They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.
They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.
Yes, there are enough people who still think this won't happen despite very conclusive recent history of this exactly happening.
Just like there are enough people who think if there were no car dealership/ salesman car would become cheaper as if car makers are full of morons who leave extra margins to buyers instead of themselves.
Or streaming service beats the shit of out cable in being cheap, ads-free and all in all better user experience. Once true, no longer.
Also funny that tips will go away when one visits self-serve in restaurants, coffee shops etc.
I guess a lot of folks are too drunk on "This time it will be different".
This is why normal people saying they are using ChatGPT to "research" which X to buy makes me so sad. Even if it is not a sponsored answer (yet) it is using data it found on random websites that it trusts are telling the truth. It is the dumbest game of telephone where the start of the chain is made up marking mumbo jumbo or straight fake, and each successive layer somehow speaks with more confidence and the end user thinks that because these LLMs have "access to all data from all time" that it means their answer will be correct.
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation.
Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customized bursts of dopamine.
You're idea is well intentioned, but this legislation will be used by the well known platforms to burden the heterogeneous web and kill it with legislation.
What we need is a 2nd renaissance of small discussion forums.
You don't need to use X, Facebook, instagram and the rest of the commercial web. Seek alternative, REAL COMMUNITIES.
Yeah, there is a suspicious amount of down-voting of anti-surveillance comments in here. I'd say there's about a 99% chance Flock is paying astroturfers.
I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).
But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?
The possibilities are literally endless:
* Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
* Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
* Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
* "Where has your spouse been?"
In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?
It exists to give an information asymmetry enabling a maximally extractive market at the cost of inefficiency.
It's the sort of thing that could only exist beneficially in some sort of communist system where deal with crime in some sort of fair way and where access to the information on these networks was regulated and equally available and the non crime information could be used to instead feed a command economy.
It may surprise many that we don't live in that world.
>. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?
>The possibilities are literally endless:
Zero chance of any of those examples happening when they already have contractual relationships with municipalities they can leverage. They can simply just extend their services to civil enforcement. Follow the concrete trucks and the contractor vans and everything else around with the cameras and drones and then fine everyone for everything. "You were seen wheeling a water heater out of Home Depot. You got a permit for that". "It sure looks like you bought a lot of Henny last time you were in tax free NH, are you sure none of that wound up in your brother's restaurant."
There's already screenshots of "Your 80k registered truck was seen on a road not open to this traffic with no corresponding overweight permit, pay up" mail violations floating around (I have not vetted them).
And unlike price discrimination, the useful idiots will cheer, because the victims will have on paper broken the rules and can be construed as <checks list of buzzwords> "scofflaws", "antisocial" and "not paying their fair share" even if they have done nothing morally wrong.
Elison and Oracle are a big threat, they have an obsession with holding as much data as possible, for every single US citizen they can get their hands on, and it is no coincidence they not only sell electoral targeting demographic data, but also are trying to install dystopian level servers under the whitehouse.
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
I went to a similar school. It depended on major. If it was a major that the school was known for, say the top ranked CS school...then it was 100% that a grad was someone who was noticeably much, much smarter than most people. If they were at the same school but in a much less well recognized major (at my school...let's say history), then they were much closer to the average. If you are seeing students at Cambridge who are in prestige majors but without obvious skills...something else is happening and it isn't good. Otherwise, you are probably just seeing the differences between different majors.
I've worked with and written papers with enough people from top ranked CS schools (multiple from top 5 on csrankings) while I was at a top 100 and it is a very mixed bag. There were plenty of idiots in the top 5 and plenty of geniuses in the top 100s.
I'd agree that average shows a difference but I don't think it is nearly as big as people act. Even the intra-university variance isn't what people would think (top universities have a very narrow distribution while lower ranks have wider). The trend follows, but the variance of the variances is not that large.
I agree with your point, but UK students also have to get very high grades in standardized national exams. That’s by no means a perfect measure of intelligence either, but it’s not something you can just blag your way through in an interview.
20 years ago, this wasn't the case (at least in tech in SV). If you are seeing this today, its because of something (or somethings) specific. Could be the general increase in size of the companies or industry, a problem with recruiting or a problem with the universities that feed into that industry. Maybe a combination of those things. But 20 years ago, you could tell who worked in tech and who didn't.
I still hold the line on interviewing. Maybe some don’t. I am sure it is true. My team us too small with too much responsibility to tolerate mediocrity to any real extent
Today's Torrentfreak article is about "an executive" and references the article you have linked thus:
This is not the first time a Reality Labs employee has surfaced in the case. Earlier this summer, Meta confirmed that a former data engineer at the division was behind a Comcast connection linked to 97 films.
Close reading of both allows for a not spelled out possibility ... that "the data engineer" is also the son of the first mentioned "an executive".
Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
man, that's grand, especially the last paragraph. I definitely should be less modest with my resume :)
"Stat reported that in 2017, Richard Graydon self-published a book titled The Genetic Risks of Cancer: The Effects of DNA, Genomics and Inheritance on Aging and Survival.” The book described Graydon as an oncologist who had served as a chief medical officer in the biotech and drug development industry. It had no reviews on Amazon.
In October 2022, Atossa Therapeutics, a Seattle-based biotech, announced it had hired Richard Graydon as its interim chief medical officer.
“We are privileged to welcome Richard to Atossa, where his deep experience in CAR-T cell therapy fits well with our current strategic direction as we explore our opportunities in cell therapy,” Steven Quay, Atossa’s CEO, said in a statement at the time.
In March, Immix announced hiring Graydon, calling him a “board-certified hematologist-oncologist with over 20 years of experience in clinical development, most recently at Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson, where he led new and supplemental new drug applications and biologics license applications for 7 approved drugs including Darzalex, Carvykti, Keytruda, and Imbruvica.” Stat noted that these are some of the bestselling cancer medicines in the world."
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics
> ...you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
This task might have been the sexiest work available at Meta, and there's nothing average about a guy that can single-handedly "process" 2,973 porn vids.
This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.
Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.
I occasionally enjoy well executed ads, like something that’s creative enough to make me curious, but nowadays, I’m seeing a lot of ads on YouTube that’s obviously low-effort AI slop, they are boring, fake, and depressing.
They weren't going to burn a couple trillion dollars of capital and lose money on every API call just so you could ask it to tell you why your cat brings you dead mice.
They're going to pump this shit so full of advertising it's not going to be funny. And worse, it's going to be incredibly subtle and insidious. You're not even going to realize the responses are guiding you into certain purchases. Just gentle, reassuring advice that you should be buying shit.
This future sucks.
reply