Replying to @msantolini and @jkbren
Academia is a good time to chat about the environment and how to make a model of clarity that mathematical texts could emulate.
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January 2019
168 tweets
Replying to @msantolini and @jkbren
I think the way to go is to make it deeper and to show just what you want to do more than asking for a Billie adventure to be a good friend.
♥ 1
Austria’s DSB has validated a paid model as an alternative to tracking & ads. I wonder how this lines up with @ICOnews’s evaluation that WaPo’s implementation of this was not compliant. (I can’t seem to find any public decision.)
insideprivacy.com/advertising-ma…
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Replying to @msantolini and @jkbren
Billie is my cat. She doesn’t have much in the way of adventure so I think my phone is suggesting a change in 2019.
♥ 1
Attentional harvesting is a pyramid scheme and populist leaders sit at the top.
Fix that and the populist wave is done for.
Quoting a tweet by @RobbyMook ↗
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Democracy was better served by editorial channels because a media’s reputation and its content were tied. This is what social media has decoupled: those companies reap the money from users but have externalised risks and costs of being actually responsible for what you show.
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Replying to @baekdal
That's, like, a longer weekend.
I am a Data Governance guy in a movie… Wait. They don’t have those.
Quoting a tweet by @sheeraf ↗
♥ 6
Replying to @annapieti
That would be one hilarious movie!
“Sir, there’s an outage in the Cookie Policy CMS!”
“Damn! Go to red alert, brace for impact!”
♥ 1
@ElliotLepers Ça existe encore Macholand? Je ne vois pas d’action récente?
Vous aussi vous trouvez que la vidéo de sécurité de @AirFranceFR ressemble surtout à une ode à la potiche, un retour au temps des hôtesses que l'on voulait cruches et à une certaine vision des femmes? #SexismIsInTheAir
youtu.be/Fi4RS7aARSo
♥ 4↺ 1
Replying to @TheAnnaGat and @AirFranceFR
I know, right?
Replying to @null and @Bouletcorp
Tu es mûr pour Brooklyn.
The SEP is wonderful. I still harbour a vain fantasy that some day I will read it in its entirety.
Quoting a tweet by @stevenmklein ↗
♥ 6↺ 1
Very interesting challenge to Section 230 (against Grindr) using product liability to make tech companies responsible for the harassment they harbour.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
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The @EFF and @CenDemTech filed an amicus defending Section 230, essentially making the case that we have to live with harassment otherwise we won’t have free speech. It reads like it was written by cypherlibertarians in the 90s.
eff.org/document/herri…
♥ 5↺ 2
Section 230 was created to enable people to run a BBS on a home machine for maybe fifty people without being liable for stupid users but it’s being used to defend massive corporations from being responsible for the defective products they profit from.
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It basically enables companies to get the full profit from intermediation with none of the responsibility. It allows those companies to grow by ignoring the massive externalities they create.
Section 230 isn’t friendly to free speech; it’s friendly to monopoly.
♥ 4↺ 1
If massive platforms had to price in the harm they create, we wouldn’t lose free speech — we would lose massive platforms.
I wouldn’t mind. I don’t think that the @EFF and @CenDemTech should be in the business of defending platforms.
♥ 2↺ 1
The platform model is only one way of architecting the Internet ecosystem. Why should the law encourage that over alternatives?
More distributed models are possible; if the law didn’t chose sides they could become viable.
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Replying to @null and @CedricLevasseur, @cyberbaloo_, @WhatsApp, @facebook
Le problème du mail c'est que les gens s'en servent un peu n'importe comment et ça ne force pas un usage très clair version chat ce qui est ce que les gens veulent. Et le SMS est nul pour les groupes. Je ne suis pas fan de WhatsApp mais ça répond à un besoin/usage.
"Design For Real Life", by @meyerweb and @sara_ann_marie. Short but deeply human and packed with excellent advice, even if you're designing processes rather than products. If you make things for people it should be on your shelf!
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Replying to @Cennydd and @adamamyl
Agreed, you need someone operational and cross-functional. Most of the relevant decisions I've seen (let alone p problems detected) would never have been visible at the C-suite level.
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Replying to @null and @SimonDeDeo, @sfiscience
Ah shame, I'm there mid-Feb, would've loved to buy you a beer!
Replying to @msantolini and @SimonDeDeo, @sfiscience
I arrive on the 16th, and stick in the broad area for the week! What takes you there?
♥ 1
Great intro to CSS Grids, with a quick mention of how they’re used at The Times. open.nytimes.com/css-grid-for-d…
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Replying to @tobie and @wicg_, @csswg
I don’t know man, I’ve been out of the loop for a while now.
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Replying to @MrFengi and @EFF, @CenDemTech
Absolutely agree. I am saddened to see these organisations go all NRA like this.
Replying to @msantolini and @SimonDeDeo, @sfiscience
Definitely! I need to check if I’m still in Santa Fe proper on the 20th but I’d love to crash your talk if that’s possible 😇
♥ 1
Replying to @null and @LBonPlanetEarth
One apocalypse at a time!
Replying to @natashanyt and @juliapowles, @Matt_Cagle
I'm not sure I completely agree. A lot of the ethical issues ride on implementation details. Many problematic systems persist on the Internet because they're described as high-level use cases, and those aren't inherently bad. Ethics is operational, it thrives on detail.
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Replying to @bfirsh and @brembs, @skdh
Yes. Even without going to ML there are tools that have heuristics that can do a half-decent job. But it's such a lossy format, you need general intelligence to get semantics back out. It's a shame for science.
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Replying to @masinter and @natashanyt, @juliapowles, @Matt_Cagle, @letsencrypt, @mnot
I'm not certain that's a technical issue, Larry. Social media is all the profit from intermediation but none of the responsibility or reputational consequences. A good first step there would be to reform Section 230 and the such.
♥ 1
Replying to @bfirsh and @brembs, @skdh
I’ve been out of the loop a while, but two I recall (and I have a notion of the right options, too, if you want) are pdf2htmlEX and k2pdfopt.
pdf2htmlEX gives you visually good HTML, but not responsive or semantic — but it can be a good starting place to hack the rest.
Replying to @bfirsh and @brembs, @skdh
k2pdfopt can be a pain to get working, but it attempts to detect columns and paragraphs so as to reformat PDF in mobile-friendly sizes. Using k2pdfopt then pdf2htmlEX could be an interesting pipeline.
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"Bolchoi Arena", by @Bouletcorp & @aseyn. Excellent premier tome, j'attends la suite avec impatience!
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Replying to @TheAnnaGat
Some French people think France is Central Europe 🇪🇺 🤔
Replying to @can and @TheAnnaGat
It reminds me of this French guy casually describing Belgium to a Finnish colleague as "Northern Europe".
Replying to @TheAnnaGat and @can
Hahaha 😂 Northern Europe actually has functioning infrastructure...
♥ 1
Replying to @can and @TheAnnaGat
I'm keeping that one 👌
Replying to @TheAnnaGat and @can
The truth is more that we don't really think about them at all...
Replying to @stubbornella
For HTML I had proposed that the snapshot model should work with year-based releases (of whatever in the draft passed enough tests). Time to revive the idea?
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My 9yo is not amused that the shutdown is interfering with her education as museums stay closed.
♥ 9↺ 1
Replying to @null and @BeninSsb, @cyberbaloo_, @WhatsApp, @facebook
Signal ou Telegram. Mais ça implique de convaincre les gens de changer.
Replying to @brucel and @briankardell
Product users outnumber UA developers by far more than that. You should write back to explain that you take elitism far more seriously than that.
♥ 2
Replying to @frivoal
I didn't watch the whole twenty minutes, which bit was bad?
Replying to @frivoal
Ick. Thank U, next!
Replying to @lymanstoneky and @Noahpinion
Taking Ethics 101 ended up being very relevant to my work 25 years later, so you never know!
Replying to @LinguaCelta
Yes! I think it's actually been studied, it used to happen to people writing emails back when that involved care.
♥ 1
Indeed, it's A Thing™. I didn't put in the research to figure out which of those links was the source...
google.com/search?q=email…
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Replying to @shepazu and @frivoal
Unrelated but I just saw this thread:
Quoting a tweet by @KEBrightbill ↗
♥ 2
Haven't started reading it yet, but at least next time I hear someone say "but people actually *want* more relevant advertising" I'll know what to hit them with.
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Replying to @mariejulien
Acrimonieux tout ça.
Replying to @DanGendler
What's the other way?
Replying to @johnwilander
Who said that? The cookies RFC is pretty clear on the matter.
Replying to @johnwilander
I'm curious, are you documenting departures? The specs in question could use an update. The priority of constituencies leans your way anyway.
Replying to @UrbnWarfareDuck
Adtech companies often state that people actually want more relevant ads. It’s a tired claim that has numerous issues.
Replying to @orzelc and @skdh
There are also some books, like JavaScript for Kids. On any of the sites others have already mentioned it can be a good idea to start with HTML+CSS. They are not programming languages but they provide a quick feedback loop to learn the basics and backbone the Web.
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Troll
♥ 6
Replying to @csarven
Oh I agree. I was admiring the master trollery, the content is entirely accurate.
Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress nyti.ms/2RLs8K3
"Beyond Weird", by @philipcball. I can't even begin to imagine how much work it must have been to cover this much ground with such clarity. Forget all the bad analogies, this takes you probably as far into the quantum as you can go without the maths.
♥ 2↺ 1
Replying to @rodolfor and @SimonDeDeo
Most good food in the UK can also be chalked up to Scottish Enlightenment.
♥ 2
Replying to @null and @SimonDeDeo
Has it really been hard to import to Britain? You can swim the Channel. Might it not have to do with the Second World War Utility Scheme?
Replying to @null and @SimonDeDeo
In the British case I wasn't thinking of the deprivation alone but it coupled with national standardisation of many basics (which really helps with repairability). East Germany has that vibe to a point (and similar conditions). I don't know if Japan standardised too.
♥ 1
The @CNIL drops a 50M fine on Google. It does not seem like much but they can keep doing it if Google doesn't change, as can other European countries.
Once more the problem revolves around the opacity of behavioural targeting in advertising and improper consent.
Quoting a tweet by @CNIL ↗
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Consent for behavioural profiling and targeting is simple: if it is properly informed and affirmative then a large majority of users should be declining.
♥ 2↺ 1
Replying to @null and @borisschapira
That's a very good question, and as you know I'm not a lawyer! However, I would say this:
- I haven't read the full decision but it's certainly scoped. I don't think it affects GMail or whatever.
- If you rely on Google’s ads as a publisher, you have a different consent path...
...that Google forced on you, and that isn't affected by this decision (that I can tell).
- There is a notion of reasonableness involved. It can be near impossible for companies in some spaces to opt out of Google. I would expect regulators to understand that.
Oh FFS someone needs to shoot the data compensation idea before it really gets legs.
Quoting a tweet by @jhardinges ↗
♥ 9↺ 7
"The Emissary", by Yoko Tawada. Post-apocalyptic but bittersweet and playful.
♥ 1
Replying to @seanmcarroll and @DailyNousEditor
In polite company the word you're looking for is "aphorism".
♥ 1
Replying to @sandhawke
Issues include:
- Seller rights in a monopsony (or oligopsony but that's hardly a real difference) are a joke.
- It means that lying about yourself to a service is theft/fraud.
- What happens to the closeted gay kid asked for his orientation on the network du jour?
Do they lie and incur fraud charges? Do they refuse to disclose and be suspiciously one of very few who don't say?
It's like labour without labour rights.
♥ 2
Oh, I always forget: the data of rich people is worth substantially more. By making it a commodity you've just made the rich richer!
♥ 3
Replying to @seanmmcdonald
I would be sincerely interested in a write-up on monetisation that does not frivolously skirt over the issues it would likely create. So far I've come up very much empty-handed.
Replying to @seanmmcdonald
I’m well aware and that is part of my concern. There are many solid models for ownership, both persona and collective. But naive solutions keep returning to monetisation — I’d like to see that off the table until someone has actually thought the problems it entails through.
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Replying to @seanmmcdonald
Oh, I'm a GDPR European born and bred, I take ownership as a given! 😄
I'd love to hear more on the second part.
Replying to @dcreemer and @sandhawke
Having no recourse is a completely orthogonal matter, many countries now have regulation for that.
Replying to @nealmcquaid and @johnnyryan, @cnrhgn, @Jessdaviesmk, @alexhern, @TonyRomm
Stating that opt-in rates are high without providing the mechanism is meaningless. They may well be high because the mechanism is not up to par.
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Replying to @nealmcquaid and @johnnyryan, @cnrhgn, @Jessdaviesmk, @alexhern, @TonyRomm
Yes, I was also referring to the article, that's the statement I think is dubious 😀
♥ 1
Replying to @nealmcquaid and @johnnyryan, @cnrhgn, @Jessdaviesmk, @alexhern, @TonyRomm
You certainly won't hear me disputing that!
♥ 1
What Uncle Ben somehow failed to mention is that with great responsibility does not necessarily come great power.
♥ 17
Replying to @null and @je5perl, @kashhill
Wicked cool question. I have the card, I'm French, and I still have legal residence there. I'll make an access request!
♥ 11
Replying to @JustinBrookman
Banks of course, but also cards. Mastercard sells audience segments for instance. As for the CCPA, it's worth documenting all the bad amendments: if things get too bad a 2020 ballot is always an option and that should be kept clear.
♥ 1
Replying to @__apf__
This is probably the best summary of virtue ethics!
Virtue ethics in action.
Quoting a tweet by @__apf__ ↗
Replying to @null and @SimonDeDeo
Ooh. Remember the eigenmorality thing? I wonder what cost-of-punishment points differentiate eigenjesus, eigenmoses, and other PD strategies in global flourishing. I would guess that specific population mixes would be optimal?
Limiting the reach of extensions is not only legitimate but necessary. I support the Chrome team here.
There's a way out of this bind: if Chrome followed user expectations and blocked third-party tracking then these extensions would no longer need to exist. Problem solved!
Quoting a tweet by @TheRegister ↗
♥ 2
If you do a little wrong, own up to it.
If you've done enough wrong that it stretches credulity, call it scapegoating and call the press biased.
Is it just me or have I seen this playbook elsewhere already?
Quoting a tweet by @RMac18 ↗
♥ 2
An excellent @nytopinion piece from @skdh about the value of a potential giant particle collider and funding priorities in physics. If you like it I also recommend her book "Lost in Math" (which is also funnier).
nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opi…
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Replying to @_abialas and @femalegazebot
Judith Butler dances?
Replying to @_abialas and @femalegazebot
Too late — I looked. dancersgroup.org/2018/01/practi…
The success of behavioural targeting has less to do with whether it’s actually effective and more with whether marketers believe it to be effective.
Given how opaque the system is, those two things are actually quite decorrelated.
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Replying to @seanmmcdonald
If governance is ethics at scale though, the two are quite related. Privacy pros should extend into broader governance issues :)
TFW your facts get published in the opinion section. 🤔
wsj.com/articles/the-f…
♥ 3
The lack of privacy regulation is a subsidy of social media and behavioural tracking to the detriment of news media and contextual advertising.
You might not believe in privacy and that's okay. But if you believe in democracy, it's time for change.
Quoting a tweet by @zachdcarter ↗
♥ 3↺ 1
Replying to @erikphoel
It's a boon to the adapter business!
Replying to @rigow
That's actually not a description of how things work. Most publishers work with a lot of different ad partners. It doesn't change where the meat is.
Solon is right. People rarely realise this but a publisher's most valuable asset is its audience and the core business model of Facebook or Google’s ad arm is to steal it.
People who tell you that a free press needs today's adtech work for adtech.
Quoting a tweet by @s010n ↗
♥ 3↺ 4
The terms with those players are typically that they cannot use a publisher's audience for targeting *on its own*. So they can't target a newspaper's audience, but they can target that audience plus a random user. Contacts built from weasel wording.
The Web's primary business model today is:
- You build an audience for your service or content.
- Platforms will give you a small share of the advertising value for that audience.
- Platforms will use the majority of the profit from that exchange to build up more market power.
♥ 1
The primary enablers of this system are Chrome, Android, and iOS. Facebook is a major player but without direct help from Google and Apple it would not be able to do what it does. It's great that Apple is walking some of its privacy talk. But some is not enough.
Replying to @JonWalkerpdx and @JonWalkerDC, @matthewstoller
I am not saying this to dismiss your analysis here, but having a party that can on occasion not be stupid is a pretty good place to be in by today's standards.
♥ 1
Watching @netflix is all autoplay video and UI gimmicks like it's 2007. I can't wait for more competition.
♥ 2
Replying to @willseth and @netflix
I know! It looks like the classic failure of a data-driven company forgetting that designers and user testing are a thing. There's probably an engagement lift from autoplay, that it's mostly unintentional or without anyone actually watching is immaterial.
♥ 1
Replying to @rigow
Maybe I have this perception from it being my job to know? The Fortune article you link does not back your claim. Maybe you're lumping a lot under "ad provider"?
Replying to @rigow
I don't quite understand. You say publishers have a choice because there are many options but also there is monopoly?
Replying to @rigow
You're asking publishers to compete with Google for tech features and data. That's just not realistic. We used to have our own but we had to stop.
Replying to @rigow
They are also wrong, the approach to consent taken by G and FB does not hold water.
Replying to @AOC and @benwerd
The lack of privacy regulation massively tilts the game in favour of large platforms over publishers, services, and innovative companies. This needs to change while there is enough left to save.
♥ 11↺ 3
I would've gone with "eudaiquirimonia".
♥ 3
Replying to @nevaudit
Thank you sir.
Whenever the Android @Twitter app gets the foreground it wipes out all of its OS notifications, many of which are useful and cannot be obtained another way.
I reached out to support a while back but *tumbleweed*. Is there any way to fix that?
♥ 1
Replying to @julien51 and @Twitter
Last I tried it out it didn't do notification for specific people but I'll give it another shot, thanks!
This is beautifully brutal.
techcrunch.com/2019/01/26/the…
♥ 6↺ 1
Replying to @matthewstoller
It's a blend of several issues (slippery slope, strawman) but the more salient is technofatalism. You can only have the progress from the tech if things work exactly how they do, with these exact externalities.
♥ 8
"Technology and the Virtues", by @ShannonVallor. A compelling and solid exploration of the essential role virtue ethics can and should play in guiding our technological questions to a future worth wanting.
♥ 18↺ 2
Replying to @_abialas and @femalegazebot, @can
Of course not Anna, I would never fight you, and I'm not entirely sure what my autocorrect was trying to say there... We can all be happy together in flex seating! 🤗
♥ 1
Replying to @rigow
I’m not going to discuss the specifics of our case, but in general terms adtech is tremendously complex, opaque, and performance-sensitive. It’s not shocking that you would expect specialised players.
Replying to @rigow
As for why one specialised solution is destroying all the others, there are probably multiple reasons, and some of them definitely have to do with antitrust. The lack of (real) standards in advertising doesn’t help, either.
Replying to @__apf__ and @jessysaurusrex, @hacks4pancakes
You should write this up. In a newspaper.
♥ 3
Replying to @__apf__
I hear you, it's just that this seems like something that people should be aware of. It's insane and dangerous, and it's likely to happen increasingly frequently.
♥ 4
"which must be secured against direct interference by the cat". Schrödinger knew his cats.
♥ 2
Replying to @null and @dtemp_09f9
Isn't that the sign that it's working exactly as expected?
Can someone make some kind of page to track Facebook scandals? Frankly I can't keep up.
Quoting a tweet by @MikeIsaac ↗
♥ 8↺ 2
It turns out that people don't actually want more relevant advertising, and if they have to be tracked for it they overwhelmingly want it even less.
nytimes.com/2019/01/29/opi…
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This appears to be a very useful method to look at the complex interconnection of the adtech universe and how it impacts users.
Quoting a tweet by @rvaneijk ↗
♥ 2↺ 1
Replying to @brucel and @stephband
Still. You need more punctuation than that.
Replying to @ewinsberg and @cailinmeister
Worse than that, it's hard to disentangle from context. We've been evaluating an algorithm to assess comment toxicity because at first brush it seemed to be quite racist: if you just changed names from statistically White to Black toxicity went up sharply.
♥ 1
But the fact is: racist comments, which are evidently highly toxic, are much, much more likely to contain words relating to being Black than White. The algorithm isn't so much being racist as correctly pointing out that a comment is more likely to be toxic if it mentions race.
♥ 1
Machine learning is currently not much ready to go beyond this sort of statistical association. Defining fairness under such limitations is at best difficult indeed.
Replying to @mcnees
Now now, no one ever wrote a rule saying «don’t rootkit children!» How could these poor, poor engineers guess that this might be perceived as evil? It’s for the purpose of delivering a richer, more relevant ad experience!
♥ 1
Replying to @MikeIsaac
If you’re a Senator with a decently organised office by now you’ll have a few of those written in advance and ready to go.
♥ 2
A few minutes ago the sky was still blue... Snow, it comes at you fast!
♥ 1
Replying to @heydonworks
Who the *actual* fuck can be so fuckingly dumb as to fail at a fucking drop shadow?
♥ 2
Replying to @null and @mattmay, @heydonworks
Thank you, thank you very much. It has bugged me for the longest time that the word for such an important concept was not available to English speakers.
Is Google anything other than Facebook with better PR? techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/goo…
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Replying to @null and @FizziksF, @LogicalAnalysis
Would you mind sharing where that is from?
Replying to @null and @FizziksF, @LogicalAnalysis
Thank you!
This very accurately captures the sorry state of men’s fashion.
♥ 65↺ 14
Replying to @null and @SimonDeDeo
I assume they’re all different h4X0rcase variants of bR0\/\/n1Sh.
♥ 1
Replying to @null and @LiebermanJeremy
The Times isn’t asking for help, I’m pretty sure our reporters are very much on top of what’s going on. It’s just me who needs some timeline!
♥ 1