Posts by omz13 21 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2022
You can’t separate tech from politics: tech realized they were subject to regulation, and regulation was subject to political whim, ergo time to get political to change the regulations so tech can do what it wants. Throw in some Ayn Rand. Add a dash of Libertarianism. Welcome to 2025. It sucks.
And even then, there are no guarantees. Having worked in that sector, some of the stuff that happens behind the scenes would make your hair turn white in 10 seconds it is that bad.
Plus, even if a regulator catches somebody doing something they should not, one of the best defences is: we've been doing it for years, and you knew about it (because we did disclose it on our reports if you bothered to read them closely), and you only now raise a concern? Politics, FTW.
Thinking about that shopping mall, there are two states.
Firstly, the owner of the mall can do some things to make money… charge more for prime locations, advertise its location, etc. This seems OK. They are in shop lease business.
Secondly, the owner of the mall could see what shops do well, then decide to get into that action too. They are now in competition with their leases. That does not seem OK. They could do things like increase rates for their competitors stores, or not charge themselves the same rates as those stores. This seems even less OK.
The problem is when to discourage or stop the second thing happening. I’m sure there are those who will say the second thing is perfectly acceptable because capitalism.
You think they would check, but they don’t. Many Americans have little idea how the world outside America works, and many assume everything is just like the USA, but with stuff written in not English but some foreign language.
Years ago I was working in Europe for a USA company. One day they decided to close the site. It was a rude awakening when they discovered this thing called employment law, redundancy law, and unions. It took close to 3 years to shutter the site, and cost a small fortune. But, hey, the US side was loosing money, the Europe side was profitable, so clearly they had to close the Europe side and keep jobs in the US side.
The problem is that, for better or worse, Fediverse is ActivityPub, and ActivityPub is Mastodon. Now, you could argue that the Fediverse is not one protocol, or one implementation of a protocol, but the elephant in the room that is Mastodon has done just that. If you remember your history, VHS was not as good as Betamax, but which one of those “won”? You can apply the same thinking to ActivityPub/Mastodon and Zot/Hubzilla. The problem is compounded because ActivityPub/Mastodon is currently getting all the attention and, more importantly funding.
Friend of mine had a childhood dream to own a Ferrari. After years of saving, he achieved his dream and bought one. Second hand. Looked wonderful. Sounded wonderful. And during summer he’d drive it around. His girlfriend at the time wasn’t impressed as it was the most impractical car around (too small to hold a bag of shopping, pain to park, and everybody looking at you like you’re a bell-end). One thing most people didn’t know was the insurance was a killer and he could only keep it on the road for a month, two max, per year. And because it wasn’t driven all year around, whenever it went for a service there was always something needing attention because it hadn’t been driven enough. And the cost of servicing was insane. When I see somebody in a Ferrari I always feel kinda sorry for them.
I was CITP. In all my decades of experience I can count on one finger the number of employers/agencies who expressed any interest in that.
I’ve worked with a handful of people who were CITP and they pretty much said the same thing.
Now, this could be due to the weird and obscure circles I’m in, or it could just be that nobody gives one iota about CITP.
What counted more was the type of projects you’ve worked on and how broad your experience is (which is a better indicator of continuing education than SFIA).
> Whatever you think of Google as a whole, there are definitely smart people there who do care about privacy.
But were the smart people the ones coming up with the proposal?
They should have defaulted to opt-in instead of opt-out (and when pushed the “but other people are opt-out” response was somewhat lame). The discussion to persuade them to do opt-in really felt like an uphill battle against a de facto thing they were going to do regardless. Part of it may be cultural because the USA has no concept of privacy compared to the rest of the world, especially the EU. Part of it may also be because nobody ever thinks what could possibly go wrong, or how could this be abused because unintended consequences and the best laid plans of mice and men, etc.
Funny you mention being CITP for many years and having to explain it to recruiters, etc. Same here. In 20 years I only had one person who recognized what those 4 letters meant… and that person turned out to be the first client I had to take legal action against for short-changing me on an invoice! I gave up BCS membership and CITP as it seemed to be pouring money down a drain.
> Whole lot of hype
Yeah, right. Explain to me how my M1 Mac mini is twice as fast as my fully spec’s Intel Mac Book Pro which cost twice as much is “hype”. The reality is, bang for buck, the M1 outperforms Intel.
For kicks and giggles I occasionally do a complete world build of the system I’m developing. M1 literally takes half the time… and that’s on a boring M1 not a M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, where the time would be similarly reduced.
The reality is M1 really does deliver.
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