ha292

A person is not a face.

Dating sites of all shades "sell" us a person at various levels of depth and according to our interests.

Our interests can be deep, or can be shallow.

Tinder is "selling" shallow+fun (Appearances, nearness, sexual adventure).

Shallow + fun sells. Look at a magazine.

Eigenfaces takes the idea a step forward. Automate shallow+fun+selection.

Remember the vaporized alcohol craze ?

Once again, Microsoft is slow to produce a product.

In this case, the product is a "moonshot" at changing the UI.

No wait, the product is a PR event that just says. "We can innovate too, you know"

If this fails, they will be late again in canceling a VR/Augmented reality product that should not have made it past beta. See Glass, Google.

Let us pause for a second an think what could possibly happen with anti-terrorism laws like this in not-so-advanced democracies where there is little protection of the average citizen from the abuse of state power.

Let us also think about how the leading democracies export the "democratic software" (laws) and they get copied/cited in not-so-advanced democracies in making their own laws. It is very easy for a barely-democratic state to cite a western democracy's law as a precedence.

Let us then think about how many people live under democratic laws (and under strong rule of law) and compare that to the number of people without that.

Depressing.

I fear that these badly written anti-terrorism laws are like software flaws that will flow from system to system and harm many more people than we can see right now.

This used to be true in the old days. These days both India and China are extremely hot markets for good software engineers. Europe always had a shortage of developers. They are also not markets where people from other countries can go and work.

So, that means all things being equal, when really good developers leave their countries they are depriving the local market of their talent.

If you think of the equation this way -- when engineers immigrate to the US they are bringing with them the investments that their own countries had made. Outside the US many countries subsidize higher education, especially engineering.

It used to be that the money that these engineers sent back would more than offset the local productivity gains. Given the growth in China and India and the salaries there it is hard to argue that the remittance is a good compensation for this "brain drain".

The disease is, to a large extent, myopic and self-serving reasoning. It goes like this: we want larger number of "highly skilled" developers to come to the US, preferably, permanently and preferably, working for VC-backed firms.

Let's think about the consequences.

If this is implemented, it will hurt the sender countries (brain-drain) and may even lower the salaries for people who are already here. I'll go back to the brain-drain again. The REST OF THE WORLD NEEDS DEVELOPERS TOO. Maybe even more than the US.

Once here, these people will toil long and hard and face very steep challenges in making serious money. Maybe 1-2% of them will see millions. Most will make sub-par wages as immigrants. Yes, H1-B wages are lower.

Meanwhile, VCs, since their bets are widely hedged will get to play many rounds of the same game increasing the odds of the payout.

I'd add that the PG post is a symptom of a disease. A disease that that is brewing in the echo-chambers of SV. Note also the recent post where PG claims that "mean people fail".

The more the VC community gets un-hinged from the reality the quicker the inflation of the bubble and the crazier the assertions.

Time to get out of the bubble.

By and large, the main product of the Web industry is the user. Content or code that is sold as a property or a service is used to lure in the product (the user) and sell the most-commercially viable aspect of the product (that is the information about their "categories") to the highest bidders (advertisers).

Is it too much of a stretch to say that this mode of user-segregation-and-information-selling is pretty much a new form of "commoditization" of human beings.

"That is, the more expressive a language or system is, the less we can reason about it, and vice versa. The more capable the system, the less comprehensible it is."

What makes these assertions true? Research/data/polls etc would be helpful. It is hard to accept such wide-ranging claims without some proof.

Also, could someone please post the effective definitions of "expressiveness" and "capability" as used in the post ?

Thanks.

What about the cyber defense command ? Couldn't they have done anything to protect the U.S. companies?

This is becoming a security issue.

No one is saying that it had to be code. It could be as simple as "talk to another peer or your manager before making the next step".

For critical infrastructure companies there is the usual rule of "four eyes" for roll outs.

So, while it may be the case that most companies will have the trusted person with the keys to the rollout car the more critical the mission gets the higher the levels of human checks are put in.

Maybe that's what the RCA should have said -- we F-ed up designing and managing the rollout process. An engineer just fell victim to it.

This is a good effort. I do have some concerns about it.

A true root cause would go deeper and ask why is it that an engineer could solely decide to roll out to all slices ?

The surface-level answer is that Azure platform lacked tooling. Is that the cause or an effect ? I think it is an effect. There are deeper root causes.

Let's ask -- why was it that the design allowed one engineer to effectively bring down Azure ?

We often stop at these RCAs when it gets uncomfortable and it starts to point upwards.

I say this to the engineer who pressed the buttons: Bravo! You did something that exposed a massive hole in Azure which may have very well prevented a much bigger embarrassment.

I am not worried about natural toxins. Most of what I select to eat is likely free of them. What I am worried about is that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of non-transfer of chemicals even at lower temperatures. I see claims but no clear evidence. Even if the transfer rates are low the chemicals "dose" can accumulate over repeated use.