Viewing profile — eykanal

If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S... ). It ta…

If you're interested in this type of stuff I strongly recommend "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. He describes the social psychology of mass movements, looking largely at religio…

As someone who is on a pretty strict news diet, this is exactly the wrong reaction. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to be informed about important thing without visiting any news…

No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't d…

I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith. Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all t…

Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; th…

It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a…

Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store! More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store"…

Googler here! Opinions are my own. Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneous…

Google was one of the earlier companies to do mass layoffs, back in 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-peop...

Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manip…

Is there an explainer on this? I'm not familiar with the geopolitics or oil cartels well enough to understand the implications here.

This is being downvoted, but is raising a serious point. - Nearly 90% of Americans eat red meat [1]. - Environmental activity against meat has led a lot of people (26% of Americans…

There's a great essay hiding in that page, but oh my goodness that is a frustrating format and layout.

The purchasing power of $3.05 in 1914 would require $100 in today's time. A bag of "stuff" worth $100 today could have been purchased for $3.05 in 1914. Technically, it does mean t…

This is an excellent overview. * His points about collaboration are excellent. So many research students think that their brains are their best asset. There are many smart people. …

I'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of…

Fully agree, and glad you posted this. Atari has no responsibility to the open source community, and indeed has every reason to push back against this effort. That they're willing …

For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited: https://scholar.google.c…

I'm struck by the utilitarian mindset of this essay. What Paul so disparagingly refers to as "brand" can also be referred to as "art". People _want_ art, and will indeed pay good m…

This comment seems to confuse _straightforward_ with _easy_. On the merits, this proposal is well argued and has good points, and his solution—essentially extend the Biden approach…

Er, this was reported by waymo themselves nearly two years ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

So playing "skeptic in a vacuum" for a minute—i.e., pretending that I don't know anything about this administration, and not having done any research beyond reading the linked arti…

As said elsewhere, success in hardware does not translate to success in software. Privacy is definitely good but it's not at all an example of the success mentioned in the parent c…

> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version. While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we'…