abvdasker

8 ms·

31.
by abvdasker 3y ago
Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.
32.
by abvdasker 3y ago
The big companies fighting to win gen AI have forgotten how to build good products. There seems to be enormous confusion about AI applications — few seem to be willing to commit to a singular focus or application, instead trying to be every
33.
by abvdasker 3y ago
> If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years. This unfortunately widely held belief is measurably wrong and reeks of all kinds of biases. Wh
34.
by abvdasker 3y ago
Anecdotally most vice in New York City is now more or less run through the police or involves some form of NYPD protection racket. Every couple years a large prostitution or drug ring gets broken up and it's always current and former o
35.
by abvdasker 3y ago
Generalizations like "the tech industry has a liberal bias" are so reductive that they aren't useful. One of the pitfalls in discussions about the overall politics of the tech industry is a lack of nuance. Another is a genera
36.
by abvdasker 3y ago
As far as I'm aware there isn't a lot of anthropological evidence to support your view that primitive societies were any more violent than we are today. You seem to have a pretty dim view of human nature that may not be reflective
37.
by abvdasker 3y ago
Great read. Makes me nostalgic for the optimistic incoherence of the 60s counterculture, a time I never knew firsthand but heard stories about from my dad. My grandmother was part of it, growing weed on a farm outside Montpelier Vermont. Th
38.
by abvdasker 3y ago
[deleted by author]
39.
by abvdasker 3y ago
It always strikes me as a little confused when criticism of Marxism focuses on the utility of markets and not the existence of private capital (only the latter is incompatible with socialism). A common Marxist critique of social democracy i
40.
by abvdasker 3y ago
The site is not running fine. Have you tried using twitter on mobile web? Go to twitter.com right now with your phone and try to play a couple videos. That's to say nothing of how bad the comment quality has become with paid accounts.
41.
by abvdasker 3y ago
I came here to note the Times' unacknowledged lies about the Bush admin and Iraq War and was pleasantly surprised to see you beat me to it. This piece is nothing less than an interminable but polite screed from someone with an axe to g
42.
by abvdasker 3y ago
Even by the absurdly high US antitrust standards of consumer harm Apple and Google's app stores qualify as anti-competitive. Major corporations like Netflix have made it impossible to sign up for the service in-app because the lost sig
43.
by abvdasker 3y ago
I immediately canceled my subscription when I got that email. Easy decision since HBO doesn't even have any new content being released these days. Plus the idiotic rebrand to "Max" forced me to download an entirely new app an
44.
by abvdasker 3y ago
Anonymity is not a band-aid, but a fundamental component of privacy. Privacy is an important right which people often take for granted and its erosion makes people less free in a multitude of ways. Even the expectation that one might be s
45.
by abvdasker 3y ago
I mean if you look at the astronomical levels of defense spending the US greatly resembles the USSR even in terms of the "tanks & steel". Broadly this kind of waste and stratification is characteristic of just about every fadi
46.
by abvdasker 3y ago
I give her less than a year. The job description is to be the public face of Twitter's ongoing collapse.
47.
by abvdasker 3y ago
To me what's so maddening about these attacks on Internet privacy is that they're extremely unpopular with actual voters across the political spectrum (it's just that awareness of these measures is very low). No politician wo
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by abvdasker 4y ago
Not only should managers not distract their reports, I view a primary responsibility of any engineering manager as proactively shielding their reports from as many unnecessary meetings — particularly with external teams — as possible so tha
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by abvdasker 4y ago
RIP to an absolute giant, on whose shoulders we all stand.
50.
by abvdasker 4y ago
> The city collects $0 if there's no building no matter what the incentive was. In reality that's not what happened. Amazon has had a very large unsubsidized office in Manhattan which predates their "HQ2" proposal a
51.
by abvdasker 4y ago
Amazon very publicly decided not to build "HQ2" in Long Island City as a result of the local opposition. Amazon's significant Manhattan presence predates any of this discussion and is largely unsubsidized. It's also a li
52.
by abvdasker 4y ago
It's worth remembering that New York-based opposition to subsidies for Amazon's construction of "HQ2" in Long Island City was widely vilified and disparaged in mainstream media outlets across the political spectrum. This
53.
by abvdasker 4y ago
I'm a Google Fi customer and experienced a very disconcerting fraud attack a year or 2 ago. I made an outbound call to the support number for my bank (I triple-checked that it was the correct number for the bank's support line). M
54.
by abvdasker 4y ago
I think you're overestimating the extent to which anyone on the left or right approves of this kind of censorship. This is one bad decision by probably 2 or 3 people in a publishing company. The overwhelming consensus online seems to b
55.
by abvdasker 4y ago
This is interesting, but doesn't address a crucial question: yes, spices seem to give practical antimicrobial benefits in food preparation, but why do we enjoy spiced food more? Did it start out as something practical until we evolve
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by abvdasker 4y ago
"Won't somebody please think of the children"-style legislation over public safety online is always used as a trojan horse for surveillance and censorship. This has been done so many times at this point that I just default
57.
by abvdasker 4y ago
I also hate the gym and this sounds almost exactly like what I do. For the last 3 months I've been alternating between running through my neighborhood (2 miles for ~20 minutes) and weightlifting at home (~30 minutes) a total of 5-6 tim
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by abvdasker 4y ago
Ruby was probably my "first love" as a programming language for the reasons you described, but nowadays I prefer statically typed compiled languages. Ruby is still my preferred scripting language, though I've seen the way lar
59.
by abvdasker 4y ago
Pieces this stupid make me viscerally angry. I disagree with many of the core points, but it's the particularly dumb way those arguments are presented that really gets me. This reads like it was written by some 70-year old retired exec
60.
by abvdasker 4y ago
If you think Saudi Arabia doesn't rely on modern slave labor I would urge you to learn more about their treatment of immigrants. And there is simply no comparing the status of women in China or Russia to Saudi Arabia. Combine that with

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