"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."
I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like 6MB of storage per language.
One thing that constantly surprises me is how many people believe that maximizing shareholder value is some sort of legal or moral obligation, not an ideological convenience made up out of whole cloth by an economist in the 70s. What's elided in this article is that Jack Welch called it “the dumbest idea in the world.”
@stilescrisis@mhoye@dalias responsibility to shareholders is certainly a responsibility, but it's not the only one, and directors have responsibility to workers, customers, communities, and many other constituencies to balance. It's only the intellectual laziness and unrepentant cronyism of most publicly-traded companies' boards that reduces them to shareholder maximization puppets who never hold CEOs accountable.
@mhoye@stilescrisis@dalias The share holders themselves are interested in more than just short term money. Subscriptions are popular because shareholders care more about recurring long term profit than a short term sale. Share holders also tend to care about the image of the company.
Most CS degrees have students do a "traffic light" exercise at some point: build an model of an intersection, run the stoplights.
Those lessons sometimes ask questions like "Are there pedestrians in your model? Maybe bikes? How about buses? Exactly who lives in the neighbourhood, do they relies on public transit? Et cetera.
A question I like to ask students, that always gets a lot of uncomfortable silence is: at what point do these decisions stop being software, and start being public policy?
@meejah The best thing I've seen in that vein are lights that turn red when they detect cars going over the limit. Really puts the pressure on traffic to stay nice and chilly, not get excitable, everyone just keep it together and it's going to work for everyone..
Re-upping this again: I wish more lefties could internalize the idea that hypocrisy is not a meaningful accusation to the right. Of course they're being hypocrites. That you are bound, by rules, standards, logic, human decency, some fundamental moral consistency, anything at all, and they are not? That is their conception of what power is, and why they seek it. So they can exercise power, without constraint, and you cannot.
This is a great writeup of a DB corruption bug and its detection and resolution. Much respect to Claire, these "things that should always happen in the right order have happened in the wrong order because of some particular set of extreme conditions, with surprise downstream consequences" bugs are absolutely the worst. "Let's reason backwards from effects to causes, with the caveat that causality maybe sometimes doesn't exist" is so hard.