> If you didn't like working with computers, then you probably made the wrong choice.
This doesn't match what I have seen in other industries. Many auto mechanics I know drive old Buicks or Ford's with the 4.6l v8 because the cars are reliable and the last thing they want to do on a day off is have to work on their own car. I know a few people in other trades like plumbers, electricians, and chefs and the pattern holds pretty well for them as well.
You can enjoy working with computers and also enjoy not working in your personal time.
Exactly this. I love writing code and solving problems. In my 20s and very early 30s I worked a lot of long hours and tried my best to always be learning new things and upskilling but it's never ending. It's hard sometimes to not look back and think about the hours I spent on code instead of building stronger friendships and relationships.
Every career path presents you with some version of this opportunity cost dilemma. The good news is you are not stuck - you can recalibrate to allow more of what you now know you want, while still maintaining a grip on the part of the job/career/enterprise that you actually excel at, and jettisoning the rest.
That really makes sense though if you think about it. When a company has an annual revenue that would put them around the 43rd largest country by GDP, they could very well begin acting more like a state. States spy and states claim to be the arbiters of truth.
Keep the huge, complex business logic on the server whenever possible.
That doesn't work for webapps that are effectively entirely based on client side reactivity like Figma, though the list of projects that need to work like that is extremely low. Even for those style of apps I do wonder how far something like Phoenix LiveView might go towards the end goal.
I expect the GP was referring to missing the boat in responding to the iPhone after it swept away Windows Mobile.
Microsoft was late to respond, eventually bought Danger and released the Kin phone before cancelling it within weeks, and only released Windows Phone in 2010 a solid 3 years after the iPhone release.
Windows Phone was actually pretty nice to use, but they were already too late to the scene and didn't have a chance to steal ground from iPhone or android who already had solid app ecosystems.
That still isn't missing the boat. The pivot to the improved UI in Windows Mobile 6.5, the last of the old school Windows CE based releases, and skins by OEMs like HTC was IIRC in response to the iPhone's successful UI innovations.
And let's not forget that Google specifically interfered with access to their services on Windows Phone to hamstring it.
Its interesting to see this valid argument raised against this use of AI to identify breast cancer. The lack of control groups is one of the more common concerns raised related to vaccines as well, the argument lands like a lead balloon there.
Because it's generally unethical to not give someone a treatment known already to be safe and effective. Studies of new vaccines where there is not an existing vaccine _do_ use placebo controls. Heck, my son got placebo during moderna's pediatric covid vaccine trial (to our frustration. grin.)
Subsequent trials generally compare against the best known current treatment as the control instead.
This study has no such concerns. It's ethical to include images of non-cancerous breast tissue. The things are not comparable.
The covid vaccines were a whole different beast, though interesting case studies they were done under emergency authorization and didn't follow standard protocols.
Vaccine studies today almost always use a previously approved vaccine as the "control" group. That isn't a true control and if you walk back the chain of approvals you'd be hard pressed to find a starting point that did use proper control groups.
Anyway, my point here wasn't to directly debate vaccines themselves, only to point out that its interest to me as someone without a career in health to see the same effective argument used in two different scenarios with drastically different common responses.
Right, but the people making the argument about vaccines don't understand the principles, because they're actually the same!
1) a double blind RCT with a placebo control is a very good way to understand the effectiveness of a treatment.
2) it's not always ethical to do that, because if you have an effective treatment, you must use it.
Even without a placebo control you can still estimate both FN and FPs through careful study design, it's just harder and has more potential sources of error. A retrospective study is the usual approach. Here, the problem is they only included true positives in the retrospective study, so they missed the opportunity to measure false positives.
And the problem with -that- is that it's very easy to have zero false negatives if you always say " it's positive". Almost every diagnostic instrument has something we call a receiver operating curve that trades off false positives for false negatives by changing the sensitivity for where you decide something is a positive. By omitting the false negatives, they present a very incomplete picture of the diagnostic capabilities.
(In medicine you will often see the terms "sensitivity" and "selectivity" for how many TPs you detect and how many TNs you call negative. It's all part of the same type of characterization.)
The two points you raise with regards to why vaccine or similar studies may be treat special, it doesn't replace the loss of data when a double blind study with a control or make estimates based on modelling indicate anything more than correlation.
We may broadly agree that submitting a control group to a placebo treatment for a particular disease is immoral, but that doesn't mean such a study isn't necessary to prove out the efficacy or safety of the treatment. As for modelling, for example trying to estimate FN and FP, it can only ever indicate correlation at best and will never indicate likely causation.
But it's not. You can do an RCT of the new treatment vs the old treatment. You won't get a direct measure of its absolute efficacy but you will know if it's superior/ non-inferior to the best known thing. And then you can use observational techniques to estimate the absolute values. That's exactly what you would do if you wanted to develop, say, a new flu vaccine that you thought would outperform current vaccines. You get the most important information: whether or not we should switch to the new one.
If you have a new vaccine for a disease for which there is no existing vaccine you do a standard placebo controlled RCT which gives you a direct, high quality measurement of efficacy and side effects.
> Its interesting to see this valid argument raised against this use of AI to identify breast cancer. The lack of control groups is one of the more common concerns raised related to vaccines as well, the argument lands like a lead balloon there.
Not just vaccines, in each study on the effectiveness of a drug, especially when dealing with potentially life-threatening conditions, the same question is posed. From[0]:
. . . ethical guidance permit the use of placebo controls in randomized trials when scientifically indicated in four cases: (1) when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition under study; (2) when withholding treatment poses negligible risks to participants; (3) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and withholding treatment does not pose a risk of serious harm to participants; and, more controversially, (4) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and the research is intended to develop interventions that can be implemented in the population from which trial participants are drawn, and the trial does not require participants to forgo treatment they would otherwise receive.
Vaccine studies use a different experimental design known as “longitudinal,” meaning they follow people over time. This study did not do that. It’s still a valid design, just limited in what it tells us.
The comments here surprise me a bit. The common thread so far seems to be a general fear of US based companies, but how is that relates to the article?
Cloudflare's post is pretty boring here in that regard. They dig into how BGP works and propose that similar leaks seem common for the Venezuelan ISP in question.
Sure they could be wrong or even actively hiding the truth of what happened here, but the article mentions nothing of Cloudflare being involved in the action and they're describing a networking standard by pointing to publicly available BGP log data.
What am I missing here that everyone else seemed to zero in on?
I don't think this article provides any evidence of anything to be scared of.
That said, based on what we know already, there is no reason to take everything is this article at face value necessarily.
Firstly, if anybody isn't aware of the history of Stuxnet, it's worth reading, because otherwise you'd underestimate the government's ability to use 0-days by an order of magnitude (we're talking full custom-written multi-month hacking projects with root-kits and custom fake drivers delivered successfully to an airgapped system, source wikipedia). Also worth learning about Dual EC DRBG debacle.
Secondly am immediate friend of mine worked at a FANG company that routinely sent a firehose of all sorts of things matching all sorts of filters directly to governments. In fact many ISPS have back-doors built in and that's not really disputed (wikipedia: room641A).
So the question to ask yourself is -- if this was a deliberate interaction that cloudfare was required to participate in via a warrant, would they legally even be allowed to publish a blog post that contradicted this?
So I think that is probably the default attitude of skepticism you are seeing, which in my opinion is a good default. Plus the primary claim of this article "Look it wasn't 1 routing issue, it's been happening for even longer! Therefore nothing to look at here!" seems really weak.
> So the question to ask yourself is -- if this was a deliberate interaction that cloudfare was required to participate in via a warrant, would they legally even be allowed to publish a blog post that contradicted this?
So you're proposing they could be in a situation where they can either:
1. Publish an untruthful blog post, relying on public data available from multiple parties, trying to somehow explain it all while avoiding talking about their involvement in a way that would get them in PR, legal or political hot water; or
2. Publish nothing.
And they chose #1?
The only way #1 makes any sense at all is if some greater consequence to not publishing was put in place. But that would be more something like "the US gov essentially forced Cloudflare to write this" than "Cloudflare was part of this".
Unless they were part of this, _and_ the government forced them to write a post saying they're _not_ part of it and...
For my money: this is something in the news making it a good marketing opportunity which is ultimately what the blog is--trying to market Cloudflare and the brand to technical crowds.
For me number 1 is difficult basically because of who runs Cloudflare. I trust Matthew Prince because I find him to be: consistent and credible.
I work in go to market, specifically for businesses like Cloudflare, I can and have said "this real world situation is going to have resonance for the next 5-10 days, what is the lowest cost blog post you could publish that is related?" - because I only manage teams who produce content that is genuinely, at some level, value add or interesting to my target market, you would end up with a blog post exactly like this. In fact, this blog post is doing that job, here we are, cloudflare users, discussing cloudflare.
It becomes nuanced doesn't it? First thing is: to trust him fully is to understand what it means to trust him... that he knows his business well enough that he can intuitively feel things are wrong. That comes from not being checked out, so: he knows who is in his company and why, he knows the types of projects happening in his business and why, he has easy levers to gain real time information when something feels wrong, and - he monitors his business correctly. I trust Matthew because I know him, so I believe all those things are true. The final part is that trust is also about knowing that mistakes happen, and that they are being: sought out, addressed and owned. So when I say I trust him, it's because I believe everything aforementioned - it makes your scenario safe, at least to me.
> "Look it wasn't 1 routing issue, it's been happening for even longer! Therefore nothing to look at here!" seems really weak.
It's actually really strong since it implies that there's no real time-based correlation with the recent action in Caracas. Especially as the purported correlation was rather weak to begin with.
It's even older than Stuxnet, but either Dish Network (Echostar) or DirectTV did something similar in the early 2000's/late 90's.
They were having a lot of trouble with pirate receivers, so they added small chunks of code to normal device updates and this went on over a period of weeks/months. On the final update, it stitched all those bits of code together and every receiver that wasn't a legitimate one displayed the message "GAME OVER" on the screen and stopped working.
Obvs it was a long time ago so forgive me if I get some details wrong.
I looked at this a couple days ago and my thoughts were basically the same as Cloudflare's. It looks like a misconfiguration - one that's easy to make and isn't terribly uncommon. I can't rule out it wasn't an attack, but absent some other evidence, I don't see any reason to believe it was one.
That said, looking at their Cloudflare radar page now for AS8048, I don't recall there being any other BGP route leaks listed there for December from AS8048 and I definitely don't recall there being any BGP origin hijacks listed. The latter is something rather different from a route leak - that looks like someone blackholing some of CANTV's IPs.
I don't think I somehow just missed that since I definitely looked at CANTV's historical behavior to see if anything they did was unusual and that would have been one of the first things I checked, but perhaps they updated radar with data from other collectors or re-ran anomaly detection on historical data.
Ah yes, and we're back into "but my buddy told me " if you have to say that then your story just isn't worth saying or hearing and you should reconsider how impervious you are to conspiratorial thinking
The one thing they relied on "my buddy told me" for is actually not really in dispute as they say. Between CALEA, the Snowden leaks, and the earlier stuff (like the beamsplitters in Room 641A), we have known clearly based on a number of public and verifiable sources that the US government has its fingers deeply into the data streams that flow through US companies. This is a reasonable inference even absent all of this information.
Now ... I don't think any of this actually supports the parent comment's implication that Cloudflare took some anti-Venezuela action at the request of the US government, just that your criticism is kinda unfounded.
I share your view - how does this article imply US companies and/or government involvement? If there were such involvement what aspect of BGP gives the US entities more ability to carry this out vs other nefarious actors? I ask this sincerely knowing almost nothing about BGP and wanting to learn...
You may have missed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504963 a few days ago where this same anomaly was discussed and American government involvement was directly implied by the article.
The top comment of that thread points out exactly the same thing this Cloudflare article does; that there doesn't really seem to be be any indication this was anything nefarious.
Probably because most people only read headlines (and maybe 3 paragraphs) combined with the fact that the US has a long history of doing what people are condemning them for, even if this particular instance probably wasn't a case of such behavior. Especially considering how the general sentiment towards the US has gotten bitter with constant threads of invasion of Denmark and Canada by their government.
Or it's just Russian and China socket accounts? Who knows...
There was another post a few days ago that suggested a connection between the American invasion of Venezuela and the BGP anomaly: https://loworbitsecurity.com/radar/radar16/
Personally, I don't think the Americans would bother hide their attack and make it look like an accident under the current regime. Trump would announce the CIA/NSA/FBI/whatever did the Greatest Attack, and Amazing Attack, to Completely Control and break the Weak Government of Venezuela to Rescue Their Oil. I'll believe the "it was just a misconfiguration" explanation for now.
I think it only makes sense that people start fearing the influence of American companies given the current developments. When America is in the news, it's either threatening someone, pulling out of cooperative efforts, or delivering on a previous threat. That's bound to derail discussions whenever American companies are involved and it'll only get worse with the way things are developing.
That's what I find interesting about the billionaire elite standing behind el presidente, like, sooner or later he'll be gone and you guys -and your companies- won't. There's been no more compelling argument to actually overtax the rich to give to the masses than the last 13 months.
Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.
That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
Food pyramid was taught when I was in school, but that was before 2011 (as mentioned by another commenter) my own children are in school now and their school lunches align with more modern ideas (veggies and proteins). Certainly could still be improved but I recognize the cost, scale, delivery constraints, plus allergy considerations makes this non-trivial.
When people say that SNAP (food stamps) should "only be able to buy healthy foods", they have to be reminded what the government considers to be healthy and just importantly, what the government considers to be unhealthy. Since SNAP is a government program, it almost certainly would use government guidelines on what is healthy.
I often hear that argument raised in response to the idea of SNAP covering things like sugary drinks and foods. I'm not sure how SNAP could follow guidelines and also pay for sugary drinks or candy (if those claims are accurate).
When I was buying lithium ion cells a few years ago for a custom off-grid battery build, CATL cells had the best reviews and testing results around.
They were founded in 2011 as a spin-off from ATL, itself founded in 1999 by a Chinese billionaire (Robin Zeng). They definitely didn't pop up out of nowhere.
I've not seen a correlation between automation and wealth, though there is an extremely string correlation between energy use and wealth.
I don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example).
This doesn't match what I have seen in other industries. Many auto mechanics I know drive old Buicks or Ford's with the 4.6l v8 because the cars are reliable and the last thing they want to do on a day off is have to work on their own car. I know a few people in other trades like plumbers, electricians, and chefs and the pattern holds pretty well for them as well.
You can enjoy working with computers and also enjoy not working in your personal time.
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