skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They had a $1 million prize for improving the recommendation algorithm. The data was anonymized and sanitized but it was apparently potentially possible to identify people from some of the data. A closeted-lesbian mother filed a class action lawsuit against Netflix (even though I do not think she was actually outed by the dataset, meaning I do not think anyone ever connected her rental history to her) on the basis that offering the dataset to researchers at all was a violation of US privacy laws over video rental records. The argument was that someone looking at her video rental records could deduce that she was actually gay.

It might be surprising given how lax the US seems to be about privacy in general, but video rental records are protected differently from some other data because of the failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (failed in part because reporters were able to get his video rental records whichI think show he had rented porn, but I don't remember all the details). As a result of the Bork situation, federal law was passed to protect video rental records. Facebook had to settle a thing with the FTC over something similar with its Beacon program.

Netflix wound up canceling the follow-up contest because of the class-action lawsuit. IIRC, a few years later they wound up settling a different lawsuit also related to the FTC stuff, but that wasn't tied to the algorithm or potentially "outing" anyone.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/
the thing is it's not incontrovertible proof, it's "beyond reasonable doubt"

the prosecution would show up with when you bought the phone, how many times you'd used it, that you used it 80 times in the last hour, and so on

and it comes down to whether or not a jury would believe that you had really forgotten it (despite that evidence)
This looks like it has fairly similar goals and implementation choices as RV64X. I didn't immediately see them citing that previous work, but I've only skimmed it so far. In any case, I love seeing work like this.
Written by whom? What was the original bill?
I just want people to remember all the previous elections where Dems were potentially hurt by e-voting bugs and to band together across the aisle to get rid of voting machines. Paper voting works for us in Canada and it'd work for you too.

The only voting machine that isn't "fraud waiting to happen" is an optical-scan under-voting detector - the thing that says "your mark for Mayor is too light and won't be counted", allowing you to take the paper and pen and correct it.

The court erred in this case, not by treating Fox's words (/unchecked republication of accusations) as a lie but by acting like the reputation of an voting-machine company deserves protection when they make something so obviously ideally suited for crime. The Flipper Zero people get accused of knowing their product will be used in crime and yet we don't apply the same logic to e-voting manufacturers.

Fox deserves the hit, but Dominion doesn't deserve the implication of honesty - their entire business is to remove proof of honesty from our elections. Perhaps the solution should have been to fine Fox but give the money to charities seeking to audit and improve the voting process.
> What is it with English Speaking Countries ?

Legal systems based on common-law?
> dubious 24Hz->60Hz conversion

Does that still happen? I set up my AppleTV device to tell my TV to use the frame rate of the media and it almost always goes into 24Hz mode when watching anything on streaming. I thought all services were using 24Hz video these days, unless they’re showing something that was broadcast over-the-air originally.
Oh yeah, my assumption is that it's 4 words chosen from a 100,000 word dictionary. I honestly have no idea if it's a reasonable estimate but it stuck in my head from XKCD's original correct-horse-battery-staple comic. Of course in real life an attacker won't know necessarily the distribution you've pulled your password from, but by using the exact distribution in your calculations you have an ironclad lower bound.
> Let's hope this will induce Fox hosts to be a wee bit more careful about keeping facts straight going forward.

My guess is that the lesson they learned here is “don’t get caught”.
Because development has high upfront costs. You need to build something before you can collect any money. That means lots of expensive engineers. When building is nearly free (free money now at expense of tomorrow’s cash flow), you build things to sell tomorrow.

Businesses of all sorts get loans when the rate is good. It’s a business cash flow thing.

Look at the SEC filings for all big tech companies. They discuss their billions in debt.
It's on their front page:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-media-dominion-voting...
I believe the Model Driven Architecture fad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_architecture) is a better analogy than wizards. Back then the holy grail of complete round trip UML->code->UML didn't get practical enough to justify the effort.
Epic Games account deletion process
Because of growth expectations brought by their evaluations
Facebook/Meta has done exactly one mass layoff in its history (in November 2022), and this is the second.
> nope, any cookie banner is pure cancer

I agree, sites shouldn't be doing the things that require showing one.

> I don't even care about all the dark patterns of now allowing you to dismiss and ignore with one click.

How is this a dark pattern?

> Thank you Europe

Indeed! If such tracking has to be allowed, I'm happy that at least I can opt out of it.
Hello! It's been a while! Haha tech circle is so small.
Nah. Get an education in something you enjoy and that pays well. In the event that AI does replace your job, you can learn a manual labor trade quickly.

Starting a successful business is not easy.
It's now riddled with bugs and every other "reply" is an ad for a product completely unrelated to whatever tweet it's replying to.

No one outside of twitter was predicting it would just suddenly collapse, but instead a slow degradation of quality (ironic given that twitter is being marketed as the "#1 most accurate source of information on the internet")

The top tweet under every "More Tweets" section is always a childish Musk tweet with a 420 or 69 reference in it
But they went through all of this trouble to justify their sex drives. Certainly that's worth a life of luxury, right?
Depends on the 16 year old. Making money should be a priority for everyone who isn't rich. Be well enough to take care of yourself before you pursue careers that have no financial benefit.

But that said, you can get paid good enough for most desires and inclinations you have.

But taking a step back here, what I have seen with kids that age is either they already have a passion or you need to shove them very hard towards different directions and see what they like. They're usually lacking in exposure. Maybe they'll like coding and computer stuff but they have no exposure. At that age I was barely fostering a coding hobby but haven't really gotten into infosec myself. Down the road I tried different things and I was very surprised at what I liked and did not like. I apparently don't have a fear of heights (scary but I can manage) and I hate long-haul trucking.

But my standing advice is to get a degree in something practical no matter what.

If they lean to technical stuff have them pursue EE, social justice? Law or languages and literature, like to work with hands? Mechanical engineering, medicine? RN

If you are an EE grad for example it is not hard to get into coding, IT or security. Or manufacturing and designing hardware, and anything with electrons. Plan to get two degrees, one before you're 23 and another before 30 after you figured out what you really like.
I'm reminded about the quote from The Incredibles: "When everyone's super... no one will be."

When smaller AI startups start, say, showing more relevant search results than Google does, and more personally relevant posts than Meta - and IMO this is highly likely, since FAANG have much more brand reputation to protect than those startups and will necessarily move cautiously - perceptions will start to rise that they are no longer the superpowers. But their valuation multiples are based on them being the only superpowers in their respective spaces. So if they want to preserve shareholder value, and they can't depend on hype, they'll have to cut aggressively so they can at least show strong earnings per share.
Can you explain how you made such a specific connection? Every school i've attended is plentiful with worthless degrees.
The most serious category of attack, a Zero Click FCP, has Android at $2.5M and iOS at $2M. To be fair, the difference is negligible and both are only about as expensive as starting a new McDonalds and easily fall within the scope of a standard small business loan. So yeah, trivially hacking any phone in the world is only within the financial means of around 60 million people in the world.
It is simply misguided:

“No such program of eugenics could work: there is no lasting agreement about desirable mental or physical qualities; an individual’s worth depends on other, incalculable ingredients. Environmental conditions mingle with inherited characteristics to make us the way we are.” - Out of Our Minds, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Like “human rights” and “education”, it is much easier to be for “desirable qualities” than to say what they are.
+1. There are certainly worse careers out there and working in green energy should help prevent the worst outcomes of climate change.
And there is even worse : sometimes the “partner” list does not have a reject all AND each partner requires a two click steps - waiting for an animation in between.

Edit: remove double post of link
On the developer side, they’re even closing down their API bug tracker, having first dropped from 95% 30 day resolution to 56%.
There’s significant latency between hiring and revenue.

There’s probably some Elon effect happening here too (“if he can do it, I should be able to do it too!”)
My apologies, I was a little outdated. Unfortunately can't update the previous comment. What I said was true as of 2017, when the USA had a corporate tax rate of 39%, which ranked third highest in the world.

It was changed to 26.8% by the Trump tax cuts, which ranks 81st in the world. But that's still higher than 144 countries, including Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, UK, and Spain (just to name a few).
I expect many groups are going to step up and demand action to somehow restrict AI from intervening their work this year. But it's too late. AI is already on its way to dominate many different fields.
How does it work? I'm guessing it's exploding the clock then playing the animation in reverse?
Not since 1972. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden...
Of course you can't make that case unless the growth in revenue continues as such.
I'm guessing this was NSF or HHS, both of which have tons of rules. DoE and DoD are much less controlling.
Anybody want to predict how the market will react to this?

My take is that it will be a negative response. They've already shed a lot of workforce -- at this point they are still facing revenue growth loss more than they'll save in costs from reduced headcount -- and I think it's unlikely they'll be able to fire folks into a convincing story about future profit growth ...

To me it's clear they are no longer a machine able to turn ever expanding quantities of engineering talent into ever ever expanding monetary growth ...

so what's left to value in their overall organizational brand?

Personally I think they have an enormous amount of technical and organizational talent still in their ranks -- but ... why? Why will they stay and try hard to chase after whatever the next gravy fad train might be? Seems like it won't be the meta verse ... and if the next fad is really going to be "ai" -- could there really be enough talent that can really stomache the thought of allowing instagram to be the one to control the worlds first super intelligent agi ...?
That's... a pretty sizeable sum. Dominion is a pretty small organization - even had they won their case in court I strongly doubt that final damages would have been over three quarters of a billion dollars for a defamation case.

Fox REALLY didn't want this to go to trial.
made with haxe, and more demos available at:

https://oimo.io/works
>Hot take: For most users, python is not used for itself, but more to flexibly orchestrate some other low-level problem.

Well, there's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, a great "glue language" (and Python sure needs lots of improvements in many areas) is kind of the holy grail of IT!
Technological Antisolutions
Once again piracy provides the best service, and free of charge too. Gabe Newell was right.
> Ironically, this was largely done by self-declared leftists

Eh, the Parliament Act 1911 was passed by a Liberal Government.

> who utterly failed to anticipate how fascism could easily manifest through such a system.

The Liberal Party, and its successor the Liberal Democrats, has long been in favour of electoral reform.
While MSNBC is partisan, they are not as committed as Fox to just making up propaganda and running with it. MSNBC is more about what they focus on and how they emphasize issues.
At Paddington station in London there's a clock on the side of a building that appears to have someone inside it, manually drawing on the hands each minute. Its pretty neat

https://secretldn.com/clock-man-paddington-station/
And yet all of these same companies are responsible for today's reality where you own nothing and can resell nothing. Converting the mainstream commerce system from simple buying and selling of goods into licenses and subscriptions is the biggest scam corporations have ever pulled on the consumer class.
I tried his cursors for a moment and they looked strange to me. I went back to my cursors of choice, which are the auto-generated black cursors from Windows 10/11. (Accessibility → Mouse pointer and touch → lime cursor → Choose another color → black. It looks good at 1x and 2x.
Ignore Meta, think about how many nonprofitable tech companies were built by basically throwing money at growth the last 10 years. Then think about how early investors were rewarded, not by turning profitable, but by going public or getting acquired. That entire pipeline was built by cheap money.
The filibuster continues to exist each new day because a simple majority of senators continue to want it to exist. Don’t let that majority off the hook for anything by pointing to a rule they could remove at will.
this is exactly the purpose of the 5th amendment in the US. the only thing I don't agree with is the supreme court's decision that you have to deliberately invoke your 5th amendment. so much for inalienable rights...
I mean, I am pretty sure (have seen first hand) that this already happens regardless of whether client cookies are enabled. There's so many other (good?) ways to track users beyond just a cookie.
What's Happening to Twitter Could Never Happen to Mastodon
I like the ads. They spice up my day and give me something fun and interesting to look at when I'm bored at work. Plus I find it positive to see adverts for useful and enjoyable products and services. Thanks Microsoft for putting these ads in my Start Menu where they are handy and easy to find.

Maybe they could also put some adverts for products and services that are relevant to my interests into other parts of the operating system. I would personally enjoy the opportunity to see exciting new products in Explorer search results, or while making changes in the Registry Editor, for example. Just my 2c!
In the US lower incomes are associated with higher fertility rates. This may suggest the elites, to 'solve' this problem, should bankrupt the population further and then give them lots of time unemployed to spur "free" activity taken during the boredom.
better https://www.divescotty.com/underwater-blog/boat-side-starboa...
You still need to keep the remaining employees engaged, though.

Adding workforce is not useful != removing workforce is
I don't think eugenics is worth debating because it's a pointless broad term. The implementations have not been great though. Usually there are some vaguely good intentions and then deciding it's easier to get rid of the bad traits than to encourage the good traits.
Skybox is closer to the old 1970s-1980s SIMD machines like ILLIAC and the Connection Machine or (I think) the current NVIDIA, it has two sets of added instructions, one has to do with managing multiple ‘wavefronts’ (like threads) that run the same instructions with the possibility of turning some off (predication, which was deliberately left out of RISC-V, would have been a help). The other instruction control fixed function units and do fused integer multiply-adds. I don’t see any talk about vector instructions.
Not even close. There's so much more on the DVD service than the streaming side.

To me, the quality of the content was better in the DVD service.

I watch a couple of DVDs from Netflix each week. I haven't streamed anything from Netflix since 2020.
In FAIRness, their investments in AI research have been significant in absolute terms. What may be lacking is the connection between research and actual products, but I think that's true everywhere. Though I agree VR has been a distraction, I think it's misleading to say the investment was in VR "rather than AI"; it's been in addition to.
Cleverness can't compete with real entropy. There's a reason that ping-pong balls, and not mathematicians, generate the weekly lottery numbers.

Say there are a million cool math phrases, and for each one, a million different l33tspeak ways of expressing it. That's 10^12 possibilities, or around 2^40, which was coincidentally the US export limit for encryption tools in the 1990s (i.e., weak then and much weaker 30 years later). Maybe that doesn't sound horrible to you, but what are the chances that your scheme is so weird that a dictionary builder wouldn't generate it?

Better to stick with the xkcd/diceware/BIP-39 family of methods. Those algorithms intentionally lack cleverness.
You sound like a great parent!
> For mail-in ballots, use envelope-inside-envelope to preserve secrecy.

This would work better if mail-in ballots were only printed on request, and had some kind of one way hashing so that someone who voted by mail could optionally verify their vote was counted correctly.

Otherwise, isn't the count unauditable as soon as ballots are separated from their envelopes? You can only verify that the number of ballots matches the number of envelopes, and perhaps that there exists a bijection between them - but you cannot verify that the same set of ballots that was in the envelopes was the set of ballots which was counted. How can you verify that ballots were not replaced, after removing them from the envelopes but before counting them, with duplicate ballots that contained different votes? An attacker might not even need to duplicate a unique ID on each ballot, depending on how the "verify my vote" system is setup, because the verification is only that you removed a ballot from my envelope. As a voter, I can call my county and offer the ID number from my envelope, and the county can honestly tell me they "processed" it - but I cannot verify that my ballot itself was "processed," nor can I verify that it was counted toward the total votes with the weight I'd expect given the number of voters.

Inversely, it's important that mail-in ballots only be printed on request, and that the (potential) voter receive a unique hash upon requesting the ballot (not just after voting with it). Because that way you can ensure that if someone receives a ballot but doesn't vote, they can call to verify that their vote was not processed. Whereas if they only receive a unique hash after voting, then only those who executed their ballot could verify it was counted, and any unexecuted mail-in ballots could be mixed into the tally with confidence that nobody would call to verify they were not counted.

Surely there is some kind of "accumulator" system that can be used here, but I'm not familiar enough with the literature to identify it.

However, I think it's clear that this is a deceptively hard problem, and worth the effort of our best minds publicly solving it, rather than deferring it to a private Canadian-owned, Serbian-operated corporation that produces proprietary systems and sues anyone who questions their trustworthiness.
Things happen based on rates of change now, not just totals.

2021 was an abnormally high jump in revenue from 2020 for Meta. 2022 was a drop in revenue, but roughly a return to trend (there's a quite linear line from 2016 to 2022 revenue-wise).

It looks like they hired based on a wrong guess about Covid revenue growth acceleration being a longer-lasting thing than it was, and now that their revenue growth path is back to their old trend, they can't justify all of that.
This hasn’t been my experience but maybe that’s due to running an adblocker
That's when the Explorer and task bar started getting convoluted, hiding things, and becoming abstract instead of concrete. It's done in the spirit of helping newbies of course but it actively harms folks who do understand, as well as crippling the newbies who might learn, to always be dependent.

Also, the transparent effects didn't help anything and look silly in hindsight. They also took out color customization and you couldn't have a dark theme for the next ten years!

Of course the type ahead search in the Start menu was a big improvement, and elevation for security. But as always one step forward, two steps back with modern Windows.
I guess they could have, but data gets stale after a while.

I have to think that the real problem is that the things Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the best recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as possible. Those two things aren't necessarily at odds, but they aren't the same thing either.

Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn.
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A community fork of Rust for “unrestricted use”
Add sound to this, would make it better.