warp_factor

I used to follow that guy religiously then I realized that he knew how to hack the "attention" system on social media. He is famous for what really is little fluffy sentences that would get retweeted and make him look like a wise man with the ultimate truth about everything.

Now I see him as a huge hack. Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley.

I wish people would be able to keep things simple and still use IRC instead of bullshit "productivity" apps like Slack

Sad day. I never used them but I always enjoyed Bryan Cantrill's postmortems and deep dives on Joyent all over the internet. Would love to see his take on this EOL announcement.

Bryan, are you around?

by all means this is censorship. Let's not get confused here.

It is a private company doing the censorship but this is 100% in the definition of censorship.

The issue here is that Youtube is already known to ban people that clearly didn't show any extreme views. This was used as an easy pretext for the ban though.

the issue is not me or you but with the masses of people that don't know // don't care where they give their attention. And that's the huge majority unfortunately.

because it became the de facto place most of non tech-savy people go to to see videos online. They have a huge monopoly on our time and attention and that's extremely disturbing.

Imagine that the electricity company providing electricity policed what kind of devices you can use inside your home (you are allowed to connect a Samsung washer but not a Bosh washer). There would be a lot of outcry.

And here we go. As usual the "racist" pretext is being used to censor videos.

I have no doubt that there are some terrible awful racist videos in that lot but you have to wonder how many times this is ALSO used as a mean to censor pretty much any video that the youtube execs don't like. Censorship is getting worse

Edit: Replacing "Censorship is coming back" with "Censorship is getting worse"

Which as a generalist I find very interesting. I have been in startups at which I was a tech lead but also a Product manager. Depending on what I would want to do next I would put one or another on my resume.

I have had both Engineering jobs that would force me to be always on and other engineering jobs in which I would completely disconnect as soon as I leave at 5PM.

The ones in which you fully disconnect are so good for your private life. You leave the office and don't even think about opening the work laptop anymore, that's something special.

Yes I believe we are all partially wasting our time. Unfortunately it is one of the pillars of our societies and it would be extremely or almost impossible to change. People expect to be busy at work 5 days a week for 8 hours.

you are exactly right. Fortunately in Tech that seems to change somewhat with homeworking and other "remote" style of working.

My theory is that 90% of people don't do more than 20 hours worth of work per week anyways. We just all got used to be very inefficient at what we do.

Spending a considerable amount of time in both Taiwan and China for work and personal reasons over the last 10 years I'm always shocked to see the huge difference between those two countries that have a common origin.

As a European I think Taiwan would be one of the easiest and best places where I could relocate in Asia. Mainland China on the other hand would be a nightmare.

Or you wait for Google or you are frantically trying to move everything you got to AWS.

Racism is becoming the catch-it-all excuse that you can throw at pretty much anything to justify why you should take it down.

I would love to hear what would all the advocates of going "100% in the cloud" think about this.

I cannot believe we are in 2019 and Israel continues to be able to do whatever they want without any real international consequences. The EU is continuously warning that they should stop. Obviously nobody cares.

The real issue is the blind support of the US behind whatever Israel does. I will not go to the level of claiming that there is an extremely active Israel//Jewish lobby in DC but at least they were extremely successful at convincing everyone that if you criticize Israel's settlement policies it makes you automatically antisemitic.

They should be seen as a public utility.

I dislike Facebook but for a lot of people it became part of their life and some information is now only available on Facebook.

As a public utility they should be regulated on what they are allow to restrict from their users.

Welcome to Facebook Co. Where a clique of Silicon Valley exec yuppies now decide what is right and what is wrong for us to see.

It's a very slippery slope. Cannot wait for the next elections where any candidates with politically "wrong" ideas will see their pages silently being discarded or randomly hidden from timelines without warnings.

that article is pushing the idea that Social networks should be better at policing speech on their platform.

As said in other comments pushing for more self policing is the worst thing that could happen for democracy and free-speech. The last thing I want is for a small clique of silicon valley tech execs to decide what I should or should not see on my feed.

I see two solutions on this:

- Censorship is coming from an elected government body

- No censorship and we let people decide what is news and what is fake news.

But having Zuck and his team manipulate newsfeed to push a political or social agenda is a terrible idea. This article is a shame.

They make me extremely nervous. Most people I know that use Robinhood seems to use it as they would play dices in Vegas. They have no ideas on the stock fundamentals or why and how the prices change. Most of them are playing a big amount of their savings too which is extra concerning.

What makes me even more nervous is that Robinhood seems to deliberately cater to those crowds of uneducated emotional day traders.

I said this before but they seem to become the "facebook of finance" with the same "break things and go fast" mission. I would never use them for any significant amount of money. That being said, I use them occasionally for options because the fees of traditional brokers are such a joke (20$ typically to sell and buy).

After using the big three clouds for a long time, GoogleCloud got the absolutely worst support. And by far.

Google Fi is a huge joke.

I had the same type of shenanigans with their customer service. Eventually after calling every day for about two weeks I managed to find a competent supervisor that managed to follow up on what he said.

Since then I moved my main number back to ATT and I keep a Google Fi account open for my international travels. I only ever use Fi outside the US and I pause the account whenever I'm in the US.

GoogleFi is a good deal financially but if there is something I learned after years dealing with shady companies is that you don't want any of those shady companies have any leverage by keeping something essential such as your phone number under control as a leverage.

Sadly I saw exactly the same type of issue with their Google Cloud customer service. I really think that Google employee still think they work for the best company in the world and that people cannot wait to do business with them. They need to get out of their little bubble.

The same kind of ethics that can justify every terrible action.

As usual if you feel fine and inline with the company's ethic then go for it. I suspect that most engineers and Facebook employee know deep down how shitty the product they build really is.

The general feel I get from most of my engineer friends is that Facebook's product is definitely not inspiring and doesn't "make the world a better place" (whatever that means).

But the consensus is that given the right amount of money, they would all accept an offer from them. And Facebook is known to pay very well.

The way I view this, funding can definitely raise suspicion. But The open sourcing of the protocols should help to remove those suspicions.

The best approximation of security in this space should be an open-implementation of an open-source protocol that can be easily audited.

As far as I know, the only app that fits this requirement with a minimum viable community such that it can be used day to day is Signal.

Sure, I might have hit a corner case but I made an in-app purchase for a one year subscription for a service.

After using the app for a couple of days and restarting the phone, the app seemed to hit a bug and behave like if I didn't buy the subscription, prompting me to buy another subscription which I did thinking that this would unblock the backend and somehow merge with the fact that I already had a subscription.

Unfortunately, Google Play charged me again for a subscription I already had. Both the app creator AND Google Play were difficult to join. The App creators never replied to any of my emails. Google Play got an automated support website that decided that "I was not eligible for a refund" and there was nothing I could do about it. It also seems to be impossible to contact a real human being to explain the situation.

Late reply but here is what I did:

- Bought a new domain name and moved my mails in fastmail. I have been super happy with it so far.

- My Gmail address is now only for spam or very low importance emails.

- All my Pixel pictures are still uploaded to Google Photos, but I backup everything once a month or so.

- I don't use Google Drive for anything anymore. I have an Evernote account and a Dropbox account.

- Completely switchecd to DDG and Firefox.

- I'm still using my Pixel2 as of now but my next upgrade will be an IPhone, or a rooted Google-Independent Android phone.