Obligatory:

I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s Short Imagined Monologues June 15, 2010

Consider also meat floss: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_floss

It’s legit, just super desiccated. Babish made some while recreating Khlav Kalash from The Simpsons.

https://youtu.be/jiFcNVfbY5A

I listened to the 404 Media podcast about this yesterday and the author argues that the subject of the article’s ire is intended to be the researchers themselves. Specifically, the bad ethics of testing this integration on non-consenting individuals (even though it was seemingly done with good intent).

Luckily the researchers realized what the fuck they had just made and pivoted the project to being about how to break the integration (ie: opt out of facial recognition systems and freeze your credit score).

I live in the residential area within the limits of a large US city.

To the nearest convenience store: 0.9 km
To the nearest chain supermarket: 2.6 km
To the bus stop: 0.3 km
To the nearest park: 0.8 km
To the nearest big supermarket: 3.1 km
To the nearest library: 2.7 km
To the nearest train station: 2.9 km

And I’d argue that these numbers are remarkably good for people in my situation as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre, the manager or staff are able to watch the inmates. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.

Asking the person you’re debating to look up your own citations is certainly one way to converse. But ok, let’s go for it.

In Aug 2023, Forbes published an article describing the proposal of “unfettered access” you referred to:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/draft-tiktok-cfius-agreement/

In June 2024, the Washington Post reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) turned down the proposal and includes some broad reporting as to why:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tiktok-offered-an-extraordinary-deal-the-u-s-government-took-a-pass/ar-BB1nfAcE

The article isn’t very technical, but it mentions some interesting responsibility angles that the US wouldn’t want to back themselves into:

• throwing open some, but not all, doors to server operations and source code creates a mountain of work for the government to inspect, which would be a workload nightmare
• the US government’s deepest concerns seem to be about what data is going out (usage insights on the virtuous side and clipboard/mic/camera monitoring on the ultra shady side) and data coming in (bespoke content intended to influence US residents of China-aligned goals). Usage insights are relatively benign from national security perspective (especially when you can just mandate that people in important roles aren’t permitted to use it). Shady monitoring should be discoverable through app source code monitoring, which you can put the app platforms (Apple, Google, whoever else) on the hook for if they continue to insist on having walled app gardens (and if you trust them at all). The content shaping is harder to put your finger on though, since it’s super easy to abstract logic as far out as you need to avoid detection. “Here, look at these 50M lines of code that run stateside, and yeah, there are some API calls to stuff outside the sandbox. Is that such a big deal?” Spoiler: it is a big deal.
• the US can’t hold Byte Dance accountable so long as it remains in China. Let’s say the US agreed to all this, spent all the effort to uncover some hidden shady activity that they don’t like (after an untold amount of time has passed). What then? They can’t legally go after Byte Dance’s foreign entity. The US can prosecute the US employees, but it’s totally possible to organize in such a way that leaves those domestic employees free from misdeeds, leaving prosecutors unable to enforce misdeeds fairly. It’d be a mess.

The second article explains this somewhat, but I’m admittedly painting some conjecture on top regarding how a malicious actor could behave. I’ve got no evidence that Byte Dance is actually doing any of that.

But going back to the “influence the public” angle, I’m struggling to see how different TikTok is versus NHK America (Japan’s American broadcasts) or RT (American media from the Russian standpoint) aside from being wildly more successful and popular. But I guess that’s all there is to it.

I’d prefer our leaders also be transparent with us regarding their concerns about TikTok. The reductive “because China!!1!” argument is not compelling on its own.

Do you have any citation for that?

Does ByteDance publish TikTok’s transmission protocol to demonstrate transparency?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol

Men: Stop fixating on the need to “get a woman”. Procreation is not how to win at life. No one virtuous is keeping score like that. All that “alpha/omega” stuff is trash. Stop everything you’re doing, trying and striving for. Spend some time genuinely at rest, not fixating on sex or work or entertainment or fitness, and think about yourself.

Really examine the person that you are. Think about the good that you’ve done. Think about the harm that you’ve caused. Think of how you can nudge yourself towards being a better person; someone who is considerate to others feelings, someone who can help without expecting reciprocation. Start doing that stuff. Your reward for this work is inner peace, not babes and money and success.

Self-reflection leaning towards kindness, forgiveness and genuine curiosity about yourself is the key to being the best you that you can be.

It will take a long time. When you get frustrated, ask yourself what kind of reward you’re expecting. If that reward is anything besides “being a happier, more satisfied me”, work on refocusing yourself.

Living like this will catch people’s attention. A word of warning: some will be emotional vampires who want to take advantage of you, and you’ll unfortunately have to live through a few relationships with those before you recognize them. But other people, more well-adjusted folks, will notice as well. Those are the kinds of people who can become life-long friends. And, in my experience, that’s where loving relationships start.

Who knows? You might uncover some really important things about yourself along the way that you never realized were there before.

( ( laughs in old… ) )

Including his sexual assault victims?

Thin steel frame, no air bags, no crumple zones.

Check out the crash tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roLcNwRi1Sk&t=40s

12 year SDE + 12 year TPM vet here.

Do everything you can to help your software engineers (or whoever is doing the work) have as much focus time as they need. Buffer your meetings and questions to one chunk of time per day. Encourage them to block-out and protect their focus time. And encourage the team to keep office hours so they can still make themselves available to others, but in a controlled way.

Be transparent with the business’s goals and frustrations you are facing. There’s an attitude (often among inexperienced devs) that PMs are good for nothing; just an interface to the rest of the business, and a source of where tasks come from. And some certainly are that, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.

Find a good mentor, and start thinking about your next career step now.

Post-it notes. One pack is enough for like a third of the plane.

Periodic office hours are tremendously helpful as well.

Block an hour, once or twice a week, for people to come by an ask you (and your team) about literally anything they want. And open it to everyone at your organization. Have your team stop answering one-off questions and tell people to bring it to office hours.

Team leads and tpms should help with logistics, messaging and hand-slapping.

I worked for Akamai for 7 years.

This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.

I’m a big Zulip advocate. I was using it globally at my previous employer for a global org and it’s pretty great.

Dancing colors; smothered, covered and topped.

That cable management is horrendous. Pull them out.