My instinct for self-preservation tells me that this is not a good thing. I understand the need for privacy, but what happens if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your face? I think that the need for privacy could be solved through the legislation: we can have very severe restrictions on who could look at this data and why. Also, we can have severe restrictions on the admissibility of such data in court. Unfortunately, I have not seen any credible efforts from politicians, right or left, to introduce privacy protections from the surveillance abuses.
Readit Newsthrowaway1959 commented on King County, WA bans facial recognition software komonews.com/news/local/k... · Posted by u/sharkweek
Should we be worried about the future of JetBrains' products? I love their IDEs, especially PyCharm and CLion, but when the "woke" comes in, the competency seems to go out the door next, although it takes a few extra years. What would be the reason for doing this? Especially by the Russian team out of Prague?
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I think this is a prime example of the "narrative engineering" done by Facebook. Before, the narrative was supposed to be X (e.g. no Wuhan leak) and now it's Y (it's Ok to think/talk about Wuhan leak). Who controls the narrative? We don't know, but presumably special interest groups with direct influence over Facebook senior management?
throwaway1959 commented on After a decade of VC influence at Stanford, what’s next? gabygoldberg.medium.com/a... · Posted by u/adrian_mrd
The Republican Party has abandoned data and evidence driven policy decisions in favor of ideology. The last Republican Party convention had no official policy platform outside of “whatever Trump wants today.” Why would you expect Professors to be excited to join a party that is a cult of personality that incessantly demonizes the very institutions they lead?
The study I cite was published in Sep 2016, so it predates Trump.
throwaway1959 commented on After a decade of VC influence at Stanford, what’s next? gabygoldberg.medium.com/a... · Posted by u/adrian_mrd
Are you suggesting that Stanford needs to lower its standards to create reserved spaces for Republicans?
Of course not. I am not actually sure how to solve this problem. I think a good start would be to move back towards encouraging freedom of speech on campus and dialog between people with different opinions.
throwaway1959 commented on After a decade of VC influence at Stanford, what’s next? gabygoldberg.medium.com/a... · Posted by u/adrian_mrd
At the end of the article, the author seem to have listed every diversity criteria, except the diversity of thought. With Democrat to Republican ratio of professors in the leading US Universities being 11.5 to 1 [1], there is a growing danger that Stanford will go the way other universities have gone: lowering academic standards, admitting students based in their identity affiliations (and of course rich parents who could skirt the system), lowering faculty standards in technical departments, etc... The Stanford startups will move towards social engineering, disguised as impact investing. Move towards normalizing the discrimination against Asian and Indian male students and entrepreneurs.
[1] https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-i...
I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.
You could say the same thing about the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments. "what about the children"