Web Excursions 2021-05-07
đ [Post of The Day] How We Manage New York Times Readersâ Data Privacy
PURR: Privacy, Users, Rules and Regulations.
our homegrown system that operationalizes The Timesâ privacy offerings.
centralizes our business logic and rules, and it communicates with our front-end products, instructing them on how to carry out the privacy rights of each unique user that visits us.
connects to an internal preferences system that allows us to securely save and sync logged-in usersâ privacy preferences across all of our products.
think of PURR as a privacy machine.
It consumes information about a reader,
analyzes that information based on knowledge it has been given about our companyâs interpretations of privacy regulations, and then
outputs instructions on how that reader should be treated from a privacy perspective when they interact with one of our products.
There are several types of directives that a product needs to be given when it comes to privacy - two categories: user interface directives and data handling directives.
user interface directivesïŒ show a certain element on the page
data handling directivesïŒ how to handle a userâs personal data.
Directives are sent via three different methods: request headers, a cookie calledÂ
nyt-purr
 and JSON.e.g. G.D.P.R. Tracker Banner:
Rules: privacy logic, written expressions in SQL
e.g., IF user is in a G.D.P.R.-eligible country AND user has no set preferences with NYT, THEN show banner.
Rule Producer: ABRA (which is short for âAbra Basically Reports ABtestsâ), our homegrown testing and targeting platform.
Rules Executors, which ingest the ABRA rules and execute on those rules in order to send directives to our products.
How Basecamp blew up - platformer.news
On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder.
Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people â more than one-third of Basecampâs 57 employees â had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company.
While Fridayâs meeting would eventually grow heated, it began on a conciliatory note.
The employee called for the founders to denounce white supremacy.
âThat would be the bare minimum for me,â they said.
âIâm not here to share my personal views on anything,â Fried said. âIâm horrified when one group dominates another.â
Fried, who is Jewish, added that he had lost relatives during the Holocaust.
âI think itâs absolutely the most disgusting thing in the world ⊠I canât say thatâs happening here.â
Fried added that he didnât âknow what to say about specific terms. I donât know how to satisfy that right now.â
Hansson remained on mute.
It was in that exchange that several employees decided to quit Basecamp, Iâm told.
Another employee said they had been thrown by the fact that the founders, after years of telling employees that they were part of an elite chosen few who were good enough to work at Basecamp, would get rid of them so easily.
Why Is It Hard To Acknowledge Preferences?
maybe it's more about cognitive flexibility.
when you get extra evidence, you update away from your prior.
You may not want to update an infinite amount from this one comment
If you're bad at calibrating updates, maybe getting told "I don't want a present" isn't enough to convince you not to give someone a present.
my impression is that the same people who are good at taking ideas seriously are also good at respecting preferences.
[RIDGELINE] Pack Exhaustion
how packing can exhaust a mind
Packing == decision making
Mainly itâs because we tend to remember in big chunks â packing as a chunk of work, when it is anything but.
The irony is I could probably spend 10 minutes packing and be fine
But the benefit of overindulgent âupfront workâ is post-embarkation freedom.
A walk is a tool and a platform and as such, prep work feels like tool refinement.
with a refined tool you have more latitude to develop your creative routine
You have fewer excuses not perform your creative work; good prep is a way of removing dingdong reasons not to work later.
Epic v. Apple turns into Windows v. Xbox
Apple and Epic delved into one of the biggest questions of the trial: whether saying iOS violates antitrust law would make every major game console an unlawful monopoly too.
Appleâs attorneys issued a dire warning to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft during its opening statement, saying that their business models were all fundamentally similar.
Epic called up Microsoftâs Xbox business development head Lori Wright as a sympathetic witness.
Wright divided computing devices into âspecial-purposeâ and âgeneral-purposeâ devices â in a way that clearly defined iPhones as the latter.
Wright made a point of discussing all the different ways that users could get apps on Windows.
Epic describes profit as one of the biggest differences between iPhones and consoles.
console makers have to treat app makers better because they lose money on hardware
no Xbox console has been sold at a profit, even late in a generationâs lifespan after manufacturing costs fall.
Appleâs strategy relied more on questioning Wrightâs credibility
push Wright to lay out in detail just how much more locked-down Xbox is than Windows, asking whether it did things like support rival game stores or streaming services.
Microsoft refers to both its consoles and general gaming division as âXbox,â
Conspiratorial Thinking and "Multiple Outs"
Magicians have this concept called "Multiple Outs."
for any possible outcomes, you have a response planned that seems natural and predictive.
Any longstanding group in political power is by the mere fact of their survival sure to have mastered the sleight of hand of "multiple outs."
our rulers just know how to use multiple outs.
When you know how to do that, it seems like you are always in control,
and by nature, people attribute a kind of magical power to you.
All you have to do is stay cool and play it off like you predicted it all.
There is a canned response, or at least a reasonably ad-libbed response, for every event and every possible event.
They are in a position of antifragility and can gain from nearly any possible event.
When they can't, the media can at least throw enough mud on public perception to inspire apathy or confusion.
The omnipotence and permanence of the Soystem is illusory. It comes from that flexibility.
Never tether yourself to one option;
that's when you lose.
Have a smart response to co-opt anything that can happen, no matter how good or bad.
Meeting⊠Tony Giaccone, Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times
Our subscriptions system is part of a larger monolith known as Plato.
We are in the process of building a microservice to extract from Plato the management of subscriptions that come to us from Apple through iTunes.
Iâm working on extracting information about the subscriptions from the Plato database and figuring out how to get that data into the new microservice database.
About two years ago, we built a microservice called the Cohort Manager, which allows us to adjust subscription packages in response to marketing, production or pricing changes.
For example, when a reader purchases a New York Times subscription, they choose a particular bundle of products, such as seven-day home delivery or weekend-only delivery.
Sometimes we need to update the bundle for a subset of subscribers, like when a newspaper distributor decides to stop offering Saturday deliveries to a particular region.
To respond to this change, we would have to move readers subscribed to a bundle with a Saturday delivery to a bundle without a Saturday delivery.
It used to be that these changes had to be done by hand, but now the Cohort Manager moves the list of subscriptions from the original bundle to the new bundle.
This was the first microservice we builtă