I agree on both points; government work can involve very little real work with no real stress of being fired. Similarly, doing meaningless work will destroy your soul and will make you hate your time in the office even more. I'd even go so far as to say caring deeply about your profession is a western value, and trying to work as little as possible is going to be difficult in a western country
I do satellites now but when I worked in insurance the work we did was meaningful. People need insurance, their policies are stored as data, and the company had to manage millions of policies.
Increasing click-through rates may not feel meaningful, but writing unit tests for a satellite which has already launched and been decommissioned will eat your soul, and you likely won't become a better developer because of it since you won't be given a budget to improve things or try new tech.
I've worked in all three sectors. My experience in the federal government suggests that government jobs are clearly defined, but not necessarily easier than a corporate job. If you want to do a specific thing for the next decade, you're better of going gov. But if you want to make a lot of money and don't mind your job changing with every CEO transition, go corporate. And if you want somewhere in the middle, go non-profit.
You could look at 16% as roughly equivalent to a dice roll (1 in 6) or, you know, the odds you lose a round of Russian roulette. That's my charitable interpretation at least. Otherwise it does sound silly.
I can see why it would affect startups not making a profit but why would it dramatically affect FAANG (e.g. some of the most profitable companies in the world that have been running for decades)? The article contributes all these large layoffs in FAANG, in part, to this tax rule.
There's a difference of $24 but I have $1200 in cash reserves. And I make up the difference later. Oh no! Guess I have to lay off 10% of my employees now.
The iPhone 1 featured "touch screen, GPS, camera, iPod, and internet access. Its software capabilities were a turning point for the smartphone industry" (random source: https://www.textline.com/blog/smartphone-history).
If you want to doubt that it was in fact a not a turning point you'd need to provide very strong arguments.
All of the things you mentioned were available in phones before the first iPhone (assuming by ipod you mean mp3 player). In fact from a software point of view it was lacking a bunch of functionality and software ecosystem some competitors had.
In my view the reason the iPhone felt so new was almost entirely the incredibly responsive capacitive touch screen with a finger ui, everything I'd used before it did resistive and preferred pen for detail. Pen actually is better for detail so in some ways it was that more than anything else that turned the device from a creation device to a consumption device which was whole new way of thinking about smart personal devices.
Of course it was also sold in a decent package too where Apple did deals that ensured it was available with good mobile internet plans which were also unusual at the time.
Also, the touchscreen was the type that unlike all previous touchscreens (except the ones made by a startup that Apple had bought)
could detect touches at more than one screen location simultaneously.
as someone who owned a number of smartphones and PDAs prior to the first iPhone coming out, the real advance was a usable mobile browser. i'd had all the same capabilities with devices for quite some time before the iphone came out, but their browsers were painful to use. the touch interface was also a big advance over previous touch interfaces. in other areas the first iphone was lacking compared to other smartphones.. copy and paste and 3rd party apps were missing for example.
> If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering.
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
You seem to think that I am making a negative judgment here. His lifestyle is fine with me and I assume he is a great person. He clearly has made many smart decisions around things like building lasting wealth through real estate and keeping good relationships with his family. He also clearly values his flexibility and his lifestyle, looking for 100% remote jobs almost exclusively. He talks quite a bit about the tax code and his three houses and how he wants to renovate them and use them to make money. However, if you look at the time spent on these things, it pretty strongly suggests that he prefers these things to programming/engineering.
I don't judge him as a person for this. In fact, he's probably better as a friend than many of us who did sacrifice a lot of this stuff for a career. Unfortunately, many careers in knowledge work are "up or out," and if you don't choose "up," "out" will be chosen for you.
Fair enough, but I don't think you realize how the original comment comes off. There's a lot of wiggle room in the terms "interested", "engineering", and "unremarkable", but the way I take it is: if one hasn't become a legend in their field by age 40, not only do they not deserve a job, they don't deserve to be here (since they're clearly not interested in engineering).
You're right on many of these points and I probably take it personally because I'm coming up on 20 years and am unremarkable. You never know what people went through to get where they are.
I went to a cheap state school, didn't major in CS despite wanting to desperately because my family convinced me it was a bad move, graduated into the GFC, got pigeonholed into QA for a while, spent years getting my masters in CS, wasted energy on side projects for many years, cared for sick family members for many years, struggled with major impostor syndrome and insecurity.
I've done things I'm proud of and I made it to FAANG after all that, but am unremarkable. It's kind of offensive to then hear that I'm not interested in engineering because I'm not a Distinguished Engineer or whatever.
If you made it to a FAANG without going to a top 20 college, there's a near 0 chance you are unremarkable. The rest of the story more than confirms that you aren't coasting.
> The easiest way to do this is to deliver things that they already know about, such as projects that they’ve asked you to do
I've struggled with this recently. I feel like advancement requires getting credit for the idea itself, otherwise you're just implementing other people's designs. But ideating (will actually good ideas) is pretty tough.
I'm often surprised when someone will paste a screenshot of a tweet with the name blurred (presumably to protect them from harassment). The contents of the tweet are easily searchable...
Public tweets are a different scenario, they are things that have intentionally been shouted out into the void for anyone to hear. Blurring out names is a courtesy to prevent low-effort harrassment (which is most of it), while using the tweet for its intended purpose (i.e. showing its message to the public).
My experience working at one of the companies that gets accused of this a lot is that many colleagues wish we were as evil as claimed because it would be so much easier do their jobs that way than struggling through the reality of it which is endless red tape over the tiniest issues that have even the slightest proximity to privacy. So I've been a bit skeptical too.
Exactly. The big companies are scared of lawsuits and trying to get approval for something like that would be a nonstarter. As a matter of fact the device folks at the same company would be working hard to kill such an idea in its infancy because it’s already an uphill battle to sell always-listening or always-watching devices to consumers because of the creepiness factor.
And people also are terrible at math. Modern ML (regression & neural nets) are ridiculously good at predicting stuff you might be interested in, particularly when rich data sources like browsing and e-commerce histories are available; the decision to show the ad to you at some point almost certainly was made long before any audio-to-marketing pipeline could act on it.
Neither is a US company. TikTok is on their last appeal to the Supreme Court to avoid being banned in the US. Huawei is banned by the US government for many uses, e.g 5G infrastructure. Neither is a good example.
Yup - having worked at Google Display Ads (arguably the epicenter of such talk), I personally only ever witnessed people walking the walk, privacy-wise. The threats to our privacy are quite public and not at all illegal; IMO data brokers and 3P browser trackers are at the top of the list, but all of Google’s known ills are there too (location tracking, exchange monopolization, allowing predatory advertisers, gestures broadly at chrome, etc etc etc).
They don’t need to be listening to us, and wouldn’t know how to even begin hiding it if they were. Something like that would require tons of compute and thousands of conspirators risking massive backlash, all to prop up a relatively tiny part of their business.
> Convincing people of this is basically impossible
Absolutely correct IME, btw. This is one of those things a smart engineer learns not to argue online, or at the Christmas dinner table for that matter. People tend to stand their ground on this one and move quickly to accusations of bias and naïveté…
I'm not trying to change your mind, but this response (from another user) was flagged, so I'm providing a pull quote.
> A marketing firm called Cox Media Group has recently revealed that it is listening to user conversations via their smartphones through its so-called "Active Listening" Software. With this, the company will push advertisements that users will see on certain platforms based on the heard conversations as unveiled by a report.
This story was widely reported, but it's a little questionable. The slides are genuine, but they seem more like a prospectus for something Cox wants to do than something that they're actually doing. The presentation also never claims the "always listening" that people are concerned about, and instead just refers to "a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior" from "smart devices." The idea that this is smartphones listening to you pervasively is entirely something people have read into it, not something the slides say or even really suggest. I think most readers in the industry find it far more likely that they are describing reanalysis of consumer interactions with voice assistants (probably not even of the audio but of the transcript). That would presumably be the one in the cable boxes their parent company distributes, because access to that kind of data from other voice assistants seems difficult to negotiate and they do not claim to have it.
If you review the actual presentation (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25051283-cmg-pitch-d...), none of the claims in it are that remarkable. The whole kerfuffle seems to have come from a combination of the presentation actually being incredibly vague (probably intentionally to allow them to overstate the capability---this is a presentation for sales pitches) and some confirmation bias on the part of 404 Media, reading into it what they were looking for. But there's also a healthy amount of "news laundering," a lot of the articles cribbing off of 404 (like this techtimes one) actually make stronger claims than the original 404 piece does. It has a fair amount of weaseling that it's not clear how the slide deck should be interpreted, whether it's a real or speculative capability, etc.
If you've ever worked in enterprise software sales, you would be extremely wary of interpreting the slide deck the way a lot of these articles do. It reads like a lot of bluster.
>I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh.
The company I work for has had to cancel contracts and claw back money a few different times from vendors that have promised features that were mandatory in our industry that weren't actually available in the software. One I recall was a pricey leave of absence tracking platform that didn't actually consider hipaa compliance to be important.
Sales not understanding their own product is a long-running joke. My favorite anecdote of it was our sales person demonstrating a highly-available system by removing power cables from all nodes. That's going to be a tough feature to provide by next quarter.
I've never heard of them, so can't say if they're junk. But they're certainly gullible.
It's a small media company whose primary business is operating a handful of local newspapers and TV stations. They have no privileged access to mobile operating systems. If they really had implemented this scheme in actual apps (rather than just write it into a pitch deck), those apps would need to be asking for microphone permissions.
Note how there never was any follow-up showing that this really was happening. The story was only ever about that pitch deck. Compare that to e.g. the currently ongoing story about the dodgy things done by the Honey browser extension.
Discussed last year when they made their announcement. No one gave a believable mechanism for them being able to do this. The consensus was that they were blowing smoke.
Ahh this one. Thanks for sharing, important point!
Basically this is just a random small-ish company trying to get new clients with a flashy feature. Ultimately they have to use the same data as everyone else, which I’m 99.99% sure doesn’t involve any intentional (much less “active”) recording by Google, Apple, or Meta. Maybe they have their own hardware partners that have networked microphones, maybe they’re really using incidental recordings from their “407 data partners”, or maybe it’s an empty promise - I sadly can’t read the original(ish) article https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
It’s perhaps noteworthy that the intermediary source is the NYPost, which is most certainly junk! This story isn’t fake news, but it also isn’t presented in a honest way, IMHO
Cox Media Group is attached to Cox Enterprises which owns Cox Communications, one of the largest US cable providers. They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.
>They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.
There was a class action lawsuit back in 2019 alleging that Apple accidentally recording people's conversations with siri counted as wiretapping. If no enterprising lawyers has tried this lawsuit with cox, and no news articles has come out criticizing their broad ToS, it's probably safe to assume cox isn't doing it.
I think it's weird how, on a site filled to the brim with engineers and comp-sci people that laugh at (or drink to) management believing the sales team, we all take the pitch deck from a sales team at face value.
If marketing or sales can twist a feature such that it's not presented perfectly honestly, but makes them look incredible and all but guarantees a sale? I think they'll twist meanings for that bonus. Certainly not every member of sales and marketing, but often enough that the pitch deck of a sales team shouldn't have nearly this much sway, IMO.
Well said. I've worked in adtech and this aligns with my experience. Alphabet probably wouldn't even make that much more money compared to its current ad program. There's no shortage of supply in display advertising.
Exactly. Overall the idea of selling more people its ad targeting service is peanuts compared to search ads, or more relevantly, selling people the ability participate in the Display Ads market at all in the first place (through the aforementioned exchange monopolization).
If you look at the court filings, the only part where they were "caught red handed" was that they knew they were recording audio for inadvertent activations, but didn't take steps to stop it. There's remotely close to proving that they were using it for advertising.
