Tracking already feeling pervasive suffers from the cognitive bias of all or nothing thinking. A phone can be turned off or apps disabled far more easily than a network of surveillance cameras. There are degrees of surveillance and who has access to the data. We can push back.
Didn't lose me, but point taken about gathering more support. How about: the costs of implementing a zero-crime world are far greater than the crime. Or attempting to trade freedom for safety will result in losing both.
Definitely, AI sentiment is positive among most people at the small startup I work at in the Seattle area. I do see the "AI fatigue" too, I bet the majority is from using AI as a repeated layoff rationalization. Personally AI is a tool, one of the more useful ones (e.g. Claude and Gemini thinking models make quite helpful code reviewers once given a checklist) The hype often overshadows these benefits.
I can share a similar approach I'm finding beneficial. I add "Be direct and brutally honest in your feedback. Identify assumptions and cognitive biases to correct for." (I also add a compendium of cognitive biases and examples to the knowledge I give the LLM.
I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of ad/user engagement optimization for example.
Correlation vs causation leaves a lot open, chronically sick with a number of illnesses people may sleep more. Their mortality risk is also higher. I'd wish we could see controlled studies that randomly assign people to different sleep durations. You also have to control for gene mutations that affect sleep requirements https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-mutation-...
Different people are trying to get different things from Facebook. I use facebook but disable notifications and unliked all pages/companies. Crippling the annoying parts to them allows people to have their Facebook cake and eat it too. Without being bothered by stupid notifications mid bite.
I remember a professor who equated smartphone use with smoking, he told people to go outside with the smokers if they wanted to use their smartphones/Facebook.
This definitely depends on a lot of factors. If you do work where you are easily replaceable sure. Most software developers don't have anything special rights wise as so few unionize. As an independent developer if you choose work in niches where the demand is greater than supply you can fire your painful customers anytime and move on to other ones. Different solutions work for different people.
It really depends on the person, thats great you recognize that you do well in the corporate world. Unfortunately in many places the company would own your spare projects due to the intellectual property assignment rules in their employment contracts. Beyond that some of us strongly dislike conformity and being a replaceable cog in the corporate machine. Connecting with one's customers and seeing directly how what you build helps them instead of dealing with corporate politics is a huge improvement to me.
Depends on where you are, in some US states you can get licensed to call yourself a software engineer. This holds you legally liable to the code of ethics. It often influences court cases involving companies too: http://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/using-the-code/
I agree, the title is certainly overconfident if not negligent. Preventing people from writing inaccurate communications would be the topic of many studies and papers by itself though!
For current issues yes, it doesn't matter you just fix it and get the results. If you want to prevent it in the future it helps to know which one causes the other. Then you can focus preventative efforts on the factor that causes the issue.
Unfortunately without putting randomly assigned teams into controlled settings to test this, how else can we figure that out? I want to know too, but this seems expensive to test to any high level of certainty for the causation.
I agree, its great to take that personal responsibility yourself. When it comes to software that others use, the easier you make it the more people use it. Isn't that a key part of why we use automation? Put work into setting it up once for end user simplicity and reap the rewards the next 10,1000,n times.