carbonatedmilk (u/carbonatedmilk)

carbonatedmilk commented on Open Source takes center stage at United Nations opensource.net/open-sourc... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

carbonatedmilk · a year ago

Many UN agencies are already working hard to inculcate an open source / open methods / open data approach to everything they do.

There's a key standard for this: Digital Public Goods, which you can read lots more about here:

https://digitalpublicgoods.net/

https://unicef.github.io/publicgoods-toolkit/

https://digitalprinciples.org/#principles

If this sounds like fun to you, here's a couple of my favourite Digital Public Goods that have great communities and make real impact:

https://github.com/primeroIMS/primero

https://github.com/rapidpro/rapidpro

https://github.com/ckan/ckan

https://github.com/dhis2/dhis2-core

carbonatedmilk commented on My Clients, the Liars lesswrong.com/posts/h99tR... · Posted by u/paulpauper

0xDEADFED5 · 2 years ago

isn't the entire premise of this article flawed? the feigned indignity at their clients lying...when it's pretty much required for them to receive any semblance of effective defense:

  There is a kernel of an exception that is almost not worth mentioning. The Rules of Professional 
  Conduct 3.3 obligates me with the duty of candor. I am not allowed to present evidence that I “know” 
  is false, which encompasses witness testimony. Some jurisdictions make exceptions to this rule for 
  defendants testifying in their criminal trial (correctly, IMO) but not all. So assuming that a 
  client truthfully confesses to me, assuming we go to trial, assuming they decide to testify, and 
  assuming I “know” they’re going to lie, then yes, this could indeed spawn a very awkward situation 
  where I’m forced to withdraw in the middle of proceedings.

carbonatedmilk · 2 years ago

This happens frequently in courts in my home country. There's even polite lawyer codewords so that you don't have to trudge in to court and say

'I'm sorry your honor, I have to withdraw from this matter because my client, who is a bit dim, has just told me at the lunch break that he totally did the thing, and also that he's going to lie his ass off about it when he gets up in the witness box in just a minute'

But the next time you hear a lawyer withdraw because they're 'forensically embarrassed', you'll know what happened

carbonatedmilk commented on Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck cnn.com/2024/02/14/busine... · Posted by u/reteltech

carbonatedmilk · 2 years ago

One of the best things I've learnt recently is how to apply the zero blame, process improvement approach that (many) air safety regulators take to my own teams.

I'd sat through 'five whys' style postmortems before, but it was reading air safety investigation reports that finally got me to understand it and make it a useful part of how we get better at our jobs.

By comparison, the way we're investigating and responding to self-driving safety incidents still seems very primitive. Why is that?

carbonatedmilk commented on Lawyers who cited fake cases hallucinated by ChatGPT must pay theregister.com/2023/06/2... · Posted by u/LinuxBender

QuarterRoy · 3 years ago

It would take 2 minutes to check on Nexus Lexis to see if these were real cases. Lazy.

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

From the Sanctions Order: "The Levidow Firm primarily practices in New York state courts. It uses a legal research service called Fastcase and does not maintain Westlaw or LexisNexis accounts. When Mr. Schwartz began to research the Montreal Convention, the firm’s Fastcase account had limited access to federal cases."

And isn't that as big a story? That in 2023, in the richest country in the world, there's no publicly searchable index of the laws of the country?

carbonatedmilk commented on Where did FTX customer money go? Firm says Bankman-Fried took $2.2B arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/moh_maya

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

This just keeps getting weirder.

From the infamous irony quotes 'balance sheet': https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/7ab64a3b-6c...

Liablities: $8.8bn of customer deposits

* $6.6bn-ish in USD or USDT

* $2.2bn in crypto

* I'm assuming the 'poorly labelled $8bn' is included in this amount, and you don't add it

Assets: $2.5bn?

* $1.5bn of liquid assets.

* $1bn-ish? of illiquid assets.

* Most of these numbers are just made up, but let's finger-in-the-wind them at $1bn ($500m at least is in 'locked USDT')

Now we find out they have another magical pool of money, the $3.2bn that they'd taken out of FTX and put in their pockets.

So the position looks really different: They had $8.8bn on one side of the ledger, and $5.7bn on the other side - After the massive bank run which collapsed the price of their shitcoins.

It appears they had the money to pay out most of their USD / USDT depositors at $0.85 on the dollar, which is obviously still 'insolvent', but possibly enough to survive a bank run (almost) all the way down to the ground (If you suspend redemptions of your crypto and persuade 15% of your USD depositors not to pull their money out)

The final question is: Who did they owe the liabilities to? If some of those 'deposits' were actually owed to other FTX-associated entities, it seems even more survivable, and would probably have preserved some of the value of their shitcoins

carbonatedmilk commented on Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries nytimes.com/2022/11/21/bu... · Posted by u/stephc_int13

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

My 7 year old son is vegetarian - Neither of his parents are (although we've always tried to be awake to the ethical implications of what we eat)

When I asked him why he'd gone so all-in on vegetarianism, he said "Daddy, animals are my friends. And you don't eat your friends"

The little bastard derived the whole thing from first principles, with no input from his parents.

I've tried to use the vegetable-based mince alternatives in pasta sauce, and we're always really unsatisfied with the results. He much prefers lentils / tofu / tempeh and frankly so do we.

We're in the target demographic for these products, and I can tell you: THe problem isn't the price, the branding or the level of ethical awareness. It's the product! It's a lousy substitute for the meat-based alternative, and it doesn't even stack up well against the raw ingredients they're derived from, which have the advantages of being cheaper and tasting better.

carbonatedmilk commented on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended twitter.com/zoeschiffer/s... · Posted by u/minimaxir

disgruntledphd2 · 3 years ago

> Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program

I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).

> * Airflow

This is actually a clone of an internal FB tool (written by the same author after he left FB).

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

> I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).

That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.

carbonatedmilk commented on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended twitter.com/zoeschiffer/s... · Posted by u/minimaxir

pschuegr · 3 years ago

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin.

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem particularly exciting.

For comparison:

Meta / Facebook:

* React

* PyTorch

* Fasttext

* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program

Google:

* Flutter

* Go

* Kubernetes

* Tensorflow

* BERT / Large language models generally

* Mapreduce / Hadoop

The much-maligned Uber:

* H3 Geospatial indexing

* Kepler.gl

* Manifold

Even AirBNB!

* Airflow

* Superset

I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work. When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.

Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?

carbonatedmilk commented on Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover theguardian.com/media/202... · Posted by u/samizdis

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

For comparison, the old, dying, 'legacy' social media platform Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

To rub it in - If Facebook & Mastodon were the only two social networks to 'switch' to, FB captured 99.8% of the 'switchers'. If 24 Million new users had signed up for Mastodon, that would be a story. That only 0.2% of them chose Mastadon shows how bad the open, federated alternative really is.

carbonatedmilk commented on Flying the Unflyable Plane: The near crash of Air Astana flight 1388 admiralcloudberg.medium.c... · Posted by u/mhandley

carbonatedmilk · 3 years ago

Even though the author is critical of the GPIAAF's report, it's amazing to see how thoroughly incidents like this one are investigated - With a real focus on process improvement. Frustrating that the obvious mechanical fix for this (have different shaped connectors for each aerilon cable) wasn't adopted by Embraer, but still a great reminder of how we can do incident handling better in software dev