What if Zuckerberg didn't change overnight but his terrible reputation was somewhat undeserved all along ?
I worked at Facebook in 2010-2011 and I must say that the gap between what was really going on inside, and the hysterical, least possibly charitable interpretation and scrutinizing of every single product decision by the press, public, and politicians was insane. By far the worst I'd ever seen.
As an engineer, I actually learnt to appreciate the job of a PR team during that time (I previously assumed they were professional hypocrites paid who put a positive spin on indefensible corporate decisions), and was impressed at how professional they managed to remain as they had to counter some truly insane shit with facts, and still nobody believed them because Facebook is the devil and obviously lying.
Of course there were obviously some large fuck-ups at Facebook over the past decade (some of which even originated from good intentions, like the Cambridge Analytica fiasco : "people accuse us of being anticompetitive as we sit on a treasure trove of data, let's be more open and create a platform !")
In my view, these were more the product of Zuck's failure to rein in bad ideas from some executives due to his inexperience, rather than any indication of strategic malevolence and cynicism on his part.
In other words, he's not perfect but I've always seen him as the rather decent guy that more people can see now, like in this interview. If there's one area where he has changed a lot, it's probably in his ability to show it.
A typical use case for it is to dump Amiga disks, which are physically 3.5" disks but whose 880KB format is unreadable by a standard PC floppy controller.
Even some PC floppies can't be read by the cheap USB-floppy drives on Amazon. They typically expect exactly 1.44 megabyte floppies. Format it slightly differently, and those USB drives can't see it, even if the floppy would have worked just fine in any "real" floppy drive connected to the floppy interface on the motherboard.
> If I give consent to participate in collection of my internet data, it doesn't give you authorization to like, have someone live in my house and follow me around 24/7 so they can see what i do on the internet.
Onavo users signed up, consented to their traffic data to be used for market research and were actually compensated for it. What's the complaint here ?
Did they? I mean, did they understand the privacy violation possible in this case? Or was the technical point they wouldn't understand somewhere in the middle of an agreement nobody reads anyway?
The difference in awareness is massive between those two use cases.
> The number of criteria required for a diagnosis of ADHD has been set arbitrarily in DSM-5. No scientific justification has been presented nor method used for deciding how many criteria should be required.
Erm.. welcome to psychiatry ?
There is nothing bizarre (or unique to ADHD) about picking from a list of precise, agreed-upon criteria to form a mental health diagnosis. It's how the entire field works, and it's actually a huge step forward from the times when each therapist made up their own definitions.
In the absence of definite imaging or genetic markers for most illnesses, building consensus on criteria and thresholds in a reference manual (the DSM) is the next best possible way to end up with objective, useful and standardized definitions.
Not having a blood test for an illness doesn't mean it isn't real.
> It's important to be aware that each percentage point is hundreds of millions of dollars.
You don't need to resort to conspiracy theories once you understand the above.
At the end of the day both FPGAs and software emulators are Turing machines that produce a set of outputs given a set of inputs : any logic an FPGA can implement can also be implemented in software, it's computer science 101
FPGAs aren't magically more accurate. That is only up to the programmer and what effort they put in.
The main difference is efficiency and parallelism : it's much easier to reliably produce cycle-accurate parallel outputs in real time with an FPGA, compared to software running on a multi-tasking OS with many layers of abstraction and no deterministic real-time guarantees.
But, as a single-core processor can fake multitasking, by slicing time between processes (preemptive multitasking), software emulation can mimic parallelism if the host is beefy enough compared to the old school system it's emulating.
The larger the performance / clock speed gap between the host and target, the more indistinguishable from a truly parallel FPGA an emulator can be.
Software emulation also has practical advantages for developers : while FPGAs force you to painstakingly implement every bit of functionality at the logic gate level, with software you can start off with a much higher level model of the target system that's much easier to implement, and mix & match that with more precise low level simulation where it matters.
The time this frees up (+ the availability of various libraries) allows the developer to spend more time researching the original system and adding modern quality of life features that just wouldn't be possible otherwise.
Interesting that you mention that use. I've spent thousands of hours in court and never heard the term applied to expert witnesses, perhaps because their background is often stipulated.
The use the public would be most familiar with is the interrogation of the jury pool, by both parties, to make sure they are suitable (e.g. suitably biased) jurors before trial:
I worked at Facebook in 2010-2011 and I must say that the gap between what was really going on inside, and the hysterical, least possibly charitable interpretation and scrutinizing of every single product decision by the press, public, and politicians was insane. By far the worst I'd ever seen.
As an engineer, I actually learnt to appreciate the job of a PR team during that time (I previously assumed they were professional hypocrites paid who put a positive spin on indefensible corporate decisions), and was impressed at how professional they managed to remain as they had to counter some truly insane shit with facts, and still nobody believed them because Facebook is the devil and obviously lying.
Of course there were obviously some large fuck-ups at Facebook over the past decade (some of which even originated from good intentions, like the Cambridge Analytica fiasco : "people accuse us of being anticompetitive as we sit on a treasure trove of data, let's be more open and create a platform !")
In my view, these were more the product of Zuck's failure to rein in bad ideas from some executives due to his inexperience, rather than any indication of strategic malevolence and cynicism on his part.
In other words, he's not perfect but I've always seen him as the rather decent guy that more people can see now, like in this interview. If there's one area where he has changed a lot, it's probably in his ability to show it.