Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.
Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.
We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.
Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.
It doesn't need to be anything nearly that dramatic as assassins, because economies of scale both lower the bar and make most attacks impersonal. Consider how odd it would be for someone in 2025 to say: "Computer security?I haven't done anything to personally offend a genius hacker."
Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return.
Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.
They are. A related example is criminal gangs tageting gun owners in France after the dataleak at the sport shooting federation. This one has been well covered. There have been a few hundred targeted robberies (on old people mostly) and one or two deaths (predictably).
In Western Europe there are also foreign burglar gangs that go on sprees for a few weeks. They're well organised but don't have time to do the stalking. They use publicly available data as much as they can.
do you have any evidence to back your claim? gangs employing teams of underage burglars assisted by risk averse adults with skills for entry and targeting are a thing. everyone has a mobile phone.
> Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.
Most of us, but for those that are...
However, in the world we live in today, the various LEOs are using this type of data to find people they do not like. It's getting to the point that I pine for the days of good ol' 1985 where you could just be another anonymous person in public with no tracking of your every move.
Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.
For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.
Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose.
a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.)
b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.
You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.
Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.
imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory
I really don't understand these criticisms of Strava, it has excellent privacy controls so you can share as little or as much as you want. You can already choose to share your activities with only your friends (followers). Or keep your activities private or hide the location data.
It does but my point is that your settings are applied to all activities.
Here's a few examples that might help demonstrate my point:
I used to do parkrun regularly. I had no problem sharing my Strava activities for parkrun because me doing it wasn't a secret, nor was the location secret, nor was my time secret. All of these things could be found from the parkrun website once the results had come up. John Doe was at this location at 9am and ran this route with 400 others in a time of 26 minutes or whatever.
I was also part of a cycling club that did a regular "club run" on a Sunday. 5-15 of us all doing the same route. It was good for club morale for us all to upload our rides to help show how popular it was and encourage other club members to come along. They could see that we weren't going at a silly pace and that we stopped regularly to regroup as we had riders of all abilities and speeds riding with us.
But then I also helped out with my kids running club at school, taking a bunch of 7-11 year old's on a 20 minute jog/run (depending on how quick they were) around the local area. This absolutely should not appear on Strava (public or not). The running club wasn't a secret (everyone at the school knew since they had the option of letting their kid do it) but that's a whole world of difference from having it public on Strava showing the usual start time, the various routes we used to take, where we stopped, etc. Privacy zones can help hide the start/end but that wouldn't help hide everything.
We just made sure that all of the parents who helped out knew that we shouldn't even record it with their smartwatch. I just used to create a manual entry of "Morning run" with approximate distance and time. That was good enough for my training stats.
There's no one privacy setting that handles all of this. Whatever setting you use relies on me to manually adjust the activities that don't fit that setting. The problem is that humans are fallible, so remembering to make it private or hide the location data isn't entirely reliable. You're also at the mercy of Strava (or whatever) not doing something stupid and accidentally making private data visible due to some bug, glitch or leak.
Right, requiring human intervention to share a run (other than maybe with eg a specific small circle of mutual friends) seems like it solves all those problems, other than perhaps being annoyed that you forgot to manually share a run.
But at least that's a failure you can fix once you notice, as opposed to making something public that shouldn't have been. Letting people opt in to automatically sharing runs to the public just seems like something designed to get people to share stuff without thinking about it.
I'm saying something a bit different: that even letting people opt in to sharing every run they track publicly is just asking for trouble. It's setting people up for their information to be made public when they forget to turn it off or that they turned it on in the first place.
Maybe "automatically share everything to the globe" should just not be an option for sensitive data like this.
Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?
Same argument applies. Driving slowly for 1km 0.01 under the speed limit, over legal blood alco limit is safer than driving at the speed limit for 10kms just under the alco limit.
It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.
The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.
That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.
To an LLM, answering “no” and changing the mode of the chat window are discrete events that are not necessarily related.
Many coding agents interpret mode changes as expressions of intent; Cline, for example, does not even ask, the only approval workflow is changing from plan mode to execute mode.
So while this is definitely both humorous and annoying, and potentially hazardous based on your workflow, I don’t completely blame the agent because from its point of view, the user gave it mixed signals.
The point is that if the harness’ workflow gives contradictory and confusing instructions to the model, it’s a harness issue, not necessarily a model issue.
First it was a model issue, then it was a prompting issue, then it was a context issue, then it was an agent issue, now it's a harness issue. AI advocates keep accusing AI skeptics of moving goalposts. But it seems like every 3-6 months another goalpost is added.
Your comment doesn’t make as strong of a point as you think it does; it might make the opposite point.
Because, yes, first, it was a model issue, and then more advanced models started appearing and prompting them correctly became more important. Then models learned through RLHF to deal with vague prompting better, and context management became more important. Then models became better (though not great) at inherent context recollection and attention distribution, so now, you need to be careful what instructions a model receives and at what points because it’s literally better at following them. It’s not so much that the goalposts are being moved, it’s that they’re literally being, like, *cleared*.
This isn’t a tech that’s already fully explored and we just need to make it good now, it’s effectively an entirely new field of computing. When ChatGPT came out years ago no one would have DREAMT of an LLM ever autonomously using CLI tools to write entire projects worth of code off of a single text prompt. We’d only just figured out how to turn them into proper chatbots. The point is that we have no idea where the ceiling is right now, so demanding well-defined goalposts is like saying we need to have a full geological map of Mars before we can set foot on it, when part of the point of going to Mars is to find out about that.
As a side point, the agent is the harness; or, rather, an agent is a model called on a loop, and the harness is where that loop lives (and where it can be influenced/stopped). So what I can say about most - not all, but most, including you, seemingly - AI skeptics is that they tend to not actually be particularly up-to-date and/or engaged with how these systems actually work and how capable they actually are at this point. Which is not supposed to be a dig or shade, because I’m pretty sure we’ve never had any tech move this fast before. But the general public is so woefully underinformed about this. I’ve recently had someone tell me in awe about how ChatGPT was able to read their handwritten note and solve a few math equations.
The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).
There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.
Im reading through all these comments and it amazes me how the perfect is the enemy of the good, for many computer people.
Ofc there are edge cases. So since there exist a handful of edge cases where a zip code maps to two states, or the more frequent (but irrelevant in the US) case of two or more city names per zip code, we should make everyone suffer?
Ofc if you are making a web form you should ask for the zip code first, and auto complete state and city. Let the user edit them if they don’t like what you chose. Or do as some have suggested here and present the official USPS data as a drop down of 2 states or 2-3 cities; thats way better than having to type all of it.
And I curse everyone who thinks it’s a good idea to break zip code or phone number or OTP into multiple fields, or if you’re too lazy to set the input type to number.
I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering.
I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.
It seems to me that there's a strong Pareto law inclination to this. 99% of non-profits are going to the local volley ball club type organizations that indeed don't make any money at all, or maybe a few hundred at most. I am in the board of a local chess club and you should see the amount of discussion that sometimes happens around a budget of no more than the equivalent of several hundred USD. I honestly can't imagine anyone is using us to launder money. (How, even? Yearly contribution is less than 100 EUR and even major sponsors for tournaments etc are easily traceable local companies that contribute <1k EUR each)
Then there's a relatively tiny amount of organizations that processes the vast majority of funds. Universities, hospitals, big FOSS organizations, etc. Those are the ones that are actually interesting.
I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives.
I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example.
And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.
For a huge chunk of non-profits, the non-profit work is the labor of their members. Their goal is not and has never been to pass revenue through to the community - what would that even look like for a hospital? There's a million different examples here.
Directors of non-profits that have enough money for this to matter are doing this as a full time job - are we going to eliminate every competent director from working here if they can't afford to stop getting compensated for their work?
Your suggestion would cripple non-profits doing all sorts of important and beneficial work.
My non profit is genuinely helpful. We spend less than $1000 a year.
At most I advertise my for-profit website and try to gain personal fame, but if I was trying to do those 2 things, I'd spend it directly on those 2 things.
This would be great. I would also like to see non profits close shop once their goals are reached or fail rather than transform into a new thing just so the top people who make up the organization can continue to have a paycheck.
Nobody wants to give you a huge grant to continue doing what you're already doing, you only get grants for doing something completely new and grandiose. If you're lucky, you may get like 20% of the grant to cover your other expenses that don't come with a caveat of having to spend it on something completely new.
This article is mostly about universities and hospitals. Not really clear how either of those could possibly pass 75% of funding through to the community.
> I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering.
Actually most non profits are a massive jobs program for the middle and lower middle class. The side effect is that some problems that the government or the private sector won’t touch, get a slight more attention while providing tax benefits to people who contribute.
I reached a similar shape (Figure 11 in my pdf: https://jimishol.github.io/thoughts_on_harmony_en.pdf#page=2... ), but the specific, even arbitrary, twisting I used to realize the torus topology gives it a unique advantage: it immediately reveals the "hinge note" of a scale.
I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.
Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.
I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.
I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.
I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.
And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.
I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.
It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.
Raymond generally discusses public things and history. That's allowable plenty of places.
Bruce Dawson was publishing debugging stories (including things debugged about Google products done as part of his job) for the entire time he was working at Google: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
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