Thibault (the creator of lichess) is a really impressive human being. I don’t idolize people but he is quite inspiring.
There’s an old perpetual chess podcast episode where he said he has never seen a single ad that was useful :-) Which is somewhat extreme and probably hyperbole but still his philosophy is loud and clear.
On this subject, I did see an ad for a small music festival near my hometown, and i brought the ticket and had a good time. If i had not seen the add, I would not have known about the festival, so I actually did at least once see a useful ad
I used to hate ads, for the intrusion they made. Then I started to run my own ventures and realised advertising is essential: even finding friends and partners requires advertising of a sort.
But on the web, advertising doesn’t stop at attention theft. Most web ads are agents of surveillance networks, and also are software running on your hardware. Neither we should tolerate.
Yeah, I actually went to school for "strategic communication" which was in large part advertising/marketing/PR. I originally had this very naive perspective that these sorts of communication are important and valuable. Which is still true (we all engage in -some- form of self-promotion, even if only in how we choose to present ourselves to others), but with massive asterisks.
In my ideal, advertising and marketing are about really understanding what the other party needs and finding a truly mutually beneficial agreement that actually generates value through exchange (A has X but values Y more highly, B has Y but values X more highly, simply by the act of exchange, value is generated).
I was even pro-tracking at one point because the more you know about people, the better you can understand their needs so the better you can offer them something they'll value. In the abstract, I still think there's something here. But it has to be done responsibly and with a user-before-profit mindset.
By contrast, ad companies have time and again proven themselves irresponsible with this information, e.g. selling it to shady groups.
> I started to run my own ventures and realised advertising is essential
There are ethical ways to go about it. In certain contexts, what people think of as advertising is really just information. It's totally fine to inform people when they ask for it.
When people open a store app, it's because they want to see products. There's no ethical conflict when the store app does what people want it to do. What's unethical is the constant product spam when people are trying to do anything else.
How’d you get the ad? It seems like something that could be posted on a coffee shop bulletin board for example, or placed in the culture section of a local newspaper. In other words, environment and location are all that are really needed, we wouldn’t need to send somebody to stalk you (like Facebook or Google) in order to show you this ad.
Ads are only good for things with broad appeal like that.
I agree that it could be posted somewhere locally in the real world, and it may have been, but the interesting part is that I dont live in my hometown anymore, even though I travel there frequently. I live in another country, 4 hours away, so I would have never seen a real world ad. Only instagram and all the data they connected about me knew my ties to my hometown and my interest in the music hence they showed the ad.
I agree on all the stalking points and I dont like that they have all this data, but this one time it was useful, i can not deny that.
> Which is somewhat extreme and probably hyperbole but still his philosophy is loud and clear.
Is it? I wish online ads that make it through would target me well.
yes, I use adblockers and I opt out of data collection. But any old-school advertisement such as print, TV, billboard, and prospect ads feel more targeted / relevant to me and guide me to a sales funnel than online ads.
He certainly had his insanities but some accounts say he was quite sane in his later years, and it must be amusing to be possibly the GOAT and living incognito in a place where chess wasn’t played much.
Finally picked up Strunk and White after years of procrastination and so far it has been a tour-de-force consolidating/spelling out the knowledge I picked up along the way (ESL). I found mentally swapping out words about writing for words about programming to be fun.
Brian Kernighan (the K in K&R and AWK) also wrote a similar book
with P. J. Plauger called "The Elements of Programming Style" [1].
There's even a talk by him about it online (2009) [2].
Kernighan also co-authored a (imo) really great book with Rob Pike
(once an assistant of Penn & Teller [3]) called "The Practice of Programming" [4].
Unfortunately, this one is a bit over the 200 page limit.
You do realize development include software engineering, right? 700 people doing programming isn't even remotely surprising.
Not to defend them against the recent security fiasco, but innuendos such as this that links "employees working in China" directly with "shady business" makes me at least uncomfortable.
For one product...? I’m sure they have a great deal of internal software and versions for numerous OS and platforms - but we’re not talking about a company with hundreds of consumer facing software products.
To be more clear, I meant "it can't only be development and QA". Meaning, there has to be something else included in that number that is not traditional R&D.
Also, to be clear: the statement is meant from the perspective of, how do they have that many employees (what are they all doing); not "why" do they have that many (which, while seemingly very large, I am not in a position to judge), nor meant to be a slander against outsourcing R&D work to China (though, to be crystalline clear, I inherently trust Zoom less because of this, just like I trust companies who base or outsource R&D to Australia less because of Australia's laws on these matters).
I didn't read it as suggesting it was "shady business". I read it as an insinuation that the company didn't know what it was doing from the top down, so they didn't hire smartly or manage well; they just threw numbers of people at the problem (and got predictably bad results).
With good management, a team of 50 should be able to provide what Zoom provides.
For those who are interested in number theory and its computational aspects, Victor Shoup (co-author of Dan Boneh for this book) also has another awesome book - http://www.shoup.net/ntb/.
That's a neat trick. Based on the article and rewatching the video, he's not actually flipping the coin.
> In Section Three we prove that the angle ψ between M and the normal to the coin stays constant. If this angle is less than 45 ◦ , the coin never turns over. It wobbles around and always comes up the way it started. Magicians and gamblers can carry out such controlled flips which appear visually indistinguishable from normal flips.
He refers to it at the end of that video clip as tossing. looking closely that's pretty much what he is doing. it looks like he might be flipping it once during the toss for effect. Such a slow rotation allows him to easily catch it at the right moment.
There’s an old perpetual chess podcast episode where he said he has never seen a single ad that was useful :-) Which is somewhat extreme and probably hyperbole but still his philosophy is loud and clear.