I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them has probably left the planet.
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?
I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface.
The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.
But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
I've done a little bit of this and Claude is pretty great. Take the app and let Claude run wild with it. It does require you to be relatively familiar with the app as you may need to guide it in the right direction.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
Interested to keep updated on this point. As a consultant, I've worked on transformation of legacy applications so this would help me greatly as well. We've worked on pretty archaic systems where no one knows how the system works even if we have the source code.
Looks great! How much optimization (e.g. deep sleep, wake trigger) was needed to get battery life with the ESP32 to where you wanted it? Also curious if the project is running on MicroPython or if you moved to something with less overhead.
Most work was getting the unit power efficient, analog design correct and constructed in a way that’s easily manufactured.
It uses microsamps while inactive and runs on Arduino still. We probably need to rewrite it with esp-idf eventually to get access to lower hardware apis and better memory management.
Fighter Factory Studio and just make a few characters to figure out the quirks. The elecbyte documentation is ok for the basics, and then there are a few tutorials on MUGENGuild and MFFA as well. I agree, and I have the dataset to make a GenAI project out of this. Maybe I will do it someday!
I've been looking for something like this to query / interface with the mountain of home appliance manuals I've hung onto as PDFs - use case being that instead of having to fish out and read a manual once something breaks, I can just chat with the corpus to quickly find what I need to fix something. Will give it a shot!
The new HSTX interface on the RP2350 seems to be squarely targeted at this use case (video output) and doesn't require the use of PIO or consuming a ton of CPU cycles. There's a nice write up on the capability here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/08/15/raspberry-pi-rp2350-...
The main advantage of the SIO TMDS encoder, is that it allows you to output TMDS on any GPIO, instead of the eight that the HSTX is restricted to.
And they allow an easy upgrade path for projects that were already bit-banging DVI on the rp2040. Other than those two advantages, I don't think there is any advantage to the SIO TMDS encoder over the HSTX TMDS encoder.
I get the impression that the SIO TMDS encoder was added to the design first, and there wasn't a good reason to remove them after the introduction of HSTX.
Isn't hstx mainly good for streaming out? My naive guess would be that it wouldn't have as much transceiver offload capabilities, like what the SIO I naively guess would be good for.
The nice part about using SIO seems to be that you can do the tdms encoding there. With hstx you need the output bitstream in the right format already which seems like you might be back to needing the CPU to do the encoding.
HSTX has a built in TMDS encoder, and as far as I can tell, it has all the functionality of the SIO TMDS encoder.
You can configure it to directly consume any line buffer with any pixel format, from 1 to 8 bits per color channel. It even supports formats with different numbers of bits per channel like 8-bit RGB322 and 16-bit RGB565.
i have the impression, that the main motivation for this project was learning the intricacies of TMDS encoding and providing an open implementation as reference for other ppl, who want to learn too.
there are too many black box electronics these days, so it's very much welcome to virtually open them up, by providing software equivalents of their operation.
That said, if the Flurry SDK is on a large and representative sample of mobile apps, then this measurement is relevant to Facebook too because Facebook's SDK would be operating in the same app ecosystem.
The sample selection / non-response bias highlighted in this write-up is a _Big Idea_ problem I've been thinking about recently:
Limitations...*Trust in surveys and political leanings:*
About 95 percent of people contacted for the panel chose not to participate because of lack of trust in having a third-party application installed on their computer or other concerns for privacy.
Think about that - a reputable, privacy-first organization asked people to opt-in to fully consented, voluntary, compensated research and ~95% declined! I can't even imagine what hidden skews are present in the 5% that agreed. This issue is systemic in consumer research and impacts both public (e.g. election polling, U.S. census) and private (pharmaceutical trials, media/advertising research, voluntary AI/ML training daat) polling.
Governments and businesses make biased, potentially discriminatory decisions if a non-random segment of the population chooses to never be counted. The ad industry attempts to circumvent this through non-voluntary passive tracking, which trades off non-response bias with bulldozing user privacy. The headwinds are only growing too, as consumer awareness of privacy lapses and the politicization of polling continues to reduce who participates in opt-in research.
Finding a solution to this that doesn't resort to privacy-eroding tactics is a moonshot level problem in terms of the size-of-the-prize if solved.
Right. An alternate take on this passage is, "95% of contacts exercised basic security measures rather than blindly install unvetted code on their machine."
It doesn't take that much of a shift in perspective to turn this into a very optimistic statistic indicating that normal users aren't always quite as security-unconscious as we normally think -- that for whatever reason (security, apathy, paranoia, whatever) sometimes they do actually make the right choices when interacting with sensitive information like their browsing habits.
You could not pay me to install an unvetted Electron application where I can't even see the source code, that is designed to MITM my browsing activity. Even if I trust the author's intention, who wrote the app? Who tested it? How do I know that the automatic redactors are going to actually work? It's not like it's hard to have security leaks in Electron.
But that's exactly the point of the OP: 95% "declined like they should" -- but what does that say about the 5% that didn't? What general conclusions can you draw from data elicited through people that are clearly unlike the mainstream?
The key thing here is trust. Trust is a resource like a rainforest: you can exploit it sustainably, or you can get a far greater profit by destroying it. Trusting people are a resource that can be exploited for fraud, which the internet is great at producing. It's not really surprising that random organizations find low trust.
It is however very unfortunate, as historically being a "high trust society" has been a great advantage of the west. And it's going to take a lot of repairing.
Is it a problem that should be solved? Shouldn't people have the right to live in peace and not be forced to participate in some survey?
I also don't really see the problem with 95% of people declining; they made the smart choice. If I was a regular Facebook user I would also decline because the account would contain tons of very sensitive data such as DMs and running an untrusted, unknown application on my main computer is also a major dealbreaker.
Try applying the problem to other issues to see the impact:
* An advertiser wants to place ads on sites / tv networks that have an audience that is more likely to buy their product upon seeing their ads. If they don't want to violate privacy, they run a survey. What if the response rate among a historical disenfranchised group (e.g. African Americans) is terrible? The modern "data driven" marketer would see little reason to advertise on Black media properties. This isn't a fictious example - it's a current problem in the media planning / agency industry.
* A local government has to decide between investing in more ESL resources in public education vs. other competing budget needs. They look at census / community survey data (which some Hispanic and immigrant populations are fearful of responding to d/t politicization) and decide to prioritize other asks due to undercounted demand. The data could also be skewed in other ways that warp their decision, like allocating budget to school zones that only represent specific immigrant communities that haven't historically been disenfranchised.
The big picture issue here is governments/businesses making decisions with bias information leading to incorrect conclusions, and the only know recourse currently is to scrap privacy.
Look at it from the point of view of regular folks:
* An advertiser - a malicious being intent on tricking me out of my money - wants to make a survey to determine how to make it easier to trick people into parting with their money. Why would I help someone make my life, and life of other people like me, worse?
The answer to that is to beat advertising down until it isn't so blatantly customer-hostile. Then people may be more willing to help.
* I'm in a politically precarious situation and the government is asking questions - ostensibly for purposes that could benefit me, but if my honest answers were seen by a different government agency, it would cause me a world of hurt. I hide away. Or lie.
The answer to that is ideally to fix the politically precarious situation of a subset of your population - but at the very least, to foster the trust in information separation between government agencies, so that I can e.g. afford to be honest with the census bureau without worrying about the IRS or the police. That level of trust is not the default.
You've really summed up the state of the world right now: we're in a crisis of trust. We don't trust each other, we don't trust institutions and the result is anxiety, fear and anger.
I broadly agree, but I would frame it a bit differently: we have a severe lack of trustworthiness in our modern world; or, at least, the trustworthy voices are lost in the noise.
This is a big big part of why I primarily use FOSS as much as possible. Generally speaking, FOSS developers and distributors seem to act with the user's interests in mind more often than proprietary software vendors. (Certainly the distributions do, probably out of necessity - there's no shortage of competitive distro options, so a distro being shady is practically a death sentence. Individual developers still deserve more scrutiny.)
The advertisers certainly do not have my best interests in mind.
Agreed. The issue isn't that people don't blindly trust advertisers and VC-backed companies enough. The issue is that those entities are not trustworthy.
People who are choosing not to share data with those companies in their current form are making a smart choice.
I think you may be underestimating the problem with your framing. The real trouble is outside of software.
If you think about it, how come otherwise reasonable people become anti-vaxxers, or flat-earthers, or believers of any kind of (perhaps less obvious) nonsense? The arguments I've seen tend to boil down to lack of trust. They don't trust healthcare institutions ("it's all bought out by big pharma!"), scientists ("all bought out by big $something!"), government agencies ("they're incompetent"/"literally nazis"), etc.
To some degree, these institutions all violated our trust in one way or another, and media (both mainstream and social) is doing stellar job at amplifying the damage. To me, the problem with the people mistrusting institutions to the extreme isn't the facts - they often have good, if cherry-picked ones. It's the relative weight given to those facts (like, just because there was a screwup with the swine flu vaccine doesn't mean flu vaccines in general are evil dangerous pharma moneymakers). Fixing that requires teaching people some rational thinking, and I'm not sure how to do that; it's much more difficult than just throwing citations at them.
This is an idea that Cory Doctorow has also promoted at various points: that the increase in conspiracy theories are due to the increase in conspiracies, and people just don't know how to tell real conspiracies from fake one.
I agree that his/your position is worth considering, and I don't think it's that far off of the mark, but I also think it's kind of oversimplifying a tiny bit.
I think some people honestly get swept up in conspiracy theories out of pure mistake, but I've also seen people get pulled into conspiracy theories not out of some kind of rational mistake, but because those theories validate something that they want to be true, or because they offer a community that isn't otherwise available, or just because it feels good to think that every problem in the world is some specific person's fault. Jumping from general distrust of the world to full-on conspiracy is... well, it's a jump, not a simple step. I don't think everyone in QAnon is there just because they're not rational enough, I think there are multiple issues at play.
I suspect there is no single unified cause for conspiracy theories that we can point to, even though I do agree with people like Doctorow that actual rampant corruption in our institutions both isn't helping with the problem and is understated as a potential contributing factor.
Fair enough. I think that the community aspect is a competing theory here - or even a complementary one. I've personally (face-to-face) dealt with conspiracy believers that tend to be isolated in their beliefs, but I totally buy that for many, it's the shared belief that matters, almost regardless of what the belief is even about. This also has support of some sociological research I remember reading.
About the Doctorow's idea, I don't know. Do we have increased amount of conspiracies? Or perhaps just a perception of it? Or maybe we're constantly exposed to micro-conspiracies - namely all the businesses, big and small, scheming how to one up each other and screw up their customers - that make people prone to see conspiracies everywhere?
> and the only known recourse currently is to scrap privacy.
I agree that low response rates are a problem, but people should still have the choice whether or not to give this information. To me, when I see that voluntary participation in these studies is so low, that's not a problem with privacy, that's a problem with the institutions doing the collection.
A good example of that is political surveys, which are really hard because people don't answer their phones. But why don't people answer their phones? Because they're swamped with scams, political ads, and other spam. Half of the time that someone says they're conducting a political survey on a phone call, what they're really doing is campaigning for a candidate.
The problem isn't that people are allowed to decline phone calls, the problem is that most of the phone calls people get are unwanted crap -- so it really doesn't make sense for them to answer the phone, they're making the correct choice by letting unrecognized numbers go to voicemail.
As a further analogy, if 50% of mail in the US postal service was infested with live spiders, you might see delivery rates for paper bills and official notices plummet. That would be a problem. But the solution wouldn't be to force people to open their mail anyway, it would be to stop putting spiders in people's Amazon boxes. And as it is with spiders, so too it is with advertisers.
You want to improve voluntary participation rates? Focus on removing bad actors and making people feel safe about their data. Governments, telemarketers, political groups, advertisers, and just companies in general all have serious issues with self-policing how they use and collect data. That's not anyone else's fault or problem to solve.
> A good example of that is political surveys, which are really hard because people don't answer their phones. But why don't people answer their phones? Because they're swamped with scams, political ads, and other spam.
But why should people answer political surveys? It's a waste of time similar to the other nuisance calls you mentioned.
Even if we assume all the other nuisance calls are eliminated, there's still no reason anyone should answer a political survey. It's a waste of their time and there is no way to ensure how this data will be used.
It would make elections a bit less stressful. There are a lot of vested interests in both political campaigns and in the public at large that want accurate polling before elections. That's extremely difficult to do right now.
I know some people debate whether having that information is healthy, which I won't comment on, but I do understand why someone might want it.
Now, at an individual level, what do I personally get out of answering any specific survey -- that's a much tougher question for me to answer.
Just do what Nielson does: Pay people for their data.
I don't think it's that difficult; if pay-for-survey skews results toward overvaluing the opinions of the poor and/desperate-for-money, well, then it would be the first time in history.
In my opinion, this is a symptom of weak/ineffective regulation in the personal information space. The consequences for data breaches to the guilty parties have been minimal at best. Meanwhile responsibility for fraud has been pushed onto individuals via concepts like "identity theft". Even if the company in question was indeed reputable and well-known, most people don't have the technical expertise to evaluate any claims about security or privacy. Who would take that risk knowing that at the end of the day most of the consequences will fall on them personally?
Are you a shill for them? "Reputable" as mainstream media? "Reputable" as in the fake news is reputable?
Whenever someone claims "I am reputable" you should run away as fast as you can.
This "I am reputable" is purely subjective based on your own biases and incentives.
No one can be reputable in the news space and people must understand this as soon as possible: everyone lies, even natural science which is supposed to be the gold standard gets so many studies wrong.
The only way news organizations stay alive is either by:
a) clickbait articles which eventualy devolves into lying or exaggeration at best.
b) News orgs that are financed by private people/corporations who have their own agendas.
There is no such thing as a "reputable" news source.
Perhaps one in ten thousand jounralist is still legit, so that he is an actual investigative journalists. But 99.999 of "journalists" are actually just script readers and clickbait writers.
Do you not see where "I am reputable" leads to? Soon the "I am reputable" organization will get political power and then they will make laws based around "my reputable reporting" and this will lead to censortship.
"I am reputable" always leads to censorship down the line since it implies that "my opponent is not reputable and is lying and MUST BE SHUT DOWN IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY".
Per my answer above: the situation where nobody can be trusted is horribly unstable, because evidence-based or impartial policymaking or even justice becomes impossible. This tends to result in replacing trust relationships with force relationships, and the society devolves into warlordism or dictatorship in order to restore order and control. You can't expect people to trust an election where all candidates are disreputable, so they vote in a dictator.
This is why the unreliability of news organizations is such a serious problem.
Look at your response. Why would OP be a shill when you’ve responded this way? It’s not hard to see people will have strong opinions on things even if they believe their opinion isn’t wild, like yourself.
Brian K. Vaughan's comic Private Eye [1] foreshadows what might happen if this dataset is breached. The premise is the digital cloud "bursts" - all private data is suddenly dumped and searchable - forcing people to completely abandon their identities and assume new ones - changing their name, appearance, re-starting their careers, etc.
When you consider this in the context of technologies like Voco [2] and Face2Face [3] that can fabricate a speech or make a fake "hot mic" video from a public figure, it makes you wonder if we'll ever be able to prove things are __true__ in the future, and what the value of our identity is if it can be shattered beyond repair due to negligence from a third party. What do we do then? How do you cryptographically sign yourself?
Sometimes I wonder that when we shower criticism on Facebook about privacy concerns, we're missing the forest for the trees. The bigger issue I see is the sheer amount of eyeballs trained exclusively to Facebook's content.
What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?
Media has always been that. Why, during a military coup, is the first thing that is attacked are the TV stations? Control the message, control the culture.
It is fascinating to see the Internet (and in this case Facebook) displacing the multi-billion(trillion?) media estate. I remember the dot.com bubble where the media claimed that statements that the Internet would make them obsolete was crap. 20 years ahead of its time I guess.
The policy question is similar to the phone system one, is it in the people's best interest that their be a standard phone system? And if so, can you regulate it sufficiently to avoid abuses? Those were the questions surrounding the original Bell network in the US. What does a monopoly look like in the Internet world, and do we, can we, regulate it? Pretty important questions.
We ultimately decided landlines needed to be subjected to pretty stringent regulatory requirements in return for their monopoly (before ultimately breaking them up). Hopefully the same will happen to Facebook if they retain market share in 20 years.
I defer to you, but my take would be that the government simply declined to fight it on anti-trust grounds between ~1910-1970.
On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore Bell Labs or the fact they they did build some amazing infrastructure. Would the world have been better off on the whole with more competition in AT&T's heyday?
Which turns out be the general argument against centralised authority. Autocratic rule, monopoly power, monoculture agriculture, etc. You've only got one system, one set of preferences, one set of decision algorithms, often with its own preferences (even if unconscious, though very often not), determining outcomes for all.
Any wealth or power imbalance tends toward this result.
Honestly? I'm not. I personally browse a few news sites, hacker news, etc, but I'm in the minority.
Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about.
I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true.
There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
You may have a point about facebook, but I have to disagree about McDonald's. Many, many people eat tons of McDonald's and live to a ripe old age, including Warren Buffet, my great aunt (now 103), and countless others.
Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world!
If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage!
Its how some people get all those things. Not people who care enough to get their news directly from a number of sources, instead of via the Facebook filter.
Even if you don't get your information from Facebook, if enough people do, then Facebook can influence the outcomes of elections which directly affect your life. If you are a plumber who doesn't use Facebook, and Facebook promotes a bunch of content that foments anti-plumber sentiments, you may be attacked on the street by an angry mob of Facebook users.
It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.
to be completely honest, having the time and energy to stay well-informed on current events from a variety of sources is a privilege. working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources. the reason i say this is not to tell you to "check your privilege", by the way. it's to make the argument that facebook's shaping of the zeitgeist primarily affects the impoverished and working classes - the people who bear the brunt of all policy decisions, the people who need to be well-informed the most.
Looking beyond Facebook for news and reporting on diverse topics with balanced viewpoints is a "privilege"?
On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads.
While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
> "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head.
The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true.
That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
> the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack
Is this a generational point of view? I don't think that the word "privilege" is "inseperable from personal attack. To me, this very much fits into the definition of a privilege as "a benefit enjoyed by a person, beyond the advantages of most". Access to and time to read a broad variety of news sources is very much a benefit enjoyed by some people, beyond the advantages of most. I don't see how there's any personal attack implicit in that...
I've observed people to respond very badly when I use it, and as best I can tell, that's why.
I speak to communicate with people - that's communicate with, not talk to, and if you're unclear on the distinction, any dictionary with etymological information will serve you.
Talking about other people's opinions, behaviors, and beliefs in terms of privilege makes communicating with them harder instead of easier. So it's not worth my while to do.
> The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time.
This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth.
Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints.
I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
I love Hacker News! I can't imagine where else it might happen that a Silicon Valley startup founder would explain to a mouthy unlettered Mississippi redneck what it's like to be poor or working class. Thank you for that!
Aparently not enough to curb the sarcasm, ditch the personal attacks, or think twice about your preconceived notions before posting.
Now, your self-description is quite colorful, but seems to only support my claims. It almost sounds like you're saying that a diverse group of people do actually have the means to discuss complex topics and critically analyze diverse viewpoints beyond whatever Facebook's algorithm might choose for them.
And thank you bobcostas55 for bringing data to the conversation upthread.
But if this is what you call "communicating with people not just talking to them" I'll just step out now.
Sorry to say, yours is the first direct reply in years of HN I've regretted not being able to downvote.
Well, I was about to write out a long and detailed reply about how having more money means also having more choices, and how I think there is a substantive difference there which you overlook. I further intended to point out that I'm actually very unusual among my cohort, and that it is inadvisable to draw general conclusions about that cohort on the basis of what I say about myself or how I say it.
Before I could get more than a few words into all of that, though, I got an email from my father, who told me that my distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up is in fact permanently paralyzed in the lower half of his body, and between that and other injuries will almost certainly require lifelong care.
I may be a sarcastic asshole of a redneck, but I am also an amazingly fortunate redneck. I have made a successful career in software engineering, which enables me to earn more in a year than both my parents combined. A lot of that I send back home. I cannot send enough. I do not make enough. In that light the perspective you express strikes me as thoughtlessly facile. I did a poor job of expressing that in my last comment, which was written in the heat of the moment. Perhaps this one, with the benefit of reflection, will make it more clear.
It's a shame you are unable to downvote that comment, if you feel it is warranted. Perhaps someone else will step up and do so.
The bad idea that a free walled garden is better than nothing, or that it's worth sacrificing network neutrality in order to increase overall access.
And to give a little more background, Facebook was trying to get free "internet" access away in India, but it wasn't really internet access it was actually just a Facebook walled garden. The local population organized and ultimately the government rightly told them to piss off.
Because being able to access a diverse set of viewpoints on the Internet is not, actually, a "privilege" but rather the central point of the whole affair.
No, the people making the policy decisions need to be better informed. It doesn't much matter if you suffer them and don't have the time to go campaigning your grievances. The sword cuts on both sides: the poor don't have political power because they don't have the luxury needed to wield it, not because they are uninformed of the state of affairs.
FWIW, I read that as: The poor people are the ones who elect the people making the decisions to those decision-making posts. In that sense, the voters are the ones who need to be informed on the issues _(and_ on where the candidates stand on the issues), in order to be able to vote for candidates who know and care about the same issues the voters do.
All the examples you cite are essentially one-to-many communication channels, where you expect to hear one viewpoint from the getgo. Whereas Facebook dishonestly promises many-to-many, but all you get is the same old one-to-many.
> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos
That Facebook is a social networking platform that some people incidentally use to try to relay news of general public concern, not an online public affairs platform with an incidental social networking function?
It's still mostly a social networking site, and to the extent "serious" content threatens the social networking aspect, Facebook has an interest in placing limits.
Lots of people have an interest in doing things that are bad for other people generally. That doesn't actually mean the rest of us should be okay with it.
> The rest of us can, but the question is to what extent the rest of us are or will in the future.
Look, if people aren't going to choose news-focused sites over social-networking-focused sites, then existing social-networking-focused sites that bait-and-switch their users into a news-focused experience are just going to lose to actual social networking sites, starting the problem back at zero.
I don't think you need to force-feed hard news to people. People who would read it will seek it out - the sorts of people who are content with what FB serves up are the kind of people who didn't read newspapers before the web and were content to get their news from daytime television.
True in general, but not relevant in this particular case. Facebook is still a social networking site with an incidental public affairs use, and not the other way around.
Why would a social networking platform prioritize wedding photos over news? Is the news less "social"? Aren't weddings news? You're begging the question here.
wedding photos keep you on facebook, which means more time spent on facebook -> more ads server & more behavior tracked. If you click the news, it will take you away from facebook.
If we follow your logic, it seems like a valid response would essentially be a social network disconnected from a company with a profit motive. The closest thing we had to that was diaspora[0], although it doesn't seem very successful.
Previously Usenet. Which died under, ironically, trolls, antipornography drives, and copyright enforcement.
There was the WWW itself, at least for a time, though there are elements which tend toward centralisation, largely discovery, discussion, authentication, and directory.
Tim Berners-Lee and others have recently announce Solid.
In my opinion, the whole idea of social networking is flawed. I don't need a network where people are interconnected ("webbed" together), I just need individual contacts and ephemeral groups. Ok, one can say that this implies that people are connected, and that multiple connections implies network, but the way this works on the Internet just doesn't feel right to me, especially with Facebook and so on. The elements of permanence and interconnectivity are just not done right. But as to how they should be done then, I haven't a clue.
> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed
I think it means absolutely nothing. I use Facebook so I can see how my friends are doing, not to find news articles to read (unless it's an article my friend just shared, and even then only maybe). I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.
> I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.
And yet enough people do that it's a real and recognized problem to the point that HN discusses it every couple of weeks. HN in itself being a similar echo chamber.
People get news from what they look at. There's no such thing as "news". It's all eyeball based. The source with the most eyeballs is considered The News.
That is what you say when you're making a distinction between "editorial" content and "news." Jon Stewart was saying "My show is obviously editorial content, not fact-reporting objective journalism." As a way of objecting to other sources who claimed to be providing fact-reporting objective journalism when they were actually providing editorial content. AKA "Fox News" vs "Comedy Central."
> I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.
Actually, nearly 50% of American adults use facebook as a news source [0]. Not that this means they don't have other sources, but it seems very likely that increased consumption of news via facebook is cutting into consumption from other sources. Anecdotally I've noticed that trend in my own news consumption, to my chagrin.
My biggest gripe with facebook is that we have given them, a company that earns money by knowing as much as possible about us, and important role in deciding how we interact with society and the people around us.
I believe you have to be a special kind of crazy not to acknowledge that as a problem. Or, considering their big user base, a very general kind of crazy.
> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?
Couldn't a newspaper that uses algorithmic metrics (or any kind of metrics or surveying) end up making a similar editorial decision for similar reasons? Journalists have worried about independence of editorial and advertising for somewhat analogous kinds of reason for a long time, and also about whether their news outlets were doing the most important journalism vs. journalism with the greatest mass appeal.
When there were two reasonably good newspapers in virtually any city (or 3, or 9, or in some cases 30 or 40), there was a readily available local alternative to the editorial decisions of any one paper, though other factors (political machine, major advertiser, mob) might have similarly restricted what was covered.
But those days are gone -- many cities in the US have only one major daily, and it's often stopped trying. Local radio and television, as well as national broadcasts, are abysmal.
What I'm noticing today, at least in print media, is a staggeringly widespread mediocrity and lack of relevance. Actually, that goes beyond print to broadcast (radio and television), and many mainstream online sources.
The saving grace, at least for now, are competing, largely non-mainstream sources, which carry information that is less likely to be carried. Yes, some sites cater to eyeball-attracting, outrage-inducing bogosities, but others actually contain solid content.
My local paper has had little if any coverage of international trade pacts which treaten to rewrite major elements of laws across multiple countries, but I can find detailed information at, of all places, Buzzfeed. Or The Intercept. Or The Guardian. Or Pro Publica. Or your EFF article -- one of the best explainers I've found, and some colourful infographics to boot (they've been in heavy play, and largely my only content, at Google+, as Google are among the sadly far-too-many tech companies promoting the TPP, TTIP, BITS, and TiSA).
Something is badly wrong with media, though, and globally. It's not a whole lot that's not been warned about for a long, long time -- Eric Blair (George Orwell), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Neal Postman, Jerry Mander, I.F. Stone, and others cautioned about it. Oh, and Walter Lippman and Noam Chomsky. But is it ever getting flagrant.
I'd even be modestly satisfied with algorithmic placements, so long as they were different algorithms, possibly rotated, and with some sortition blended in for random perterbations.
Facebook's a problem, and a large problem, but not the only problem.
Taking the US as an example, I think the concern is that there is 1 Facebook, vs 50+ state / regional news papers to get competing viewpoints. Yes, many of the sources of news on Facebook are themselves different news websites.
The point here is that this is all being funneled through one filter. And many media / news companies may disappear over time so the issue could become worse.
Number and variety of sources of information is the distinction.
I think your analogy would apply if there were many "Facebooks". But there is only one.
While is stays an algorithm optimizing for usage, I'm not concerned.
The moment is squires extra optimizing targets, that's a problem. What is more troubling is that we can't even know when that changes (if it didn't already).
> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos
You'll be a hell of a lot healthier since the war photo is pointless(Exactly what's the point of reseeing the photo... to remind you war is bad?) but your friends count.
You are assuming people will "resee" it. But people need to have seen it for the first time somewhere in order for that to happen. A lot of people don't know this picture, or have idea what impact it has, and if Facebooks censorship remains unchallenged, a lot of important pictures will remain unseen by a growing proportion of people.
This specific people may escape that fate, as it's important enough to be in history books - I believe I first saw it in primary school - but handing Facebook the power to hide important parts of history from a huge proportion of people is dangerous.
When you take into account the full range of tracking methods cited in the article, I think the impact of Tor would be limited. For example: you probably already have an app on your phone that has an SDK from Gimbal (beacon company in the article) or a similar firm that reads beacons and tracks your location passively. So while Tor would disguise the source of your web requests, the SDK still has free reign to send your location and your Ad ID back to the mothership.
We have at least five different kinds of problems with mobile device privacy here:
- Apps that intentionally identify you and your location to somebody (like apps that have permission to use location services, supposedly for some user benefit, and tell the app developer that location)
- Apps that intentionally reveal your presence in a physical location to other devices nearby
- Apps that unintentionally identify you to a network operator or wiretapper (because of unencrypted unique identifiers like cookies)
- Aggregate device profiling because of a unique combination of observable behaviors (e.g., this person has this OS version and this combination of apps)
- Observability of hardware and subscriber identifiers in the RF protocols
All of these are bad for privacy, but the way of fixing them is different.
Tor helps a lot with the third one. To deal with the others, apart from somehow getting that software not to exist or not to be installed on people's devices, it could be sufficient to make some of the software not communicate on the network at certain times or in certain ways, like if the OS could say "maintain radio silence, except for Tor-aware apps".
For the device RF identifiers, we need the ability to change those identifiers, which is kind of sort of there for wifi on some devices (except there was just a paper showing it often doesn't succeed in protecting you), and not there at all for mobile network interfaces.
We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces. Has anyone tried something like this or can recommend a service that's worked for them?