ecwilson

AI didn’t invent the em dash nor “It’s not just X, it’s Y” and sometimes those are appropriate for the situation. Prose should be judged accordingly.

I was going to post this exact same comment. I was obsessed with Etherpad when it came out and to this day, reminisce about it whenever I fire up a Google Doc. Can’t wait to try this.

What does restore mean this context? I’ve downloaded files from their online portal without providing a key. Perhaps restoring in this context means having them mail you a hard drive.

It’s a false narrative that this was about politics and non-work things in the workplace. It was a workplace issue that blew up and employees were annoyed with how the founders handled it.

I've always assumed it was one of two things:

1. The social benefit. There's research showing that if you have a rich social life and friend network, you live longer. The assumption being that the drink is likely to be with other people.

2. The stress management benefit. It's not healthy to be stressed out. The alcohol's mitigating effect on stress may be greater than the alcohol's poisonous effect, in the right dose, for the right person.

Apple is up 100% in the last year for no good reason.

1. VR/AR finally become a thing as the tech becomes small enough, powerful enough, and wireless enough to be a good UX. Facebook's investment in Oculus pays off as Oculus becomes their main profit center, and we transition to a Ready Player One reality.

2. The world faces increasingly alarming & extreme weather disasters. The damage will be utterly devastating and start to really hurt economies. Governments will still be inept at managing these crises. People who have the means will move to lower-risk areas like the Pacific Northwest, driving up real estate prices. Those who are poorer will suffer from homelessness. There will be massive encampments like we've never seen before of displaced families.

3. MDMA and psilocybin will be legalized for medical use and will revolutionize mental health care for depression and PTSD. Which is great because we'll all need a lot of mental health care.

4. Trump loses his re-election bid and ultimately flees the country to avoid consequences as the world closes in on him. He loses his US assets but is given safe passage by a foreign power he has had corrupt dealings with.

5. CRISPR is touted as the tech of the decade as it cures a major disease and appears to have incredible potential. At least one nation violates international ethical standards in their experimentation with CRISPR, igniting a debate over whether we have opened a pandora's box. There are protests and our CRISPR anxiety is evident in pop culture.

6. Americans finally catch on to the bidet/washlet craze thanks to an incredibly effective viral ad campaign.

7. Learning Chinese in school becomes more common because China has become the dominant world superpower. India rises to second, and US falls to third.

8. Bitcoin will cost $500k+ per coin, having peaked at 100-150k by 2022 and 500k+ by 2026. There will be a Silicon Valley-esque tv comedy about rich crypto bros that everyone hate-watches.

9. There will be a major pandemic that scares the shit out of everyone because we are woefully unprepared for it.

10. We're all going to become preppers by the end of the decade because there will be so many potential existential threats.

11. Water will become a lot more expensive, driving major innovation around desalinization.

12. Lab meat will have it's first big success a la the Impossible Burger as clean/lab meat tech becomes commercially available. There will be a thriving DIY culture around growing meat at home.

>I think the general theme I see is that folks expect companies to solve problems that their governments must be solving. And when they don't get it uniform, everyone's mad.

People want an outcome and don't particularly care where it comes from, public vs. private. If one fails, they'll push on the other to find a leverage point. Example: A pundit can say some truly awful and damaging shit and it's legal under the law. But if you target their advertisers, that's the leverage point that matters.

>I'd rather live in a world where companies aren't trying to push their morals on me and have a central entity (govt) arbitrate the same (Believe me I see evil in both places).

A company should be free to push its morals on you, given that the market allows it, and their morals aren't illegal. Right?

Personally, in the current environment of profit-at-all-costs capitalism, the major flaws seem to be incentivizing short-term-thinking and negative externalities. When a company flexes morals that appear at odds with short term profit (e.g. Twitter), I tend to assume they are actually acting out of self-interest but are better able to grasp the long vs. short-term incentives, for whatever reason.

I was hoping a Facebook engineer would show up in this thread. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions.

> Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on other companies (Twitter, Spotify, etc) disabling political ads for this very reason. Facebook has not. It's a given that you can't manually review every political ad -- so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech.

Secondly, what would Facebook do if a grassroots movement started to put pressure on advertisers until Facebook cancels political ads? What if this movement recruited real users to click on lots of ads in their own feeds, with the goal of disrupting advertiser ROI with difficult to detect garbage clicks? Would advertisers get upset? Would Facebook have any recourse?

Thanks for indulging me on this. The idea came to me in the shower and I'm not sure if it's brilliant or stupid.

> This is, unfortunately, a rational response to the current climate.

Yes! It is rational to have a fear response to the prospect of being held accountable. Because we have not had a culture of accountability, many men are not confident in their ability NOT to behave in a harmful manner, even if they do not intend to harm. That feeling of discomfort is from finally having to think about these things. I hope more men embrace that discomfort instead of resent it.