you probably just forgot what you were taught in praxeology 101

“No but see patents are a government granted monopoly, so when it’s exploited by an absentee owner for profit it’s different”

So now that it's public knowledge that Facebook shares private messages with other tech companies, can we please delete it?

Don’t forget banks.

They're first in line for the guillotine.

Well yeah, but no, I mean they were giving that stuff to banks too. At least the Royal Bank of Canada.

Oh, I didn't hear about that. So uhh.. why? Investors give cheaper loans if you let them spy on their girlfriends?

Who knows? RBC and Facebook are both denying it.

If only we could read their private messages to find out.

I feel like this is why Facebook has such a high valuation right? There's no way this wasn't a fairly open secret in the banking world. They probably half value Facebook so high knowing how they really operate.

I don’t know about banks fixing the Facebook stock price, but I agree this is probably well known by the biggest companies. You’ve probably never heard of RBC but it’s the largest Canada domiciled company by revenue|profit|market cap. Bank of America is “only” worth twice as much, and they have a market 10 times bigger. We’re talking top 10% on the S&P 500 index, if the US ever annexed Canada. So it’s pretty far from a nobody company.

And Facebook gave them unlimited access to user information, including their private messages.

If RBC had that access, you can bet Chase, Capital One, and BofA did too. Other guys as well. Think about all of the top 50 US companies by market cap and ask yourself whether you’d be comfortable with them being able to read your private messages. Because it’s a safe bet that they did.

I don't mean necessarily as them fixing the price, but like, if you were to actually value a company, a company who illegally leaks you data seems like a better investment than a similar company who doesn't. Facebook being a colossal sack of crap makes them more valuable. Who's not going to do business with someone who skirts the law for you?



I seem to remember RBC coming up when the LIBOR scandal was a thing, but not much besides that.



I would not be surprised if they use that information to find keywords which signal bad lenders, or other lexical analysis to determine education and general intelligence and use that for racist loan policy.

Which, if so, means the United States pioneered China's "citizen points" thing, rofl.

Consumer banks make of their money from service fees now. Interest rates are rock bottom, and most household debt is backstopped by government insurance, so banks don't have any reason to care that you might be brown or whatever. They'd actually prefer customers who get NSFs over customers who make exactly two deposits and one credit card payment every month.

um, yeah, like over 100 years ago.

Facebook is basically Equifax, except you're also encouraged to voluntarily share your personal thoughts and preferences with it.

Oh. I think I made my credit card account when I was broke and nearly homeless, so my bank probably thought I was going to bring in the cash. But I haven't missed a payment. I think I overdrafted once at the beginning, but now that doesn't happen.



****. America is a messed-up place.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-data-security/amazon-error-allowed-alexa-user-to-eavesdrop-on-another-home-idUSKCN1OJ15J?utm_source=reddit.com

I refused to buy an Echo from day one because 1. ****ing why and 2. there's no way hackers aren't interested. Turns out you might not even need to become a hacker, Amazon will leak information for you.

So this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, and we should think of these revelations as a purely private sector analog of the Snowden revelations.

Funny thing, at the time of the Snowden revelations, a professor of mine was rather adamant in response to some student concerns that the government was reading our emails that, well, the private sector was doing the same exact thing. And for some reason people didn't really blink, because for some bizarre reason Americans are more likely to trust their bank than their congressional representative.

It's almost as if private sector lobbyists embodied in the likes of Reagan and co., who have fed us nightmares about G-men running around at night coming up with nefarious plots to enslave us, well, were engaging in highly weaponized pro-business propaganda.

"Government control is evil! They will read your emails and enslave you like the GDR. Elect us to government and we will stop them, so that we can let our friends in business do the exact same thing."

No. Gubmint evil. Private property good. Business good.

Facebook is now claiming people 'consented' to others reading their private messages.

America desperately needs a version of the GDPR.

we need a private sector version of the GDR

.

On the other hand, perhaps:



Seems to me, that without some comprehensive law (GDPR?), we won't every really know wtf they are doing with our data. And consumers won't seem to care.

Some people like their government ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[quote=Ronald Reagan]The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.[/quote]

Wait a minute... this quote now makes perfect sense to me, now that I realize who the pronouns really refer to: namely, the party being terrified here should be understood as businesses, and the people the government is trying to help are the voting public! Holy cow they did a great job pulling the wool over people's eyes.

But by Steinbeck's Lemma, we know that every voter is actually isomorphic to a millionaire at a later date. So it's OK. We can all be millionaires, we just ALL have to get lucky and win the jackpot. In fact you're going to win so much that you're going to be tired of winning. There can never be any losers in the game of capitalism. (Except of course the undeserving ones who are simply lazy by virtue of being black, not following the bible, etc.)

I laughed.

= ≠ ==

Personally I'm not sure why most languages don't use := for = and = for =, since, you know, = is a pretty universal notion in mathematics.

If you ever want to feel a little weirded out by infinity. Imagine standing at the base of a paraboloid:



Now look up. What do you see? Assuming you can see infinitely far, there's only a single point straight above you that's not parabola. Everywhere else, no matter how vertical, is just parabola. Even though it gets infinitely wide, it blocks everything except a measure 0 spot in the sky.

I know this is right intuitively, but this feels wrong in many ways.

because Fortran.

https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/76529

You had me weirded out at "infinity", which doesn't exist. Cue Dr. Zeilberger...

...


(just kidding)

At any rate, if you think the infinite parabolic sky is weird, just wait till you hear about cDonald's Theorem:

Another thing which is a literal headache is to imagine having flat eyes, then imagine Euclidean space. Try looking at the end of an infinitely long line:



Can you do it? Lol, with spherical eyes, sure. But with flat eyes it's literally impossible. If you tried to look down, you'd see the whole line in your vision, and as you look up, suddenly the line would go from covering your vision from top to bottom to covering none. There is no possible way to see the end of the line with flat eyes.

It's really hard to unwire your brain from interpreting space with curvature and to think about Euclidean space in this way.

Dude, what? Flat eyes? weed lmao

(I honestly can't tell if you are stoned or not right now.)

Did you hear that? That was my skull. I'm so wasted!

No weed. Just think of the normal vectors on a flat surface vs. a round one. The flat surface has all parallel normal vectors. Check my ****ty mspaint drawing:



If the flat eye is at F, the direction of gaze is Y, and we take the limit of X towards infinity, then the angle at F converges to 90 degrees. But at 90 degrees the eye is not looking at the point, it's looking above it. For any given angle below 90 degrees, the vision of the flat eye is gazing at a finite value, it cannot see the point at infinity. A flat eye can never "see" a point at infinity, it's not possible to create an angle where it lies in the field of view.

The curved eye has no such issue. As long as the edges of the vision are around the point at infinity, there exist plenty of angles at which the point the line converges to is within the field of view.

It might have something to do with the measure of your field of view: with a flat eye, the further you look the proportion of what you can see drops to 0. With a spherical eye, you maintain the same proportion no matter how far you look.

It would certainly be disturbing to be trapped at the bottom of an infinite height parabola, but the intuition and feeling seem pretty right to me. It’s a matter of trigonometry.

I happen to know the missing piece there.

This was a micro-optimization. B dropped the : from := because assignment is a more frequent operation than equality comparison, and it saved a few bits.

Not at all, this is a practical discussion. The perspective projection used for 3D games is based on a flat eye (~= your monitor). This causes severe distortions, which are especially bad with high FOV/ultra wide/VR.

After reading it again, I believe he is talking about orthographic projections, not perspective projections.