> We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.
Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).
Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece.
If I have a dictionary, I don't have to ask the meaning of a word I hear from someone I am speaking to, I can look it up in the dictionary. I may infer an incorrect meaning because the word has multiple meanings or is a colloquialism.
If I need to clarify that inaccuracy, I need other data points (for example, the context of the conversation), or I can ask my conversational partner for clarification).
> Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece.
Yes, that would have tripped the prompt asking the user, which would have had explicit user acceptance or refusal. The point is you don't need consent to do a fuzzy match usibg other data in most jurisdictions.
> my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).
Tor and similar multi-hop proxies, depending on construction, supposedly can't match source to destination IPs.
I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering. LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings (1). I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one otherwise its a humanitarian crisis. In fact, I'd say it's beyond unreasonable to suggest that.
Still, I do feel bad for younger folks trying to break into the industry - but "work for cloudflare or go hungry" is beyond a stretch.
Edit: Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture.
> LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings
Yeah sure. I've seen literally dozens of job openings in certain companies that match my resume pretty much perfectly. None of them ever bothered to respond when I applied beyond "nah, better luck next time" (even that is not guaranteed, some just ignore you). I have no idea what those millions of job openings are, really, but the fact is, when you're out of a job, you don't feel like you have millions of employers lined up to invite you. Especially after you spend a couple of months submitting resumes and getting no interviews.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
This is pretty generous, usually a couple of months is all you get, sometimes people don't get even that. With that kind of approach, working for Cloudflare becomes even more decent option, comparatively.
I hope people don’t gaslight you into thinking it’s something wrong with you. That was exactly my experience this year - and that’s completely new compared to 4 years ago. It’s the market that’s changed.
No, I have been in the field long enough and done enough things that I know I maybe not the best ever, but I am pretty good. I appreciate the kind words though. And I am lucky to have a good job too, now. But that's what happens in the field, and it's not only me - I have heard the same you are saying from multiple people over the last years. It's just how it works now. Maybe there is some super-elite level where you can just sit on your Herman-Miller throne and the unicorns come and bow to you and beg you to take a job with them. I know I am, while being pretty good, not at that level. And many, many other people aren't either, while still being pretty good. All those people don't always have a luxury of refusing a well-paying job just because they get a slightly wrong vibe about what could happen with the company years from now.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture
We were talking about the people interviewing and picking jobs in general, not specifically ones that had been laid off from CF.
> I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering.
Maybe not right now (though I imagine that varies a lot even now). But I've been there. I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month. Admittedly, that was after the dotcom bubble; but it left me with a mindset of not assuming everyone has a choice to work at the company they want to. Sometimes you need a job, and being picky about which one you choose isn't always an option.
Huge gulf between "sometimes you need a job" and "employees are pigs to the slaughter".
"I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month" is pretty intense. I'm sorry you went through that, but if you get ~7 months of paid time to job search and still wind up 100k in debt, there are definitely other problems. I don't think it's at all fair to characterize getting laid off from an extremely highly paid job as a humanitarian crisis.
Should tech companies hire more slowly and carefully? Yes, definitely. Does that actually help employees? I'm not sure, in this case they're getting paid more than they would have had they not been hired at all. Are there plenty of jobs available outside of software? Yes.
Though it’s ridiculous to entertain the thought that one would pivot their career at the drop of a hat. Even just bumping into a tech stack will chain one to it as recruiters stare at yoe in a specific one and completely ignore anything adjacent, imagine doing anything more radical.
One can do it, but it’s a life changing, irreversible and likely damaging event nobody sane would take lightly. Absolute nonsense.
"I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one"
I understand your point, but this is the least bad world we're in. If you mandated no-firing or mandated year-long compensation for laid-off workers, you would be crushing the small business economy and destroying more jobs than you were trying to save.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
That's great that they're doing that, but it's absolutely not guaranteed, either in this particular case (prior to this announcement, i.e. when these people were hired) or in general.
But all of this ignores the more general point, which is that--for reasons which may or may not be their fault--some people are not in a good situation financially and for them being laid off is a big deal with very real risks. Just because that's not you doesn't mean it's not a real thing.
Most job openings are fake. Ghost jobs are a real and growing problem as dishonest businesses use it to signal growth without the actual intent to hire.
But, I won't be there to see how they feel about me at my funeral. I'm here now, to see how they treat me. So yes, doing things to conform / be one of the crowd may not be what people remember you for... but it may be what impacts your daily life.
Just an observation. My computer bag is older than most of my coworkers.
Oddly enough, asking an AI to add docs to a classfile explaining "what it does, why it needs to exist, and what uses it" is a great way to include some of the "why". I know it's not ALL the why, but it does a pretty good job of finding the reasons that someone new to the code wouldn't be aware of.
Somewhat by definition, AI-generated docs would only include information that could be obtained elsewhere in the codebase. That can be valuable, but far more valuable is the information you got from debugging all the failed alternative designs that were never committed, etc. Information and context that goes beyond the actual code being read.
My experience is that most people fail to capture this ultra-valuable documentation, but AI never does.
> The claim you should know everything about everything you work on is an intensely naive one
This is a slight tangent from that, but I place a lot of value on the ability to offload some/most of the mental model to AI. I need to know less about everything (involved in this one task) when working on it, because a lot of the peripheral information can be handled by the AI. I find that _incredibly_ useful.
I think the point was that, when you make a metric goal of "you must use AI this much", then people will use AI even in ways that isn't adding to productivity.
I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed.
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
> However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc.
This form of civil disobedience is effective against bad laws that nevertheless assign punishments proportional to the nominal offense. If "demonstrations without a permit" is punished by a week in jail and they won't give you a permit then you do the demonstration and spend the week in jail. A week later you're back out there demonstrating again. MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times in a span of 11 years.
It doesn't really work in the modern system which is tuned for coercing plea bargains and full of three strikes laws, because then "pissing off the government" is an aggravating factor that causes them to stack more charges until you're facing years instead of days. Then you're not making a point through a willingness to spend a few nights in a cell before your next press conference, you're getting taken off the board.
It also never really worked against bad economic rules because the nature of bad economic rules is to make good economic behavior uneconomical, like converting units to types in higher demand or funding new construction. The deleterious effect of the rule is that instead of it costing $50,000 to add a housing unit, it costs $500,000. But doing civil disobedience by building it anyway would catch you >$500,000 in fines and penalties, or carries penalties like demolition of the structure. So the bad law acts as an extremely effective deterrent against doing the good thing by making it uneconomical regardless of whether you follow the law or you don't. A bankrupt company can't continue to advocate for change or serve as an example of doing something good.
And if they actually did pay the fines then instead of people saying "that's not real civil disobedience" they would be saying "look at these lawless corporations paying token fines as a cost of doing business" and arguing for the penalties to be increased to a level that would bankrupt them wherever that isn't already the case.
So the remaining option is to break the law and then argue that the law is harmful and shouldn't be enforced.
Meh. What they are doing is NOT civil disobedience and protest. What they are doing is just normal breaking the law for profit thing.
That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
>I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves
Do you truly believe this is some protest action by Airbnb? Because I think most of us rightly characterize it as "intentionally breaking the law for profit" and little more than that.
I'm not sure I like seeing their behavior compared to legitimate protests and activist work. That seems rather insulting to the people and organizations who actually take real risks for the public good. This is a silicon valley startup, a VC-funded profit machine disrupting communities around the world by breaking the law. To paint this as somehow altruistic is a novel take to say the least.
It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.
And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.
Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
They all have variations of a bitter aftertaste to me. It’s not sweet or pleasant at all.
And it’s a different form of bitterness than the one you get from kale/collared greens, brussel sprouts, etc., whichi quite enjoy. I _almost_ want to drink a diet drink along with one of the “bitter” vegetable or even a crème brûlée to quantify the difference.
I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.
You're conflating two different things. Unless you have some very weird genetic condition, it does taste sweet to you. That is, it activates the same sweet receptors on your tongue and in other parts of your mouth that sugar activates - and more or less to the same extent (relative to concentration).
However, sugar isn't simply a sweet taste. It also has some amount of flavor, and so do the artificial sweeteners, and it is these flavor differences that you (and many others) dislike. Flavor is something that happens in the air tract, and is far more complex than taste.
It absolutely does not. The places on my tongue that taste sweet and the places that taste aspartame are completely different (the latter strongly at back of my throat, sugar strongly on my tongue).
No, this is pretty common in folks who don't drown their taste buds and systems in tons of it every day. Then you feel it anytime its there, since its pretty rare and its disgusting chemical bleh, one feels it fully.
Its a bit like smoking cigarettes - to many non-smokers, its disgusting beyond description, smearing face with old feces wouldn't be worse. To many smokers its mild, pleasant, they enjoy it with lunch etc.
Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
At this point I think it almost definitely is "most" in USA at least, going by volume/count/shelf-space.
Like >90% of energy drinks use at least one (normal red bull is a rare exception), and diet sodas typically have more shelf space than regular from what I see, often by a huge margin.
Almost all gatorade-likes have it now too (I typically can't find even a single counter-example in a store, unless they're one of the oddballs carrying regular gatorade (most do not)), often also including regular sugars. Even stuff you'd hope would be maximally-simple like pedialyte has it in almost every variety.
Almost literally every single water-flavoring in stores uses them, I go years without seeing unsweetened or sugar only. skratchlabs.com is sometimes in expensive bike or running stores though, yay.
Stuff like Liquid Death used to be just low amounts of sugar, but now has stevia in it too. The same happened with Bragg's drinking vinegar(???!).
It's wild to be someone who dislikes the flavor of these things and read labels, and watch the massive rise in use in despair. They're in lots of candy bars now too! That was a rather nasty discovery.
Aspartame has a pretty strong, weird metallic flavor to it, and a lot of the sugar alcohols taste... idk, like a belch after a slightly sweet chemical cocktail? Some taste... airy, or dusty, like an absence of flavor, like there's a gap where you'd usually taste something. Hard to describe but very unpleasant. And the flavor lingers for quite a while. Xylitol is mostly alright tho, sadly it's usually blended with other stuff nowadays.
Personally though I think stevia might be the worst, and it's getting added to everything lately, even stuff with more than enough regular sugar.
Honestly I'd prefer to not taste that, since I think most probably are pretty safe and fine (though I would be glad to see a reduction in sweetness in general). But it's really not a choice, nor have I "gotten used to it" in 40 years, despite it being extremely common.
This summarizes pretty well the three main problems I have. Most things are already way too sweetened, the trend of adding artificial sweeteners to something already naturally sweet ruins something that could be good, and many artificial sweeteners taste metallic and have weird aftertaste.
Its one thing for soda or other sweet items, I get the reduction in sugars there. Its just boggling how many foods people, particularly americans cant eat unless its sweet enough to be dessert
You know what, it's exactly what everything tasted like the week that I discovered that grown-ups could catch hand, foot and mouth from their children and also what my toddler was so upset about.
When I drink a non-diet cola, it tastes awful to me; sickeningly sweet. I don't have any problem with diet colas (though I don't like Diet Pepsi, it's slimy to me).
The main point is that it's not that X has an awful taste. It's that different people have different reactions to different Xs. It's not that X tastes bad unless you happen to get used to it.
I also found it super gross but after a few weeks of tough endurance, the chemical taste subsided and disappeared. It comes back after a week or so without Diet Coke.
But yeah I could hardly swallow it in the beginning.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
> It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events;
> The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
How is that achievable? PIs can legally do it. Random people can keep tabs on you and exchange gossip. It's the sudden scale and low cost that doesn't sit well with freedom to not be tracked in public 24/7 we took for granted.
The core ill is aggregated data, because that's what allows the mass in surveillance, data mining, etc.
The collection actions are almost immaterial. Without persistence they must be re-performed for each request, which naturally provides a throughput bottleneck and makes "for everyone" untenable.
If we agree the aggregated data at rest is the problem, then addressing it would look like this:
1. Classify all data holders at scale into a regulated group
2. Apply initial regulations
- To respond to queries for copies of personal data held
- To update data or be liable in court for failing to do so
- To validate counterparties apply basic security due diligence before transferring data (or the transferer also faces liability)
- To maintain a *full* chain of custody of data (from originator through every intermediate party to holder) so that leaks / misuse can be traced
- To file yearly update on the types, amount of data, and counterparties it was transferred to with the federal government that are made public
The initial impediment to regulatory action is Google, Meta, Equifax, etc. saying "This problem is too complex and you don't understand it."
It's not. But the first step is classifying and documenting the problem.
The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.
Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.
It is not realistic to say that no person is allowed to keep track of another person; watch where they go, when, with who, etc.
It should not be acceptable for a company to gather information on "everyone"; where they have been going, when, with who, how often, etc. And it should not be acceptable for them to sell that information (to government agencies OR private citizens).
It's a matter of scale.
- Making the first one illegal/impossible would be difficult/costly; and not doing so has a limited impact (to society, not to the single person affected).
- Making the second one illegal is much easier, and it's much easier to shut down a large company doing it than it is 1,000 individual stalkers. The impact of making it illegal is much wider and better for society as a whole.
We don't want anyone being stalked. But in a cost/benefit analysis, we can do something about one of them but not the other.
If PIs can "legally" do it then it sounds like there is a law which allows them to do it. That law can be revoked (unless the power comes from Constitution which would make it effectively impossible to revoke).
Note that PIs are effectively illegal under GDPR by default. They would generally need to provide Article 13 notice, i.e. you would become aware of them unless they were just asking around without actually following you. Member states can make them legal though (via Article 23) and likely in many cases they have done so.
In the US, PI licensing is only about PIing for hire. The actual act of going through public records, following cars and whatnot do not require a license, you can spy on anyone without a license as long as you don't get paid for it.
EU is more complicated, but Article 14.5.b allows withholding notice if it would impair/defeat the purpose of processing. The PI must however apply "safeguards", whatever it could mean.
Article 14(5)(b) does, but that only applies for Article 14 notice (personal data not directly obtained from data subject). Article 13 (personal data obtained directly from data subject) does not have such exception in GDPR itself.
This becomes extremely relevant when you read it in the light of the C-422/24 decision. In that personal data collected via body worn cameras was determined to be "directly obtained". Paragraph 41 from the judgement:
> If it were accepted that Article 14 of the GDPR applies where personal data are collected by means of a body camera, the data subject would not receive any information at the time of collection, even though he or she is the source of those data, which would allow the controller not to provide information to that data subject immediately. Therefore, such an interpretation would carry the risk of the collection of personal data escaping the knowledge of the data subject and giving rise to hidden surveillance practices. Such a consequence would be incompatible with the objective, referred to in the preceding paragraph, of ensuring a high level of protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons.
Given this it's very unlikely that PI observing (especially if they record) could be considered to be Article 14 instead of Article 13 type of collection as it's exactly "hidden surveillance practice" that the Court warned about.
Member states do have a right to restrict the Article 13 disclosure obligations via Article 23 restriction, but that requires specific law in the member state & the law itself must fulfill the obligations that Article 23 requires. Article 23(2) essentially forbids leaving everything up to the controller.
And as far as PI in the US goes, actions between stalking and PI "for self" tend to be so similar that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone to try it.
Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).
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