If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?
This is not a problem with some messages' content. It's a privacy problem.
Would people here be happy if the USA (or any other country, for that matter) had the authority to record all your private conversations with friends at the bar and use them against you?
> If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?
CBP in the U.S. and equivalents pretty much everywhere deny foreigners the right to privacy. Heck, even in the U.S. the Fourth Amendment is taken to not apply at the border and ports of entry (and within 100 miles of any such, including the coasts!!). I too think that's quite a stretch, but that's how it is, and not just in the U.S.
I think there have been cases of CBP refusing entry to people who didn't even have smartphones with them.
So I agree that it is a privacy problem.
However given that we all have very little privacy when entering a country (even our own) the contents of this researcher's messages is relevant to deciding whether CBP acted reasonably even though we might say (I do) that CBP should never ask to see your communications without probable cause that you've committed or intend to commit a crime.
One advantage of being a US citizen. If I'm entering the country and they want to see my phone, I can tell them to get lost. Worst they can do to me is hold me briefly and confiscate my phone for a while. That would be annoying and costly but not a particularly big deal.
I can't do that when entering any other country, of course, but they seem to be much less likely to try it.
You might want to consider whether your definition and the government's definition of "briefly" agrees.
For example Carlos Rios, a naturalized U.S. citizen was held for a week before being released. Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia was detained for three weeks. Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/more-americans-will-be-ca...
So far they are, for citizens. The worst case I've heard of was a citizen who was held by ICE for a few hours because they didn't believe him. Which, don't get me wrong, is bad given the racist underpinnings of it, but not something that worries me in and of itself. And yeah, they've gone so far as to deport US citizens from time to time over the years, but it's not anything like systematic.
They're not refusing entry or holding citizens indefinitely for refusing to unlock their phones at the border. Maybe they will, but until it starts, what I said holds.
When I say “they”, I’m referring to the people ICE reports to. Precedent and rules don’t constrain them, so what happened in past years seems irrelevant.
Swapping LLM models isn't hard, but if you build a production app or business process around it, how much time/effort is the testing to have confidence?
Which is easier when maintaining an LLM business process, swapping in the latest model or just leaving some old model alone and deferring upgrades?
Swapping is easy for ad hoc queries or version 1 but I think there's a big mess waiting to be handled.
I can still use Kindle Scribe exactly the same as before the Jailbreak. Think of it this way - before it had Library (for reading and annotating Kindle books) and Notebooks (for writing). Now it has a third thing - KOReader (for reading only, KOReader doesn’t support handwriting annotation).
One thing is to have someone visually checking on your ID you're an adult, another thing is to record your full name and IP address, along with the site you access, who knows on what insecure database and probably forever. When you leave a brick-and-mortar adult store, no one asks you what your name is, records it down next to your purchase, and sends it to state authorities.
These are two very different things.
This law is not only about Pornhub or porn, but about anything each state government consider "harmful". Porn is the excuse for blocking you from accessing, in a not-so-distant future, any topic your local government frames as harmful.
The solution is the general populace becoming more tech literate, much like I became more literate in the yellow pages 20 years ago.
The reality is these are no longer mere tools, they are instruments for conducting life. They are a prerequisite to just about any activity, much like driving in the US.
We expect each and every citizen to have an intimate understanding of driving, including nuances, and an understanding of any and all traffic laws. And we expect them to do it in fractions of a second. Because that is the cost of utilizing those instruments to conduct life.
We can act on two levels. We (as a society) can work for regulation and we (computery people) can take direct action by developing and using software and hardware that works in the user's interest. One does not exclude the other.
That said. You can order a Pixel with GrapheneOS pre-installed and Google Apps and services can be isolated.
Apple knows an M4 is a hard sell for M2/3 owners. Except if you have specific workflows that can take advantage of the newer silicon, you'll spend a lot of money on something you probably don't need. I have an M1 32GB with multiple software packages running, and I see no reason to replace this machine.
This is why Apple is comparing against M1: M1 owners are the potential buyers for this computer. (And yes, the marketing folks know the performance comparison graphs look nicer as well :)
> I don't see how this is different from disputing the banking sector by conducting a heist.
Let's leave aside this logical fallacy; we're all adults here.
Buying music on iTunes became popular because it was easier than pirating the music. You could buy individual songs for less than 99 cents (you still can do that [1])
News outlets have the option of selling content by the piece (as you suggest) instead of forcing you to go into a monthly or annual subscription you don't need because you just want to read 1 or 2 articles per month from a particular newspaper.
However, they don't want to do so. And because of that, pirating the content becomes again more convenient; like in the pre-iTunes years.
Your idea of using an intermediary service to get that content isn't the solution. I'm not interested in a third party profiling me based on the content I read online.
There's no profiling going on, we take a cut of the sale price and that is it. But I understand your concern and will think hard about how we could make this more obvious. I'm not sure if it's a general concern or it applies more to people like us.
Also, I assume you read stuff on Substack, Medium, Reddit, etc. Definitely so on a third party commonly known as HN.
Re iTunes: it's not about the will of the news outlets. It is impractical for them to offer a model which sells by the piece. And the most prominent cause is banal: payment fees are too high a percentage on what would be a typical price for a single piece of content.
Keeping a credit balance solves that, but keeping a credit balance at every outlet is just as bad as monthly subs.
Two years ago, I had a similar experience with Chainlink. I underwent hours of interviews and completed an extensive work assignment, only to be offered the job _after a personality test_.
Simultaneously, I interviewed at a startup. There, I spent about an hour discussing my experience and providing feedback on their current system with the person who would become my manager.
I chose the startup, and it has been the best job decision I've ever made.
Personality tests can disclose a lot of personal information. It's unclear where this data might end up or who might have access to it. I detest this practice and consider it a major red flag.
This reminds me when I tried incredibly hard to get a tiny scholarship to study abroad in country X and got rejected. In fact, there were several rounds and I didn't even make the first one. My Prof. told me to go to country Y and I hesitated because of the immense administrative burden to apply again and since I was de facto not qualified for a postgraduate scholarship. But application was easy, I got it, and they stuffed me with money.
I always remember the words of my Professor: "Don't you know that everything where you have to invest a lot (I assume effort, time, money, energy) nothing ever comes out?
So if your IT job requires a letter of recommendation from the pope and even if you are able to get the letter, you are unlikely to get the job. :-)
Corollary experience: the more effort/time/money/energy you expend in a successful transaction, the more likely it is they'll impose a shitty condition at the end of it, expecting you to be too invested to challenge it.
This reminds me of an investment maxim that has helped me a lot over the years:
You don't make a profit on the sell price. You make a profit on the buy price.
That's something I lot of people seem to not understand about investment, it's not about how high something can go. That's random chance. It's about how deep a discount you can find on something valuable. If you can't estimate what something might be worth, you're not investing, you're making a bet on things you don't understand.
The goal is to get the answers they want without saying it. They want people who will naturally know ‘the right thing’ to do to get paid by them, without them having to say it.
Folks on a spectrum are usually that way because they’re bad at already knowing that - or unwilling/unable to say it naturally. For various reasons.
Which is why the spectrum covers ‘disorders’ (aka things that make life suck sometimes/most of the time) instead of ‘awesomenesses’.
That said, there are advantages and utility where one can find niches and ways to adapt most of the time.
Being the same/reacting the same as everyone else, tends to get you the same results as everyone else. For better or worse.
Mixing in with the herd offers a lot of protection, as long as the whole herd isn’t being stampeded off a cliff by a smarter adversary.
You’re unlikely to starve either, but you’d better be good at eating grass other people have already crapped on/next to.
how well are you able to guess what the test wants you to say, and game the system?
i remember doing these like 20 years ago when i got out out of the military and just needed a bartending job.
corp chain, had you take a bunch like "if I see an employee slacking off I'm 1) very offended, 2) slightly offended, 3) indifferent, 4) okay with it, or 5) very okay with it
it was obvious what answer they wanted, and empathy had nothing to do with it
Personality tests are screening principally if you are Conscientious and Agreeable. The hack is:
Suggest you answer every question to imply you are orderly, hardworking, calm, stable and cooperative with others.
Notably, organizations are almost always led by disagreeable folks.
It’s a pain in the ass to lead disagreeable people.
Agreeable people are often terrible leaders, as they’ll as often lead a team off a cliff as say no. Or be unable to actually drive action among a group of disagreeing people.
leading often requires coming up with your own answer based on the circumstances you’re seeing - someone can’t ‘agree’ their way out of that.
That said, someone too disagreeable will just cause friction and internal issues all the time for no value add. Disagreeing with the right/proper thing to do is just being a pain in ass for the sake of being a pain in the ass.
Usually, the organization has settled on a middle ground somewhere for each level of it’s hierarchy.
Very top down organizations usually need very agreeable ‘bottom’ layers to do the grunt work. It has predictable consequences - good and bad.
There is a reason why militaries pride themselves on ‘breaking down’/‘rebuilding’ people in basic. And why officers almost always go through a separate process.
Part of being a grownup is coming around to the fact that if someone you just met clearly doesn't trust you, that's 95% about their issues, not yours.
Then it becomes a question not of whether you're 'worthy' of a job with these people, but whether you really want to walk into a place that is telegraphing this much paranoia.
I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview and I wish I did. What I do know is how to sandbag an interview, and I'm sure there are a few people out there who have poor opinions of me that are the direct result of my poor opinion of them.
Places with calm confidence during the interview process may be their own kind of delusional, but they may also be really great places to work, with a good sense of teamwork.
> I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview
"Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk to me, guys, but I don't think this is a good fit. Let's cut our losses and give each other some time back. Bye."
> I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview and I wish I did.
What I do is say something along the lines of "I believe that I would be a poor fit for this position and am withdrawing my application. Thank you for your time and consideration."
> Part of being a grownup is coming around to the fact that if someone you just met clearly doesn't trust you, that's 95% about their issues, not yours.
Trust is earned, not given.
part of the reason you feel as if you can trust them is because you don't have to trust them _fully_. You're protected by the system, life circumstances, etc. Put another way, it's easy for me to trust that someone I don't know will pay back the $20 they just borrowed because if they don't the damage to me is minimal, it's a hell of a lot harder for me to trust that someone will pay back $20k that they borrowed.
If someone isn't showing the level of trust you would expect it's generally two things.
1. That person is themselves untrustworthy and they view the world as if everyone is like them, or
2. That person doesn't feel as safe and protected by the systems in place as you do. Sometimes due to general anxiety, sometimes due to life experiences, etc.
Even someone in category 2 may show themselves to be untrustworthy because they're going to cross you due to a perceived slight or as a means of protecting themselves so 1 & 2 can often blend together.
But make no mistake, you don't trust them either, you just know they can't truly hurt you so it's safe to assume they're trustworthy. Trust is earned over time, not given.
For a personal anecdote, there's a developer here who had major problems with me, it got heated a few times to the point we both had to walk away from the conversation. He just took everything I said in such a negative light. We would talk it out and then it would happen again. And then it came out that he had medication for anxiety, my gf of 12 years has anxiety too so I understand it better than most I suspect.
Once I had that understanding I approached him differently and we have a great relationship now. Some if it was serious heart-to-heart conversations, some of it was my behavior changes. That combination and time has earned me his trust and earned him my trust. He'll very publicly challenge me and I never take it personally, I'll publicly challenge him and he doesn't take it personally either. Sometimes he'll contact me directly and tell me something I said looked bad to others and he helps me keep a lifeline into the team as a whole (I'm an architect).
I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses but it's definitely a good working relationship now. I say this just to say be careful of dismissing people outright. Sometimes you have to but make sure you have to before you do.
Trust may be earned, but respect should be a default. These tests definitely don't respect you nor the company's time and values. But I guess someone had to feel useful (emphasis on "feel").
> I say this just to say be careful of dismissing people outright.
I'll give them the minimum amount of respect, but if I have to walk on eggshells just to do every day work communication, I'm going to trust them very little. I'm glad you worked it out, but most of the time you will never know their story (and you'd be cast as the bad guy if you pried to find it).
If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?
This is not a problem with some messages' content. It's a privacy problem.
Would people here be happy if the USA (or any other country, for that matter) had the authority to record all your private conversations with friends at the bar and use them against you?