I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.
This really isn’t fair. It is not simply hope and pray: it is a clearly stated/enforced deterrent that anyone who violates the policy will be terminated. You lose your income and seriously harm your future career prospects. This is more or less the same policy that governments hold to bad actors (crime happens but perpetrators will be punished).
I get that it is best to avoid the possibility of such incidents but it is not always practical and a strong punishment mechanism is a reasonable policy in these cases.
You don't think it's fair to expect a trillion-dollar business to implement effective technical measures to stop rogue (or hacked!) employees from accessing personal information about their users?
I'm not talking about small businesses here, but large corporations that have more than enough resources to do better than just auditing.
> crime happens but perpetrators will be punished
Societies can't prevent crime without draconian measures that stifle all of our freedoms to an extreme degree. Corporations can easily put barriers in place that make it much more difficult (or impossible) to gain unauthorized access to customer information. The entire system is under their control.
Okay, how do you want to implement those technical measures? I propose that we add a checkbox, for employees to click when they have gone rogue, or have been hacked. That way, when the box is checked, we can just reject those requests as being bad/wrong/illegal. Simple as that!
There may be some details with the implementation of this, but once we've got that check box, then things will be secure.
Or maybe trillions of dollars can't change digital physics. I don't care how much money you have, you can't make water not be wet.
Agreed. These services offer a lot of valuable social infrastructure, and it would be nice to keep the good and stop the bad.
On a personal level I do something like this on my home router by adding latency to specific websites and I totally recommend this to anyone trying to cut the habit. A few hundred ms of extra latency can really kill the doomscroll’s grip while still giving you access to messages from friends. Doing this is also not too hard to configure using a pi hole and some vibe networking.
This is kind of an unreasonable request. The OP is making claim of a general trend not obscure and subtle bias on any single article. Informally the claim feels true from my experience with Wikipedia and it makes sense that a small number of editors would have a wider bias. Just think central limit theorem here.
I think your link is broken. Need to scroll past a more recent article on an incident of 19th century American history before the target article on botanicals and golf balls.
I clicked again on the link I posted to make sure it’s correct (https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/plastic-before-plastic) and it brought me directly to the blog post without needing to scroll through anything else.
Wondering where the link you clicked on dumped you into?
I think they just missed the segue from the intro (about the caning of Charles Sumner) to the body of the article (about gutta-percha).
The two are only tangentially related in that the cane happened to be made of gutta-percha, and its easy to miss the sentence where they mention this because it's sandwiched between a large image and a form to subscribe to the newsletter.
Yeah my bad. I saw the substack subscribe footer followed by the full Gutta Percha section and figured that it was a separate article. In my defense that was a very circuitous lead in.
This post really nails it. The fact that access to a user photo is an all or nothing game and the most basic operations require full access is a huge problem in Apple’s ecosystem. Web browsers are able to easily let a 3rd party upload a file without giving access to every single file on your computer. I’m sure there are some reasons why it is not so simple on iOS but it can be done and the current setup is really bad.
To your point there are plenty of apps that explicitly operate on the photo reel so the api/permission is needed.
Steelmanning the point: plenty of apps request photo permissions that shouldn’t need it. This is really an Apple problem though. They have their selective access option which is a patch on the problem inconvenient for the user. I have two apps that end up requesting photo permissions because basic things like saving or loading a photo require the full set of permissions. I would much rather Apple just have a widget that allows me to pipe that data in as a black box, since the pop up message is distracting and I only need the most basic capability. Instead they do some prop 65 warning where even the most basic and reasonable uses trip the warning and what’s app is allowed to scan your entire library with the same permission.
> I have two apps that end up requesting photo permissions because basic things like saving or loading a photo require the full set of permissions.
Absolutely not. Saving a photo does not need the full permissions. If an app does that, the developer is either ignorant or malicious. I see multiple apps that only have "Add Photos Only" permission including apps like Duolingo that.
Similarly the use case of allowing the user to pick one photo doesn't require any permissions at all. Just use the system photo picker. I post reviews with photos regularly on Google Maps and the Google Maps app doesn't have any photo permissions.
> plenty of apps request photo permissions that shouldn’t need it
True, and this could maybe be solved by better app store review.
Every app submitted to the app store is reviewed by a human for approval. The reviewers could apply more scrutiny to photo permissions and reject apps whose permissions aren't justified.
Exif data is really fascinating, and exiftool is really worth playing around with for an afternoon. The metadata on color space, focal distance, aperture are all really useful tools for making photos look correct on an arbitrary display surface, and it is pretty fun to swap them out to see the effects on rendering.
As an aside, the location/time data is useful for somethings but also kind of creepy and I really wish there were more privacy considerations in how these pieces of meta data are handled. There was a period where I routinely set these fields to be taken in Pyongyang, North Korea, 100m below sea level and one day in the future.
> I really wish there were more privacy considerations in how these pieces of meta data are handled.
When you Export a photo from Apple's Photos, there is a checkbox you can toggle for Location Information. I generally have that unchecked so that it strips that EXIF data from the resulting exported image.
The list of Olympic gold medals per capita is typically led by small Caribbean nations like the Bahamas and Jamaica. Middle income eastern block countries like Hungary are a close follow.
