that's why our interview prep platform focuses on teaching developers how to effectively communicate their technical decisions and problem-solving process, rather than just meeting skills
> So long as Facebook remains available to everyone
This is not a given even today. Creating a new Facebook account involves a ton of scrutiny, you need to upload an ID, and until your account is older and established it’s likely that anything you do can get auto-scanned by some spam bot and get you banned for using some keyword, even in private chats.
I don’t have a Facebook account but I needed to create one a few years back to use my oculus quest (this is before they finally came to their senses and separated the accounts) and I had a lot of trouble convincing FB that I was a real human.
I had a Facebook account long ago, deleted it (and my Twitter and my LinkedIn) both because I thought social media was going crazy and because LinkedIn had personally brought ruin into my life.
Recently I made a new Facebook account to go with my Quest 3 VR headset. I don't find too much appealing about Facebook, posted a little, haven't used it much. I wanted to make an Instagram account because I want to post flower and sports photographs, really inoffensive stuff that would do well on the platform. Whenever I try to create an Instagram account, linked to my Facebook account or not, I get a message saying there was an error and I should try again later but later never comes.
Talking to support about it gets no response. I don't know if my history of deleting my account long ago is the cause or if it is something else.
A person I know who committed a misdemeanor is now on probation and one term of his probation is that he stay off social media, though he can use ordinary web sites. I saw a poster for a board game club which is exactly the kind of community activity that his probation officer would approve of, but the only information on the sign is the title and a QR code that points to... A Facebook group. There are plenty of other people who choose not to use Facebook for various reasons who are also excluded by this.
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The world badly needs something to support community organizations because of the problems pointed out in this movie based on Robert Putnam's work:
It's not difficult to approach this as a startup, but it is a devilishly hard problem to sustain it without being attached to something toxic like personalization-based advertising. There are plenty of foundations which could afford to fund this kind of effort (e.g. you could kill it at $1M a year if you weren't paying Bay Area wages and didn't have nonprofit bloat) but if anything the ability to fill out the paperwork from grants is inversely proportional to being able to execute on this sort of thing.
That is ironic, given how the whole push to get Apple to support RCS came from google in the first place. They had that website with the open letter to try and tell Apple that supporting RCS was in everyone’s best interest and would enable Apple and Android users to be on even footing, etc etc.
But then oops, turns out Google’s on wireless service doesn’t even support it. Maybe google didn’t think Apple would call their bluff?
Google stole Microsoft's position of "arrogant company that just doesn't get it". What I found about Google comms product was that they worked the worst on slow internet connections of any product. Back when I had 2 Mbps or worse DSL, I could get on meetings with anything that wasn't Google Hangouts, Google Talk, Google Meet, etc. It's like it was with Docker Hub, which had low timeouts that made it impossible for me to actually download images to install anything substantial.
That, plus other little slights like only buying high-quality aerial photos of upstate NY years after Microsoft did left me feeling that Google saw me as a non-person because I didn't live in the bay area, NYC, LA or DC.
All the things you describe are done automatically on program exit, even if the program is SIGKILL’ed. The kernel cleans up file descriptors, database transactions are rolled back automatically when the client disconnects (which it should be observed to be when the program exits and the kernel closes the connection as part of cleanup), and I’m not sure what you mean about mutexes, but if you mean in-memory ones, those don’t matter because the program is gone (if you mean like, file-based ones, those also should be implicitly unlocked by the kernel when the program exits, at least that’s how a good implementation is supposed to work, e.g. by writing the pid to the file or something.)
The whole of modern operating systems are already very familiar with the idea of programs not being able to exit gracefully, and there’s already a well understood category of things that happen automatically even if your program crashes ungracefully. Whole systems are designed around this (databases issuing rollbacks when the client disconnects, being a perfect example.) The best thing to do is embrace this and never, ever rely on a Drop trait being executed for correctness. Always assume you could be SIGKILLed at any time (which you always can. Someone can issue a kill -9, or you could get OOM killed, etc.)
I'm well aware of this and good that the option exists to bail out with abort instead.
But there are still cases where you would like to fsync your mmaps, print out a warning message or just make sure your #[should_panic] negative tests don't trigger false positives in your tooling (like leak detectors or GPU validators) or abort the whole test run.
It's not perfect by any means but it's better than potentially corrupting your data when a trivial assert fires or making negative tests spew warnings in ci runs.
It's very easy to opt out from, and I don't consider the price of panic handlers and unwinding very expensive for most use cases.
Right, sorry for the patronizing tone, I’m sure you know all this.
But I tend to lament the overall tendency for people to write cleanup code in general for this kind of thing. It’s one of those “lies programmers believe about X” kinds of scenarios. Your program will crash, and you will hit situations where your cleanup code will not run. You could get OOM killed. The user can force quit you. Hell, the power could go out! (Or the battery could go dead, etc.)
Nobody should ever write code that is only correct if they are given the opportunity to perfectly clean up after any failure that happens.
I see this all the time: CLI apps that trap Ctrl-C and tell you you can’t quit (yes I bloody well can, kill -9 is a thing), apps which don’t bother double checking that the files they left behind on a previous invocation are actually still used (stale pid files!!!), coworkers writing gobs of cleanup code that could have been avoided by simply doing nothing, etc etc.
I live in a Midwest state that allows gambling completely unrestricted, including apps where you just give a credit card and press a slot machine button and (inevitably) lose all your money.
I also watch the local news each morning as part of my morning routine.
It’s utterly ridiculous how many gambling ads are on tv now. Like outside of election season with political ads, it feels like 9 in 10 ads are for some gambling app. Sometimes a casino app, often sports betting. It feels so dystopian, like if I were an addict it would be seriously triggering me how constant and incessant the ads are. It’s always felt so strange to me that we allow this.
I’ve also had family members lose their livelihoods to gambling apps. They have perfected the addictiveness, giving you free credits if you lose too much, to keep you going. It’s extremely difficult to actually get money out of the apps too. They want you to gamble it all away, but slowly. Of all the things that have changed in this part of the country in my lifetime, this is the most obviously bad one, the one that makes me feel the most ashamed of how bad we’ve collectively let things get.
Not sure of your location, but it seems many rural areas have turned completely to vice. It seems every other new business is a smoke shop, dispensary, bar, tattoo parlor, etc. Many other businesses are shutting down, like bowling alleys, hobby related stores, etc. And gambling has been added to some that stick around, including stuff like "skills based" games.
But the most obviously bad change I've seen is the drugs. I think they're also partially responsible for the popularity of gambling due to hopelessness and how bad things have gotten in some areas.
Edit: I should add that the other 50% of business seem to be fast food and dollar stores.
Primarily, I agree. However, I think there is a secondary effect once it's wide enough spread that others start to think things are hopeless, or the crime and broken homes from the drug use erode the hope of others.
I dont think so. I believe The starting point is often mostly functional people, Some of these have major problems which are struggling to manage.
Drugs can lead to a decent path with the end stage of hopelessness and massively more problems than they started with.
I think early intervention is possible, and how it works for the vast majority of people. Not everyone who has a beer or line of coke starts off miserable and hopeless. That's later, after they have Dui's, lost jobs, broken relations, and failing health.
Problem is you are talking about grandpa in the areas OP is talking about, while OP is talking about the third gen addicts that never got any early days, just a life of always living with (others) addiction, and now their own.
People who are not hopeless tend to care more about their jobs and relationships and thus can prioritize stopping easier. They also have a lot less of a need for the relief that drugs offer.
In Australia gambling ads are pretty frequent on TV, at least during football (NRL and AFL season). I think the government is looking to crack on the hours when the ads can run but I don't think the TV stations are too thrilled as gambling companies are big spenders when it comes to ads and I don't think many if any other industries come close to spend in TV ad dollars.
Is there anywhere I could watch a livestream of this kind of channel? I would like to get a feeling for just how bad it is. I live in a country where betting and advertising of betting is legal. I don't like it, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as bad here and what you're describing.
Are there any fan theories of what the work is they’re doing?
My bet is on lumen “renting” part of their subconscious to train a computer, while their conscious minds see a sort of projection of the training, and the act of selecting the numbers has a mirror effect on the part of the brain they’re renting, affecting the model training. But that may be a little too “current events” focused, and the writers may have something totally different in mind.
My theory is kind of the inverse. Their technology has the ability to "take over" the mind and implant a new personality but maybe at the current level it's unsophisticated and all they can do is make a "clean slate" of a person with some basic motor, language and other socialization skills.
"The work" is then not about training a computer model but seeing if they can induce a reaction into a person. That is, they're trying to refine their mind control program.
The characters talk about feeling things when they group numbers for binning. So the task is about refining their projection system, to induce a particular emotion or reaction, in a controlled way, over and over to dial in the technology.
From season 1, there's lore of MDR going crazy and killing a neighboring group. This could be when their experimentation malfunctioned or was too sloppy in some way and induced a killing frenzy.
I have no idea what "cold harbor" is though, or why Mark S. is so special among the other innies.
Agreed with your theory overall, but wasn’t that lore of “MDR going crazy and killing a neighboring group” revealed in s1 to be fabricated entirely, with each group having their own version of that lore against other groups? E.g., the optics and design group had the exact opposite version of the lore as MDR, down to paintings depicting the events being the exact same, but with swapped badge colors that indicated the aggressor.
Just a theory on my part, and I'm trying to build evidence from clues in the series, so you might be right.
We know that there's a lot of unreliable information because Lumon is actively trying to deceive everyone but my take on that was that there was a significant event that actually did happen, some group going crazy, that Lumon needed to rationalize with some narrative in order to address it.
Just to list some events after re-watching some of season 1:
* s1e3 Dylan talks about O&D staging a coup but Mark assures everyone that there was no killing
* s1e5 Irving intercepts a print job that was sent to their print station "by mistake". The picture shows people with green badges (O&D) attacking people with blue badges (MDR). Immediately revealed to be a subterfuge attempt ("you ran a 266 on Irving B." Cobel to Miltchek)
* s1e5 Dylan finds a painting in O&D depicting the same picture that Irving saw on the printer
but with the attackers as blue badges and the victims as green badges ("The Macro Data Refinement Calamity")
So this very well may be subterfuge by Lumon to keep the groups separate.
I read it differently initially, that the printed copy was altered from the original painting and that the original painting was the "true" version, but I think your take is probably more consistent. If Lumon can erase memory then there's no need to keep institutional knowledge about past events that no one remembers.
Some other tidbits of information:
* s1e2 and s1e5 Irving hallucinates black goo while in front of his terminal. I believe as soon as he stands up or backs away from his terminal, the effect goes away.
* s1e3 Natalie is shown on tv talking about a "workie" getting pregnant while severed
* s1e5 Devon goes to a house to give birth and meets someone who's severed. I think the house or property is owned by Lumon (but I'm not sure?)
So, I suspect Mark S.'s sister, Devon, might be the severed employee who got pregnant while severed, though I'm not sure how this fits into the larger narrative if true.
Also, I might be reading too much into it but there's clues sprinkled around about immortality and "Kier speaking through people" that might be support the theory of them trying to resurrect Kier. There's a scene where Cobel gets Petey's chip with a line that says "that's Petey".
So far the series has delivered and I trust the writers, so I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
My theory is that all the severed employees are doing various maintenance tasks to keep the floor functioning. Like the hospital in Yes, Minister that is closed to the public but has 500 employees, all of them overworked.[1]
Take O&D for instance, their full time job appears to be to just create art and handbooks used on the severed floor. Perhaps all the departments are like that. MDR could be doing some sort of ongoing maintenance for the severed system itself, like emotion or memory control of the employees on the floor.
I believe the "point" of the severed floor is not the actual work that's being done, but the act of keeping them occupied while they are experimented on. Besides Mark S and Cold Harbor, I believe there are hints of other experiments being run. The dreams Irving B has during work seem unique to him, and it's uniquely affecting his outie as well. I also believe recent events in Season 2 with Dylan G could be the start of another experiment.
I thought the wife was oddly emotional during that scene with Dylan G. While I agree it would be odd to see your SO's innie, the way she was in awe and full of emotion just seemed very intense. Like seeing a long lost lover or those first date jitters. Probably overthinking things but I thought it was odd.
My take was that she's dissatisfied with her marriage with her outie husband who seems detached and a bit wayward, whereas the innie has purpose and drive and finds her awe inspiring.
I'm almost certain it's going to turn into a love affair with deep questions - is she cheating? Well, on paper, no, but it's obviously more nuanced than that.
That + the whole concept must be just uncanny to face in real life as opposed to just being aware of it.
It is one thing to know “my husband goes to work, but there he simply doesn’t remember anything outside of work, and vice versa at home”, and another to see it for yourself and realizing “holy shit, this is actually just another entirely unrelated brand new person occupying the body of the husband i live and raise children with for half a day.”
Not even mentioning all the potential implications that might have crossed her mind after facing it in reality. That person is nothing like my husband in any way, where did that new person come from, were they just born out of nothing? Could they potentially unknowingly get switched with my husband outside of the workplace and what would that mean? What happens to that person if my husband quits the job?
My hunch is that Lumon is working on trying to transfer minds into new bodies and/or bring deceased people back to life, namely for the immortality of the founder. I think the MDR numbers stuff is somehow related to getting severed individuals to map memories somehow, hence their association with different feelings.
This is also my running theory. Cult-like structure focused on elongating legacies via body replacements and consciousness transfer - MDR being a testbed or something for emotional stability and processing or something of the sort.
It's been suggested that Mark S is adjusting the neural nets for a robot replacement of his wife. This supported by a few MDR UI screenshots showing acronyms that reference Kier's 4 fundamental tempers: Woe, Frolick, Malice and Dread.
My opinion is that the work they are performing it's not the point of them being there. It's about testing the limits of the exploitations of human beings.
Best I can figure is that it's some form of cryptography. The "severed" thing would be to compartmentalize even more what the underlying work is, the outties are clueless, but even the innies don't get to know what they do because the work is encrypted. They're able to perform it because another part of their brain is severed even more, and just performs the raw algorithm work of decrypting/sorting.
But the rest of Lumen just seems like some bizarro "there's a spaceship hiding in the tail of the comet" cult.
They’re sorting people according to the four tempers of Eagan - woe, frolic, dread and malice. The buttons are labelled accordingly, using two letters on the show but one letter here.
Theoretically an excavator could be designed which uses a winch-type system to curl the bucket (maybe a highly-geared transmission from an electric motor) and then, to uncurl it, lets gravity pull it and lets the spinning winch drive a generator. I can’t think of any way to do it that isn’t extremely inefficient though.
Plus as you say, excavators don’t use a winch and motor, they use hydraulics, and I don’t think the former would be powerful enough to move lots of earth. But OP said “theoretically”, which makes them technically correct (the best kind of correct.)
There are proposed energy storage systems that involve simply lifting a lot of heavy stuff to store energy, and then lowering it again to recover it. So the idea isn’t even new. But said systems have terrible energy density (lifting and lowering stuff doesn’t store very much energy overall) and are basically a terrible idea as it is.
I’ve said this before a zillion times, but Siri is only good for imperative stuff. Commands. “Play this song”, “make a note”, “set this alarm”, etc.
And even that’s only barely true: it gets things wrong even within that very narrow set of use cases. But it at least kinda works most of the time.
Siri is absolutely not useful, and never has been, and likely never will be, when it comes to “conversational” use cases, like asking it questions or getting advice, etc.
The thing is, I only ever use voice for imperative stuff in the first place. If I want to know things or do research or have a conversation, etc, I’d much rather type into a real keyboard and read the results at my leisure. Or if I’m at a phone I can use voice to text to make it easier to do this, but it’s not really the same thing as a “conversation”.
So for me, I’m keeping Siri for the use cases it works for (home automation, timers, music, etc), because I really don’t think OpenAI will ever be good/useful for that sort of thing, even if Apple opened up the API’s to let it do so. An LLM is just too heavy-weight.
Siri can set a timer or reminder for me sometimes. The rest is utter trash and it’s embarrassing that the largest company in the world by value, and sitting on ungodly amounts of cash, won’t or can’t improve Siri. The usual set of events is I ask Siri something and her response is so non-sensical and bad that my girlfriend and I just laugh at it and shake our heads. Then I’m reminded again why I never ask Siri anything.
Oh my god I ran into this yesterday. I wanted a very specific kind of underarmour sweat pants. It gave me every other company competing with underarmour and a bunch of things that are not sweat pants. It’s like they’re not even trying to do “search” any more, but instead just feed your search string into their ad auction system and give you the results. There’s just no way to actually get a specific thing.
I've slammed headfirst into this wall of infuriating frustration dozens of times. Just trying to find a particular kind of LED bulb that has the feature of being dimmable. Any attempt at searching for that term returns all of the bulbs which helpfully mention "Not Dimmable". And there's no way to exclude that string.
It's maddening because Amazon used to have a modern, reasonably capable search function. You could require terms. You could exclude terms. Terms could be phrases. I'm sure they still have all these capabilities, they've just decided to intentionally disable them because their A/B testing indicated that breaking their search would return a fractional percent more revenue by shoveling more unrelated results in front customers. It must work on someone but it's never worked even once on me, because I KNOW what I need and I'm only going to buy exactly that - if I can fucking find it.
I'd actually be okay to let Amazon annoy the NPCs who just clickety-click and buy whatever random shiny shit they shovel in front of them, IF they'd just add something for us technically-minded, engineering type people who are looking for one precise thing only. They can even hide it behind an arcane interface like REGEX. That'll keep the rabble out! :-)
