choice (ish) with all of the associated security and accessibility defaults, plus your extensions and whatnot. They are apps on the web.

> Shit Apps

You can do better.

> I can’t believe I had to explain that.

You didn't really have to. I guess I made my point badly. The fact that a "web browser" is somewhere in the chain of what is reading an application does not mean that the application itself has anything to do with "the web", so I think calling it a web app is confusing and pointless. And again, seems like a technicality.

> As for the second issue: users care because performance is worse, accessibility is by and large non-existent and platform features don’t work.

I agree with this in general. It doesn't mean it helps the user to call it a web app. Maybe we need a third, generic term for electron apps and others like them. A name that refers to the potential differences in performance, accessibility, and performance that users may notice?

Web app doesn't work for what you are talking about as far as I can tell. Of course this is an industry where terms and definitions change a lot.

This is a simple definition but I think it lacks a couple important things:

1. It doesn't match the words. If that defines a "web app" then where does the web come in? I would think part of being a web app is that you can access it via the web and don't have to install it on your device.

2. Usefulness of the distinction to users. The specific nature of the bundled runtime for the code doesn't matter to anybody. It strikes me as pedantic to insist that because under the hood a thing is running in a browser we should call it a "web app".

I think the most practical distinction is that web apps have a URL as the entrypoint. If you want to use it, you can visit the URL from any browser that supports the app. Web app requires a URL and a compatible browser.

If instead you install the thing on your computer and run it from there, it's not a web app. It's a native app. No URL and it doesn't care what other browser you have installed because it comes with everything it needs. It's independent.

How and why would users be expected to understand anything else?