RyanZAG

Seems highly unlikely to ever work, but why assume the technology is evil? If you could create a system that had a high accuracy of detecting terrorists, then that would be a good system, not an evil one.

I get your point that a system that claims to detect terrorists but only really detected Arabic people would be an evil one - but you're automatically calling the terrorist system evil without knowing if it really does detect terrorists or not.

As an extra hypothetical question, do you feel a system that could detect people who were really just about to commit terrorist attacks as good or evil? At a conceptual level, assume the system somehow scanned brain waves or some other truly difficult method.

All reporting is always biased. Every word you select is a direct product of bias, and the choice between multiple sentence phrasing changes emotional direction of the reader.

I don't think many would argue that the content was in any way worse back when the internet was used by a much smaller population. At the end of the day, the content that is really useful and that you actually want is rarely created by an army of everyday internet users. It's created by the dedicated and the ingenious, and those are the types that will migrate quickly to the hidden places.

If an app (even badly coded) causes memory leaks in the OS, that's a fault of the OS still. Of course fast moving OSes like Android or iOS are always going to have these kinds of bugs and it's probably not related to Swift as Swift isn't used in the kernel internals.

Companies are just people though - the guys in charge of decisions are the ones we're ultimately evaluating. That the left hand of the company doesn't know what the right hand of the company is doing isn't much of an excuse, as ultimately the buck stops at the executive and board positions.

There's no way a decision like this one didn't get approval from the top layers of the company as it no doubt had to go through different levels of legal, product and everything in between.

You'd need to get it into all servers too, which is probably a very long time frame.

Doesn't mean you go rob people's houses.

I don't think this is correct. For all the people who would have their data exposed in a public torrent, their data is likely safe at present and just needs to be removed from that website. If you put it in a torrent, you're hurting all of those people in a very direct way - you're the one stabbing them in the back.

What the authors here did is correct - they've publicized the issue. Releasing this data as a torrent is not 'publicizing' anything - it is stabbing millions of people in the back, and then waiting for the crowds to come and gape at the dead bodies.

"Missed opportunity" ?

People can be stabbed in the back if they go into dark alleys without watching behind them. Let's stab a few people who go into these alleys so that everyone will be afraid to do so and we have an opportunity to prevent people being stabbed in future by making them aware.

Why would you possibly think this is a good idea? The idea is to prevent pain, not cause more pain in some bizarre attempt at making people afraid. There's enough privacy violations - we don't need to be making more of them ourselves.

We should probably keep doing studies to check how dentists think we should brush our teeth. We just shouldn't have dentists do a study on a variable that directly harms their income as we would already know the results they would give before the study is even done.

If you wanted a study on that variable, you'd likely need to at least get input from someone who says going to dentists is a bad idea - but at that point, you're just going to have a shouting match and a statistics measuring contest between the dentists and the guy who doesn't think anybody should see dentists. Your results would likely be contradictory and fairly useless.

We haven't yet found a way to do such studies in a useful manner, and it's an ongoing problem in politics that has yet to have a solution. And may never have a solution. And it's very important to be able to determine when such study variables align with the financial and ideological requirements of the researcher.

If you can tell without doubt what the result of a study by a certain group will be before the study takes place, it's usually a red flag.

With one of the major contributors to the paper being 'Committee on the Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academic Science, Engineering, and Medicine'[1] who only get paid because sexual harassment exists surely can never have an agenda in proving such a thing exists.

In a follow up study, we could go and ask the labour unions how much benefit they give to the average worker. Surprise finding! Labour unions benefit all workers immensely, and they benefit workers who pay the most in membership fees. And then we can follow up with a study by dentists on how regularly you should visit your dentist (hint: it's more often than you think!)

[1] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24994/sexual-harassment-of-women...

Yes, it does feel that something is wrong somewhere, but I can't find out where. Nobody would be using the idiomatic goroutine-per-task with that kind of overhead, yet it's one of the most common building blocks of golang projects.

Isn't that already the case though, regardless of net neutrality? Seems the large scale surveillance and manipulation will happen, whether it is legal or not.

Kind of defeats the purpose of using golang for a task like this. The whole point of golang is using the little greenlet threads, but actually using them in this case is terrible on performance.

The remaining performance left behind is all in memory allocation and garbage collection - something you could optimize relatively easily if it were written in C. Such as by using a memory pool, so that you wouldn't need allocations or garbage collection at all.

Of course if performance isn't a big issue for your task, then none of this is really important.

Google stopped caring about search a long time ago. Nobody at Google gets promotions for 'keeping search good', only for adding unwanted features. So more and more unwanted features keep coming from all directions, and Google's core products keep getting worse and worse.

A similar thing happened to Microsoft back around the time of Windows Vista (and similarly poor mismanagement by management at the time), so we already know where this train is going.

It's in the article, and the article isn't terribly long. But here you go anyway:

> Eight of the rivers are located in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.

Obligatory relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/882/

And if you think this only applies to statistics, you need to think about the problem being described here a bit more.

Hmm makes sense. I see what you mean from the position of say a general in US army tasked with this stuff: if someone says China can do X, his bosses are going to ask why America can't do X too. And therefore to force America into doing X, you just need reliable sounding misinformation to prove China doing X, and then moral arguments are swept aside.

However that aside, AI is very big in China right now, and they're using it for numerous applications with thousands of students going through Chinese universities being taught how to handle this stuff. While the same doesn't apply to niche interests like genetically enhanced humans (who is working on that, really?), something like AI with thousands of capable researchers and engineers is a different story.

Not so, nobody forces anybody to compete in an arms race. My point is that there is an arms race - and inventions such as AI for war are part of that arms race and are being developed. These are very easy inventions too, given the widely available and extremely powerful software and hardware. These are facts. No amount of upsetting moral arguments make the arms race go away.

The question is: should America compete in the arms race? I don't know. But there are big consequences either way.

I don't think you have to worry here. Even as a kernel contributor, you'd likely never interact directly with Linus.

If you ever end up in a war with China, you'll be seeing plenty of drones. Obviously China doesn't use drones for killing terrorists - China doesn't kill terrorists because terrorists have no way to get into China in the first place.

I'm not from the rural mid west, but no one from the mid west uses underscores for emphasis.

But seriously, there are 65 million people living in the US midwest. I can promise that thousands of you guys use 'mid west', underscores, italics, and just about everything else.

It's a good point, and if anybody thinks an arms race isn't already happening then they are very naive. While we're debating the morals of this, the Chinese, Russians and many others are trying to make it happen. For all we know, they may have already succeeded, and we're discussing the morals of it while it's already in full production a few thousand miles away.

The relevant research papers, knowledge and skills are widely available across the world. There are some advanced courses at Chinese universities right now that can only be seen as 'AI for military'.

That's just artificial scarcity, right? Rural property out in the woods is just as cheap as its ever been, in my experience. Cities just have a lot of laws preventing a lot of things, but I think most people who choose to live in cities prefer it like that.

What does it indicate?

You can go to a place like Mauritius where the delta is enormous, but everyone is pretty happy and the rich and poor mingle freely. Or you can have a place like France where the delta is far smaller, but the rich and poor detest each other and very rarely mingle.

In terms of poverty, is there a difference between getting more wealth vs everything becoming cheaper? I don't think there is - your life has improved just the same either way.

Fixating on silly numbers that ultimately mean nothing doesn't seem like a good way to make the world better. We should look at concrete things - and how often you can eat an orange is the kind of concrete thing that really matters.

Firing Musk is never going to happen. It would collapse the share price, and investors know that. They can complain, but they can't fire him and not lose a fortune all around.

I think point of above is more that it's in their interests to make sure they never do any checks, so no doubt they never do any.

They could probably catch 99% of abuses by just specifying it in the contract with the 3rd party, but they have't done that.

Windows 10 is really recent though.

That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it.

And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.

Github don't control git --

> Torvalds turned over maintenance on 26 July 2005 to Junio Hamano, a major contributor to the project.[25] Hamano was responsible for the 1.0 release on 21 December 2005, and remains the project's maintainer.[26]

I'm guessing Torvalds still has a lot of control if push came to shove, so we can assume git is executively controlled by Torvalds and Hamano.