SALT LAKE CITY | Friday, 16 November 2018 |
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced changes to the recommendation process for young missionary candidates. These expanded opportunities will allow more young people to serve as missionaries in various capacities that meet their personal needs or circumstances.
If you're a Plex user who has stuck with the free tier of the media library streaming service to date, this might finally be the day you convert to paid: the company is offering a rare 25% discount on its lifetime Plex Pass, bringing the cost down to just $90. That's the same price you'd pay for 18 months on the monthly ($4.99) plan, and for a little over two years at the annual rate ($39.99).
Read MorePlex is offering a rare 25% discount on a lifetime Plex Pass (new subscribers only) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
The NY Times has published a long piece about how Facebook has responded (and failed to respond) to various crises over the past three years: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis. It does not paint a very flattering portrait of the company. This part is particularly damning (italics mine):
When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.
And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.
While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
Are you fucking kidding me? Facebook paid to promote the right-wing & anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros pays protestors? Shame on you, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the rest of Facebook leadership team. Legitimizing this garbage actively hurts our democracy. On Twitter, The Guardian’s senior tech reporter Julia Carrie Wong gets at what is so wrong and different about this behavior:
There’s something about this Soros story that feels significantly different than the usual Facebook scandal. Most recent negative Facebook stories are issues relating to challenges of scale and a tendency toward passivity.
Facebook’s standard playbook is to admit that they made a mistake by being slow to react, remind us of their good intentions, then promise to do better. It’s the aw geez who woulda thought in the dorm room that we would have to deal with all these tricky issues defense.
This has been very effective for a company that still gets the benefit of the doubt. No one would ever suggest that Facebook *wanted* to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya or lynchings in rural Indian villages. They just were in a little over their heads.
But this Soros thing is different. This is no passive failure. It’s a malevolent action taken against groups who criticize Facebook for things that Facebook admits it has failed at. It takes advantage of and contributes to the most poisonous aspects of our public discourse.
It makes you wonder if the “ah geez” thing has just been an act all along. Mike Monteiro, who speaks and writes about ethics in the design profession, is surprised that Facebook’s employees haven’t spoken out more.
Tags: Facebook George Soros Mike Monteiro politicsWhat surprises me is that Facebook employees are still at their desks after finding that their company was actively attempting to discredit activists. No doubt some of them are shook. No doubt some of them will make public statements against their company’s policy. And those are needed. No doubt there will be internal spirited conversations within the company. And those are needed as well. But there won’t be a walk-out. I say this hours after the article was released. But I doubt that I’ll have to come back to this paragraph and revise it. I wish I wasn’t so sure of that. But I am.
Dan Jones😭
Actually, I don't use either of those features, but I'm still annoyed they might be removed.
Tasker is a fantastic app for tech enthusiasts. It allows you to automate almost anything on your phone, and it’s fully customizable and very powerful.
Unfortunately, it’s likely that the app will soon be less powerful. Thanks to Google’s changes to the Play Store’s rules, apps can no longer access SMS and call permissions unless they are the default apps for those uses. Those permissions are necessary for Tasker but it does not comply with those rules.
The developer has contacted Google for an exception, which the app has gotten before, but the company has denied them. Thus the developer will be removing any functionality that requires SMS and call permissions in January.
It’s not too late for Google to make an exception. If you want to make your voice heard, you can contact Google about this too. Until then, the app will lose functionality because of Google striving for better security on the Play Store. A noble cause, to be sure, but maybe an overbearing solution.
Forbes recently released their 2019 “30 Under 30” list of “the brashest entrepreneurs across the United States and Canada” who are also under 30 years old. A persistent criticism of the list is that many of the people on it are there because of family or other social advantages. As Helen Rosner tweeted of last year’s list:
My take is: all 30 Under 30 lists should include disclosure of parental assets
In a piece for Vox, Aditi Juneja, creator of the Resistance Manual and who was on the 30 Under 30 list last year, writes that Forbes does ask finalists a few questions about their background and finances but also notes they don’t publish those results. Juneja goes on to assert that no one in America is entirely self-made:
Most of us receive government support, for one thing. When asked, 71 percent of Americans say that they are part of a household that has used one of the six most commonly known government benefits — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, or unemployment benefits.
And many people who benefit from government largesse fail to realize it: Sixty percent of Americans who claim the mortgage-interest deduction, which applies to homeowners, say they have never used a government program. If you’ve driven on public roads, gone to public school, or used the postal service as part of your business — well, we all rely on collective infrastructure to get ahead.
And then she lists some of the ways in which she has specifically benefitted from things like government programs, having what sounds like a stable home environment, and her parents having sufficient income to save money for her higher education.
I went to public schools through eighth grade. My parents were able to save for some of my college costs through a plan that provides tax relief for those savings. I stayed on my parent’s health insurance until I was 26 under the Affordable Care Act. I have received the earned income tax credit, targeted at those with low or moderate income. I took out federal student loans to go to law school.
Juneja’s piece reminds me of this old post about how conservatives often gloss over all of the things that the government does for its citizens:
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.
And also of mayor Pete Buttigieg’s idea of a more progressive definition of freedom:
Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge — but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them.
I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.
Lists like 30 Under 30 reinforce the idea of American individualism at the expense of the deep spirit & practice of collectivism that pervades daily American life. America’s fierce individuals need each other. Let’s celebrate and enable that.
Tags: Aditi Juneja Helen Rosner lists Pete Buttigieg politics USADan JonesI love Pocket Casts.
I've recently tried to other podcatchers (Google Podcasts and CastBox), and neither of them had the features I need.
But one thing that I really liked about both of them, that up until now, Pocket Casts didn't do well, was discoverability. Google Podcasts was really good at that.
So, I'm pretty excited for this update.
Pocket Casts has grown into one of the most popular apps out there when it comes to listening to podcasts, and now the platform is making it even easier to discover content.
Whether it’s a brand new podcast that you might want to binge next, or just digging deep into a specific series you may already follow to find a specific episode or topic, Pocket Casts makes it all a bit easier. Recommendations will now be handled not only by algorithms, but also human curation. That means Pocket Casts should be able to learn from what you listen to and offer up suggestions that are actually relevant to your preferences.
The new Pocket Casts now allows for specific episode searches, so you can dig into a series and find the exact episode you’re looking for. And you can do all of that without having to subscribe to the series first, too. Pocket Casts is also gaining an Up Next feature which will sync along with all of the platforms where the service is available (Android, iOS, the web, Android Auto, and more).
The redesigned app has a variety of other features baked into it that are meant to improve the overall quality of life. That includes new features for archiving content, listening history, playback effects while you’re streaming, and more. This marks the first major redesign for Pocket Casts since the app was acquired by NPR and three other public radio stations earlier this year.
The new Pocket Casts is available as an open beta for Android users beginning today. The app costs $3.99. You can find a link to download and install the app below.
Dan JonesI posted this mainly because I recently applied to work here. I did an initial interview with them so far. The interview was conducted via Slack.
The content of the interview was pretty typical for a webdev job. But having the interview via text was definitely unusual.
I've been given a short assignment to do on my own, although this isn't the audition that was discussed in the article. If they like what I did for this small assignment, I'll get to do the trial run after that.
So far, an interesting experience.
The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible.
This spreadsheet lists a number of ways in which AI agents “cheat” in order to accomplish tasks or get higher scores instead of doing what their human programmers actually want them to. A few examples from the list:
Neural nets evolved to classify edible and poisonous mushrooms took advantage of the data being presented in alternating order, and didn’t actually learn any features of the input images.
In an artificial life simulation where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).
Agent kills itself at the end of level 1 to avoid losing in level 2.
AI trained to classify skin lesions as potentially cancerous learns that lesions photographed next to a ruler are more likely to be malignant.
That second item is a doozy! Philosopher Nick Bostrom has warned of the dangers of superintelligent agents that exploit human error in programming them, describing a possible future where an innocent paperclip-making machine destroys the universe.
The “paperclip maximiser” is a thought experiment proposed by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University. Imagine an artificial intelligence, he says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips, and to improving itself so that it can get paperclips in new ways, while resisting any attempt to divert it from this goal. Eventually it “starts transforming first all of Earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities”.
But some of this is The Lebowski Theorem of machine superintelligence in action. These agents didn’t necessarily hack their reward functions but they did take a far easiest path to their goals, e.g. the Tetris playing bot that “paused the game indefinitely to avoid losing”.
Tags: artificial intelligence lists Nick BostromFor the last several years, Google Play has celebrated the best content in the Store, including top apps, games and movies. This year, we want to hear from you. For the first time, we’re introducing the Fan Favorite category as part of our “Best of Play” yearly list.
Starting today, it’s time for you to vote! Pick the winners from a shortlist of the year’s most loved and trending titles across apps, games and movies, including Quizlet, Candy Crush Friends Saga and Incredibles 2. To select your Fan Favorites of 2018, head over to this page and cast your vote before the polls close on November 26th.
And the fun doesn’t stop there. The Fan Favorite winners, along with the rest of the Best of 2018 picks from our Google Play Editors, will be announced on December 3rd. So stay tuned!
Dan JonesReally cool concept
While flip phones have all but entirely disappeared from the market, Samsung is seeking to rekindle the love affair by introducing another smart flip phone. Featuring dual screens and an imposing specs list, this high-end phone is set to launch in China for 18999 Yuan, or about $2732 USD. The device in question is the W2019, a follow-up to last year’s W2018. Let’s look at what it’s packing:
It’s worth noting that the W2019 does not feature a 3.5mm headphone jack, instead offering only a USB-C port. Samsung is also including extra support for software fixes, phone disinfection, and an exclusive support hotline for W2019 owners.
The Samsung W2019 will launch on China Unicom for 18999 Yuan ($2732 USD). Pre-orders will open on November 11.
What are your thoughts on Samsung’s latest flip phone? Does it fill a need in the niche luxury market?
In the music video for (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!) and in promotional material surrounding the release of the band’s debut album Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys’ Mike D wore a chain with a VW emblem around his neck.
In the US and around the world, fans of the band started stealing VW emblems from the fronts of cars on the street and in dealer lots. In the UK, facing down some potential bad publicity, Volkswagen cleverly turned this into a marketing opportunity with this magazine ad:
Using the iconic layout of the groundbreaking “Think Small” and “Lemon” ads and calling their logo a “designer label”, VW offered fans of Beasties a free emblem just for writing into the company and requesting one. Brilliant ad. (via @imperica)
Tags: advertising Beastie Boys crime music Volkswagen
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Tetris was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov. It was a hit from the start but became a sensation after it was bundled with Nintendo’s Game Boy. It’s perhaps the most popular video game of all time and was played casually (and not so casually) by hundreds of millions of people around the world. You’d think with all those people playing, the limits of the game were fully probed and the highest scores reached, right? Not quite…
As John Green explains in this video, a few people are actually getting much better at the NES version of Tetris than anyone was back in the 90s. One of the reasons for this is that a smaller dedicated group working together can be more effective than a massive group of people working alone on a problem. Today’s top players can not only compare scores (as people did in the pages of Nintendo Power), but they get together for competitions, share techniques, and post videos of their gameplay to Twitch and YouTube for others to mine for tricks.
The two approaches boil down to ants solving problems vs. deliberate practice. The hundreds of millions of players were able to map out seemingly all corners of the game, but only up to a point. It took a smaller group engaging in a collective deliberate practice to push beyond the mass effort.
Green’s discussion also reminded me of something Malcolm Gladwell said in his conversation with Tyler Cowen:
The most interesting thing happening, to me, in distance running right now is the rise of Japan as a distance-running power. And what’s interesting about Japan is that Japan does not have any one runner, particularly in marathons, does not have any one marathoner who is in the top 10 in the world, or even the top 20 in the world, but they have an enormous number of people who are in the top 100. So, your notion of whether Japan is a distance-running power depends on how you choose to define distance-running power.
We have one definition that we use, where we say we recognize a country as being very good at distance running if they have lots and lots of people in the top 10, but that strikes me as being incredibly arbitrary and it goes to my point about we’re not encouraging mediocrity. Why? All that says is… OK, Kenya’s got 9 of the top 10 of the fastest marathoners right now — why is that better than having 300 of the top 1,000? It’s purely arbitrary that we choose to define greatest as just the country that most densely occupies the 99th percentile. Why can’t we define it as the country that most densely occupies the 75th through 100th percentiles?
Tetris today is like Kenya in distance running…all the best-ever players are active right now. With Tetris in the 90s, you had a much broader group of people who were really good at the game but none of whom would crack the all-time top 20 (or perhaps even top 100).
Maybe you don’t give a flying flip about excellence in Tetris or distance running, but how about education? Should we direct the resources of our educational system to ensure that most people get a pretty good education or that fewer get an excellent education? Having a few super-educated people might result in more significant discoveries in science and achievements in literature or music (that everyone can then take advantage of) but having a broader base of educated citizens would result in better decisions being made in untold numbers of everyday situations. Which of those two situations is better? Which is more just? I’d suggest the answer maybe isn’t that obvious…
Tags: Alexey Pajitnov education John Green Malcolm Gladwell Tetris video video gamesSome apps require the latest version to access the service, whether it’s for security or anti-cheating. Heading to the Play Store to update the app has never been a big deal, but Google aims to make the process easier.
The company is introducing the “In-app Updates API” that allows developers to offer better ways to update an app before use. The first method is a full-screen experience, where pressing a button will bring up a full screen overlay that updates the app and disappears after it’s done, leaving you back in the app.
The other method, which is a lot more interesting, is a flexible update option. This will allow you to hit the update button in the app and continue using it while it downloads in the back. Developers will be able to customize the “flow” of the update.
This feature is now being tested with select partners but will soon be released to all app developers. Details are still scarce but we look forward to this improvement!
In just a few years, Sevilla, Spain went from almost no bike paths and low ridership to robust network of bike paths and many people using them. To do it, the ruling party used the positive results of a public poll to move quickly, annexing 5000 parking spots and spending a relatively meager €32 million to build 80+ kilometers of bike paths in just 18 months.
Tags: bicycles cities SpainThe year after the basic network opened, Calvo said, it seemed like every family in the city had suddenly bought one another bicycles for Christmas.
“Everyone was talking about the success of the bike lanes at that point,” he said. “The sports shops, they ran out of bikes. They needed to get bikes from Barcelona, from Madrid, and over from France.”
Once that happened, it became clear that the huge bike network investment had been a fiscal bargain.
“The whole network is €32 million,” he says. That’s how many kilometers of highway - maybe five or six? It’s not expensive infrastructure. … We have a metro line that the cost was €800 million. It serves 44,000 trips every day. With bikes, we’re serving 70,000 trips every day.”
