notes that , the primary source, glosses over nitty-gritties. e.g. the “message queue” server. Maybe reading through these will provide a larger perspective to design decisions made in Chromium regarding observers.
Rant: some of willchan’s thoughts on WeakPtr, for those who care to read criticizes the observer pattern for murking dependency chains. Investigate more in this regard.
Intent A one-to-many dependency between object so that when one object (subject) changes, all its dependents (observers) are notified and update automatically....
Targeting Ads Based on Mood NYT’s nytDEMO launched perspective targeting, an ad product that allows advertisers to place ads based on the sentiment that the content is predicted to evoke . ESPN, USA Today, and Oracle’s Grapeshot have similar products too.
How successful is this approach? Google, the largest online advertiser, does not mention it in their ads targeting help page , but Google is not in the publishing business either....
A Zooming Web Browser. Bederson, Benjamin B.; Hollan, James D.; Stewart, Jason; Rogers, David; Vick, David; Ring, Laura; Grose, Eric; Forsythe, Chris. Multimedia Computing and Networking, 1996. Vol. 2667. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/454001 . https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/05064f81c4a6352889d2057214e75bb729f39c2f/Zooming-Web-browser/list . Interesting because these were the early days of the web, back when Netscape was king. The web could have evolved in different ways. Why didn’t the zooming browser catch on?
Problem Context Navigating the web presents a struggle between focus and context....
One of the grand dreams of the web is bringing people together so that they may find relevant information.
Sometimes this is implicit, e.g. Google Search’s PageRank learns from inter-page links which are mostly made by people, but there may be room for explicit collaboration when navigating the web. This section explores such explicit attempts.
A Group Asynchronous Browsing (GAB) Server Premise: Users submit their subject hierarchies (bookmarks) to the GAB server....
Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest uses a captivating narrative style to elaborate on a complex question. The exposition makes the scientific parts memorable.
features a good anecdote of insight favoring the prepared. On a jog in London in January, probably primed by reading Nick Lane’s Oxygen, he noticed that there were some bar-headed geese. These geese migrate between India and Kazakhstan/Mongolia, necessitating a flight over the Himalayas, sometimes at 28,000 feet....
Browser Market Share Worldwide (2009 - 2020). Source: statcounter | GlobalStats
At the very least, Chrome is worth studying. Something worked out. I’m biased, I only plan to deeply explore Chromium-based browsers and Firefox.
Stability, Testing and the Multi-Process Architecture In a single-threaded browser, devs use asynchronous APIs - which may sometimes hold the browser up. Instead of multiple threads, Chromium chose multiple processes: isolation, independent crashes, better asymptotic memory management, identifying expensive sites, etc....
32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ‘21) Reconstructing Ireland’s Lost History through the Beyond 2022 Project Aims to create a virtual 3-D reconstruction of the “Record Treasury” of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin. The original one was destroyed in Ireland’s Civil War of 1922. Reassembling will use copies, transcripts and records scattered among archival partners.
The full text of discusses challenges presented by the Beyond 2022 project....
WWW ‘21: Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 User-oriented Fairness in Recommendation Showed that active users who only account for a small proportion enjoy much higher recommendation quality than the majority inactive users. They propose a re-ranking approach by adding constraints over the evaluation metrics.
There’s a subtlety here. Although the active users are the minority, the recommender considers them the majority as they are the ones providing a lot of the training data....
The paper is written in a period when NLP practitioners are producing bigger (# of parameters; size of training data) language models (LMs), and pushing the top scores on benchmarks.
Environmental Risks Large LMs consume a lot of resources, e.g. training a single BERT base model on GPUs was estimated to use as much energy as a trans-American flight.
Marginalized communities are doubly punished. They are least likely to benefit from LMs, e....
The lack of explanability is a common theme. Higher-ups claim the machine is unbiased, while the workers on the ground say, “It’s not me; it’s the computer”.
Automating Inequality: How High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor should be an enlightening read.
Computers Can Solve Your Problem. You May Not Like the Answer The algorithm had four guiding principles:
Increase # of high school students starting after 8am Decrease # of elementary school students dismissed after 4pm Accommodate the needs of special education students Generate transportation savings Unprecedented opposition to the algorithm’s solution....
WWW ‘21: Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 REST: Relational Event-Driven Stock Trend Forecasting REST, an event-driven stock trend forecasting framework, that overcomes two limitations of existing event-driven models. Models the stock context, and learns the effect of event information on the stocks under different contexts. Constructs a stock graph and designs a new propagation layer to propagate the effect of event information from related stocks.
The value of stock trend forecasting is not unanimous, e....
Dotcom crash took away $8tn (yearly output of Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Russia) of market value.
The Internet Bubble The internet had 2 bubble qualities: some new technology & some new business opportunity.
A Broad-Scale High-Tech Bubble Cisco and JDS Uniphase, producers of the backbone of the Internet, sold at +100 P/E.
As usual, companies changed their names to include “dot.com”, “dotnet”, and “Internet”.
Stock High ‘00 Low ‘01–‘02 Decline Amazon....
Maximizing the Value for Shareholders Suing a company for not following its code of ethics and therefore misleading investors doesn’t fly, but Signet Jewelers settled for $240m . Signet’s 70k female employees sued for discrimination, but the class action is yet to be resolved.
Tom Toro’s New Yorker cartoon : Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders....
The Tulip Bulb Craze Virus causes colored stripes in tulip petals. The Dutch valued such bulbs. Prices rose (just when one thought they couldn’t go higher). Let the tulipmania begin.
Note: And that’s where FOMO comes in. You can’t argue with the results. You just want to dip your toes and get out. I watched Bitcoin keep climbing, until I got into the game with $50…
Tulip bulbs options....
Pre-read thoughts.
I think for the general population, the value of privacy is not worth the inconvenience associated with securing it, in the cases where it’s not readily availed by Big Tech. For example, one wouldn’t go out of their way to not have passwords and 2FA. However, when it comes to matters like online privacy, most folks are willing to allow surveillance in exchange for free services like web search, social media, etc....
Privacy and Human Behavior in the Age of Information. A. Acquisti; L. Brandimarte; G. Loewenstein. Science, Vol. 347, Issue 6221, Page 509-514. Jan 30, 2015. People’s uncertainty about the consequences of privacy-related behaviors and their own preferences over those consequences Incomplete and asymmetric information. People rarely know what info others, firms and govts have about them or how the info is used.
Some privacy harms are tangible, e.g. financial costs associated with identity theft....
Techno-utopianism claimed that the old ways of doing things are broken, and technology is the panacea: ending poverty, fixing racism, equalizing opportunity, strengthening democracy; toppling authoritarian regimes.
Disruptive, wealthy and apolitical innovators were/are the heroes, and not the tech activists, e.g. the late Aaron Swartz.
However, the conversation has shifted to techno-dystopianism: humans losing jobs, loss of privacy, radicalization, etc.
But both techno-utopianism and techno-dystopianism are too facile and simplistic outlooks....
State Surveillance In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, FBI was contacting people whose cellphones pinged cell towers near the Capitol during the riots.
A powered mobile phone always sends signals to one of the closest base stations. Given multiple base stations, the angle and time of arrival, and location signatures of each cell location can be used to locate a mobile device. The higher the density of cell towers, the more precise the calculated location....
Going to a talk is difficult for everyone because nobody understands the whole thing, but it’s especially difficult for undergraduates because they still expect to.
How to Read a Paper The First Pass (5 - 10 min) Objectives: category, context, validity of assumptions, contributions and quality of writing.
Carefully read the title, abstract, and introduction. Read the section and sub-section headings, but ignore everything else Glance at the math to determine the underlying theoretical foundations Read the conclusions....
Premise: Orr can have “effective” dreams that retroactively change reality for everyone else, except those who are aware of him dreaming. See for a refresher on the plot.
Notable Plot Points Prodded by Haber to dream of the end of overpopulation, Orr dreamt of a plague that killed 6B people. But Orr tries to convince himself that the world that was was fiction in his head, so he didn’t really kill anyone....