BC TECH
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Here's the thing, as someone who sees themself both in ad tech & as a privacy advocate: Advertisers who seek personalized targeting will focus on platforms with the most personal data: Facebook & Google. But I don't believe the status quo of ad targeting is the only future of it.

 The idea that advertisers will walk away from platforms that don't provide personalized targeting simply doesn't hold up. Advertisers buy posters and billboards and TV ads and lots of other things that don't promise the accuracy of web advertising...
Further, the promise of that accuracy has mostly been false. Year after year after year we see that ad products that promise perfect accuracy and tracking don't work, are giving false results, are proving entirely ineffective, or have unexpected negative brand impact...
Also, the one thing we've learned for sure about advertising on the web is that advertisers will try all sorts of things and look towards outcomes. This includes bad things that fail... https://t.co/MYkZtfdqQQ
This includes things that don't work at all, but still end up costing millions of dollars. https://t.co/5KPc4fJNcm
And it includes a ton of ad tech that makes claims to personalization that simply don't hold up in reality. https://t.co/rndP1drQYk
Everyone in advertising should know by now that many of the promises of advertising vendors don't hold up... https://t.co/FcUbmQTqb0
But the pricing mechanisms of the status quo makes no room for an alternative version of the web. We've no basis to understand what the market could like like in a web where intrusive user tracking becomes impossible on a technical level. https://t.co/1sWrpeV33Y
And putting all of these questions aside brings an even bigger one forward: do publishers benefit from a web that, through invasive tracking and targeting, generates societies that distrust journalism and make it hard to separate fact from fiction? I think not.
Perhaps that's too esoteric a future to consider. Perhaps we can only see the future in dollars and cents. That's the way Facebook sees it. That's the way the people who have shaped the face of web advertising up to now see it. https://t.co/WeAudmCpFw
But I don't think the future of the web has to be, or should be, defined on dollars and cents alone. I think a healthier web--one that respects what users want & how they seek to interact w/it, publishers, & advertisers--will create a better environment for publishers to thrive.
$1.3 bil was spent on influencer marketing in 2018. It's hard to believe that publishers can't remake themselves in a private web to change from delivering individual humans to be something else to advertisers. Especially if the ground shifts to make the web force that change.
(Source: https://t.co/CJkqFg3kLA )
I can't imagine a world where advertisers decide their only venue for digital advertising is FB and Google. That they're just going to leave the rest of the web up for grabs. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think the rest of the web was valuable for advertisers, users & publishers
And if it has value, then it can be priced competitively. And if it can be priced competitively than I have to believe the parts of the web where users can regain control over their personal data can present a competitive argument for advertisers to Facebook and Google.
Beyond that, it is hard to imagine the situation for Publishers in regard to trust and monetization could become more dire by respecting users' interest in a more private web. https://t.co/jbVGYMnjWx
Finally, I think the difference between publishers & other businesses is they have an ideological core to work on behalf of readers, to do journalism, to make the world more clear & honest. It's hard to see how the current regime of individual user tracking aligns w/that mission.
At the end of the day it is hard to imagine surveillance capitalism as compatible w/journalism. The future of ad tech is entwined with the future of journalism. If that's the case, how can we deliver journalism into the future on a system w/which it is incompatible?
Perhaps there's an immediate financial disadvantage to the privacy-first web. But I think on a longer timeline, a more private web as the baseline standard will not eliminate advertising or chase advertising dollars away. And it will make it easier to be a successful journalist.
At the end of the day, a more private world lets publishers have more control over their own data & be better advocates on behalf of their readers to advertisers & ad tech systems. More control means more opportunity to figure out new approaches and new models. Sounds fun to me!

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Jason Kint
Jason Kint
@jason_kint
I could create an entire twitter feed of things Facebook has tried to cover up since 2015. Where do you want to start, Mark and Sheryl? https://t.co/1trgupQEH9


Ok, here. Just one of the 236 mentions of Facebook in the under read but incredibly important interim report from Parliament. ht @CommonsCMS https://t.co/gfhHCrOLeU


Let’s do another, this one to Senate Intel. Question: “Were you or CEO Mark Zuckerberg aware of the hiring of Joseph Chancellor?"
Answer "Facebook has over 30,000 employees. Senior management does not participate in day-today hiring decisions."


Or to @CommonsCMS: Question: "When did Mark Zuckerberg know about Cambridge Analytica?"
Answer: "He did not become aware of allegations CA may not have deleted data about FB users obtained through Dr. Kogan's app until March of 2018, when
these issues were raised in the media."


If you prefer visuals, watch this short clip after @IanCLucas rightly expresses concern about a Facebook exec failing to disclose info.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.
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s. e. smith
s. e. smith
@sesmith
Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.
TECH , SOCIETY
Aviral Bhatnagar
Aviral Bhatnagar
@aviralbhat
I spent 1.4 lakhs on Zomato alone this year

Once these platforms build a habit, it's hard to leave

Lifetime value of customers is immense, which recover marketing costs and more

These very "loss-making" companies eventually become money-making machines

I love the assumptions people are making here to try to work out how this is possible, but I'll not share the math to just keep this fun.

Few hints: I have excellent cardiovascular fitness, love fine + healthy dining and order with my wife and brother

Guess AOV and order freq
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Lea Kissner
Lea Kissner
@LeaKissner
Last up in Privacy Tech for #enigma2021, @xchatty speaking about "IMPLEMENTING DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY FOR THE 2020

Differential privacy was invented in 2006. Seems like a long time but it's not a long time since a fundamental scientific invention. It took longer than that between the invention of public key cryptography and even the first version of SSL.


But even in 2020, we still can't meet user expectations.
* Data users expect consistent data releases
* Some people call synthetic data "fake data" like
"fake news"
* It's not clear what "quality assurance" and "data exploration" means in a DP framework


We just did the 2020 US census
* required to collect it by the constitution
* but required to maintain privacy by law

But that's hard! What if there were 10 people on the block and all the same sex and age? If you posted something like that, then you would know what everyone's sex and age was on the block.
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RISHI BHRINGI AND ARDHA-NAREESHWAR SHIVA

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Once, he visited Kailasha along with other Rishis. All the Rishis did parikrama of Shiva and Parvati both except Rishi Bhringi.


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So on one such visit, Mata Parvati sat on the left lap of Mahadev when Rishi Bhringi came.


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SRI VARAHA NARSIMHA, SIMHACHALAM, VIZAG (AP)
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One of the 32 Narsimha Kshetram of Andhra. It has a unique form of Narsimha, appearing like a shivlingam

It is said that Narsimha’s fierce nature is soothed by worshipping him with Varaha, considered a peaceful deity


The shrine is believed to have been constructed by Prahlada. With time, it crumbled.
In Treta yuga, King Pururava was passing from here in his vimana. The vimana was attracted to this place by a mystic power.
When the place was unearthed, the deity was found.
@GunduHuDuGa


Pururava’s wife, Urvashi, had a dream that the deity should remain covered in sandalwood paste for the whole year except on Akshaya Tritiya.
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The mukhya mandap here, has a pillar kappam stambham believed to possess curative powers.


Chandanotsava/ Chandan Yatra is the most important festival celebrated on Akshaya Tritiya. The sandalwood paste is removed from the moolavar deity and nijarupa darshan (original form of deity) for twelve hours of the day are done by devotees.
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Vibhu Vashisth
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RANI GAIDINLIU:THE LESSER KNOWN FREEDOM FIGHTER

Rani Gaidinliu joined the freedom struggle at 13 &was sentenced to life imprisonment at 16."We r free people—the White should not rule over us.”Thus calling out to her Zeliangrong tribesmen was the voice of 13yr-old Rani Gaidinliu.


She joined the freedom struggle in the present-day Northeast India. Today, her struggle is lost in history as most of her countrymen wouldn’t even have heard her name. B'coz our history textbooks tell us that only Mahatma Gandhi &Pandit Nehru got India its Independence.


At 16 yrs of age, this valiant girl was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading a movement to drive out the colonial rulers from Manipur and Nagaland. Nevertheless, she was released in 1947 after India’s independence and was given the title ,"Rani of Nagas".


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Gaidinliu belonged to the Rongmei clan of the Zeliangrong tribe in the Tamenglong district of western Manipur. Born on January 26, 1915, she was fifth among eight children.


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ashkan soltani
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BREAKING: @CommonsCMS @DamianCollins just released previously sealed #Six4Three @Facebook documents:

Some random interesting tidbits:

1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition


2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:

Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.


3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.

4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.

https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
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WORLD OF SANATAN DHARM...
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UNTOLD STORY OF QUEEN BHAVASHANKARI OF BENGAL - A 🧵u must read

Know the role of Naga Sadhus

PART-1

One of the most underrated empires to ever grace India is the kingdom of Bhurshut from central Bengal.

1/


A medieval powerhouse this kingdom stood firm against the Pathan invasion from Orissa twice, and with each time devastating the enemy forces.

Along with this, we also have to note that this was the time when the empire was under the reign of a widowed queen named Bhavashankari.

She wasn’t even born in a royal family and yet she achieved what most of the kings couldn’t do

This begs the question, why does no one remember this great kingdom?

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Bhurshut empire thrived from 15th century till late 18th century as an independent kingdom while acting as tributary state with full autonomy.

4/

What’s even more puzzling is that no one knows about the great queen Bhavanshakari who thrashed the Pathans single handedly without the aid of their allies.

5/
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