Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

i was in dc for the first time a couple of weeks ago tombot and i described https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service to ppl there and they straight up laughed at the idea

actually i laughed at the bit where i said government websites are now responsive by de facto regulation

i mean it's utopian and sinister to apply #product design to government but having dealt with both governments as a resident i know which i prefer

http://giphy.com/gifs/2016-journalism-journalist-3o7rbU8oYEVkUwyMs8

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7rbU8oYEVkUwyMs8/giphy.gif

seriously who did you tell that to? 'Cause Barack straight up hired Mikey from Google and started this shit last year and it's the new hotness all over the local version of "trade press"

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/11/fact-sheet-improving-and-simplifying-digital-services

https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service

I actually threw my resume in the ring on a recommendation from a guy who was leaving for greener pastures, they gave me a phone interview and then told me I wasn't their type about four months later

I mean there was a 2011 executive order on customer service which was straight ripped off y'all's gov.uk initiatives and serious talk about driving down the federal web footprint to the absolute minimum necessary - they even put my team's domain on the chopping block

I am having fun relating these tales in outdated parody blogger voice

anyway there are actual cool kids working under the digital services banner doing neat stuff - like https://pages.18f.gov/guides/ is pretty neat for example
but on most levels it's still all covered in the static-free sheen of technocratic solutionism and of course no seasoned security asshole like me is going to trust any of it

Sign me up for the technocratic socialism

it was someone from the urban institute iirc

think tankers are all basically performative academics
I can't wait until my turn

an uber but for shoveling snow

what is wrong with these people? http://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

jesus fucking christ

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/30/10876838/obama-computer-science-education-funding-4-billion

What we need more of is... entry-level coders!

http://jezebel.com/there-s-only-one-nurse-for-5-500-students-in-flint-mic-1756011390

who gives a shit about school nurses they're all in cahoots with those fucking teachers' unions anyway

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.