Ordering satellite imagery and counting cars is just a weekend project. The last time I looked at ordering imagery, the main obstacle was the minimum order size, so it'd actually scale better for monitoring every store car park than for looking at a single car park.
So if Macy's parking lots have 11% more cars than the same time last year, is that a buy or a sell? Are people actually buying more, or are they more cash strapped and spending more time looking for value?
How busy are the car parks by their dispatch center? are the cars staying longer because people are working overtime? how many UPS trucks are visiting?
you buy data flow data from ISPs at all tiers, so even though they're encrypted, knowing how much traffic is going to Macy's.com vs JCPenney.com gives you information you can act on.
We know this is being done, because of reports that say Netflix is X% of Internet traffic. The undredacted reports from those same data sources have much more detail. It's also why some apps that don't appear to have any business model are actually quite valuable.
I am a millennial with a few online friend groups and they're not really the same thing. For me those online relationships are loose and impermanent. People are continuously entering the group and continuously leaving never to be seen again. There's some level of trust and stability from meeting in-person that I can never seem to achieve online.
> For me those online relationships are loose and impermanent
I hate to break the news but most relationships simply are loose and impermanent, we just don't usually notice how brittle they actually are.
As for trust, is it really reasonable to trust someone more or less just because they've been in front of you vs not? And I mean that both ways: too trusting of people in front of us and not enough of people away.
> I hate to break the news but most relationships simply are loose and impermanent, we just don't usually notice how brittle they actually are.
Probably true at some level, but I'd wager that's much more common for Gen Z and younger millennials for a variety of reasons, as well as among people who just aren't really authentic, suburbanites, and people who just don't invest in friendship building.
However, that's a bit of a silly comparison, online relationships have some value, maybe a lot maybe a little, but they aren't an equal substitute for a friend in meatspace
I'm aware that most relationships aren't going to last forever, but the friends I have online are notably less cohesive than the friends I used to work with.
I make no claims to reasonableness. We are not creatures of pure reason and our friendships are never totally rational. All I claim is that there's something which ties offline friends to me and I to them, particularly if we've worked together, which is not present for any of my online friend groups.
You really don't need them to be in person. Have you scheduled any lunchtime catch-ups? Got any regular group calls around interests? Just random banter? My work group online is a better experience than I've ever had in the office. It may vary for other people and environments, but "something missing" is not a given just because of remote contact.
In the same way junk food is equivalent to a healthy meal (IMO). There is a reason some mental health issues have been skyrocketing, and this is a big part of it.
Not ‘online communities being the cause’, rather ‘lack of genuine in person community and physical connection’ being the cause.
Same as junk food isn’t necessarily the cause of health issues - rather lack of enough healthy, not processed to the tits food is the cause.
Replacing most/all food intake with junk food is going to be bad.
Doing it periodically with enough of the ‘real thing’ to compensate? No issues.
The issue is not enough of the real deal. Which is possible until something breaks because of the alternative, but not necessary.
If you put someone in a capsule in say Antarctica, and they only communicated with other people via video chat - would anyone be surprised if they went crazy?
Hell, I think we’d all be surprised if they didn’t.
The challenge right now is a lot of people (including many people here) are de facto in that pod in a way that they can’t see, because theoretically they could walk outside and have conversations, etc.
They just won’t actually do it, because there are less visible factors pushing them away - factors that in many cases they aren’t allowed to see or acknowledge.
> rather ‘lack of genuine in person community and physical connection’ being the cause
Yes, caused by toxic corporate culture and the modern American work week. There are no third spaces because everyone is busy working, and we all hate the people we work with.
When people say "community", your corporate hell-hole should be the absolute last thing to enter your mind. The fact it's what you turn to and long for really highlights the problem. We've destroyed communities and conned the average joe into thinking work life is their life. Their family. Now we take that away and they're nothing.
The problem isn't the taking away, the problem is getting to a point where the only thing standing between happiness and being a loser is asking how the weather is going by the water cooler.
There is a vast body of literature that shows that in person interactions is not just correlated with happiness, but an effective intervention for loneliness and depression.
In full disclosure, even setting aside the research, I have way too much anecdotal evidence from what I have seen and experienced to be convinced otherwise.
I havent read about workplace interactions as an intervention for loneliness and depression. It would be hard to run a RCT on that, so you would only be left with correlation.
I dont know why making it a more pleasant experience during work has anything to do with how much someone thinks about it outside of work.
I think the comparison would a workplace where people can take a break and chat with friends, vs one where they spend their breaks in isolation.
Alternatively, a workplace where a grocer talks with customer while filling an order vs one where they get a packing list from a machine and puts it in a pickup box.
Seems highly testable. You could if the climate catastrophy and affordability crisis cause the same amount of distress for people who spend lots of time with friends vs have no friends.
It shouldn't be shocking studies show loneliness and depression tracks well with how many close friends people have and how much time they spend with them.
I don’t see how yours are theories as they don’t seem to have any relation to the underlying anything, or have anything testable per-se. Frankly, I’m struggling to see how they’re even hypotheses?
I could see how adding a few sentences onto them could result in such things. Which is why I’m asking for you to elaborate.
After all Hurtful != lonely or depressed. Problems existing != lonely or depressed.
We’ve always had problems of some sort. I’m unaware of any time in history where someone didn’t have something nasty to say about anyone, or there wasn’t something bad potentially happening.
Lonely or depressed tends to happen when someone is isolated and/or feels like there is nothing they can or should do to resolve an existential issue.
Depression tends to be the ‘I should hide in a corner and pretend I don’t exist’ survival strategy.
Not necessarily because there is a problem in general.
But the issue is unlikely to just be ‘living at home with the parents’ still, since in Europe and Asia that is and has been a thing for a very long time, and we don’t see such an epidemic there eh? (Or do we?)
My personal theory is that the problem is less ‘the problems’ - rather that our increasingly sedentary/isolated lifestyle is leading to a downward spiral where we’d rather bitch about/ruminate on problems (and ramp up anxiety fear to try to get moving) than actually solve problems and move on, or even just accept problems and live.
It's primarily some mental blocker in the old that prevents them from connecting things online to their real-life counterparts. It's like being illiterate and insisting that no one else can read those strange symbols. I'll offer in advance that younger people need to learn to separate the two sometimes.
Or they (some at least) might have a better frame of reference and “the young” people simple don’t know and can’t comprehend what they are losing. My interpretation is on no way less generous than yours.
It's pretty normal for ordinary government workloads in the UK, or at least it was at GDS. Using niche suppliers who cater to government paranoia is expensive, and they're usually much less mature than hyperscaler platforms. It's also open for debate whether those niche, inflexible suppliers result in a genuinely more hardened target or not.
Yes, this is the point and the reason it's so good. Centralization and standardization. I'm so glad that my country (Turkey) has made big leaps in centralization of digital services in the recent years with E-Government platform. I even recently wrote the Presidency Public Communcations Center, suggesting every citizen should have a government-issued email address and that an email account must be a right. E-mail is a necessity at this point and it's unacceptable that anyone can lose access to their email account just because Google's ML models decided he's a bot. The government could easily verify every real citizen.
Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that
stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on
my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and
bring even more things properly back in-house.
Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we
recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed
that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.
Some but not all of it run-of-the-mill corruption from the usual
suspects like Priti Patel. There's not much of Britain left to sell to
private equity and Big Tech, but they're always working on finding new
"markets".
I despise Google and what they became and so should you.
Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.
For our podcast we specifically set up Plausible to exclude Google
analytics. Rather little of value to be gained or lost either way, but
it's a matter of conscience and politeness to our users. Sadly we
had to put in links to other big-tech application platforms, but those
are links to click out of choice if you're a user of those services.
This is always the problem when interacting with the corporate internet. I have a Shopify store on my website where my readers can buy mugs and t-shirts to support me(not that anyone is lol). Lord knows what goes on in there.
I hope someone reinvents the services we take for granted with a focus on privacy.
> I despise Google and what they became and so should you
It's a bit laughable to talk about despising a company over this stuff. We're not talking about an evil regime, or even Nestle for what they did with breast milk in Africa. It's so over the top.
Should they instead invest time and public money into solving simple product problems (“how many times was this thing looked at?”) in a way that can be understood by the average desk worker? When that problem is well met by the private sector?
> Should they instead invest time and public money into solving simple
product problems ... when that problem is well met by the private
sector?
I think the answer is yes, and in my earlier post said I'd actually be
happy to give more money for government projects that protect peoples'
privacy better. For me the problem is not "well met by the private
sector" because that solution imposes a hidden externality upon the
public end-users. Part of the price we pay is leaking of our data to
a non-national private company.
I'm not sure using Google Analytics qualifies as an "externality" but even if it does the UK government has proven time and time again it doesn't give a damn about anyone's privacy, so what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for privacy? Because it would certainly be worse from a technical standpoint.
> what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for
privacy?
Well, it's a personal value judgement what is "better" of course, but
for me being British, I see my government as having some legitimate
interest in what I am doing, especially when transacting with them.
On the other hand, a gargantuan for-profit American corporation that
enriches it's shareholders and was once run by Eric Schmidt, whose
legendary face-palm gaffes buried "Don't be Evil" under a smoking heap
of sulphurous brimstone....
"We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or
less know what you’re thinking about"
No thanks!
My government may be a sneaky bunch of bastards, but so far they've
had the good manners not to openly show utter contempt for privacy.
Yes, we should. In fact, I believe every unit of governance of human society (read: nation) should be as independent as possible in every area necessary for its functioning. This means every nation should be completely independent in all of the technology it uses. This is obviously impossible. Not every nation even has the required raw resources, energy input or workforce. So no point in even trying. Luckily, all of this unfathomable monument and mess of concrete and asphalt and silicon which is called global human civilization has not even 50 years left to its total collapse. But oh, wait a minute, let me open the door... This must be your new FPV drone from China, son! Came fast, isn't it? It has only been one week...
A lot of people use google analytics for no logical reason what soever though.
Typical use case for a small to medium website seems to be a list of most visited pages.
That's a perfectly logical reason to use GA. As long as HTTP servers don't have a built-in UI for analytics, people will continue to use GA (with server side Measurement Protocol for counting hits from people with adblockers) for that use case.
GA and external CDNs require cookie banner/consent under GDPR (which is still valid in UK AFAIK). So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it.
But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.
IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.
I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.
I just mean don't take the remote work idea too far. Raising children is affecting the ability to do any professional work and because of that people deciding to have children should receive various forms of support and protection by social institutions and employment laws. Pretending that you can take care of children while working from home is very harmful idea imho.
