Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I mean this administration has bought into the fucking valley koolaid like nobody's business and I should not be surprised but $4 billion for pushing CS in K-12 is really unbelievable

http://i.imgur.com/Mdx79Ma.jpg
"Christ, what an asshole."

what we really need is a ton of assisted living facility caregivers for when all these baby boomers need help getting on and off the toilet in a couple years

tbf computer science skills are pretty useful to anyone who works in an even tangentially technical field. it is like the new computer literacy for analytical/technical jobs

in my field some measure of programming literacy is a required baseline skill, and nothing about the field itself would imply that competency as necessary

*to the outside observer

*fart*

thx

the art/fart pun is the pizza! of all art departments

― Sufjan Grafton, Sunday, 27 December 2015 01:31 (1 month ago) Permalink

what is your field, art, if you don't mind me asking? (sorry if you do)

bananas https://twitter.com/balajis/status/703519076107194368

wow that guy's samrt

"Singapore and Estonia are far along here" would be a good thread title

someone needs to set that guy on fire

i'm sure the cloud will rush to save him

His viewpoint matches that of flea that thinks all it has to do is jump to a new dog.

I love that

otm

(what Aimless said, not the tweets of nutjob)

probably a dumb question but what are these guys doing in the cloud that is so important. my IT friends at my work aren't geniuses but they get the job done. i don't think many of them have a desire to move around to exotic locals either, one just started dating a really awesome secretary (single mom of two) from the other side of our building.

The cloud is kind of over imho
insourcing IT management saves you money more often than not - paying somebody else so they can upcharge you on equipment refresh and electric bills is not, as it turns out, the best business decision.

Not strictly true ime - the cooling and power infrastructure saves money in larger quantities. That's why so many companies who previously ran their own dc's are outsourcing to like Amazon who can run them on a huge cost saving scale

OK, I'm just going to say it now, you watch, Amazon spins off the EC2 side in a few years. People are going to start figuring out that a colo is a colo and having your own guys to run your own cages is safer and easier than the arrangement with a CSP. Governments and similarly lugubrious institutions are going to be the last PaaS customers standing.

The cloud is kind of over imho
insourcing IT management saves you money more often than not

please someone tell upper management this, we just upgraded all our IT infrastructure and finally got a full team of sysadmins but someone seems to be deciding why even use that stuff when The Cloud is a buzzword and we need to be in on all the buzzwords even if the people signing the paperwork don't know what they mean

Governments and similarly lugubrious institutions are going to be the last PaaS customers standing

oh... oh yeah. that's us. ah. "lugubrious nonprofit" TICK there we are.

dammit.

terrible band name btw

running your own shit is horrible, my workplace have two moderately modern data centers and a good contract with the power company and amazon is still cheaper and often easier to set up. fire suppression systems and redundant power and only spooling up compute power when you need it instead of running a bigass virtual machine cluster in house is nice

fuck the people who think putting our mail server in the cloud or having a very limited number of vpn access points is a good idea, though

Cloud's great when you need less than one or a great many of something. And when you can budget for opex.

tbf the "cloud" I fear mgmt throwing money at is not so much EC2 etc but "why do we even need to have a shell prompt and access to our own data anyway, we can give lots of money to a 3rd-party Cloud Solutions provider to run everything for us, not let us build on it in any way except maybe writing some horrible kludge which maxes out our allowed no. of API calls by 4am every day, and when we stop giving them money and ask how we export our data to the next next big thing they say 'you don't'"

another thing which sounds appealing to lugubrious nonprofits

actually this might be fine for a lot of places but my particular lugubrious nonprofit is also clinging to a lot of arcane practices not really catered for by off-the-shelf packages. perhaps in the long run it's no bad thing if this year's management would rather push an assortment of irregular polygons down a single round hole

idk if tom is right. maybe he knows things i don't (my speciality is power + cooling infrastructure) but i'll say this - if you're a financial institute, or a healthcare institute, or any other kind of proprietary information - you better handle that shit yourself no matter how much you might save w/ a colo.

i don't think that's generally true. you could make the case that the more sensitive the information, the worse an idea it is to try to handle it yourself. that's the way credit card billing has gone. no one does that themselves any more. everyone farms it out to square or whoever.

the point is "it depends"

Should be a cloud c/d.

http://wiki.biohack.me/

Grinders are passionate individuals who believe the tools and knowledge of science belong to everyone.

Grinders practice functional (sometimes extreme) body modification in an effort to improve the human condition. We hack ourselves with electronic hardware to extend and improve human capacities.

Grinders believe in action, our bodies the experiment.

http://i.imgur.com/PK1gPCu.gif

if you're a financial institute, or a healthcare institute, or any other kind of proprietary information - you better handle that shit yourself no matter how much you might save w/ a colo.

That's interesting -- my company handles a lot of confidential and proprietary information that can affect market activity (and sells ourselves partly on security), and last year we went from an in-house server array to a colo.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CchcB-aW0AAx5Oi?format=pjpg&name=large

1) 10 dads
2) there are 10 of them
3) if u count the dads, u will count from 1 to 10
4) they are 10 times as big as regular dads

Before you decide to have a child, it's not a bad idea to do a SWOT analysis. Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. It's a Marketing 101 keywords that I've learned.

Before you decide to have a child, it's not a bad idea to do a AYTD analysis. Are You Ten Dads.

https://38.media.tumblr.com/a0d94b74bb43ba83eb6728e95665dec2/tumblr_inline_neg5qxMhrF1rzosu7.png

lol at pluggers/grinders connection

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/03/07/what-thomas-hardy-taught-me/

On education reform by SV tech-obsessives

bay-area effective altruist i know is going to one of these

of course

http://www.circlinginstitute.com/

the transformation of your way of being through authentic relating

sounds legit

xp i'm not crazy about freddie de boer but that's a good article

Not sure if this is the thread for "gig economy" startups, but I've been seeing a lot of analysis like this lately, and it sounds about right:

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/27/good_riddance_gig_economy_uber_ayn_rand_and_the_awesome_collapse_of_silicon_valleys_dream_of_destroying_your_job/

haha, this is very encouraging. love the litany of failed business i've never heard of but all of which i hate on principle: "Companies like Cherry (car washes), Prim (laundry), SnapGoods (gear rental), Rewinery (wine), HomeJoy (home cleaning)" ---- fuuuuuuck you all

Totally would have used SnapGoods.

http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html

What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like Silicon Valley? I feel like I understand Pittsburgh pretty well, because I grew up here, in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley pretty well because that's where I live now. Could you get that kind of startup ecosystem going here?

When I agreed to speak here, I didn't think I'd be able to give a very optimistic talk. I thought I'd be talking about what Pittsburgh could do to become a startup hub, very much in the subjunctive. Instead I'm going to talk about what Pittsburgh can do.

What changed my mind was an article I read in of all places the New York Times food section. The title was "Pittsburgh's Youth-Driven Food Boom." To most people that might not even sound interesting, let alone something related to startups. But it was electrifying to me to read that title. I don't think I could pick a more promising one if I tried. And when I read the article I got even more excited. It said "people ages 25 to 29 now make up 7.6 percent of all residents, up from 7 percent about a decade ago." Wow, I thought, Pittsburgh could be the next Portland. It could become the cool place all the people in their twenties want to go live.

It's true that people aged 25 to 29 tend to be open to trying new things and to accepting risks, which is generally necessary for prompting rapid change. They are also drawn to living in places where they can meet other people aged 25 to 29.

"youth-driven food boom" is very corny and this dude basing his talk & his excitement on a nytimes food article is especially corny but i do think the range of "cool places all the people in their twenties want to go live" could change overtime as places like austin, portland, bay area, nyc increasingly become completely unaffordable. idk though. people in their twenties are okay w/ living in shitty conditions if the location is cool. i think maybe more "cool places all the young people in their 30s with families want to settle down" is more what i am thinking of

It's p ridiculous to think that "cool place where people in their 20s want to move" = enough to fuel becoming the "next silicon valley."