There has been speculation that changes to the way the internet is implemented will be rolled out to allow access only to authorized sites.

Some think this is impossible

I'm here to tell you it is not, and very likely.

Allowing access only to white listed IP addresses is easy.

Facebook -- having taken out full-page ads in the NYT, Washington Post, and WSJ -- is generally seen as the primary victim of the new app privacy controls coming in iOS14. But Google is perhaps even more vulnerable to ATT. Why has Google remained silent? (1/X)

2/ First, background: here's a high-level overview of how ATT / IDFA deprecation impacts advertisers and ad networks, and why this whole ordeal has put advertisers and ad networks into a state of panic:

3/ Google is equally as susceptible to harm from ATT as Facebook. Google's UAC product -- esp its tROAS and tCPA campaign objectives -- relies as much on IDFA-indexed monetization and engagement data as FB's mobile product does. But Google has one big weakness wrt ATT: YouTube

4/ Broadly, view-through attribution accounts for a disproportionate % of conversions from YouTube app install impressions. This means: user sees the YT ad, doesnt click, downloads app later, & Google is able to claim it by reconciling IDFA seen at impression to IDFA seen in app

5/ View-through attribution is nonexistent in the ATT paradigm as it relies on the IDFA; some significant portion of YT's attributed conversions will evaporate. So why isnt Google vocally opposing ATT? Two reasons: consumer optics and its duality as ad network / mobile platform

Transgenderism resembles a mass psychogenic illness that has spread thanks to the internet. If there were no Tumblr identity fluidity nonsense, and if Reddit and YouTube had never existed, most “trans” people would not have landed on “gender” as the source of their ills.
1.

It is handed to them in the same way religion is handed to children. Thoughts and ideas are set before them, and they have brought these thoughts and ideas to live in themselves. Without the Internet, their feelings of dis-ease would have found a different explanation.
2.

These ideas became a framework for self-understanding, a map that instructs their actions, a vocabulary that programs their tongue. The pursuit of identity was the task, the online bubble its surrogate. They were commanded by it, and it gave their lives purpose and meaning.
3.

It had benefits. It catered to vanity. Social adulation arrived with each new step. This is why they so fiercely cling to it, since any conceptual breakdown would shatter the world they’ve built, which has been buttressed and fortified through these concepts – these errors.
4.

Its appeal first came as an escapist fantasy for the dysmorphic and disenchanted. Unbound from the meanings thrust upon them by others, they could instead become self-creators. They imbibed the dogma that suggested only two paths lay before them: – transition or suicide.
5.

1/ @werat asked about whether the debugger was using the C# compiler or language service in VS 2002. It was not. The debugger has a component called an ‘expression evaluator’ that is provided per language and is responsible for parsing and evaluating expressions when stopped at a

2/ breakpoint. For example, if you type into the immediate window, hover over a variable, type into the watch window, etc. the expression evaluator is involved. The debugger and the language service are actually deeply integrated in a number of scenarios in VS, which may

3/ initially seem surprising. I may talk about more of these scenarios in the future, but to give a flavor, when you set a breakpoint at design time the language service is involved, when you are using Edit and Continue the LS is involved, the range of what is being evaluated

4/ when you get a debugger data tip, completion lists when typing in the data windows or immediate window, etc. Prior to VS 2002, there were distinct debug environments tailored to each target customer (VB/VBA, C++, VJ, VBScript, TSQL, FoxPro, Fortran, etc.). The goals of the

5/ VS 2002 debugger included unifying the debugger backend components and providing a single UI stack that would enable new scenarios (for example, a callstack across languages). Expression evaluators are the architecture that separate the language specific pieces from the

If you're interested in DB internals, stop what you're doing and watch @CMUDB Quarantine Talk from Nico+Cesar about @SQLServer's Cascades query optimizer: https://t.co/FCdsbHHEaD

Many talks this semester were good. This one is the best. My thread provides key takeaways

[6:50] Microsoft hired Goetz Graffe in the 1990s to help them rewrite original Sybase optimizer into Cascades. This framework is now used across all MSFT DB products (@SQLServer, @cosmosdb, @Azure_Synapse).

[14:43] The optimizer checks whether it has stats it will need before cost-based search. If not, it blocks planning until the DBMS generates them. This is different than other approaches we saw this semester where DBMS says "we'll do it live!" with whatever stats are available.

[21:05] Their Cascades' search starts small/simple and then they make decision on the fly whether to expand search based on the expected query runtime and performance benefit from more search.

[26:33] They explicitly have a property for Halloween Problem. Operators specify whether they protect from it and then optimizer ensures property is satisfied. This is mindblowing. I have never thought about using the optimizer for this but it makes sense.