LIVE at 1pm: @AjitPaiFCC joins @AEItech for his final speech as Chairman of the FCC. He'll discuss the tough choices he made that shaped U.S. communications policy.

Tune in:

.@AjitPaiFCC: I'll "walk you through four of the most challenging calls I had to make over the past four years.
The details and circumstances of these episodes vary, but I think it’s important to say up front that the underlying principle guiding my decisions never changed."

"I said repeatedly that every decision I would make at the FCC would be an independent one, based on the facts and the law. Nothing more. Nothing less. In my view, that must be the lodestar for any FCC leader." - @AjitPaiFCC

"Net neutrality advocates approached the issue with a religious fervor, and the press corps covering the issue was broadly sympathetic to their position." - @AjitPaiFCC

"It was clear that there was no real political upside for me to re-open this fight. ... But investment in high-speed networks had declined for two straight years for the first time outside of a recession in the Internet era." - @AjitPaiFCC

🧵 Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic Systems, Mitre Corporation y Mayo Clinic, anunciaron el jueves q estan desarrollando estándares tecnológicos para permitir obtener y compartir registros de vacunación a través un “pasaporte de

People are asking for more pirate bay stories. Sure. I have a few... Thousands.
Do you know that tpb once hijacked North Koreas Internet?

Someone managed to find a broken router setup which managed to make it possible to pretend to be north Korea, in a more central routing location than actual north Korea. To make it look real even the traffic was slowed down to look like a satellite connection.

Took days before people figured it out. It was quite fun, unfortunately it meant that people in North Korea had issues getting online. But I think their sacrifice was worth the lulz.

Tpb also did one of the first (maybe the first) crowd funding campaign. What did we try to finance? New servers? No, we tried buying a country called Sealand. I remember I was laughing when the Prince of Sealand got invited to Larry King because of it.

On a side note, a weird American dude contacted me when this happened, he liked that we had weird ideas and wanted our help to build Internet in a corrupt African nation, which he had traded guns for a lot of rights.. Like owned their infrastructure. Forward thinking dude.

When we say that "an algorithm is biased" we usually mean, "biased people made an algorithm." This explains why so much machine learning prediction turns into phrenology.

1/

Researchers with phrenological delusions ask machines to find statistical correlates of personalities or emotions, and machines dutifully provides them. It's high-stakes, machine-human collaborative apophenia, detecting patterns where none

Regrettably, this junk science gets published in respected journals. In 2017, @nature published a study by Stanford's Michal Kosinski claiming that machine learning could detect the facial correlates of homosexuality, creating an alleged AI gaydar.

3/

Unsurprisingly, Kosinski's study spectacularly failed to replicate. But as is so often the case, the blockbuster finding gets all the press, the careful replication work that calls it into doubt is roundly

Kosinski hasn't given up on AI phrenology. His lab's latest paper (published by Nature...again!) claims that he can detect political affiliation from social media

Scary but Artificial intelligence...😊😊

Ordering a Pizza in 2021
CALLER:
Is this Pizza Delight?
GOOGLE:
No sir, it's Google Pizza.
CALLER:
I must have dialed a wrong number. Sorry.
GOOGLE:
No sir, Google bought Pizza Delight last month.

CALLER:
OK. I would like to order a pizza.
GOOGLE:
Do you want your usual, sir?
CALLER:
My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE:
According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.
CALLER:
OK! That’s what I want ...

GOOGLE:
May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?
CALLER:
What? I detest vegetable!
GOOGLE:
Your cholesterol is not good, sir.
CALLER:
How the hell do you know!

GOOGLE:
Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.
CALLER:
Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza! I already take medication for my cholesterol.

2. '𝐢 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠'

In the spring, Katsuki gets accepted into the bioengineering program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His friends insisted they opened the admissions letter, just in case he got waitlisted—then they all screamed, because

he’d been accepted.

Just like he knew he would be.

Personalized letter from the dean of students. Excess financial aid. Honors.

He smiled, even if it hurt a little, knowing he’d be leaving them soon. Hanta had applied there as well, and although his standardized test scores

weren’t great, he still had a shot since he scores really well in STEM courses. Other than him, everyone else planned to stick around Musutafu.

Eij wanted to join the armed services. Denki wanted to be a dental hygienist. Mina would go to the community college, and figure shit

out when she got there.

Ochako planned to leave the country, take a gap year and travel around a bit. Tsu—who is now dating Mina—was also on a full-ride to the University of Tokyo, on a pre-med track.

And then there was Deku.

The dumbass couldn’t pick a direction if you handed him a map and a compass.

Hizashi wants him to join the military; and as much as Katsuki hates the bastard of a man, he can’t deny that it may be Deku’s best option. If he doesn’t pick a school or come up with a plan,

have you ever:
- struggled to find junior roles with game studios?
- wondered how to find contract roles?
- been a contractor, been disallowed from attending a holiday party and not known why?

let's talk about the weird world of contract labor in the US games industry! 🧵

first, i want to give context for why the system works this way so that you aren't just reading this thread going "WHY?"

in 2000, Microsoft lost a lawsuit with contractors. you can read more about it here. this is where "permatemp" comes from.

that lawsuit formed the backbone of "permatemp" contractor law in the US. the end result was that companies who need a lot of contract labor (i.e. game studios!) distance themselves from the process of hiring contractors, and it's largely done via third party shell companies.

i want to disclaim a little bit that by creating this thread, i'm not arguing that the contract labor process is ideal or fair or pro-worker. i have been a contractor. it had pros... and serious cons. i am simply describing the system as it works; do with this info as you will.

other disclaimer that obviously, i am not a lawyer, and please don't interpret any of this as "100% true in all situations." this info is based on my experience contracting, helping hire/convert contractors as a manager, and having many friends who have been through this process.

At the #AAS237 conference yesterday I went to a panel discussion on the effect of large constellations of satellites on astronomy from the ground. The thousands of satellites @spacex and others want to launch are a serious problem. 1/n

The launch of so many satellites might change the appearance of the night sky for ever and the trails they leave in astronomers' cameras and the potential for interference with radio telescopes are serious problems 2/n

Those problems are particularly acute for those searching for near-Earth or threatening asteroids, for example, though any large survey of the sky is affected. 3/n

It was good to see @spacex, Amazon's Kuiper project and @oneweb present, and to hear that the latter have dropped their plans from more than 40,000 satellites to 'only' 6372. All the speakers were positive about working together. 4/n

@OneWeb And a lot has been done. All three companies talked about making sure their satellites were fainter than 7th magnitude soon after launch, which would make them invisible to the naked eye and avoid the worst problems for large surveys 5/n

Just gonna leave this here. When we released the Alternative Influence Network report (@beccalew is the author), many were criticial of the humble recommendation that social media companies should review accounts as they gained popularity.

Becca wrote, “In a media environment consisting of networked influencers, YouTube must respond with policies that account for influence and amplification, as well as social networks.” This recommendation was simple, clear, and I told every company of the implications.

I wonder if we would be in this situation today if some of the more prominent disinformation voices had supported this recommendation, instead of saying that deplatforming threatened free speech.

Too busy trying to spot a bot maybe? Too worried about declining data stockpiles?

It’d abhorrent to have been arguing for simple policy fixes for years and only have support for them when hell touches down for the white middle class. BIPOC and women have been organizing for decades to get policies enforced for community safety online.

Instead of learning their work and policy recommendations and doing everything we can as researchers to help get these shared concerns on the table, I see white men rebranding as “disinformation,” “extremism,” and “conspiracy” experts.

It’s bumming me out.

From an ⁦@extendicare⁩ Assist supervisor:
After dedicating his life to nursing, he has lost trust in his employer. “There is no friggin’ way I would ever put [my mother] in a place like that. Never.”
⤵️

...96 of Ontario’s 626 LTC homes have been outsourced, where the owner of the license has contracted a third party to operate the home. As of publication date, there have been 506 COVID-19 deaths in outsourced homes- 34% higher than homes that have not been outsourced.

Outsourcing is most prevalent among for-profit homes, but it happens across the industry: of the outsourced homes, 61 are for-profit, 30 are non-profit, and 5 are municipal.

Non-profit & municipal homes that have outsourced their operations had death rates that were 105% higher (3.68 per 100 beds) than non-profit & municipal homes that did not (1.79 deaths/100 beds).

It’s not enough to ask who owns the home; it’s also a question of who operates it.

Interesting they can’t answer this question....can’t easily blame older design standards now can ya 🤔

It doesn't matter if you're a Junior or Senior Developer, everyone uses Google to search for solutions.

What a lot of people don't know, is how to effectively search for the right answer.

Let me help you improve your Google search skills with these 16 tips!

🧵🧵🧵

1. NOT Logical operator:

You use this operator to exclude results if it contains the operand using "-" e.g.

javascript -frameworks

2. OR Logical operator:

This is a binary operator that returns a result if it contains both operands or one of them e.g.

(angular OR react) javascript tips

3. AND Logical operator:

This is a binary operator that returns a result containing it's operant on the left and right hand-side e.g.

html AND css

This returns a result if both terms are in the search result.

4. Exact match:

Use quotation marks to return an exact match in your search result e.g.

python tutorial "full course"

For threat hunting, a non-trivial amount of the work is referencing, creating, and updating system and network inventory. This doesn't get talked about enough as a skill set that someone develops. 1/

Threat hunting is all about finding anomalies that automated detection mechanisms don't find. That means manual anomaly detection, which sometimes means weeding out things that are normal. 2/

For example, let's say you discover a binary that runs in the middle of the night on a host and that's weird! So, you eventually search for the prevalence of that behavior and see it running on other hosts in that department. 3/

At the same time, you find this host talking to a weird internal system on an odd low port you haven't seen before. In this case, that behavior is nowhere else on the network. 4/

Eventually, you talk to an IT person or user in that department and find out the process is some special software they use and the weird system is a dedicated server for it, and it's all legit. Job's not done, though. 5/

Today we are releasing the public beta of the @stripe extension for @code, which brings Stripe inside your editor. Let me give you some background on why we built this extension, what it does, and where we are going with our developer tools.

https://t.co/FyyHVNQtWA

A thread 🧵

By bringing Stripe inside code editors, we move Stripe-specific information inside the context where developers already are when they build. We believe this will reduce context switching, reduce friction, and make it faster to integrate, build, and test with Stripe.

We decided to start with VS Code, one of the most popular code editors, and build an extension that would bring in a range of common workflows through a new Stripe panel in the activity bar and a set of custom commands.

Let me walk you through the features:

🛠 Webhooks can be burdensome to work with, so we made it easy to forward webhooks events to your local box. You can trigger events to test - this is integrated with the VS Code debugger so you can easily set breakpoints and step through your code.

📑 Sometimes when you’re integrating events, it's hard to know what the payloads will look like. You can now see the most recent events, and we’ll fetch the full event payload as JSON if you click on it, so you can easily see the properties — all without leaving the editor! 🔥

Grad school app season is (mostly) over, and since academic twitter is going nuts about the idea of paying research assistants $15/hr...

Let's talk about how expensive it is to be a student applying to graduate school--especially for underrepresented students.

(1/14)

This fall, I spent $515 on applying to grad school. This might sound high, but in fact, the cost was ~4 times less than it would have been in a normal year for me. Why? Mostly, the GRE.

(2/14)

Since the GRE subject tests were cancelled bc pandemic, every school I applied to no longer required the GRE, general or subject. I also had application fee waivers to 2/3 of the schools I applied to through various programs like AISES.

(3/14)

The general GRE costs $205 and the subject tests cost $150. Sending scores to more than four schools will cost you $27 for each test.

(4/14)

If I didn’t have fee waivers for 2/3 of my apps and if every school had required the GRE tests—which almost every grad school did before 2020—the estimated cost for me to apply to grad schools is well over $2000.

(5/15)