Yeah, that's falling directly into Facebook's talking points. It's a web extension, anybody can inspect the source. It doesn't do what Facebook is claiming. The NYU team bends over backwards to ensure that no personally identifying information about other users gets captured.
The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform.
So Facebook, who just paid a 5 billion dollar fine to the FTC for allowing exactly what these researchers are doing, should adopt a policy of examining the source code of every update to any extension used for scraping data to determine whether it's allowed or not? Is that the other option?
> When Facebook said Ad Observer was collecting data from users who had not authorized her to do so, the company wasn't referring to private users' accounts. It was referring to advertisers' accounts, including the names and profile pictures of public Pages that run political ads and the contents of those ads.
The comment that I'm replying to argued that facebook is concerned about the privacy of advertisers, and I argued that this concern is legitimate. If you don't agree that facebook is concerned about the privacy of advertisers, maybe you should reply to the comment that actually made this claim?
I'd say installing an extension is a pretty big sign of consent. It's named clearly and clearly describes what it does in the first sentence of the description:
> A browser extension to share data about your social feed with researchers and journalists to increase transparency.
I'd call that type of data gathering quite consensual.
You're also granting the extension access to your friends' data, given that it can see everything that you can. Your friends consented to show that data to you, but not to the extension developer. Your friends' consent is not transitive.
When I was a regular FB user I understood when I share stuff with friends that it might be visible to their browser extensions. Ubt I feel your comment is sort of misdirection as the purpose of the browser extension was to collect information on ads in peoples feed. Advertisers might show up in your feed, but that doesn't mean they're your friends, even if you consented to receive ads by signing up with a petition organizer or political campaign.
It's very strange to call a proposal (negative income tax) made by economists as orthodox and central to 20th century conservative politics as Milton Freedman as _utopian_.
But even beyond the aspirations of a UBI/negative income tax, the real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all.
Will UBI be counted as income? How will this interact with other programs such as SNAP, healthcare subsidies, HUD housing subsidies, or any number of state operated programs? Will they be mutually exclusive?
Will existing policies or laws need to be modified in order to accommodate such a proposal?
> real problem with any such proposal will be implementation and policy details which most UBI proponents don't talk about much if at all.
They do talk about this, you just haven't been listening. Yang proposes a voluntary switch between needs-based welfare and UBI combined with a national VAT.
Hey Jared, in fact, if you click into the video on the Open Steno page, the stenographer & developer you're talking about is Stan Sakai, who is involved in Open Steno:
I worked at the Journal-World for around five years, starting in 2006.
Upper management at the time was interesting. A lot of people who didn't necessarily understand the internet or technology in general, but knew they didn't, and were willing to hire and trust people who did. That was the magic sauce that led to Django, and a lot of the other innovative stuff. The owner of the paper, for example, had his secretary print out his emails and bring them into his office; then he'd write his replies on a manual typewriter, and hand them back to be typed into a computer. But he'd also managed to ride the wave of first the cable TV/internet boom (by setting up a cable division) and then the web boom (by hiring a team of people to build a first-class news site and giving them more or less free reign to do it right).
And that was how you got the heyday of the Journal-World. All sorts of interesting experiments in using the web to enhance journalism, close collaboration between the newsroom and the tech team, and a ton of cool things accomplished and a bunch of industry awards, etc. I actually had a byline at one point, on a feature that's now gone because Django got retired (a data-journalism project tracking the impact of flu during the H1N1 scare).
And other news organizations were happy to pay for the software to do their own version of that. We had both hosted and on-prem versions of it, and recommendations for hiring developers and training them to work on it, and as far as I could tell they seemed pretty happy to have something that had been designed at and by a newspaper (as opposed to other news CMS products, which often have their first encounter with a journalist at the time of production deployment).
But all good things come to an end. There were some management shakeups, and a lot of the tech team (myself included) left for greener pastures. A little while after that, I heard the CMS division was being shut down and everyone in it laid off; then I heard another company had made an offer to acquire it. As far as I know, Ellington (the Django-based news CMS) is still available today as a supported commercial product. But the Journal-World no longer uses it or, to my knowledge, maintains an in-house technology team like it used to.
Tilde built a server monitoring daemon with Rust and it's low resource and doesn't crash. Tilde thinks the Rust community & its resources make it easier to teach to new team members.
I suggested it because it'd help other people not waste the time scanning the paper for the same minuscule amount of not-that-interesting content. But at least it gave you the opportunity to contribute your interesting comment. Yeah, man!
> I wonder if NYT can help other news websites by making their code open source?
Hey! I, and a number of other news nerds have been encouraging FOSS for the past decade or so. And in fact a number of major open source projects have come out of news related projects, including Django, Backbone.js/Underscore.js, Rich Harris's work on Svelt.js, and a whole lot more.
Most often the problem with local news organizations are operational constraints. The news biz has seen a huge downturn over this same period of time. Most orgs, both on the reporting side and on the tech side are super strapped for people-time.
It's not enough to have FOSS software, you also have to have folks doing devops and maintaining systems often at below-market salaries.
Nah, the paper explicitly states that their system is not recurrent nor convolutional:
> To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying
entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using RNNs or
convolution.
Nothing about OpenAI actually addresses any real world problem. So i have a problem with their rhetoric as much as their research agenda.
Nothing they're writing about addresses any of the real world problems with how AI can or might be applied in society. They're a non-profit research lab with no clear agenda and no clear connection to how they plan to interrogate the world which seems like an important part of the equation if you care about outcomes.
So, irrespective of subjective judgements, please explain to me how any of this is supposed to help anyone?
Or, alternatively, how isn't this just free R&D for industry unshackled and unconnected to ethics or society?
I think the thesis is that most cutting-edge work is siloed in R&D departments of big players. OpenAI hopes to ensure the power of AI will be out there for any kind of organization to benefit from. Under the assumption that a more democratized AI capability is less likely to lead to an adverse outcome than a highly concentrated one.
I'm not sure I buy it, but that's what I think it is.
The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform.
https://twitter.com/issielapowsky/status/1422879438765797380