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The real scandal inside Facebook’s cross-check program [Casey Newton, Platformer]

By Spencer Chen

In [Platformer]

December 6, 2022

754 views

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• Facebook’s cross-check program has been criticized for offering unequal protection to some users, leading to the Meta Oversight Board investigating the program.
• The board found that the program leads to unequal treatment of users, causes harm, and does not measure its effectiveness.
• The board made 32 recommendations for the company, including developing stronger criteria for which accounts should be eligible for ERSR protections, making those criteria public, and allowing individuals to proactively apply for the program.
• The board also recommends that Facebook build more capacity to ensure it’s actually reviewing posts in the GSR queue.

Published December 6, 2022

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AI Homework [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen

In Ben Thompson [Stratechery], Science/Technology

December 5, 2022

355 views

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• OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a free AI-powered chatbot that uses GPT-3 language model and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to generate text.
• It has sparked an explosion of interest in AI and its potential impact on society.
• OpenAI’s API is a leader in terms of offering access to AI capabilities, but its cost limits exploration and discovery.
• ChatGPT is a threat to homework, as it can generate “original” text from regurgitation for free.
• AI output is probabilistic, unlike calculators which are deterministic, and it is important to catch it when it gets it wrong.
• AI-generated content is a step beyond user-generated content, but currently has a low rate of accuracy.
• Stack Overflow has temporarily banned the use of ChatGPT to create posts on the site.
• The role of the human in terms of AI is not to be the interrogator, but rather the editor.
• Homework assignments should focus on verifying and editing AI-generated answers, rather than regurgitating them.
• Zero trust information is the only systematic response to Internet misinformation that is compatible with a free society.

Click HERE for original. Published December 5, 2022

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Who Cares Where the Holidays Come From, If the God They Celebrate is Dead? [Freddie deBoer]

By Spencer Chen

In Freddie deBoer

December 5, 2022

468 views

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• Atheists have shifted from being disrespectful towards believers to being overly respectful, engaging in a ritual of debunking the idea that Christmas is a reappropriation of pagan or Roman holidays.
• This disdain for arguments about the pagan roots of Christian religious practice is a prototypical example of the current turn in atheism.
• This shift has caused atheists to neglect the essential tasks of atheism, such as arguing for the non-existence of a supernatural deity and attempting to limit the destructive power of religion.
• This shift has been caused by the New Atheists becoming politically right-coded, and atheists now scrambling to disavow them.
• Ultimately, this is a classic example of an essential question: which is worse, insult or condescension?

Click HERE for original. Published December 5, 2022

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Where Does Data Come From? [Emily Oster, ParentData]

By Spencer Chen

In Emily Oster [ParentData]

December 5, 2022

512 views

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• Data for population characteristics like obesity rate is usually collected from surveys, such as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
• NHANES is designed as a representative sample, but non-response can create imbalances in the data that need to be addressed with reweighting.
• Re-weighting adjusts for differences between the sample and the overall population by giving more weight to characteristics that are underrepresented in the sample.
• Non-response can lead to selection bias, which can make it difficult to draw precise conclusions from survey data.

Click HERE for original. Published December 5, 2022

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How Much Aerobic Exercise Is Safe During Pregnancy? [Emily Oster, ParentData]

By Spencer Chen

In Emily Oster [ParentData]

December 1, 2022

678 views

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• Aerobic exercise is generally safe during pregnancy; maximum heart rate should not exceed 150 bpm.
• Fetal heart rate often increases with maternal exercise, but usually not into a zone of concern.
• Exercise has benefits for maternal health, but there is a slightly higher risk for injury due to loosened ligaments.

Click HERE for original. Published December 1, 2022

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Real-World Engineering Challenges #7: Choosing Technologies [Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer]

By Spencer Chen

In Gergely Orosz [The Pragmatic Engineer]

November 29, 2022

424 views

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• Trello used RabbitMQ to power its websockets functionality for several years, but experienced reliability issues and high resource usage.
• The team evaluated five alternatives and chose Kafka due to its failover capabilities, in-order message delivery per shard, fanout message distribution, low latency, and required throughput of 2,000 messages/second.
• Birdie moved to Micro Frontends to reduce the tight coupling between parts of its codebase and reduce the time it took to run tests.
• MetalBear chose Rust for its stack due to its performance and hiring considerations.
• Motive moved over to Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) to share business logic between iOS and Android.
• Why Trello moved over to Kafka: Trello needed a reliable messaging queue to handle their high-volume of web socket connections, and chose Kafka for its scalability and reliability.
• Why Birdie moved to Micro Frontends: Birdie needed to reduce the number of tests run when making changes, and chose Micro Frontends to split up their codebase and give teams more autonomy.
• Why MetalBear settled on using Rust: MetalBear chose Rust for its low-level features, small memory footprint, thread safety, and because it would make hiring engineers easier.
• Why Motive moved over to Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile: Motive chose KMM to ensure consistency in business logic across the mobile apps, and to execute faster on development.

Published November 29, 2022

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Why some tech CEOs are rooting for Musk [Casey Newton & Zoë Schiffer, Platformer]

By Spencer Chen

In [Platformer]

November 28, 2022

519 views

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• Elon Musk’s radical remaking of Twitter is getting largely positive reception from tech CEOs.
• CEOs are inspired by Musk’s leadership and tactics, which could have ramifications across the tech industry.
• Musk’s sledgehammer tactics have given executives an excuse to begin unwinding some of the leverage that their workforce gained in the roaring 2010s.
• Musk’s project to reinstate banned users and picking a fight with Apple is making it harder on himself.
• Internally, employees have referred to the project as “the Big Bang”.
• Advertisers remain deeply skeptical and Apple has threatened to remove Twitter from the App Store.
• Musk is planning to lay off most of the remaining engineering managers this week.
• It’s clear that the person in most need of a late-night performance review is Musk himself.

Published November 28, 2022

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Trump is restored to Twitter [Casey Newton & Zoë Schiffer, Platformer]

By Spencer Chen

In [Platformer]

November 21, 2022

432 views

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• Trump is back (sort of) on Twitter, but he has said he won’t use it. Elon Musk restored his account based on a poll, without forming a content moderation council as he had promised.
• Late-night code reviews: After offices were closed and employees were asked to sign loyalty pledges, Musk asked engineers to fly to San Francisco for brief code reviews.
• The shrinking sales team: After two meetings with the global sales team, Musk laid off more employees.
• Uncertainty: Security certificates are set to expire, raising concerns that Twitter could go down without the people on hand to bring it back.
• Elsewhere in Twitter: Engineers must email Musk what they’re working on, blue verification might not re-launch, and Musk says layoffs are over for now.

Published November 21, 2022

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Narratives [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen

In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]

November 14, 2022

464 views

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• Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried’s recent actions show how narratives can lead people astray.
• Musk’s attempt to take Twitter private was rooted in his personal grievances, and his letter to advertisers was mostly wrong.
• Bankman-Fried’s political activism was seen as a way to hide his fraud, and his ambition to change the world was a distraction from his business.
• Changpeng Zhao of Binance is an example of an entrepreneur who focused on his business, rather than on political activism.
• The article discusses the importance of product-based narratives over theory-based narratives when it comes to understanding the implications of new technologies such as crypto and AI.
• It argues that the narrative of crypto being a decentralizing force has been challenged by its product manifestation, which tends towards centralization.
• Similarly, the narrative of AI being a centralizing force has been challenged by the emergence of decentralized and open source AI projects.
• The article concludes that the best way of knowing is starting by consciously not-knowing, and that narratives that are right follow from products.

Click HERE for original. Published November 14, 2022

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Elon only trusts Elon [Casey Newton & Zoë Schiffer, Platformer]

By Spencer Chen

In [Platformer]

November 14, 2022

493 views

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• Elon Musk’s Twitter halted new enrollment into its $8-a-month Blue subscription offering after it led to widespread impersonation of government officials, corporations, and celebrities.
• Days before the launch, the company’s trust and safety team had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans for Blue.
• On Saturday afternoon, a week after an initial round of layoffs had cut Twitter in half, a second massive wave of cuts hit the company, targeting contractors.
• On Monday morning, at around 1:45 AM, Twitter engineers were called into an emergency meeting and told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice.”
• Eli Lilly, Volkswagen, Pfizer, IPG’s Mediabrands, and Omnicom Media Group have all paused their ad campaigns on Twitter, potentially costing the company millions of dollars in revenue.
• GroupM has told its clients that Twitter is a high-risk media buy, and mid-afternoon on Monday, after Musk announced he would begin disconnecting up to 80 percent of unspecified microservices, two-factor authentication temporarily stopped working via SMS.

Published November 14, 2022

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