Interesting Links for 18-05-2018

[andrewducker]

Here's what's actually going on with the Yanny/Laurel clip

(tags: sound age )

Accurate anti-drug slogans

(tags: drugs funny )

Some differences between Christianity and Judaism

(tags: Judaism Christianity history religion )

Exquisite Rot: Spalted Wood and the Lost Art of Intarsia

(tags: art wood history )

Deaths from fungal infections exceeding malaria, say researchers in new drug resistance warning

(tags: fungus )

Chinese mass-indoctrination camps evoke Cultural Revolution

(tags: China propaganda Education nationalism )

Edinburgh to ban all on-street advertising boards citywide

(tags: Edinburgh advertising )

GDPR Hysteria

(tags: privacy europe )

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

That GDPR article says:

Processing all these end-user requests will be a huge burden

Then automate it. If you could automate the collection of the data in the first place then you definitely can automate the rest of the life cycle. There is no technical hurdle companies won’t jump through if it gets them juicy bits of data but as soon as the data needs to be removed we’re suddenly back in the stone age and some artisan with a chisel and hammer will have to jump into action to delete the records and this will take decades for even a small website. Such arguments are not made in good faith and in general make the person making them look pretty silly after all nobody ever complained about collecting data, in fact there are whole armies of programmers working hard to scrape data from public websites which is a lot more work than properly dealing with the life cycle of that data after it has been collected. So yes, it is a burden, no, the burden isn’t huge unless you expressly make it so but that’s your problem.

Hmm.... Speaking as someone who develops these sorts of systems, that's bollocks. It's rather more complicated than that. You might have, for instance, really antique code that collects the data, and therefore no current developers who really want to touch it. More generally though, allowing one user to store one record is a whole load simpler than allowing one user to retrieve the record that is theirs (you have to validate that they are that record's owner!), and make changes to it or delete it.

[skington]

If you had a legacy system that was unmaintainable, you were storing up technical debt and you've just been found out.

More generally, the data you're storing about your customers is probably fine. If you have a significant exposure to the GDPR, you were probably storing too much and you should wonder why you were doing that.

I think this is the salient bit of the article:

If becoming compliant with the law will cause your business to go under that is more or less the same as saying that your business is built on gross privacy violations. So if that’s your business model then good riddance to you and your company.

[momentsmusicaux]

I've worked on tons of sites for charities and small organizations that are just collecting data from users or visitors because they're convinced it'll be useful to them and because, so far, they've simply been able to. (Seriously, some clients are like kids in a sweet shop.)

That doesn't mean it's their business model.

And every site has technical debt. Sites for non-profits often have years of it. For instance, I have for the last year been working on a complete rebuild of a not-for-profit's site that was built about 7-8 years ago. If they hadn't come along and stumped up for the rebuild, they would have a massive heap of tech debt.

[skington]

With respect, if people have been hoovering up data just because they could, that is precisely the sort of behaviour the GDPR is designed to thwart. It's unfortunate that things we like, like small charities, are guilty of it as well as large corporations, but on the other hand the EU is likely to be lenient towards them as long as they show willing.

As for technical debt, it's like any debt: some is fine, if it means you get what you need faster, and you can then pay it back at your leisure. It's if it becomes unmanageable that you have a problem. If the GDPR means lots of companies need to look at their legacy systems and put in some work to make them manageable again, again that's a good thing, like the Millennium Bug was.

[momentsmusicaux]

Oh absolutely. I've been telling clients for years that they have no damn need to hoover all this data up, and they don't bloody listen to me!

The point I am taking issue with is just that it's no big deal to comply with this. It's not necessarily.

> As for technical debt, it's like any debt: some is fine, if it means you get what you need faster, and you can then pay it back at your leisure. It's if it becomes unmanageable that you have a problem.

Yeah, well most websites are built on bit of glue and string and fly on sheer blind hope and luck. I should know, I build them. GDPR doesn't expose this. This gets exposed any time there is any kind of major security issue, and we see that most sites just aren't keeping up to date (e.g. Panama papers, where the site that leaked them hadn't applied a security patch that had been released something like a year previously). But then that's not just websites -- all aspects of software are glue and string and luck. Look at all the things that were in trouble with the SSH bug that came to light about a year ago.

[calimac]

The person(s) responding to the question about the difference between Christianity and Judaism is/are Orthodox, and thus take a somewhat different and more technically theological tack than I as a Reform Jew would do.

However, they've gotten the main points that aren't technical but about the basic feel and point of the religions:

1) Judaism is focused on this world, not on an afterlife. Sufficient digging can unearth a traditional Jewish concept of the afterlife, but it's vague and I've never seen it discussed. We're just not interested in it.

2) Judaism is about practicing the religion in daily life, not about subscribing to a creed.

Of course, Jewish sects differ about what practice of the religion means. Orthodox traditionally mean by this following the halakha, the rabbinical Jewish law (an immensely complex concept embodied in a core of aspirational but often vague divine commandments, several layers of voluminous and extremely detailed rabbinical commentary, and a body of case law still being added to). Reform treat halakha as voluntary, and interpret tikkun olam as pursuing social justice in the world and mitzot as doing good deeds for others. (Both terms cited in the post in their Orthodox meaning of following commandments.)

But Reform agree with Orthodox that there is one Jewish creed: the Sh'ma, which in the brief form we use it is 12 words long (in Hebrew) and says that God is one and indivisible, and is to be praised. The Christian Trinity is a repulsively blasphemous concept to Jews. That leads to:

3) Whatever Jesus may have been, he wasn't the Jewish Messiah. Even if he was God the Son (whatever that means). That's not what the Jewish Messiah was there to do, and in fact Jesus's words can be read as saying "Scrub that stuff: I'm here to do something else." Either you accept that change of plans as legitimate, in which case you become Christian, or you don't, in which case you stay Jewish.

[calimac]

One other point that should definitely go into any discussion of the differences, because it's something I've seen many Christians comprehensively not understand:

The halakha regarding permissible foods, the laws of kashrut, are some of the most complex parts. Jews who keep kosher might take an ambiguous food to their rabbi for a ruling on whether it's permissible.

Christians imagine the rabbi blessing the food and making it kosher, the way a priest blesses the water and makes it holy water, or blesses the wafer and makes it the Host.

Not at all. That's the difference. What the rabbi does is consult the halakha and make a ruling, as a judge would.

When you eat the food, you do say a blessing, but the blessing is not to make the food holy. It's already either kosher or it's not, and that's all there is to that. The purpose of the blessing is to thank God for giving us this bounty, and Christians do have similar blessings.

Because of the complexity of halakha and the respect for rabbinical authority, rabbis do have some leeway for coming up with the right answer, and there's a great example illustrating this, regarding a shipment of canned food, in William Tenn's SF story "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi."

Yanny/Laurel

[agoodwinsmith]

My system won't play the clip you link to, but, our local news played the clip for us last night, so both SOGP and I were listening to the same clip at the same moment. I hear only Yanny and he hears only Laurel. They played the clip several times for us, and since I could only hear Yanny, on the last playing I listened very carefully for any sound of someone forming ELL sounds. Nada.

What I find odd is that I am 62 and SOGP is 69, and in a psych class when I was 24 there was already proof that I had lost my ability to hear the high pitched sounds the people younger than myself could still hear. I wonder if my issue is a larger inability to hear the low sounds anymore?

I mean - I have a processing disorder, so that unless I am watching your mouth, I can't *hear* the difference between bad socks and Dad's ox. But Yanny and Laurel are formed completely differently in the mouth, so this is weird.