Nowhere in the article is the author suggesting that local or state governments manage these algorithms, just that they be audited for fairness given the amount of power these algorithms hold in the market. Google operates something of a monopoly in Google Maps and its recommendations. You don't find an attempt to understand the efficacy of its rankings or how Google or market participants could be manipulating the rankings to benefit themselves interesting?
> At minimum, ranking algorithms with this much economic consequence should be auditable.
"At minimum". Immediately preceded by a paragraph starting by "For policy", with sentences like "If discovery now shapes small-business survival, then competition, fairness, and urban regeneration can no longer ignore platform ranking systems" or "tools of local economic policy".
That's perhaps not an outright call for regulation, but it's certainly suggesting it's warranted.
Any analysis of Github's functionality that begins and ends with blaming individuals and their competency is deeply mistaken while being insulting. Anyone who has ever worked at a large company knows exactly how hard it is for top performers to make changes and it's not difficult because the other people are stupid. At least in my experience, almost everyone holding this "they must be stupid" opinion knows very little about how large organizations make decisions and knows very little about how incentives at different levels of an org chart leads to suboptimal decisions and results. I would agree with you that being overly polite helps no one, but being correct does, and what they initially wrote isn't even right and it's also insulting. There's no value in that.
That's besides the point, isn't it? There is a high likelihood that these models, these companies, and the people building them are going to be central in shaping future conversations and thought. Why does it matter what they're used for right now?
> It's not a skill issue, it's an organizational issue.
We can say that for the majority of companies with large teams that already have this. Everyone knows Meta is no different.
In this case, it's a skill issue to ship low quality software which is what whoever that team at Meta just did and knowingly approved.
> The engineers at Meta are world class but they're nerfed by organizational constraints.
That doesn't mean anything given that shipping regressions to billions of users is not of "world class" calibre.
If fact, that is of amateurs behaviour and way below the expectation of a multi-trillion dollar company hiring the "best" engineers which they can certainly afford.
It is a management failure 100%. It doesn’t matter how good you engineers are when they are punished for doing good work and rewarded for shipping garbage.
Part of being good means pushing back too and managing upwards. Seems like they hire only those that won’t. Thus the management failure causes culture causing mediocrity.
You don't think it's a bigger assumption that plowing hundreds of billions of dollars into a novel and often misunderstood technology is going to net out positive? We're not talking "people like feeds of cat photos" money and risk here, we're talking about a bubble with the potential to tank the entire economy. On top of that, it's also a higher disruptive technology that should it ramp as quickly as it might will lead to massive amounts of societal strife at a time where we're already stretched a little thin to say the least. "What do you mean Credit Default Swaps don't work? They've been functioning perfectly well these past few years and so far the impacts have only been positive. Tons of people are getting mortgages on houses they weren't in the past, it's the American dream!"
The author didn't say the road was designed to kill children. They said the system was working exactly as designed in that it prioritizes vehicular traffic over other concerns and this is a predictable side effect of that prioritization.
Or they realize it and they're trying to squeeze the last bit of juice available to them before the party stops. It's not exactly a suboptimal decision to work towards your own job's demise if it's the best paying work available to you and you want to save up as much as possible before any possible disruption. If you quit, someone else steps into the breach and the outcome is all the same. There's very few people actually steering the ship who have any semblance of control; the rest of us are just along for the ride and hoping we don't go down with the ship.
Yeah I get that. I myself am part of a team at work building an AI/LLM-based feature.
I always dreaded this would come but it was inevitable.
I can’t outright quit, no thanks in part to the AI hype that stopped valuing headcount as a signal to company growth. If that isn’t ironic I don’t know what is.
Given the situation I am in, I just keep my head down and do the work. I vent and whinge and moan whenever I can, it’s the least I can do. I refuse to cheer it on at work. At the very least I can look my kids in the eye when they are old enough to ask me what the fuck happened and tell them I did not cheer it on.
In the case of immigrant workers in Qatar, the deal they're offered very often ends up looking very different from their lived experience once it's accepted and they move into the country to perform the work. If the deal was clearly stipulated ahead of time I'd agree with you.
A realistic fair share is probably some colloquial measure of people and corporations being equally angry about their taxes and equally angry about others not paying their fair share. It's my personal opinion that corporations have it way too good in the current system, specifically because they've spent millions to find ways to save billions, which people cannot reasonably do, and because they've also spent millions buying our political processes off to ensure tax laws don't meaningfully change.
Yes, and in fact the entire purpose of a progressive marginal tax system is that "everyone feels the pain of taxation" equally. It recognizes that a fixed percentage, even with a threshold, feels very different if you earn poverty-level wages than if you earn 10000 times that.
And that's what our tax system is designed around.
Corporations, and specifically their status (or otherwise) as "persons" complicates the picture quite a bit.
Yes, I would expect the government to blindly stick to the founding document of the country. I would also expect the government to go through the amendment process to change that document if it was found wanting given changes in society over time.
It’s far easier to pay lip service to the document while doing whatever you want. This is common with authoritarian regimes. From the PRC’s constitution:
> Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
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