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Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity

26 Apr

https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1386749711755980801

This is an extraordinary document in a bunch of ways. 1/

https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1386749711755980801

One way to understand it is that Facebook didn’t do a good enough job of identifying and suppressing a dangerous, harmful movement. Events lend some urgency to this point of view. 2/

But another way is to notice that Facebook is actively in the business of researching and improving techniques to suppress social movements on its platform, not just astroturfed, but what employees describe as "organic harmful movements". 3/

Read 7 tweets

Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity

25 Mar

@ElcomSoft

Last week I lamented the disappearance of voice memos from my wife's iPhone, somewhere over the course of iOS upgrades + phone transfers via iCloud. @ElcomSoft saw my frustration that most tools were unable to scrounge iOS 14 iCloud backups + took pity. Thank you @ElcomSoft! 1/

@ElcomSoft

The @ElcomSoft "Phone Breaker" application was able to download iCloud backups, including from a phone we lost several months ago, that she stopped actively using in 2017. Thanks to that backup, we were able to recover lost memos from 2012-2017 as plain sound files. 2/

@apple

The software is great. "Phone Breaker" sounds so adversarial and hackerish, and I am very grateful for it. I'd recommend it highly. But what's a bit frustrating is that all it did for us are things by rights @apple should allow us to do for ourselves. 3/

Read 15 tweets

Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity

8 Mar

@lymanstoneky

this by @lymanstoneky is worth a read, but i think he’s wrong to be so sanguine things are within historical norms. it’s not mere “left” sour grapes but the ideological sorting of the parties and winner-take-all governance that has raised the stakes of representational skew. 1/

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1369027698668998661

we’d be better off with an electoral system that rewarded multiple parties and fluid coalitions. 2/

short of that, under the existing sorted and polarized two-party system, we need tight representational accuracy to prevent a winning party from gaming the degrees of freedom into durable dominance (by ideology if not party, as the parties will adapt). 3/

Read 4 tweets

Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity

21 Feb

https://twitter.com/CityLab/status/1363401737231564802

Usually the YIMBY proposal is to take zoning decisions out of local hands, on the theory that at the municipal, regional, or state level addressing housing crisis can outweigh idiosyncratic NIMBY resistance. 1/

https://twitter.com/CityLab/status/1363401737231564802

@johnrmyers

This proposal by @johnrmyers and @michael_hendrix flips that intuition on its head, arguing that at a sufficiently hyperlocal level, there are plenty of city blocks that would not object, that might for their own idiosyncratic reasons desire, “upzoning” of one form or another. 2/

If we enshrined a hyperlocal *option* to upzone, on terms agreed by immediate neighbors, would enough tiny sovereignties opt for granny flats or fourplexes to put a dent in housing supply bottlenecks? 3/

Read 6 tweets

Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity

7 Feb

the powerful have always had to self-censor. it’s a prerequisite of wielding power nondestructively. if you’re Fed chair, you don’t get to say what you think candidly in any context it might leak. presidents must be careful not to insult a wide range of delicate sensibilities. 1/

much of “cancel culture” comes from the fact power has become more divorced from formal public roles, so people who don’t understand that their institutional position demands self-censorship, who don’t think they’ve “signed up for this”, face the actual requirement of it. 2/

you thought you became a journalist to speak truth to power, to transgress, but once you’re at the NYT you wield power, and all the powerful, you must be careful about how you express your truths. you haven’t changed, but the social facts surrounding your words have. 3/

Read 11 tweets

Steve Randy Waldman

@interfluidity

30 Jan

when the r/WSB guys realize their quarry is not high-short-interest hedge funds after all, but option writers and importantly their brokers, does that make them less or more enthusiastic about their games? 1/

so much of financial intermediation depends upon modeled distributions of asset price moves. what r/WSB did was basically to take direct control of some assets and make their prices move in ways to which the models would have given infinitesimal probability. 2/

if intermediaries update their models for much thicker tails, margin requirements become huge, and products like options become much more expensive. that would be disruptive. 3/

Read 6 tweets

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