The employees who think this are the ones who have to watch videos of babies and toddlers being raped, so that tends to influence their opinions. My partner was one of those employees and she is, consequently, very much against anything that makes it easier for this to go undetected.
Yeah, if we could guarantee a purely benevolent system that will only ever use the data to catch or prevent pedos without ever widening the scope, it seems like an easy choice. I don't doubt the more awful shit you see, the easier it is to convince yourself such a system exists.
But like the recent abruptness in states like Texas immediately targeting women for receiving healthcare the second they were able to should give anyone pause. Especially given that a large population wants to reelect an insurrectionist publicly planning a dictatorship.
That reveals a major complication of the process that your partner was a part of: if you suspect content to be CSAM, you *legally must not* look at it, open it, etc. It’s a way to prevent bad people from abusing those positions, but at the same time, no one (innocent) who was told to do that wants that law to be changed.
It makes building detection systems harder, though.
Your intuition points to a typical PR pattern around Meta: employees disagree, and they resolve their frustration in the press. So many big tech scandals are an opportunity to remember the “two wolves inside of you” story.
That doesn't make the employees stalinist, does it.
The issue is that CSAM is not some sort of nebulous, vague idea. It is pervasive and endemic in online communities and if you have any tool that can facilitate the sharing of images and communication with children by adults then it will, inevitably, be used by paedophiles. This isn't a vague conjecture, it is the truth of the matter.
FB Messenger is specifically a problem because of the ready access it provides adults to children.
This sort of imagery is often created for profit - either for the kudos of being the creator of first-generation material or for actual profit in the case of a number of asian abuse rings.
So yes, demand reduction will reduce actual instances of rape and sexual abuse - while there is an argument that nonces will nonce regardless, the encouragement and egging on by others is a significant driver of offending.
There is also the matter that mere possession of these images is also a criminal offence.
Pete Davidson joked that depression is a rich person's condition because it implies you have a life you shouldn't be depressed about. Same with software engineers?
I know mental health issues and suicide attempts correlate much more strongly with folks lower on the socioeconomic ladder, but when I was poor I was too busy to be depressed in the same way I am today. Now my life is far easier, yet also somehow much more depressing.
having grown up extremely poor, I agree with this sentiment.
But it's also more than that. I hate using this word but I think it applies here.
Poor people don't have to the privilege to stop and whine.
- When I was a teenager I had a flat tire and the spare was flat. I knew of a tire shop a few miles down the road so I pulled the tire off my vehicle and walked it the several miles to the shop. The shop was closed because the guy had called in sick. It was another 15 miles to town, so I started the walk. Thankfully someone took pity on me and picked me up after a couple of miles.
- When I first graduated college I didn't have a working vehicle but got a job miles from the house. I would leave around 3am and walk for 5 hours to be there at 8am, then hitch a ride home. I did this until I could afford a bicycle, which I had for about a month before someone stole and I was back to walking.
- I know a woman who recently (w/i the last 2-3 years) was talking about how when her vehicle broke down one night she ended up having to walk 12 miles back into town.
For poor people there's this hard wall where if you stop it's akin to laying down and dying, the results are catastrophic. So you do what you must. People who are not poor often don't understand how it is that someone can't or won't take the time to talk to a therapist about trauma. They can't afford it either in time or money.
I appreciate it, but long-lived branches aren't the problem here.
Let's say you're working on dev, you add two commits, and now you want to merge these to main.
Most people don't know that GitHub has no PR merge method that simply allows you to copy those two commits onto main.
It's literally impossible for you to use GitHub PRs to simply have dev become main.
Here's why:
If you use a merge commit, it will create a merge commit ("The pull request is merged using the --no-ff option.") So dev isn't becoming main; main is becoming something new.
If you use squash and merge, it will rewrite your two commits into a single commit. But you wanted two commits or you would have already done one commit in dev. Again, dev isn't becoming main; main is becoming something new.
If you use rebase and merge, it should then copy your two commits onto main, but in fact, it rewrites them with new commit hashes, it's not a copy. Then, you need to rebase dev back onto main because main is now something new.
I was hoping somebody would chime in on the sustainability of helium for airships.
I'm a total amateur here.
Is there no hope of finding a new source of helium?
Is there any opportunity for airship gasses that are reasonably competitive to helium but have a much more abundant supply? Is helium the only possible such gas (besides hydrogen)? Are competing gases 30% less efficient or 3,000% less?
> Is there no hope of finding a new source of helium?
Not on Earth, or anywhere in the Solar System except the interior of the Sun, as far as I know. Mining the Sun's core for helium is unlikely to be practical any time soon. :-)
> Is there any opportunity for airship gasses that are reasonably competitive to helium but have a much more abundant supply?
No. The problem is weight. More specifically, the weight of the airship in total including the gas inside, compared to the weight of an equal volume of air. So obviously any gas that is as heavy as or heavier than air won't do. And that only leaves, by my count, three possible gases that aren't already in air, that are lighter than air at all. The comparative weights are, roughly speaking:
Hydrogen: 2
Helium: 4
Neon: 20
Air: 29
So the maximum amount of weight available for all the rest of the airship--its structure, engines, passengers, cargo, etc.--would be, roughly speaking:
Hydrogen: 27/29
Helium: 25/29
Neon: 9/29
The hydrogen case is known to be easily doable, but of course it also has the huge downside of flammability.
The helium case is doable, but not easily: once you've done the structure and engines, the weight left over for any kind of payload, i.e., passengers and/or cargo, is not very much.
The neon case is simply not practical: there isn't even enough weight left over for a reasonable structure, let alone engines and payload.
Hm, interesting. Helium-3 would be better than Helium-4 (which is what I assumed in the numbers I gave), its weight is halfway between Helium-4 and Hydrogen gas.
Fusion and fission breeders are expected to create helium to some degree. No idea if it’s even worth mentioning here, but basically we’ll get more by atom manipulation and that’s it.
A lot of crypto people knew he was unscrupulous and opposed him before FTX blew up. There were a lot of signs he was a bad person and the effective altruism thing was B.S.
But, pretty much nobody in crypto expected him to be the wholesale incompetent fraud he ended up being. We thought he was a bad guy, not a blood-chillingly evil moron.
It's nice to see the NYT shift to offer some reasonable coverage on Sam. One of the NYT reporters, David Yaffe-Bellany, is a good friend of Sam, spoke with him regularly even after he was apprehended, and routinely provided rose-colored puff pieces throughout his fall.
Yeah I noticed 60 minutes was running some sort of SBF puff piece yesterday and immediately turned it off. Was trying to eat dinner. I know his ill gotten wealth will be paying for a massive character laundering campaign and so none of this is unexpected. But it’s not going to be filtered out so easily by the naive and largely ignorant public. The news is bought and paid for.
Even the way the title was written. When I first read it, I missed the last word and it seemed to be saying that the crypto community was rooting for the guy
It would be much clearer if it said something like The crypto community calls for SBF’s conviction
That's what the NYT is for: buddy-buddy with the financeers of Wall Street and carrying their water as much as they plausibly can while maintaining the facade as "the paper of record".
It seems that Western society is divided over the question as to whether or not employers have some broader duty of care to their employees beyond the economic arrangement of employment.
If the CEO of a factory had to sell half their maintenance-hungry machines to balance the budget, do they owe it to the sold or retained machines to take a pay cut so they "share in the harm of the layoffs"?
The factory machine example is silly because they are machines and offensive because many people would agree that employees are very much not machines.
> If the CEO of a factory had to sell half their maintenance-hungry machines to balance the budget...
... then they're clearly in dire straits and the company should be looking at any cut they could make including the CEO's compensation. Payment in stock devalues the stock; payment in cash decreases the runway.
I was hoping somebody would pick up what I was trying to put down, which is that there's a fuzzy spectrum between silly examples and a self-evident duty of care between employers and employees.
