brandon

I know most of these companies have large logistics operations in other countries, for example Mexico.

Can/will they attempt to dodge the tariffs on China by redirecting shipments through some other country with lower tariffs on the product’s way into the United States? Would it be legal for them to do so? (It seems to me that a tariff happy country might prefer to view that as undesirable behavior–would the Trump administration have any recourse against that sort of thing?)

The enshittification of the English language.

I got it from the library, so I won’t comment how much money it’s worth.

Hard to say I enjoyed it, since the conduct described within is nearly without expection horrifying. I expect that most people on Lemmy would probably be unsurprised by it.

I found it to be a pretty quick read, and I’m glad it’s out there. If you’re interested in the topic I’d say to give it a shot.

I didn’t see the testimony, but I did read her book.

When most people think “targeted advertising”, I think they are thinking about something like: this user is a middle-class woman between 18 and 25 who enjoys bicycles, so we’ll show her ad X.

According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook/Meta is doing things like detecting when a user uploads, then immediately removes a photo–detecting that as a moment of emotional vulnerability (that is, the user was feeling self-conscious about their appearance), then bombarding them with ads in that moment for beauty products.

I think the former is ‘obvious’ to most people, but the latter probably isn’t–probably because Meta and other advertising companies have put a lot of effort in to keep this on the down low–which is why Wynn-Williams is speaking about it publically.

(not accusing you of defending them BTW, just my 2¢ that this goes beyond what most people would consider obvious, imo)

The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or “apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.

To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.

Please be careful when copying anything that could be considered your employer’s intellectual property (almost certainly anything you built as an employee falls into this category) off of that employer’s systems.

And definitely be even more careful about using one employer’s IP for a new employer (neither company would be pleased to discover this).