kylevedder

Related: I recently wrote a blog post about using docker to containerize my ML research dev environments -- I've never found another way to make properly reproducible dev environments. http://vedder.io/misc/research_dev_env.html

It's stupid sour grapes comments like this that make me hate HN commenters.

Meta and Google have both contributed an enormous amount to open source (creating PyTorch, TensorFlow, Chromium, contributing to clang/LLVM, Linux kernel, HTTP standards), but you're mad because they didn't sponsor your work and a bunch of people mindlessly upvoted it.

Using the existence of regulation as proof that the regulation is needed is circular reasoning.

Humans give explanations that other humans find convincing, but they can be totally wrong and non-causal. I think human explanations are often mechanistically wrong / totally acausal.

As a famous early example, this lady provided an unprompted explanation (using only the information available to her conscious part of her brain in her good eye) for some of her preferences despite the mechanism of action being subconscious observations out of her blind eye.

https://www.nature.com/articles/336766a0

What? They want their bottom line to decrease, not increase. The fastest way to increase their bottom line is to cut costs.

Are you trolling?

I've spent a significant amount of time playing with the variety of Diffusion models available and DALLE 2 tends to produce much better quality images. The other killer feature is DALLE 2 has support for in-fill.

>without government intervention you end up usually with a monopoly or oligopoly.

I would love to hear your explanation of how government intervention is the only thing preventing a monopoly or oligopoly of plumbers, electricians, pet groomers, or halal carts.

I don't see why you can't add guardrails to things like subpoenas -- it's not like they are allowed to engage in aggressive subpoenaing of non digital info without a due process procedure, just make the digital one more rigorous. The issue lies in the flawed execution of the current legal system, so fix that instead of taking a hatchet to big tech.

>Google makes most of its money on ads that don't really need aggressive tracking, like ads for toasters when you search "toaster" or ads for other car brands when you search "Ford SUV." Arguably, the tracking might hurt their system since they try to produce fully personalized results for you.

A very non trivial subset of their revenue is personalized ads, and I promise you they work pretty well; if you don't believe me I recommend taking a job on the ads team. This is a huge revenue hit, for a company that's consistently putting that money into product innovations as well as societally important moonshot projects, all in order to side step the issue of your concerns with the American justice system's subpoena process.

>it would be very likely that Comcast would bundle a Google subscription into your cable plan the way they do for entertainment products.

If you're a SWE you probably have coworkers raised in India. Ask them how likely they would have been able to afford such a subscription system and by extension how much worse their life would be if they didn't have access to Google. I would bet a substantial fraction of them would still be in India and not software engineers.

>This kind of cognitive distortion is traditionally addressed with laws: social security, healthcare mandates

We have healthcare mandates and social security because if a person has no money and is out in the street or gets health care and then can't pay, it's society's problem. If you get nailed by the government for doing something illegal due to invasive subpoenas, it's not only not society's problem, depending on your opinions on the role of the state this is a feature not a bug.

There's a free market of platforms without subpoena power, and people time and time again choose the free platforms powered by ads. I'm in the overwhelming majority with my statement when you look at people's revealed preferences.

Copy and paste from elsewhere because it's the same talking point over and over: big tech is not the government, and your complaint is with the government. The FBI could just as easily setup a StingRay network [1] and capture all cell information. The only protection against that is robust digital civil rights legislation protecting Americans from governmental over reach, not lampooning big tech companies for having data. It's not like Google is willing to just shovel data at anyone who asks nicely, they will actively fight the government on nominally lawful requests it thinks are unreasonable/won't hold up to further legal scrutiny [2].

If you're going to go after someone, at least go after the right people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/18/google-...

People continue to flock to new, free, targeted ads powered platforms. Look at the enormous growth of TikTok in the US; it has exploded well after the discussion on targeted advertising entered the American zeitgeist (Cambridge Analytica happened in 2018). In light of this, I don't think you can argue that Americans would have chosen something different if they knew more about targeted ads -- they are still, to this day, choosing to join free targeted ad platforms because they like using apps with that business model even when the app is effectively controlled by a foreign power.

I appreciate your kind words. I think people tend to be pretty myopic about targeted ads ("I don't like them/find them creepy") and fail to reason about all the positive things they are getting because of them, and as a consequence they fail to suggest alternatives that are actually better for the general population.

I think it's sad, because a huge amount of good for humanity has come out of Google search and other Google products being free to access while generating enough revenue to truly innovate for 20+ years. It didn't have to be this way, and one can easily imagine a world where Google was paywalled behind institution licenses, limiting its access to only powerful companies and wealthy universities. That world would be so much worse for all of us, and it was avoided because Google found the ads business model. People are now attacking that model but aren't suggesting truly viable alternatives (Google's biz dev is hard at work trying to crack this nut as well).

Your complaint is with the government, not Google. The FBI could just as easily setup a StingRay [1] and capture all cell information. The only protection against that is robust digital civil rights legislation protecting Americans from governmental over reach, not lampooning big tech companies for having data. It's not like Google is willing to just shovel data at anyone who asks nicely, they will actively fight the government on nominally lawful requests it thinks are unreasonable/won't hold up to further legal scrutiny [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/18/google-...

>nobody can compete with free

Yes you can, just make yours also free and put up ads like DuckDuckGo.

>the amount of money being earned by said advertising is private.

Google is a publicly traded company with a legal obligation to disclose financial data to their shareholders as a matter of public record. You can go read their quarterly earnings reports stretching back years.

They already did. People vote with their feet and attention, and people continue to flock to free services powered by targeted ads, systematically out competing services that had other models. If you don't like these services, don't use them; they don't have subpoena power. However, you might find the other options to be lacking, because they have inferior business models that do not allow them to compete on product quality.

>It all goes into profiles that most definitely have an impact on you in real life

Such as?

I might add the initial discussion was about Google tracking ads but I'm curious to hear what you have to say about these down market trackers.

Google making ad auctions more efficient and "state surveillance" aren't the same thing. Did you legitimately not know this or are you being intellectually dishonest in your argumentation?

>wholesale sale of data to anyone

You know Google doesn't do this, right? Besides being against their own terms of service (and outright illegal), they're economically incentivized not to; they use the data to make their ad auctions more efficient, an edge they would lose if they sold the raw data.

>But that just means the novel representations are a step forward, just not the whole solution.

No. The part where people argue Google is collecting a lot of data is sound. The part that's missing is why is this bad.

No chart, no numbers, no sounds, or anything else will in their own argue why this data collection is bad. This argument as to why is what's missing, and until nominal privacy advocates start putting together coherent arguments as to why it's bad (and, importantly, why these costs do not merit the benefits), they're not making forward progress.

>If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO

This is just nonsense. If there were no ads, hyperoptimized SEO would only be more important because it's the only way for you as a web admin to surface your content in people's searches.

And you think that complaining about tech companies, companies owned by share holders who have no particular obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders, is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want?

Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation, something which we've already seen occur with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US. It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those bills though, so I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.

A lot of AV companies bootstrapped their maps off of OpenStreetMaps -- it's great anything is free, but they kind of suck. The "cost" of a company using info about me to run more efficient ad auctions is totally worth the benefit of having highly accurate maps with up to date business info with stuff like hours and direct links to their website/contact info.

I wholesale reject the following:

1) Big tech colluded with government, and got nice advantages for their participation with the surveillance system -- they're getting raked over the coals at dog and pony show anti trust hearings.

2) completely immoral act of gathering very private information without consent -- you literally gave these websites this information, and there's legal privacy policies that no one reads describing how it's used. If you don't want them to have your info, simply don't give it to them.

3) Authoritarianism can creep up on you -- ok and? The fact that Google's ad auctions are more efficient isn't going to cause authoritarianism.

4) Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? -- lmao no

The police asked for stuff and the company complied and now you're upset that the government has it, but somehow it's actually Google's fault? Pass laws so your government can't do things you don't like.

>If you don’t see the glaring material issues, that explains a lot about why Google is Google.

I don't work at Google anymore. Feel free to click on my profile to see what I'm up to these days.

You're asserting that's not how they work, but you're also asserting they're illegally subsidizing their search and maps business with... the revenue they generate from selling ads space on their search and maps businesses.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the lurkers to decide who is probably right.

The Snowden leaks were about NSA data collection. Last I checked the NSA was not a tracking ads powered big tech company.

Also I hope you realize pointing me to an entire metaverse of memes is not an argument. If this corpus is so massive it should be easy to concretely point to several very specific examples, not hand wave at the entirety of one of the largest national security leaks in American history.

Their other businesses being what search or maps? Those are ads properties. You could setup competitors that also serve ads.

The target audience for my comments are the hundreds of people reading and not commenting. If you're casually reading the comments, without a foil of reasonability, I think it's easy to get sucked into implicitly accepting the premises of the zealots frothing at the mouth in the comments. You're right that I don't imagine I'm going to change the mind of the zealots.