Are you doing one of those 'a lie requires intention, and we can't know their internal state of mind, so we can't know if something is a lie unless they tell us' things?
Do you consider misrepresentation a lie?
If there's a lawsuit which determines that Meta misrepresented something, do you consider that a lie, even if Meta says it was merely on honest mistake made in good faith?
If the European Commission "fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" and that "contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility" then that statement was not actually a lie, right, because no one at Facebook said they lied, correct?
Can you give an example of any company which has lied, but where the company officials have never agreed with that conclusion?
And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything?
So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just “forgot” to turn off the camera after they were done with it? Sounds reasonable… except wait, they were actively re-activating it while you were scrolling, and until iOS 14 users were none-the-wiser. If it was an honest mistake, do you think FB testers would have not caught it during the MONTHS between iOS 14 developer preview and release? And yet, for this one I do think it was probably a bug about when to activate the camera.
The European Commission has found that Facebook provided “misleading information” about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp following an investigation into the deal.
The commission’s complaint relates specifically to the sharing of user data between Facebook and WhatsApp. In a submission to the EU made in August 2014, Facebook said it would not be possible to create a reliable automated system for matching users. In August 2016, WhatsApp announced that it would be linking WhatsApp user phone numbers with Facebook user identities.
Read that book in two days. Wild stuff. Of course I don't absolve Sarah Wynn for of her responsibility that is Facebook and it's completely maliciously run company. She is also complicit I don't care how many "I was trying to do the right thing! Whaa!" she sprinkled throughout the book.
The fact that they successfully got the book removed from sale for a while speaks volumes. They not only lie they are encouraged to.
The best lies are corporate lies. And those lies are said plainly, calmly, and with a sense not of conviction but rather it it's not a serious claim because it was always a true statement ... just repeating it now.
They are also uttered on TV, in public talks and to a far lesser extent in court. Court is a formal process. Outside it's not. There's a big difference.
Ha. This is why the best lawyers in the world work for these people. Over drinks, when I brought up some of the blatant dark patterns in the ad market, someone who worked at one of the biggest companies in the world responded to me bluntly: "yeah, sure, but have we ever lost a case in court over click fraud? No, we have not."
Correct. The best liers like the best bullies are really good at assessing risk. They're honest in close when they sense they're butt is not on the line.
I would classify their "oops we reset your privacy settings accidentally again" as a lie. Granted this was a common occurrence in the 2000's, and not so much the last 15 years.
The privacy settings also did not obviously do what their wording suggested - accidental over-sharing was their goal, and the wording was carefully crafted to deceive and confuse. Is that lying? It's a technical argument, and not really relevant - they are shady AF and always have been.
Just to be a bit more clear, this was a while ago. The answer in gp was to the question: "hey, I am not an ads guy, but my friend asked me to look at his account, and he had no geo restriction set. Why did 60% of his clicks for 'barn wedding venue east tennesse' come from Malaysia? Why would so many people from there see that, and click on in it?"
The bragging wasn't about their lawyers' ability in court, it was about their lawyers' ability to draft Terms and Conditions such that they could not be caught in a lie.
Also take the "can't see your messages" statement with a grain of salt. Like the famous Lotus Notes backdoor [1] they might have given the government an easy(ier) way to decrypt those messages.
The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete.
A seekable Zstd file contains a seek table, which contains the compressed and uncompressed size of all frames. That's enough information to figure out which frame contains your desired offset, and how far into that frame's decompressed data it occurs.
Not sure about zstd, but in xz the blocks (frames in zstd) are stored across the file and linked by offsets into a linked list, so you can just scan over the compressed file very quickly at the start, and in memory build a map of uncompressed virtual offsets to compressed file positions. Here's the code in nbdkit-xz-filter:
Light could only go to Andromeda and back 1000 times before the sun burns out. That's not very many times IMO. On the scale of galaxies, light is slow relative to any timescale relevant to large objects.
Tangentially, I've long wondered about sci fi like Star Trek. Namely, even with FTL, how large can your interplanetary alliance be? How far away can the parliament be? Over what distances can you defend against common enemies? Trade? Culturally exchange ideas?
I have had similar thoughts as well. Assuming FTL isn’t possible, at some point it wouldn’t make sense to have a cohesive system. Say, there’s an outpost that is 30 years away by the fastest spacecraft.
The paywall says I get extra stuff from premium, including "unlimited photo, voice, and barcode logging", "unlimited AI nutritionist chat", "unlimited Personalized tips from your AI nutritionist".
It sounds like if I pay more, I get more access and can use the app more? So the original article was completely correct in characterizing the premium plan as $79.99
It says
> The app was free to download, no trial period necessary. There's a $79.99 per year premium plan, but it's intended to be a donation. The app caps free tier users at three photos per day, while all non-photo methods of logging are unlimited and free for everyone.
Apple requires us to say you get more as part of premium. They have silly rules that tie our hands on stuff. You have access to everything as part of the free tier. Hopefully the recent court case from Riot will help make it easier for us to clarify this.
I just tried in the app on Android and it would not allow me to take more photos unless I pay.
When you say "you have access to everything as part of the free tier", does that apply to Android as well?
Because what you are saying is not true on Android.
After 3 photos I cannot take another, the message says "You used all of your photo logs! As a free tier member you get 3 free Photo logs per day."
Good post, the only part I think I disagree with is
> Never. Let. AI. Write. Your. Tests.
AI writes all of my tests now, but I review them all carefully.
Especially for new code, you have to let the AI write tests if you want it to work autonomously. I explicitly instruct the AI to write tests and make sure they pass before stopping. I usually review these tests while the AI is implementing the code to make sure they make sense and cover important cases. I add more cases if they are inadequate.
I never claimed that it did. Gemini would probably save me the same dozens of hours, but come with ongoing costs and additional starting up hurdles (some near insurmountable in my organisation, like data security for some of what I'm doing).
Gemini flash or any free LLM on openrouter would be orders of magnitude faster and effectively free. Unless you are concerned about privacy of the conversation - it's really purely being able to say you did it locally.
I definitely do appreciate and believe in the value of open source / open weight LLMs - but inference is so cheap right now for non frontier models.
For the second one in particular, Meta never listened to anyone's mic. I would know, I worked on this stuff there at that time.
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