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I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.

The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.


> I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.

One thing we will find out - did they return on their own, or did they return because of persistent sales calls from FB and YT? Those are the part of the cuts - Twitter lost some very high profile relationships with brands that spend big. And it's reach/scale rarely justified dedicated campaigns - I'm sure most agencies are happy to not spend 20% of their time on 5% of their reach, compared to G and Meta.


the most recent advertiser exodus from youtube was mostly stemmed because youtube put in significant work to increase their content moderation and improve brand safety - that was when all your favourite edgy youtubers started complaining about having their videos demonetized.


As that financial advertiser said the problem with Twitter is that the performance and ROI of their campaigns has plummeted. That has nothing to do with recession and it's nothing like Youtube/Facebook which had external and temporary factors.

It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.


Does it though? The ad engine was either in place already or it wasn’t. There shouldn’t be a shift in performance of the engine due to people being let go.


Machine learning models require regular retraining.

And given that there is a code freeze at the moment it's quite likely no updates are going out.


Whats the usual cadence? It’s only been a few weeks. I would hope that it would be mostly automated, to last a few cycles more.


Bingo. The problem is every modern recession seems to be topped by an LBO, and Twitter is this season’s RJR-Nabisco / Harrah’s.


> The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.

Is this true? I've seen a lot of big budget ad investment from companies whose stocks have been tanking all year. It almost seems like they're trying to dig themselves out of a hole with marketing.


If you have rename installed, just run

    rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *


There are several programs called rename with different argument conventions.


As the plane is headed down, it increases its speed. At a certain point, due to aerodynamic forces, pilots cannot stabilize the plane with the stabilizer trim wheel in the cockpit. The situation is unrecoverable.

This is explained here: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...


Another example is the First Step Act that has been signed Dec 21 last year. It is being considered especially important for poor and black people.


To add, there's not much inclusivity in a company of single female-only product, in a market of overwhelmingly female-oriented products. Doesn't that fit into "majority" category?

Has there been any inovation for men toys?


> a market of overwhelmingly female-oriented products

What market are you talking about? This claim seems pretty dubious.

> Has there been any inovation for men toys?

See: CES.


The posting literally describes sex toys for men at CES being displayed. There have also been numerous sex toys over the years by multiple partners and companies. I'm not sure why the award was withdrawn, however none of the options make CES look good.


The presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...

Some good points. The proper scientific answer is a peer-review, not a suspension.

When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics.


As far as I can read, the author makes points based on the data he analysed. The jabs at gender studies near the end were somewhat misplaced in my opinion but they do not contain the core message.

It should be easy enough for someone opposing this man's view to take the dataset presented about and disprove the conclusions made.

Claiming statistics like "amount of citations at time of hiring" are offensive is by no means helping anyone's case.

I hope the author will be reinstated quickly because I see no reason to act revenge upon him just because one disagrees with their conclusions from a statistical analysis. This is exactly what the peer reviewed system should prevent.


> The jabs at gender studies near the end were somewhat misplaced in my opinion

Maybe, maybe not. I have several female friends who went on to study soft sciences and regret it. Some say this out loud, some give non-verbal clues. They clearly prefer their daughters to choose STEM careers. The paradox here is that these kids are just not interested in STEM that much, just as my friends themselves are not. They treat STEM as a way of making money, not something interesting to discover. If you don't have this internal curiosity in you, it's hard to pass it on to your kids.


Yeah, I agree - and furthermore, it's just difficult to impossible to prevail in STEM careers if you're not internally interested as you say.


From the last slide, "Conclusions":

> Physics is not sexist against women. However truth does not matter, because it’s part of a political battle coming from outside. Not clear who will win.

So why poke that bear? You know it'll maul you if it notices you.

> PS: many told me “don’t speak, it’s dangerous”. As a student, I wrote that weak-scale SUSY is not right, and I survived. Hope to see you again.

Oh yeah, but being perceived as a crank in your specialized field is nowhere near as dangerous as alerting the pitchfork crowd. I don't think he'll survive that, he just painted a target on his whole field. It'll be Damore 2.0.

EDIT:

> When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics.

Yes; to quote dlss[0], "The political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.". Science should avoid it as much as possible.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12699503


This is an unfair description of the content. Some good points, interesting statistics, but some of the slide would belong more in some obscure subreddit than in a scientific conference.

"I said Thoughtcrime according to Minister of Truth and PC Thought Police."

"It’s blind human biology practiced as in the plains of Africa thousands of years ago."

What the hell?


> "I said Thoughtcrime according to Minister of Truth and PC Thought Police."

Judging by the reaction, he's not wrong (and given a similar reaction to Damore's memo, which was written in a much "nicer" style, this statement wasn't the cause of the reaction - i.e. it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy).


English is clearly not his first language. I'd forgive the awkward poeticism.


It's not mine either, but I know where this kind of rhetoric comes from.

I don't mean to belittle his work. But his point would come across much clearly without the last few slides. Let's not make this an idealogical issue!


Perhaps I am just less attuned to evil muses, but I think you might be reading too much into his words.


>Science needs an environment free of politics.

I find this sentiment weird. Science is, to me, inherently political. As I have noted before, it's interesting how people will claim anything they don't like is "political"-> bad. You probably don't go around telling off scientists acknowledging climate change for being political, after all.


You know that politics/money influences science when studies get published (or don't), get grants (or don't) based on whether the results match the interests of whoever wants to influence the outcome. This is inherently bad and it's weird to me you challenge that. Scientists acknowledging the climate change do just that - they publish the studies based on what's actually going on, not what someone wants to see.


> Science needs an environment free of politics.

That's unrealistically idealistic. Science depends on things like funding, ability to voice unpopular opinions and to research them etc. These are all influenced (if not entirely determined) by the zeitgeist and science doesn't exist independently of that.

Two fronts. Firstly, people will be prevented from exploring avenues that don't really fit into the zeitgeist. Secondly, people won't be interested, inclined or knowledgeable about ideas outside the zeitgeist to sufficiently explore them.


In the western world, being able to voice unpopular opinions is treated as a given, a baseline, a default state (and it is, since it's a fundamental part of western democracies). The "politics" here have negative impact on the ability to explore avenues outside the zeitgeist.


I'm not sure about that anymore (atleast in practice). There's a lot of subtle speech policing that happens especially in academic circles and there's some amount of counter movements too (e.g. https://heterodoxacademy.org/)


What is the "western world"? Does it include Spain, Italy, and Germany during their respective dictatorships? Does it include East Germany during Soviet control?

Or, let's consider only western democracies.

Does that include Volksverhetzung in modern Germany?

Does it include the US during the various anti-socialist and anti-communist movements? Or those prosecuted under the Sedition Act of 1918, like when Debs was jailed for speaking out against US involvement in WWI?

Nor is the US alone of the western democracies in prosecuting people for their seditious acts of speaking out against the government.

And then there are the western democracies which have (or had) laws against blasphemous libel. Was Canada not part of the western world in 1935 when Rahard was found guilty of saying things "calculated and intended to insult the feelings and the deepest religious convictions of the great majority of the persons amongst whom we live"?

The historical evidence says that your views - that the ability to 'voice unpopular opinions' - is not a fundamental part of the western world, nor even a fundamental part of western democracy.

Important? Certainly. Influential? Yes. But fundamental and a default state? No, I don't think so.


> Some good points.

Which do you think are good points specifically? I am struggling to find them myself.

It's very hard to engage with your comment without knowing exactly what your argument(s) are.


Essentially every descriptive claim he presented is sensible and well-evidenced.


I think I disagree with this. To take a look at the first few points:

* I don't follow why the distribution of women in different fields "Does not look discrimination". Seems to me it could be adequately explained by either M, C, or a combination of both, theories

* I find the correlation between % of women in STEM/Theory and Gender Equality Index unconvincing for a few reasons. One is that there are regional + cultural correlations between countries that, unaccounted for, undermines the regression somewhat. The RHS plot also looks like it's influenced a lot by a few high leverage points on the right hand side.

* I have no idea how you get to "it’s merit, not sexism." from "M more cited than F, equally by M and F". To think that sexism operates only through the action of misogynist men is a naive and unhelpful view of the world. There are plenty of alternative, structural reasons that could cause a trend like this. To take one example, if women leave the field in greater numbers or earlier in their career than men, they could not present their findings at conferences or promote their papers in ways that would boost citations.

I know it's hard to fully engage with a talk when you just have the slides, but I think even with full generosity of interpretation, the points raised here are still lazy, weak points.

Furthermore, data is a tool. A very useful tool, but one among many. When we reach for data alone, while giving no weight at all to the lived experiences of our female friends and colleagues, we are throwing away real, useful information. This talk fails to really acknowledge any points beyond the bibliometric data. If you're really interested in getting to the truth, with no agenda, using only one limited source of information is a really poor way to do it.


>while giving no weight at all to the lived experiences of our female friends and colleagues

i've been seeing this 'lived experience' nonsense for years. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence, has everybody forgotten this?


while I agree there are some real arguments, this is not what I would call a scientific presentation. It starts acceptable, but page 19, 22 are just unnecessary and have a connotation. Page 24 seems a bit conspiracy-theory-like. The comic on page 25...that's not scientific. It frames your opponents as angry grown-ups denying young girls the chance to shine in science!

I think on the other pages are are also phrases and formulations that don't have a phrase in scientific presentations. CERN is full of smart people and they will find a way to deal with this issue.


Thanks a lot for the presentation, I heard about this this morning and was wondering about the content.

To my ex-physicist, ex-CERN, the presentation looks good after a quick read. There are numbers (nubs are good), graphs (graphs are good) and expectation of statistics which make sense (as opposed to a lot of "studies").

I now expect the adversaries to burn it on the stake by refuting one by one the slides.

Oh well, at least this is what is done in science. CERN completely fucked up here, the atmosphere must have changed in the 20 years I was there last.

This is really a shame and simply shows the incapacity of some grouos to discuss FACTS.


Huh? What are the good points? It's very cringey presentation!

First slides trying to sound sciency about a political topic. You can't use statistics as objective tool for political decisions - the questions you ask are already biased, see for example slide "% of women in theory". There is (super weak) negative correlation between gender index and women in fundamental theory. So what? If you chose a different subfield it might come out differently! Cherry picking at its best. "I'm evidence-based" lol, the fake paper about chocolate helping weight-loss is as well!


Statistics is probably the most valuable tool for creating policy, the aim of politics. What else do you propose we use to make decisions about interfering with stochastic processes over diverse populations?


> The proper scientific answer is a peer-review,

Not necessarily. This can be viewed as a case of vaccines-cause-autism. The proper scientific answer there is to prevent endless repetition of the same boring, already sufficiently disproven, 'good points'.

His observations/facts/data can be explained in a number of different ways, if you take into account that there are sociological factors to consider. Even in physics just taking the data 'as is' is not acceptable: you need to check whether the data is reasonable. In these case there are huge questions to be answered: why do women publish fewer papers? Why do they get cited less? If the answer is 'because of sexism', then the argument presented by this physicist is a circular argument.


Guess this is what they mean when they say we are in a "post truth world".


No, this is what they mean when they say "everything is political".

It's a way to justify the use of power to silence criticism. Always, always, always that is the purpose of the phrase, and this is a perfect example.


> Science needs an environment free of politics.

I believe if he'd given the presentation, minus his "cultural marxism", it would have been ok. IMHO he brought this on himself by bringing in politics.


Sony offers to block stolen PlayStations. It's a similar case - you may buy a used item that may suddenly stop working. Moreover, Sony does cooperate with authorities re locating those devices. You may have a surprising visit.


Transformer oil is there primary for cooling and secondary for corrosion resistance. When you see transformer burning, it's the oil inside. Larger transformers cycle oil through pipes visible outside.

In the Czech Republic (or at least in some parts) pole numbers and their positions are shared with emergency services. If you are disoriented, reading the number identifies your exact position. Works for railway crossings as well.

Update: typos


While cleaner, technically geothermal energy is not renewable. After couple of years the area is cooled down and efficiency drops. For example, one project planned in central Europe is expected to last only 15 years. Then re-drilling is necessary or leaving the drill to re-charge. Among other risks, contamination of underground water and earthquakes are commonly mentioned.


Agreed, geothermal in that form is not a good option. They (we) need to come up with a better, more sustainable technology. If found, then geothermal holds the promise of providing all the energy we might need (and satisfy a certain amount of greed as well).


This myth is even in Python source code[1]

  However, since the indirect jump instruction is shared
  by all opcodes, the CPU will have a hard time making
  the right prediction for where to jump next (actually,
  it will be always wrong except in the uncommon case of
  a sequence of several identical opcodes).
[1] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/ff8ad0a576c6cf375e682...


It seems likely that Python is targeting a wider field than just the latest few generations of desktop/server CPUs.


I think that this might just be because that code is a bit older now.

I actually have to thank the documentation there for explaining all the flags you need to turn on GCC to get the computed goto to work. By default gcc's optimizer will mess things up and I would have never figured out the flags by myself to be able to run my benchmarks


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