If we want to get past the perception that this industry is of, by, and for misogynistic manchildren, maybe we should start by not being misogynistic manchildren.
Counterpoint: I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. So by that metric, Facebook is far better than generic Ads I see on TV.
> I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in.
You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable.
The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.
Is your argument that if an ad works I am being manipulated, and if it doesn't work then I am not being manipulated?
I'm telling you right now that I don't mind seeing Ads on Instagram. They're great and I've found out about niche products that I otherwise would not have. If this means that small brands are able to rise up against the mega corps (Dollar Shave Club vs Gillette, as a classic example), then all the better for the market.
The other reason I don't mind is that they're visually appealing and seem to fit the Instagram ethos. Compare that to shitty banner Ads that disrupt the flow of content by being so different and so jarring in comparison.
Now, my opinion isn't meant to be generalized. Others may have a far different experience on Instagram (just because of how the product is designed to work). I'm sure there is someone who will chime in and say they hate Instagram Ads because they are completely ineffective. We could both be right in opposite directions since our feeds are probably very different.
If your opinion isn’t generalizable, it’s probably not useful in a discussion about civilization-wide issues, right? Moreover you’re only sharing your perception of how ads affect you, while others are pointing to known effects on whole populations. In essence you’re arguing against a system worth many billions with your own personal anecdote.
My opinion isn't generalizable because no two people have the same experience on Facebook and no two people use the product in the same way. For example, I only use Messenger. Some people only use the photo sharing features. Some people only use Marketplace to buy/sell things. Some people use newsfeed as their primary news source. Some people use all of these things in tandem.
So when people come into this discussion with strong opinions and try to impose their experience on everyone else, that's not useful nor reflective of reality.
What you're arguing is something very primal and not isolated to Facebook. You can make that argument about literally anything in this world and that's why I'm saying it's not useful. Cars have known effects on whole populations. Tax regulation has known effects on the behaviors of whole populations. I mean potato chips and similar snacks are engineered from the ground up to be addictive and have known effects on mass populations. Where do you draw the line for your argument? I chose to draw it at the bounds of my own personal experience with the product we're discussing.
It's OK to not like Facebook. It's also OK to like Facebook. But for me to impose my opinion on you would be misinformed because I don't know how you use it. It's an incredibly complex product with incredibly complex effects.
Sometimes I don't know what I'm interested in, which is where TV ads are much better than targeted ads. For example, once I stopped watching TV, I found that I never knew when new movies were coming out, because I never saw ads for them.
By the way, I submitted this with the title "GitHub will discontinue TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 on February, 2018" but when I looked a few minutes later it was already changed to be the title of the original blog post. I'm sure this article was posted last year (clearly GitHub gave plenty of timing), but I saw this as a public service announcement on Twitter and thought, "Oh crap, lots of people are going to have weird issues tomorrow, I'd better go tell some people!"
If the mods do that, they should also add the date it will be disabled. If it just had 2017 in the title, it could mislead people to think support ended last year.
Have you ever been to the area? It's not a soundtrack, that's just what it sounds like here. There's always a gently strummed guitar flowing out of a watery amp somewhere off in the distance.
I had a similar issue with Venmo—a friend tried to pay me back for a Cuban sandwich, and the transaction was held up because he just wrote "Cubans" as the description. Only in Venmo's case, the issue was resolved mere hours after he sent an email explaining the situation.
I opened a Coinbase account back in college ~6 years ago when they were giving $10 in Bitcoin to anyone who signed up with a .edu email address. I forgot about it until last summer, when I realized that amount was now worth around $160.
I didn't have access to my college email anymore, so having to provide proof of identity was reasonable; having the entire process take a month wasn't. They also do this particularly insidious thing where if they don't respond to your request for two weeks or so, they automatically close it as unresolved. They do automatically reopen it if you send another email, but that you have to do that in the first place is dumb.
Woah. Venmo parses and makes decisions on the description field before performing the transaction? That's wild. I would have thought that to just be a convenience field for the customers. So Venmo decides what you can spend money on and what you can't? Yikes, I'm happy to not use it regularly.
Every payment service provider is required to filter transactions if they offer payment services to consumers. (Part of AML, anti-money-laundering legislation) In essence, there's a set of things that money can't be spent on, and it's their responsibility to take measures ensuring that their customers don't spend (in significant amounts) money on that, and show that these measures are reasonably effective (i.e. that they're not just for show - if they assist their customers to circumvent their filters, that's a crime) or not offer payment services at all. For some of the wider restrictions (e.g. payments to cuban nationals) it may result in quite wide-catching automatic filters; and it's the choice of the company whether just to block the payment or spend time and $ to have a human look at the payment and make a decision on whether you can spend money on that or not.
If you want to use services that ignore what you can spend money on and what you can't, you literally have to use illegal services - no legitimate company in the western world is allowed to offer that.
> If you want to use services that ignore what you can spend money on and what you can't, you literally have to use illegal services
Cash between friends is not illegal. Venmo, for lots of people including me, just replaces cash for paying your friends back. That's even their #1 example they have on their website for why you might use Venmo.
There is no agency or anyone in charge of asking what I'm spending the money on when I give my friend a $5 for lunch. If Venmo wants to replace that experience, they can't refuse the payment because they think I'm suspicious and expect to keep my business.
I understand the pressure they are under as a payment processor. But the alternative to Venmo to keep payment privacy intact is not illegal, it's just plain old cash.
Well yes, that's kind of the point - replicating this part of the experience of paying someone directly in cash is illegal. No matter what Venmo wants it can't replace that (part of the) experience and, more importantly, neither can any of their competitors. So you either keep using cash or (no matter if you pick Venmo or someone else) get a different experience.
Also, don't forget that above certain amounts cash between friends also needs to obey a bunch of reporting rules and can not be entirely private. Simply taking a briefcase of cash from your buddy and leaving it at that is illegal.
Except it's not cash, even if it seems to be used like cash. It's an online transaction, which eventually becomes a bank transaction if you ever want to cash out, so not surprising the same rules apply.
In case it wasn't immediately obvious from my original comment, the issue was that "Cubans" is ambiguous and could be related to commerce that might be covered by sanctions against Cuba.
Which is crazy because I've only used it once or twice but each time I've noticed many people use tongue in cheek descriptions like "for drugs" or "strippers" when they are just splitting a bar tab.
You will get called for this - I had a friends whose summer job at venmo was to call people and ask them to change the description from ‘sex’ or ‘drugs’ to something more innocuous - or to please stop buying drugs through Venmo.
This has been true so far in the US, but there are countries where ISPs transparently provide different bandwidths to different types of content, and customers pick and choose service plans for each in a package deal.
The transparency might be ok to choose among service plans of a single ISP, but I suspect those other countries have a fundamental underlying commonality that most US markets are missing. Their markets are structured via regulation, or just happen to be currently constructed, with multiple ISP competing for the business of the end user.
How obvious was the counterfeit? I’m worried That I’m oblivious enough to not notice something is counterfeit and just think the product is bad quality.
I was certainly fooled the first one or two times it happened; my initial thought was that Levi's provided the worst of its production to Amazon. The jeans were cut and sewn poorly, covered in sawdust, and fell apart within months. It's only upon doing further research that I realized they were counterfeit, and that many people have had this problem.
I know "if you don't like your job, find a new one!" is a tired cliche that often gets thrown at people complaining about legitimate grievances, but software engineering is one of the few fields where a good employee can fairly easily leave for greener pastures whenever they want, at least in the US.
Today I had to search for Slack messages that were sent long before I was hired to solve a problem at work. In an end-to-end model, you're only going to have logs as far back as you were there to receive.
Not necessarily (depends on how you define e2e). One could handle group messaging in a way where membership gives you full historical access vs. only when you were subscribed. In a corp environment you might even require that some groups remain server-side so you can instantly revoke access.
Allowing different security models for different groups would make sense, as long as you could communicate the security models to users and admins somehow.
I disagree, corporate chats still have plenty of reason to want access to historical user-to-user chats. Ignoring the cynical reasons, institutional memory isn't confined to channel chats.
Also, discrimination against overqualified applicants is now illegal in California, but I imagine it still happens.