crandycodes

If the government was also addressing the concentration of power in the American social media apps, I’d buy it. If this was about making laws on what info phones could record about you, I’d buy it. If this was about establishing transparency laws to allow the government to better enforce the privacy laws it has, I’d buy it. If it was a law saying recommendation algorithms can’t be used for political content, I’d buy it (though not sure that’d be constitutional).

Instead this says it’s fine to spy on and manipulate US citizens and concentrate media power, so long as you’re “American”.

It's possible that "Open Source" here is the OSI definition, which FSF has some objections to. If "Closed Source" just means "not Open Source as OSI defines it", then it is true that some non-OSI software is "free" software. Free software still requires source to be available and that you're allowed to modify and distribute it.

I disagree. If just expecting good outcomes worked, why would we have any laws at all?

Before we had laws on child labor, we had children working and falling into heavy machinery. Before we had laws on food quality, you had to guess which milk provider was going to give you the least amount of formaldehyde poison. Before we had laws enforcing civil rights, over half the adult population in the US was disenfranchised. Was Western society exhausted at enforcing religious/ethical norms back then or is it just a recent thing?

Using the "social contract" theory for why governments and countries exist, you could say that we don't need laws until we do. Once an undocumented part of the social contract (e.g. ethical or religious norm) is no longer sufficient to maintain the integrity of the contract, it must be written down and enforced via government as a last measure. I do expect my car manufacturer to sell me a car which is relatively secure. If they are failing to meet that expectation from society, then it falls to that last measure to enforce compliance with that norm. Laws are also often used to add clarify where there is ambiguity. Different cultures and religions have different norms. If those norms conflict (does the gender of my partner matter in a marriage?), it falls to law to clarify.

It's a fair debate about how much guardrails should we put in. There's likely value in allow kids to hurt themselves as long as they aren't at risk of being permanently maimed or dying. It's a fair debate to discuss the root causes of criminal behavior, be it the issues with modern religion or systemic issues which prevent people from successfully participating in mainstream society and the economic opportunity therein. However, there is no value in allowing easily stolen vehicles (a good which has been regulated for almost a century) to be sold, where they can then be used to enable other crimes.

+1 for Brother. Had the same one (MFC-L3750CDW) for years now. Just works. No weird subscription push. No weird apps to manage it. Actually integrates with 3rd party software easily. Everything I need and nothing I don't.

> The situation that the VCs and founders are in is often enviable, but isn't really relevant here.

Respectfully disagree. It's relevant to the extent the parent comment was talking about employees wanting to have someone else "hold the bag".

> Regular employees need to be financially responsible about accepting jobs with private-company equity comp, and not expect miracles.

Agree that it's their responsibility and no one should be starting a kickstarter for them or anything. But that doesn't mean you can't sympathize with them. They are often fairly young people who aren't experts on contract law. It's not unreasonable to say that at least some of them have been exploited with excessive promises. The industry would be a better place if rather than say "they should have known better", we instead said "employers shouldn't exploit people". A precedent of bad behavior shouldn't excuse it.

That seems like an odd way to frame it, imo. "Holding the bag" usually implies something negative, as in someone will be "caught" with something bad. As in the employees are looking to dupe someone into buying what they are selling. But employees, outside of company officers, do not control what information investors get about what they are buying. They can't trick anyone into buying something, although they could theoretically benefit if someone else did trick buyers.

But it's a weird take, because employees are already the ones "holding the bag". Office space, cloud compute, etc. are all sold as COGS. VCs usually have some ability to sell their shares on the private market since they can negotiate to get their capital. Employees are often the only ones which are taking an IOU for their time and effort compared to what they could get elsewhere in the market. Employees are often the lowest class of shares which get paid out last and often reliant on the board to be able to sell on the private market. Yes, the employees decided to take this offer, on good faith, that their management would look after them. They are adults who made a, theoretically, informed decision. But structurally, they are set up to be the ones "holding the bag" if things were to go wrong with an exit.

So of course they want an exit. They literally have no other choice to get a return on their time/effort than for that to happen. (or some odd third thing like private dividends, but again, they have practically no control over that happening)

"Converting between units is a useful skill" - is it intrinsically useful or just useful because we are forced to do it with the status quo?

Handle what, exactly? Are you actually experiencing any issues from not doing these things or are you experiencing FOMO? You've not articulated any problem you're facing.

Accusing others of being fake and producing crap may make you feel better for not being good at it, but it won't help you either way. I hope you're not a Principal Engineer I'm forced to work with - the work of those people are important for what we work on to succeed, whether you value it or not.

It is rational for governments to be defensive of practices which externalize costs onto 3rd parties, and they have to balance it with a number of factors including innovation.

It is easier to understand this with health, as compared to privacy, I think. The meat packing industry used to use substances such as formaldehyde to preserve meat longer. This wasn't transparent to the end customers and the health issues lead to lower productivity of the population as a whole. Soldiers eating this meat lead to lower fighting capabilities and higher illness. The meat packing industry fought against any transparency here knowing that it would hurt their profits. After an enormous amount of advocacy over decades, there was regulation added. There is a balance here - some substances are outright banned and some are just required to be documented on the food. This makes sense, in my opinion, because we can't expect every person to be a food chemist and know what's good and not good. Market makers have relatively large amounts of money to spend to confuse customers with misinformation, if given the option.

Applying this to privacy, the question that governments have to find out is what is fair for end users to be allowed to make a choice on and what is outright harmful such that a rational, informed person wouldn't make that choice. It is a tricky thing to get right and this bill may be overreach, but that is the nature of government and any policy - iteration. But there is always a place for a government to be in the market. Otherwise the market will be dictated by the powerful, not the people. Without perfect information transparency and the ability to interpret that information, there is no such thing as a free market.

No one things FB is evil because they aren't transparent. It is because of the observable harm on society and their perceived reluctance to mitigate that harm. Internally, they also suffer with retention because employees don't want to work at an evil or perceived to be evil place.

Thus, FB decides to have more transparency, gets a little credit that they want to fix the problem. All good.

Now, FB then revokes that after it leads to criticism (which is the point of being transparent...), so they revert to the previous state, only now there is even more evidence and the problem is worse.

It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy. Not only is that not the issue at hand but it speaks to the lack of self-awareness that I can only hope will doom FB to irrelevance or legal destruction.

For me, I never really made friends in the office, but I did make friends from the office and my profession from outside of the office activities. Conferences, education, meetups, big morale events. These things have stopped, for me, since the pandemic, so I've not made any new friends this way. I'm full-time remote now, and moved away from the west coast, but I expect I'll still do conferences and the big morale events. I've not explored the meetup scene here, but I am hoping to also make some friends doing non-tech activities finally, since my new area is less tech focused.

As someone who's needed to maintain complex, high-performance database drivers that needed to work across a bunch of different platforms, I've been following them and their predecessors of OpenTracing/OpenCensus. The problem that's always been interesting to me as a library maintainer is consistency across platforms and well maintained multi-platform libraries.

I hadn't really found an acceptable solution that would work across Java, Node.js, browser, and so on. We'd invented our own formats and then we owned all the integration problems with various monitoring tools. I left the team before we started to adopt, but they've started doing it and it looks like it's help with reducing integration burden. I also think using someone else's opinionated library can help avoid bikeshedding on concepts not related to your core value.

I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve.

Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast.

I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB before COVID hit, and then accepted a new management role back on the team right as COVID was hitting. I've never seen my team all in the same room; but it's been fine/normal-ish. Now that full-remote just takes manager approval, we've had folks move away from Seattle/SF. I've got reports in the UK and NYC. It's pushed our culture to be a lot more communicative, intentional, and organized, which is good for everyone, Seattle based or remote.

What's great about all this is now there isn't even a question of "is remote ok"? We don't need to be looking for a specific skillset or a certain level of seniority. It really opens up the talent pool; recent hires have given us a lot more selection. (P.S. - I'm hiring Product Managers; permanent remote. Check out my pinned tweet on the twitter profile in my bio)

Distasteful speech is legal and so is kicking distasteful speech off your private platform. The primary limitation on what businesses can and can't do with who uses their platforms are that they need to avoid affecting protected classes.

If you think we need to protect MAGA supporters as a class, I just flat out disagree that there's any cause for it. That group of folks are largely already brimming with privilege that protects them (see walking away from storming the Capitol after killing multiple people).

If you think that the government should force private entities to not enforce consequences to speech they disagree with, I believe the government would struggle to prove that that doesn't itself impact the free speech rights of the private entities and it face immediate law suits to overturn such a law. The 1st amendment protects us from the government, not us from each other.