this is really sad. as I will ONLY be buying an EV in future (it's EV or nothing). i certainly don't want another ICE, that's for sure. I guess i'm in a tiny minority, yet again.
Readit NewsTaste in food, the supplements you take, and things like whether you like Elvis Presely, can absolutely be used to out you in ways that you may not want.
The famous example I remember from growing up was a teen girl whose parents found out she was pregnant from a personalized (mailed) Target ad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... . There seem to be some skepticism in later articles that this is actually how her parents found out, but only because she told them first. They could have found out from the ad.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2017.0074 is a more detailed study of how Facebook likes can out people. It looks like the "cloaking" solution that the authors propose actually makes the model more accurate. From the article "false-positive inferences are significantly easier to cloak than true-positive inferences".
If you're the only one who knows what ads you see, that might still be okay, but if a platform can make these kinds of inferences to show you ads, they can use the same data in other ways. At the very least, they might leak this information to other users by recommending people you may know, etc. You might also reveal what kind of personal ads you get if you ever browse the web someplace where other people can glance at your screen.
but judging how awful the targetting is, I don't think anyone watching your screen as you browse should be able to make any kind of conclusions of you. if anything, the ads we receive are a reflection of human beings at large or at least what advertisers think of them.
you wouldn't believe how irrelevant to me, the ads i get are.
Sadly, data collection has been completely normalized.
I've been thinking about buying a new car, but I'm very aware of how much tracking/telematics they include nowadays... so I decided to search "$manufacturer disable telematics". Every single thread I found was full of people saying variants of "Why do you even want to do that lol" and "Looks like somebody is doing something illegal".
Every time I see stuff like that, I'm tempted to jump in and share a plethora of examples about how tech companies misuse your data, don't protect it properly, sell it to all sorts of dubious actors, and, most importantly, use it for advertising - which I consider to be nothing more than gaslighting to get you to buy stuff and absolutely despicable.
I have to stop myself because I know I wouldn't get through to them, and I would probably sound crazy.
i get the having control of your data part (at least for address, name, social sec #, phone number and email - those are really important). but i could care less if an algorithm knows i like elvis presely or what my taste in food is, etc.
but i don't understand how personalized ads are harmful. if you don't like the product, just don't buy it? what am i missing?
personally, i only buy products that I really want or really need, so if an ad pops up that convinces me to buy, then it's done me a huge favor. but this almost never ever happens. usually, the ads are terribly targetted and don't show any clue of understanding who I am as a person. to me, it seems the problem is they're not targetted enough, rather than too targetted.
Comments here so far focus on personalised ads as the issue -- but that's a symptom of what's being banned, which is the mass collection of personal data.
Personalised ads are beside the point. The issue is how they are personalised, namely by building a rich profile of user behaviour based on non-consensual tracking.
It isnt even clear that there's a meaningful sense of 'consent' to what modern ad companies (ie., google, facebook, amazon, increasingly microsoft, etc.) do. There is both an individual harm, but a massive collective arm, to the infrastructure of behavioural tracking that has been built by these companies.
This infrastructure should be, largely, illegal. The technology to end any form of privacy is presently deployed only for ads, but should not be deployed anywhere at all.
yeah, i really don't get why people are so against personalized ads. As a user of these platforms, I feel the ads are already nowhere near targetted enough and now looks like we'll be getting ads that are even more irrelevant. at this point, I think they're just trying to find more way of fining fangs as a means of selective taxation and punishment.
throw8383833jj commented on Cities turn to ‘extreme’ water recycling e360.yale.edu/features/on... · Posted by u/CoBE10
This stuff is good - but it's penny wise.
Agriculture is outright wasteful of water. California agriculture consumes 80% of the state's water.
https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agric...
Its an environmental equivalent of Amdahl's law - spending so much effort to make a small portion of the water use efficient when we can work far less to make agriculture more efficient. Of course its all because of lobbying.
why not just allow the price of water to accurately be reflected in the prices that farmers pay for water? if they paid more for water, they'd use it more wisely and more varieties would get planted that use less water, more efficient irrgation would become financially viable. you can't expect farmers to take financial losses by saving water. however, if you make it in their financial intereset to save water, it'll automatically get done.
throw8383833jj commented on SoftBank Vision funds post record $39B annual loss ft.com/content/1dd470c2-b... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
Their massive early investment in Uber distorted their reality and they expected ride sharing to be incredibly successful in other markets when it's not even successful in the USA - it's a fraud that pays below minimum wage off the backs of people who cannot do math. It has never made money anywhere ...
ARM has had a laziness problem ever since the Apple A1 chip - there's a reason why nobody uses their 6-yr old layouts. ARM almost killed Qualcomm when they adopted A57 for the snapdragon 808 using the 64-bit arm design - that chip melted quite a few phones and this gave Exymos it's start!
where is this whole below minimum wage thing coming from?
Everytime, I take an Uber or Lyft and calculate the hourly earnings of the uber driver minus vehicle miles, uber's take, and x2 the time needed (for the return trip), I come up with 15$-20$ an hour or so.
> Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!
When Google was a startup and even a decade in they managed to treat everyone the same.
Today this has went backwards like everything else Google it seems.
there are legitimate technical reasons as to why a roll out would happen for one place rather than everywhere at once.
I just think it's remarkable how people can take any piece of good news and find the most negative interpretation of it.
throw8383833jj commented on Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023 twitter.com/tomwarren/sta... · Posted by u/dustedcodes
I never understood the idea that salaries should be expected to always be corrected for inflation, and that not doing so is somehow secretly a "salary cut". Salaries are driven by supply and demand, and individual companies (maybe not Microsoft though) can generally only afford to raise them by a given amount. If that amount is less than inflation then that's that, right? Most companies (again, maybe not Microsoft though) can't just conjure up more money out of thin air, that's not how businesses work.
It is a salary cut because the dollar is worth less every year. It's already lost well over 99% of it's value in the last 200 years (a time when the average house cost 800$). So, if inflation goes up by 10%, your salary is being cut by almost 10%.
throw8383833jj commented on Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023 twitter.com/tomwarren/sta... · Posted by u/dustedcodes
Yes a lot of companies hired a lot more. A lot of money also got distributed in this process which otherwise wouldn't have. Laid off employees got some work experience out of it. Better than nothing.
I don't get this stuck up argument again and again Why did they hire before? As if there is some really great answer that can reveal itself by repeatedly asking this question.
> Cutting would be better than freezing salaries.
Many would like same or lower salary than being laid off. Those who looking for higher salaries can move on just like they always have.
i thought the answer was Jack welch philosophy of management: always overhire and then prune 10% of your workforce every year. the theorey goes that way, you keep the best and loose the rest. But, that assumes that employees are interchangable like cogs which isn't true. plus, most companies aren't necessarily able to determine who's best and worst and may even end up laying off those who are better.
Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south bay is ideal but it's better than SF.