I'm skeptical that Ron Wyden anticipated algorithmic social media feeds in 1996. But I'm pretty sure he gets a decent amount of lobbying cash from interested parties.
The text of the Third Circuit decision explicitly distinguishes between algorithms that respond to user input -- such as by surfacing content that was previously searched for, or favorited, or followed. Allowing users to filter content by time, upvotes, number of replies etc would be fine.
The FYP algorithm that's contested in the case surfaced the video to the minor without her searching for that topic, following any specific content creator, or positively interacting (liking/favoriting/upvoting) with previous instances of said content. It was fed to her based on a combination of what TikTok knew about her demographic information, what was trending on the platform, and TikTok's editorial secret sauce. TikTok's algorithm made an active decision to surface this content to her, despite knowing that other children had died from similar challenge videos, they promoted it and should be liable for that promotion.
Moderating content is explicitly protected by the text of Section 230(c)(2)(a):
"(2)Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or"
Algorithmic ranking, curation, and promotion are not.
It absolutely makes sense. What NetChoice held was that the curation aspect of algorithmic feeds makes the weighting approach equivalent to the speech of the platforms and therefore when courts evaluated challenges to government imposed regulation, they had to perform standard First Amendment analysis to determine if the contested regulation passed muster.
Importantly, this does not mean that before the Third Circuit decision platforms could just curate any which way they want and government couldn't regulate at all -- the mandatory removal regime around CSAM content is a great example of government regulating speech and forcing platforms to comply.
The Third Circuit decision, in a nutshell, is telling the platforms that they can't have their cake and eat it too. If they want to claim that their algorithmic feeds are speech that is protected from most government regulation, they can't simultaneously claim that these same algorithmic feeds are mere passive vessels for the speech of third parties. If that were the case, then their algorithms would enjoy no 1A protection from government regulation. (The content itself would still have 1A protection based on the rights of the creators, but the curation/ranking/privileging aspect would not).
I misunderstood the Supreme Court ruling that it hinged on personalization per user of algorithms and thought it made a distinction between editorial decisions that show to everyone vs individual users. I thought that part didn’t make sense. I see now it’s really the third circuit ruling that interpreted the user customization part as editorial decisions, not excluding the non-per user algorithms.
This ruling is a natural consequence of the NetChoice ruling. Social media companies can't have it both ways.
> If that were the case, then their algorithms would enjoy no 1A protection from government regulation.
Well, the companies can still probably claim some 1st Amendment protections for their recommendation algorithms (for example, a law banning algorithmic political bias would be unconstitutional). All this ruling does is strip away the safe harbour protections, which weren't derived from the 1A in the first place.
Our system would make sense if it was the case that the literal only way to turn and asset into money was to sell it. But, because assets can instead be used as collateral for loans, asset owners (overwhelmingly the wealthy in the U.S.) get to have their cake and eat it too.
I’ve never understood this reasoning. Loans need to be repaid at some point, so one must realize some income to pay them back, at which point they will owe tax.
It seems like it's a two-way street, isn't it? If American devs are more likely to say "no" and push back, then American managers/bosses on some level come to expect that behavior.
I wonder what it's like at Indian tech companies with Indian engineers. Managers there must have a cultural way of dealing with this that works.
IMO, that's the big problem with offshoring. It's rarely the case that the company that offshores stands up an office in the other country and staffs it with people who were held to the same standards in hiring as candidates for U.S.-based jobs would be. If companies did it that way, they might be more successful at navigating cultural differences, but most of the time they use subcontractors instead.
You don't need to be good at leetcode to make a performant and well written frontend. You don't even need to know data structures, algorithms, or Big O notation.
Yeah, this sounds more like a late-00s startup mentality than anything else. Maybe the FAANGs were this once upon a time, but nowadays they are firmly in "stable grownup job" territory.
I don't think most employers are out there looking at the timestamps on your commits to see if you really completed it within the timebox or not -- I certainly wouldn't.
I don't think that candidates who spend less time or turn in incomplete take homes are necessarily at a disadvantage. Sooo much can be discerned from a take home even if it's not finished. I can evaluate a candidate's familiarity with modern syntax, how they organize functions, how readable their code is, whether or not they used ChatGPT/CoPilot or copy/pasted from an online tutorial (surprisingly easy to discern when you're evaluating many submissions), and so on.
All of that tells me a lot about how well someone functions as an engineer, as well as what level they're operating at, and it doesn't require the completion of the take home problem.
In a current hiring loop my company is doing for a senior, we have a take home divided into a series of steps, with explicit instructions that say that completion of the entire exercise is not necessary to advance (and we mean it).
The take home serves two purposes: (1) should the candidate progress to the in person interviews? (2) if the candidate stumbles in the in person coding, can I deduce from the take home that they do actually know what they're doing, and the stumbling was a side effect of interview anxiety?
I can tell a lot even from an incomplete take home, about whether someone is likely to do well on the in person interviews, but I mostly find it extremely valuable for (2), as a tiebreaker.
It hasn't happened yet in this cycle, but I can imagine a situation where someone turned in a fantastic take home and then brain farted during the in person coding, and, thanks to the take home, got hired.
