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The diffusion of technical expertise is an unalloyed good, but the article does not spend enough time exploring the interaction between dispersed expertise and

The diffusion of technical expertise is an unalloyed good, but the article does not spend enough time exploring the interaction between dispersed expertise and concentrated market power. There are two very problematic phenomena: (1) plagiarism, and (2) quasi-legal corporate espionage. In (1) large companies just rip off FOSS code and call it a trade secret, as Goldman seems to have done. [1] In (2) companies that operate information infrastructure use it to surveill and preempt dispersed talent (as Amazon is alleged to have done with its market data, and Facebook is alleged to have done with its VPN app) [2]. The net effect of all this is suboptimal investment in new tools, techniques, procedures, and business models. You can't invest if you can't profit. A clear market failure demanding public intervention. [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47281906 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47281906

eternalban 6y ago
Interesting point. Capital (still) trumps knowledge. There is a pop meme that tries to sell "information as the new oil", but your post reminds us that the 'value' of information is akin to 'weight' of a 'mass'. The gravitational field in question is centralized power, market or otherwise. [personal meta-aside: Did you know that JFK gave that speech to persuade American press to self-censor? That pull quote has been misused rather egregiously.]
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Don't they usually mean data when they say information? And data is hardly freely available.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    I don’t know. Frankly it’s a bit of semantic muddle in my own head. For example, is my browsing history “data” or “information”? So for my own personal dictionary, “data” means basically ‘measure’, and “information” is ‘processed data’.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  Thomas Jefferson drafted the US Declaration of Independence, and was a particularly violent "slave owner" [1]. While context is important, it doesn't mean that a document with an unsavory origin story should be ignored for that reason alone. [1] scare quotes indicate that I reject the assertion that anyone was ever "owned" by anyone else. Some people were violently imprisoned against their will, but never owned.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    No issue with the content, just a meta fyi/?.
  - ozborn 6y ago
    I had not heard that Thomas Jefferson was particularly violent in his slave holding vs other slave holders. A quick google search isn't informative either, do you have any source for that claim?
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      Henry Wiencek wrote a book about it. That particular work received intense criticism from other respected Jefferson scholars. It's a debate worth reading.
  - skissane 6y ago
    I don't think it is just the authors of the US Declaration of Independence who were unsavoury, but also some of the things in the text itself. The most well-known aspect of its unpleasantness is the part about "merciless Indian Savages"; less well-known is its opposition to cultural rights for French Canadians ("For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province...") When Britain conquered New France, Britain promised that French Canadians would retain cultural rights, including the freedom to practice the Catholic religion, protection of the French language, and the continued use of aspects of French civil law in the legal system. It is that last aspect of Britain's commitment which the authors of the US Declaration of Independence found so offensive. (Strangely, when the US agreed to buy Louisiana from France 27 years later, the American objection to the French legal system appeared to have vanished, and Louisiana still partially uses French civil law to this day.)
eZ2see99 6y ago
It’s generational transfer of control of social discourse. Retirees and over 45s are losing their grip on social narratives as the youthful population outnumbers their once solidly coupled cohorts. We’re tired of being treated like the aliens in Enders Game. Our logistics are better and we outnumber them. It’s riling the rubes, but on the flip side deference to a generation we can’t really understand is stifling everyone else. They don’t have an information advantage. Just a financial capital advantage. They need to manage political debate to keep that advantage. It seems like such an easy fix is right there: look away from the platforms and build 1:1, networking our way together across cloud hosts. Otherwise stop using the usual portals. Step 1: dump shareable data into an S3 bucket and provide secured access. Step 2: iterate on this general habit. Wanna go on prem? Kubernetes + Kilo can be setup in any OS in an hour of googling. Why do I need Dropbox anymore? Why do I need an app? Why not just store my data and develop a 1:1 or 1:N as needed (with doctors) by owning where it put it? Oh right; jobs wrapping AWS in the 9 millionth form of a todo list.
- Konohamaru 6y ago
  > Wanna go on prem? What does "on prem" mean?
  - userbinator 6y ago
    "on premises", a "cloudism" for "not cloud".
xdavidliu 6y ago
> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma... Great article. One part that confused me was how he said he deleted his bash history because he didn't want people to see the password he typed in. Surely that's a crock of BS? In what situation do bash histories contain typed passwords in plaintext?
- m463 6y ago
  It could be: 1) a journalist failing to capture the precise technical details 2) or this guy used commands that passed the password as an argument (for example "curl -u username:password" maybe svn has something similar?)
  - skissane 6y ago
    > 2) or this guy used commands that passed the password as an argument (for example "curl -u username:password" maybe svn has something similar?) Other commands that take password arguments include ldapsearch/ldapmodify/etc (-w argument), mysql (-p/--password option), and Oracle sqlplus (sqlplus user/password@db) Best practice is that you don't put passwords in command line arguments, and find an alternative method of supplying the password to the utility (such as reading it from a password file, or using non-password-based authentication mechanisms such as Kerberos). Despite that best practice, I'm sure plenty of people still do it. People also sometimes accidentally paste passwords from a password manager into their shell and they end up in their shell history. This can easily happen if you are meaning to paste it into some kind of interactive command such as ssh or su and the command doesn't execute the way you expected. If you discover you have passwords in your bash history, editing it to remove them (or even deleting it entirely) is a sensible thing to do. Shell history was never meant to be an auditing measure. There are products out there that will record SSH sessions (by acting as a recording proxy between the client and the server); if you need a list of commands executed for auditing purposes, those sort of products are the proper answer, not expecting people's shell history to be left intact.
    - xdavidliu 6y ago

eternalban 6y ago

Interesting point. Capital (still) trumps knowledge. There is a pop meme that tries to sell "information as the new oil", but your post reminds us that the 'value' of information is akin to 'weight' of a 'mass'. The gravitational field in question is centralized power, market or otherwise. [personal meta-aside: Did you know that JFK gave that speech to persuade American press to self-censor? That pull quote has been misused rather egregiously.]

MattGaiser 6y ago
Don't they usually mean data when they say information? And data is hardly freely available.
- eternalban 6y ago
  I don’t know. Frankly it’s a bit of semantic muddle in my own head. For example, is my browsing history “data” or “information”? So for my own personal dictionary, “data” means basically ‘measure’, and “information” is ‘processed data’.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rmrfstar 6y ago
Thomas Jefferson drafted the US Declaration of Independence, and was a particularly violent "slave owner" [1]. While context is important, it doesn't mean that a document with an unsavory origin story should be ignored for that reason alone. [1] scare quotes indicate that I reject the assertion that anyone was ever "owned" by anyone else. Some people were violently imprisoned against their will, but never owned.
- eternalban 6y ago
  No issue with the content, just a meta fyi/?.
- ozborn 6y ago
  I had not heard that Thomas Jefferson was particularly violent in his slave holding vs other slave holders. A quick google search isn't informative either, do you have any source for that claim?
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    Henry Wiencek wrote a book about it. That particular work received intense criticism from other respected Jefferson scholars. It's a debate worth reading.
- skissane 6y ago
  I don't think it is just the authors of the US Declaration of Independence who were unsavoury, but also some of the things in the text itself. The most well-known aspect of its unpleasantness is the part about "merciless Indian Savages"; less well-known is its opposition to cultural rights for French Canadians ("For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province...") When Britain conquered New France, Britain promised that French Canadians would retain cultural rights, including the freedom to practice the Catholic religion, protection of the French language, and the continued use of aspects of French civil law in the legal system. It is that last aspect of Britain's commitment which the authors of the US Declaration of Independence found so offensive. (Strangely, when the US agreed to buy Louisiana from France 27 years later, the American objection to the French legal system appeared to have vanished, and Louisiana still partially uses French civil law to this day.)

eZ2see99 6y ago

It’s generational transfer of control of social discourse. Retirees and over 45s are losing their grip on social narratives as the youthful population outnumbers their once solidly coupled cohorts. We’re tired of being treated like the aliens in Enders Game. Our logistics are better and we outnumber them. It’s riling the rubes, but on the flip side deference to a generation we can’t really understand is stifling everyone else. They don’t have an information advantage. Just a financial capital advantage. They need to manage political debate to keep that advantage. It seems like such an easy fix is right there: look away from the platforms and build 1:1, networking our way together across cloud hosts. Otherwise stop using the usual portals. Step 1: dump shareable data into an S3 bucket and provide secured access. Step 2: iterate on this general habit. Wanna go on prem? Kubernetes + Kilo can be setup in any OS in an hour of googling. Why do I need Dropbox anymore? Why do I need an app? Why not just store my data and develop a 1:1 or 1:N as needed (with doctors) by owning where it put it? Oh right; jobs wrapping AWS in the 9 millionth form of a todo list.

Konohamaru 6y ago
> Wanna go on prem? What does "on prem" mean?
- userbinator 6y ago
  "on premises", a "cloudism" for "not cloud".

xdavidliu 6y ago

> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma... Great article. One part that confused me was how he said he deleted his bash history because he didn't want people to see the password he typed in. Surely that's a crock of BS? In what situation do bash histories contain typed passwords in plaintext?

m463 6y ago
It could be: 1) a journalist failing to capture the precise technical details 2) or this guy used commands that passed the password as an argument (for example "curl -u username:password" maybe svn has something similar?)
- skissane 6y ago
  > 2) or this guy used commands that passed the password as an argument (for example "curl -u username:password" maybe svn has something similar?) Other commands that take password arguments include ldapsearch/ldapmodify/etc (-w argument), mysql (-p/--password option), and Oracle sqlplus (sqlplus user/password@db) Best practice is that you don't put passwords in command line arguments, and find an alternative method of supplying the password to the utility (such as reading it from a password file, or using non-password-based authentication mechanisms such as Kerberos). Despite that best practice, I'm sure plenty of people still do it. People also sometimes accidentally paste passwords from a password manager into their shell and they end up in their shell history. This can easily happen if you are meaning to paste it into some kind of interactive command such as ssh or su and the command doesn't execute the way you expected. If you discover you have passwords in your bash history, editing it to remove them (or even deleting it entirely) is a sensible thing to do. Shell history was never meant to be an auditing measure. There are products out there that will record SSH sessions (by acting as a recording proxy between the client and the server); if you need a list of commands executed for auditing purposes, those sort of products are the proper answer, not expecting people's shell history to be left intact.
  - xdavidliu 6y ago