It’s not accurate though (see other comments). The one I’m amazed by is the assertion that “ The supermarket pays for everything on its store shelves (except, rarely, for certain new products on a consignment basis in which case it only sales for units actually sold)” which is leaving a lot of money off the table
Supermarkets might pay for the product, but Kellogg’s, Budweiser, etc pay them for shelf space, eye level, end of aisle placement, etc. there is a dozen ways they make money off the sellers. Supermarkets don’t just pay for product as a textbook marketplace
> Supermarkets might pay for the product, but Kellogg’s, Budweiser, etc pay them for shelf space, eye level, end of aisle placement, etc. there is a dozen ways they make money off the sellers.
I don't see how this invalidates the analogy. Brands paying for eye-level placement is the same as 'sponsored products' on Amazon. Any Amazon Seller has a right to do this and Amazon has the right to sell this access. Just like any brand has the right to meet eye-level requirements.
Yes, supermarkets have a store brand. Yes, they may also place store brand items at eye-level at no cost. But! I think there are two key differences:
1) In most cases, supermarkets buy from the existing product manufacturer at wholesale in order to be able to slap their brand on the product and use other cost saving measures (ie: bland, cheaper packaging, etc) to sell the same product at a lower price. In cases where they don't buy from the manufacturer, the copy of the product is likely not covered by a patent or is different enough as to not infringe on the patent/trademark.
2) Many Amazon Sellers are small independent companies, just look at their success stories page [1] to see the extent to which they market to small business owners. These businesses likely can't afford to patent their products and when Amazon decides to copy their product (based off the data they collected [2]), they can't defend themselves and their product effectively.
Not all Amazon brand products are a problem. The biggest issue is the exploitation of companies in a certain 'sweet spot' on its platform. These small businesses have taken on risk to provide a good product that sells well, but aren't big enough to patent the product or hire lawyers.
Maybe Amazon is just a symptom caused by the imbalance of power in the economy right now. Either way, it's unfair and should be fixed. I think separating Amazon "the marketplace" and Amazon "the competing store brand" would help (as long as Amazon "marketplace" sells store data to Amazon "brand name" at the same price it offers everyone else).
A law requiring store brand items to be made from an existing manufacturer in it's "marketplace" would also help. Supermarkets would be mostly unaffected, Amazon would need to a) buy the product from it's Sellers at wholesale volume (like a supermarket) and b) compete based on other merits like faster shipping, customer service, etc.
The problem is facebook is wiping out the alternatives. In Australia there is a decent buy/sell site called Gumtree but its ultimately doomed as facebook marketplace uses its massive pre exsting userbase to wipe it out.
Facebook either buys or crushes all competition which doesn't have billions of dollars to push back.
Of course I won't cease functioning without being able to buy and sell furniture but my life will be worse off than before.
Since the function of the government should be ensuring the best outcome for the majority of the population and what facebook does makes things worse for the majority, it makes sense to take action here.
Blocking domains works right now but what if Facebook register a new domain? Or a thousand new domains? Or they proxy traffic through a site owner's domain? What's needed is a way to block Facebook's privacy invasion regardless of the tech they use. That is unlikely to be a problem solved by tech. It needs enough people, including governments, to tell Facebook they're unhappy with Facebook's activity.
As far as the cross-site tracking goes, they'd actually need to get all the other websites to update the facebook JS code they include, and it would only work until the tracking blockers updated their lists again.
I agree that tech is the wrong place to be solving this problem, but it can work in a rather cludgy way.
Just in case you weren't aware, uMatrix has been deprecated and will receive no further development, including fixes. It still runs fine now, but it may not in the future.
There seem to be several forks, although it doesn't look like there's much consolidation on merging PRs into any specific repo. Hopefully they don't just splinter off and end up fragmented and neglected. :-\
uBlock Origin in advanced mode is gorhill's suggested replacement. If you have never used uMatrix before most likely uBlock Origin is what you should be using, and can easily accomplish the "globally block facebook domains" either via blocklists or manually via the advanced mode.
This argument is so tiresome. It isn’t a radicle idea that people should be able to engage in basic actives like transportation, commerce, communication, etc. without having to give up their rights to safety, privacy, and other basic standards. “If you don’t want to risk getting poisoned, just don’t shop at that multination store”. How about any store should be regulated to provide a minimum level of safety in the things they sell. How about any communication platform be regulated to provide a minimum level of privacy and data protection for private user information.
I read your message a few times, but your concatenation of concepts and words for no apparent reason makes this entirely not understandable. If you're going to make things up, at least explain yourself.
I noticed the same thing on one of their now flagged comments. It's like there's some list of words and metaphors that conspiracy theorists love to employ
If they're trying to make a legitimate point, then it's been completely lost in all the waffle in the rest of the sentence.
This may just be to discourage you from doing it. I've been on a number of hiring committees, and job hopping was never discussed as a negative. By the time you've been on the job for 1.5 years, chances are the hiring manager and recruiter have both moved on.
Someone mentioned "At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee"...
I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days.
I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month.
Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable.
Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
It definitely changes the bar for me. If I see someone has a long string of 1-2 year jobs on their resume, the conversation changes from:
"Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to
"Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?"
It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
I was job hopping in Amsterdam where the market is saturated by VC-backed SaaS startups. The churn rate was insane. Many of the teams I worked on have churned so much not one member is still there I worked with - in a space of 18-24 months (this was pre-COVID).
It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already!
At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone.
Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer.
There was no sense of loyalty on either side.
The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis.
Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
Personally I consider it a yellow flag when hiring. It could be a sign that they are likely to hop to the next thing and not worth investing in, or it could just be that they are looking for the right place to settle in. I will generally ask about their experiences and what they are looking for to try to discern which camp they may be in.
As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
I’m more talking about less than or equal to 12 months. It takes months of investment of my company to train a new hire. At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee and the investment is starting to see returns.
Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
Also, I'm hired to do a job. Around 1-2 year long job. I finish it and move on to what excites me next. My best hiring/HR managers and recruiters understand this, it makes our cooperation a bliss.
As a former recruiter of 6 years... Most companies do not care. If you can do the job and pass their interview process they will make you an offer. I very rarely had anyone look down on "job hoppers" and if they did it would be when someone had 4-7 six month stints in a row. Normally those people would just say those were contract gigs and then the company wouldnt care.
In the summer of my junior year at undergrad engineering school I attended a "career accelerator" course, a week long series of lectures from entrepreneurs and practicing engineers. One gentleman working for a multinational industrial corporation said specifically he recommends people get a new job every two years. He said he was on track to become CEO of this multinational company. Sometimes a new job can be found in the organization you work already.
Anchoring bias is a better name for this flaw. Either way, the handful of examples provided here are.. random? This post has poor depth and breadth, akin to a listicle
I'm searching for an intro to miniKanren that's also an intro to logic programming. Ive never used datalog, clojure, or others. The main miniKanren website assumes preexisting Scheme / logic programming knowledge
I don't think you necessarily need much scheme knowledge to start learning minikanren. You might in order to read the implementation. There are versions out there in most languages
Seconding The Reasoned Schemer for learning miniKanren. It's a complete tutorial compared to most you'll find online that either quickly go from "here's how to start" to "now here's us generating lisp functions from specifications" or never move past the "here's how to start" portion.
And like all the Schemer books, it's a pretty pleasant and easy read. You can go through a chapter sans computer and then revisit it with the computer (I read it while traveling so half the time I was reading, my computer wasn't readily available).
This isn't (or wasn't) a review process for scholarship. Oodles of people within Google (even within Brain) have gone through this process and it seems to have always been the case that it just checks for things like PR problems, IP leaks, etc.
Further, she claims that initially she was not allowed to even see the contents of the criticisms, only that the paper needed to be withdrawn.
Let's say you were working on a feature. At the 11th hour, just before it hit production, you get an email telling you to revert everything and scrap the release. Apparently somebody in the company thought it had problems but they won't tell you the problems. Then after prying you do get to see the criticisms and they look like ordinary stuff that is easily addressed in code review rather than fundamental issues. They still won't tell you who made the critiques. Would you be upset?
Because this isn't peer review — or at least, it's not meant to be (per the top-level comment). That's the whole issue, really: there already exists a peer review process to ensure the paper's academic rigor, so why is Google hiding behind a claim of the necessity of anonymity for a corporate (not academic) process?
Fro my understanding, this paper had already passed peer review and been accepted. Google management then decided to block the publication using the IP review process.
Please go read the link first. Jeff clearly states that Google has a review protocol for journal submission which requires a two weeks internal review period.
Timnit shared the paper a day before the publication deadline, ie, no time for internal review, and someone with a fat finger apparently approved it for submission without the required review.
That's not under dispute. What's under dispute is:
1) Is the review protocol that requires a two-week review period a peer review process intended to maintain scientific rigor, or an internal controls process intended to prevent unwanted disclosure of trade secrets, PII, etc.?
Repeating the comment at the very top of the thread:
> Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal company IP (eg. details about datasets, details about google compute infra) does not leak to the public, and maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing more.
If it's not a scientific peer review process, arguments about why scientific peer review is generally anonymous are irrelevant, just like arguments about why, say, code review is generally not anonymous would also be irrelevant. It's a different kind of review process from both of those.
2) In practice, is the two-week review period actually expected / enforced? Other Googlers, including people in her organization, are saying that the two week requirement is a guideline, not a hard rule, and submissions on short notice are regularly accepted without complaint:
(I don't work for Google, but I work for another very IP-leak-sensitive employer that does ML stuff, and we have a two-week review period on publications. The two-week rule exists for the purpose of not causing last-minute work for people, but if you miss it, it's totally permissible to bug folks to get it approved, and if they do, it's not considered "someone with a fat finger." It certainly doesn't exist for the purpose of peer review - it's assumed that the venue you're submitting to will do review, and I think everyone understands that someone from your own employer isn't going to be a fair peer reviewer anyway. There is a "technical reviewer" of your choice, but basically they just make sure you're not embarrassing yourself and the company, and there's no requirement for how deeply they review. I think I've gone through the process twice and missed the deadlines both times.)
So, if this "rule" exists on paper, but only exists in practice for her, then this is the textbook definition of unfairness.
Papers differ. A short, straightforward, low-impact paper on a non-controversial topic could probably be reviewed in a glance or even rubberstamped. A long, complex, high-impact paper on a controversial topic (or worse, a paper with a fundamental conflict of interest) might take a long time and definitely can't be rubberstamped. The paper at question seems to fall under the latter category? It's like skipping a stop sign; 99 times you do it in your neighborhood with no one around and there are no consequences whatsoever, but that one time you do it in downtown with a cop parked right around the corner and you get a ticket.
I think the "skipping a stop sign" analogy doesn't quite work because there was someone around - someone had to approve it, and furthermore, the fact of the late submission and shortened approval is recorded in the review system. If they wanted to tell people "Hey, in the future, don't do that," they could. There'd be more of an argument there if the common case was that, say, people ignored the system and submitted anyway and hoped nobody would notice.
(... Also, comparing this rule to our overpoliced society where everyone commits some sort of crime and the police just choose who they go after kind of reinforces my point about unfairness. Sure, it may have been strategically wrong for her to not do everything by the book, but if so, it's very interesting that the in-house ethicist has to play by all the rules to not get fired and the practitioners can safely skip them.)
Anyway, the culpability for rubber-stamping this paper is on the person who rubber-stamped it, given that short approvals are commonplace. Saying "You should have known that this approval didn't really count, so it's your fault for going through the normal process and not realizing it should have been abnormal" is nonsense. That's literally the job of the reviewer, and if the reviewer can't do that, someone else needs to fulfill that role. At worst, if they told her on day one "Your job is publishing high-impact papers with fundamental conflicts of interest with the company, so everything needs detailed review from X in addition to the usual process," that would be different. But they didn't. Better yet, they could have flagged her in the publication review system as needing extra review. There were lots of options available to Google if they weren't trying to make up rules after the fact to censor a researcher.
> Anyway, the culpability for rubber-stamping this paper is on the person who rubber-stamped it, given that short approvals are commonplace. Saying "You should have known that this approval didn't really count, so it's your fault for going through the normal process and not realizing it should have been abnormal" is nonsense. That's literally the job of the reviewer, and if the reviewer can't do that, someone else needs to fulfill that role.
This is key, and I don't see it being mentioned as much in other comments. It was approved.
Supermarkets might pay for the product, but Kellogg’s, Budweiser, etc pay them for shelf space, eye level, end of aisle placement, etc. there is a dozen ways they make money off the sellers. Supermarkets don’t just pay for product as a textbook marketplace