Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky. What apps are "shady"? How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?

I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.

>Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky.

I don't think anyone who actually is at risk, or cares about risk, is going to be overconfident about their security because some HN commenter said "you're probably fine".

>What apps are "shady"?

Depends on your paranoia level. I'd say first party apps (eg. apple/google maps/weather) are probably fine. Google has the additional caveat that they record location history and therefore might be subject to geofence warrants. If you think iOS/Android is backdoored then all phones are off limits.

>How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?

They're whatever ad SDKs can get their hands on. If the app has location permissions, it's that. Otherwise it's something like geoip. At the end of the day it's just third party code running in some app's sandbox. If the app can't get it, the SDK can't get it either.

>I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.

What other plausible mechanism are there then? wifi/bluetooth scanning requires location permissions since forever ago.

This isn't a criticism of you, I don't know your full story. But I think many people have a misconception of the role of an ER. I know an ER doctor well, and the role of an ER is to, in approximate order of priority:

1. Prevent someone from dying

2. Treat severe injuries

3. Identify if what someone is experiencing is life-threatening or requires immediate treatment to prevent their condition worsening

4. Provide basic treatment and relief for a condition which is determined not to be an imminent threat

In particular, they are not for diagnosing chronic conditions. If an ER determines that someone's stomach pain is not an imminent, severe threat to their health, then they are sending them out of the ER with medication for short-term relief in order to make room for people who are having an emergency. The ER doc I know gets very annoyed at recurring patients who expect the ER to help them diagnose and treat their illness. If you go the ER, they send you home, and the thing happens again, make an appointment with a physician (and also go to the ER if you think it's serious).

Unfortunately, the medical system is very confusing and difficult to navigate. This is a big part of why so many people end up at ERs who should be making appointments with non-emergency doctors - finding a doctor and making appointments is often hard and stressful, while an ER will look at anyone who walks through the doors.

Where I live there is a lack of family doctors.

> To me it's crazy that doctors rarely ask me if I'm taking any medications for example, since meds can have some pretty serious side effects.

This sounds very strange to me. Every medical appointment I've ever been to has required me to fill out an intake form where I list medications I'm taking.

If so, then we can at least put that myth to rest and move closer to a real solution. The only potential downside I see here is that maybe it pushes the real solution a bit further down the road.

We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.

Without understanding the level of detail required, which we do not yet know, we cannot say.

When I think of English specifications that (generally) aim to be very precise, I think of laws. Laws do not read like plain, common language, because plain common language is bad at being specific. Interpreting and creating laws requires an education on par with that required of an engineer, often greater.

Laws being unreadable is largely an Enlish-language problem zo. I have no problem reading them in my native language. Not requiring massive context size of case law makes things easier still. Big part of being a lawyer is having the same context with all the other lawyers and knowing what was already decided and what possible new interpretation is likely to be accepted by everyone else.

> Big part of being a lawyer is having the same context with all the other lawyers and knowing what was already decided and what possible new interpretation is likely to be accepted by everyone else.

And to create software specifications with language, the same thing will need to happen. You’ll need shared terminology and context that the LLM will correctly and consistently interpret, and that other engineers will understand. This means that very specific meanings become attached to certain words and phrases. Without this, you aren’t making precise specifications. To create and interpret these specifications will require learning the language of the specs. It may well still be easier than code - but then it would also be less precise.

>And to create software specifications with language, the same thing will need to happen. You’ll need shared terminology and context that the LLM will correctly and consistently interpret, and that other engineers will understand.

That sounds awfully similar to... software development.

Yeah many programming languages have been advertised to fulfil precisely this goal, that people can program computers via natural language instead of having to think hard and too much about details.

Usually programming languages intend to make editing as easy as possible, but also understanding what the program does, as well as reasoning about performance, with different languages putting different emphasis on the various aspects.

It's the induced demand or river length/flow/sediment kind of situation. Doesn't matter what level of abstraction the language provides, we always write the code that reaches the threshold of our own mental capacity to reason about it.

Smart people know how to cap this metric in a sweet spot somewhere below the threshold.

And this could end up looking more like mathematics notation than English. For the same reason mathematicians opt to use specialized notation to communicate with greater precision than natural language.

Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.

I like the basketball, volleyball, and baseball way where the noun before ball has some leeway but should be clearly identified with an aspect of the sport.

football -> tackleball rugby -> tossball cricket -> paddleball golf -> clubball hockey -> icepuck

Everything you just said is, through another lens, the boons of Discord. Lack of discoverability and permanence are a big part of why communities are moving and forming there.

Though there may be some very good information locked behind unsearchable discord servers, and that won't be publicly archived for the greater good (not that most of reddit isn't forgettable).

The good and bad, I guess.

Git (the version control program, not GitHub) associates the author’s email address with every single commit. The user of Git configures this email address. This isn’t secret information.