Apple is making better hardware than ever. Like your iPad, devices get at least 5 years of updates and will generally run faster every year. Like you said the biggest noticeable difference is in the battery, but this is obviously a much harder problem to solve.
Governments can only be trusted when any given individual can be trusted. I understand that Norway’s current government is one of the most accountable and transparent in the world so the damage a given individual can do is limited, but that entails trusting all future governments.
Very much this. The same people that feed large amounts of data to an ad network in exchange for videos of puppies can also be upset when they discover something about that same company that leads them to believe they’ve been harmed.
But lets also add, that so many of them will gladly believe everything an ad financed company tells them, just to have a bit of convenience and just so that they do not have to go against any network effect. All that, while people tell them, that they are being spied on. All that, while there is one personal data scandal after the other.
Many people are severly uninformed or have closed themselves off to information, that could disturb their comfort with FB and the likes (ha, pun not intended, but it works!). Many people are computer illiterates, addicted to their "drug of choice" and kept in place via network effect of "all their friends and family being on FB/WA/whatever" and they too are part of the problem, increasing the network effect.
I've had discussion with people, where I told them, that FB had the biggest personal data scandal in history (financially, in terms of what they had to pay), and that there is a new thing happening every month or so. Still these people do not want their way of being addicted shaken and continue regardlessly, dragging others down with them. I am sometimes at a loss what I can tell them, how I can explain to them what is happening. Telling them, that FB is running on ads, which are tailored to them, by spying on their behavior and mining that data. Nope, message not understood.
> But let's also add, that so many of them will gladly believe
everything an ad financed company tells them, just to have a bit of
convenience and just so that they do not have to go against any
network effect. All that, while people tell them, that they are
being spied on. All that, while there is one personal data scandal
after the other.
You are so right, I can't argue against that. It's the same psychology
and social dynamics as why people continue to smoke or use harmful
street drugs while seeing the people around them dying or getting
sick, and being told every day that it's harmful.
I tried to make as clear, and sensitively as I could in Digital Vegan
[1] why I think some digital technologies are a major public health
issue, and that we are in the same territory as with tobacco 50 years
ago.
One problem is that unlike heroin and tobacco, where the sickness of
the victims is a net burden on governments, consumer capitalism, being
a form of proxy mass-surveillance, traps governments in an uneasy "see
no evil" alliance, if not outright support for digital harms.
Another is that digital harms can be remote, deferred in time and
place, thus difficult to connect causally. As with many diseases or
pollutants we are still in the early stages of understanding the
effects of damage to privacy.
> Privacy is often inconvenient. Understanding is inconvenient.
You're so right. What else?
- Safety is inconvenient
- Growth is inconvenient
- Success is inconvenient
- Long term happiness is inconvenient
We could write a very, very long list of all the good things in life
and find, at root, that they are "inconvenient".
That's why I consider the word convenience to be the modern form of
the Greek work Thanatos, which is the "death drive" toward atrophy,
stasis, forgetfulness and rigor mortis. Living is "Inconvenient", and
because everything worth having costs something, convenience is
"anti-life".
But that's a lot of beard-stroking philosophy. A more interesting
question for hackers might be:
"Exactly when did we become the arse-wipers of the world, coddling
everyone in "convenience" lest their delicate brows produce a bead
of sweat or their minds be troubled by a moment of doubt?"
Here's a quote from Digital Vegan pondering the writing of De
Tocqueville:
Political scientist Alexis De Toqueville writing in his 1840
Democracy in America [DeTocqueville35] questions the perils of
convenient systems so perfect in their pampering and coddling that
they render life pointless. Of what today we would call cybernetic
governance, he writes:
`` That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and
mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like
that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood;
but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
childhood: it is well content that the people should
rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For
their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it
chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that
happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and
supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures,
manages their principal concerns, directs their industry,
regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their
inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care
of thinking and all the trouble of living?''
They seem to react strongly to the scenes in The Lives of Others with the Stasi eavesdropping and covertly opening physical mail. But do it "on a computer", and the aversion seems to diminish.
Because after all, we don't talk about anything important on a computer - for that, we type up and send a physical letter.
> Because after all, we don't talk about anything important on a computer
Yeah, that's definitely a sentiment I've seen many times. I'm not sure if there's any scientific explanation/proof, but I see claims that the "vast majority of people are averse to [any] change" a lot in articles and books.
The problem is that the world doesn't care, and changes anyway. So we've moved financials and military to the digital world - which should be the very definition of "important" or "serious" - but people's perception of computers stayed mostly the same: tools for playing games, gossiping with friends, and watching funny cat videos. I think the general population will only catch up to the changes the IT revolution brought in a generation or two. By that time it'll be too late for any kind of regulation, I'm afraid.
Do you remember how Facebook howled and whined so loudly after Apple gave iPhone users the choice to be tracked by FB or not, and the majority decided “No”? Tell me again that people don't care.
Did they really decide? Default settings are a sort of a pre-decision made by someone else.
That has been intensely studied in behavioral economics and there is a lot of laws that addresses the fact that people actually tend to leave pre-made decisions in place. (This is used in, e.g. laws that regulate consent to organ donation.)
You're not wrong, but those who do have an oversized impact. My family don't care or understand, but if I announce were moving from a family Whatsapp group to a family telegram group they'll comply. They don't understand or care but they're happy to take my lead. You only need a small number of users to opt out and you lose a lot of other users with them...
Well, that'll be too late then. The EU is preparing to force chat app providers to build an unprecedented espionage and censorship infrastructure on their behalf. (Of course only to fight against terrorism and child abuse! /s)
The EU already allows governments to use spy on their citizens with stuff like Pegasus. They are just making it easier to buy and sell that kind of software.
Secret services are one thing, police operations and investigations are another, spying your own citizens for the sake of spying them and collecting their data is not allowed in EU, but it happened in US (we have proof) and when it happened in Europe it was US companies doing it (Cambridge Analytica data scandal, to name one, was made possible by Facebook).
This is a nice example of the kind of thing that bothers me. I don't have a smartphone, my address book is mine. But given that probably 99.9% of all my contacts do have a smartphone with Android on it or a Facebook account there is a fair chance that my address book can be reconstructed from theirs. So I can't even opt out, no matter how much I would like to, my 'spot' in the social graph is defined anyway.
Is there a website that anyone knows of for these types of open-source curriculums? Feel like it would be nice to have a place where people could post these and you could reference them when you wanted to learn something in the correct order and with the best resources.
They’re much narrower in scope than a full curriculum (or even a course, for that matter), but Better Explained [0] has some very good overviews of math topics. They are a useful supplement I’ve come across repeatedly while searching topics I found challenging over the years.
On the topic of open source learning, I take every chance I can to heartily recommend fast.ai’s course [1]. It’s a good intro to Deep Learning that leaves you informed enough to build things, and equips you to ask follow-on questions and dive deeper when/where you need to.
It has a lot more detail on stuff like floating point storage, memory layout, sparse matrices, iterative methods, etc than most linear algebra courses, but doesn't go much in to proofs, geometric interpretations, and other stuff that's less needed for algorithm design and implementation.
Khan Academy is great, but I mean for all resources on a subject. In other words, a place where people can post curations of resources, not actual content. So say I wanted to learn linear algebra it would point to Khan Academy for the basics part and then other places as well.
For the trading jobs, would I need experience in trading particularly. Also, for these jobs in general do side projects and the like matter a lot (like they do for SWE)? Thanks sm btw!
Unless you do something really amazing, they will judge you on your school and grades. When you're older, it's different of course.
You can't really get any real trading experience unless you work as an instiutional trader, so no, you don't need to have traded.
You also don't need to know anything about finance, though it helps. With a math+CS degree from a top school, I wouldn't imagine you have trouble getting a S&T offer at a bank (maybe not a specific bank like Goldman tho).
The other path you could take is to go straight to the buy-side: prop shop, hedge fund, etc. These jobs are significantly harder to get.
The money won't be as good at the sellside, but it's a lot less risky. Also having a big bank on your resume never hurts. Probably the most common career path is:
summer bank internship -> 2 year analyst stint -> mba/mfe/PhD -> associate role at bank or buy-side fund
C++ still the superset of a language that is a dialect of C. In terms of ISO, it's probably still closest to the C90 dialect, with some C99-like features (inline functions, // comments).
