6 ms·

We can act more effectively in the domains in which we are most authoritative, knowledgeable and able to effect change.

by dictum 7y ago

lm28469 7y ago
Yes, we, as tech workers. Most people aren't "us". It's perfectly understandable for places like the android/apple app stores to be heavily moderated. Same reasoning for forcing people to have their cars serviced by mechanics and not do their own maintenance in their backyards. Otherwise we'd have people driving cars without pipes and DIY break pads. I'd much rather have that enforced by megacorps/govt than by an infinite amount of businesses/individuals trying to game the system. For most people a smartphone is an entertainment device, a tool at best, they don't give a single fuck about the underlying tech and they should not. Feel free to root your phone and install whatever you want, you can't ask people to become tech literate, it's your hobby/job, not their. Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. Look at your own life, chances are you don't even have surface knowledge of 99% of the things you use daily, and that's perfectly fine, nobody expects you to be a furniture designer, building safety inspector and car mechanic.
- jtbayly 7y ago
  Yikes. Really? Where do you live? I can’t imagine living someplace where I’m forbidden from picking up a wrench. Heaven forbid I buy some PVC pipe. Who knows what mischief I might get up to! For the record, I do my own break pads. And have done the master cylinder (thing that powers the breaks) on my cars a couple of times. Not just without formal training. Without any training except what I could quickly Google.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    Europe. When I lived in the US I saw cars with bald tires, clearly damaged frames, spewing insane amount of smoke &c. on the road daily, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that over here.
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      44 states have minimum tread depth specified in the law. Almost nobody has the tool necessary to replace a tire anyway, so nobody does that themselves. So what’s your point? Not sure why you would assume that prohibiting people from working on their cars would increase the level of maintenance.
- jkilpatr 7y ago
  In every other field people are reasonably held responsible for their failures. As a service tech if I fill a car with tomato sauce instead of oil I pay for the car. As a programmer I can sell all the users data, leak it to hacks, then laugh all the way to the bank. As a furniture salesman I can requirements on materials transparency. If I break those I'm liable. As a programmer I can totally change the rules of my application at any time. If society wants to trust tech it will have to hold it's creators responsible.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    In which country are developers above the law ?
    - gravypod 7y ago
      In every country the ruling party does not understand technology. It's very difficult to regulate something you don't understand. The back door encryption thing is a fun example of this.
      - lm28469 7y ago
        Yes, and this is the real issue to me. The end user having a computer science PhD or not won't change that.
        Santosh83 7y ago
        How is that? If more 'ordinary' people understood that the only functional encryption is one that is resistant to MitM etc., and the undesirability of implementing backdoors, even for ostensibly legitimate reasons, there would be far more pressure on legislators to not keep advancing these proposals than there is now.
        lm28469 7y ago
        Again, knowing that privacy is good doesn't have anything to do with the "underlying tech" and doesn't require any technological understanding. You can read a book without knowing how it was printed.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  The problem is the authoritarianism. You are advocating for totalitarian control as a solution to the possibility that some individuals might misbehave. If there is one thing we should have learned from history by now, it's that that's about the worst solution to a problem ever.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    We're talking about an app store, not the Final solution. And as far as I know in developed countries companies still have to follow the law.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Nazi Germany was a pretty developed country, and its companies followed the "law" pretty well ? Imagine how useful an app store would have been to identify the "indesirables" and how long / whether the app store owner would have resisted?
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
      So? I don't understand your point. Authoritarian solutions are good as long as they are not "the Final solution" because ... ? And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this? Even "the Final solution" was law, and in a developed country at that, so ... yeah, could you explain what your point is there?
      - lm28469 7y ago
        If any rule/law = "authoritarian regime" to you I think we can't stop the discussion now and save us both some time. > And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law, I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon. Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime. If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously. But I guess it's fashionable these days to compare everything to nazi germany/fascism/_insert_bad_people_, no matter how convoluted the comparison is.
- etiam 7y ago
  > Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. But, you can't really provide them safe tools without fixing some of the behavioral components, can you. "Don't try to lick the sharp parts, especially when running the machine" is an implicit and important (albeit obscure) part of the safety to operating, let's say, a band saw. Unfortunately, the intellectual bar seems to be noticeably higher for "When a very urgent and heavily accented Microsoft Support representative calls you out of the blue, don't type into your shiny techno-thingy what they tell you to". I'm generally all for sane defaults and constructing to make spontaneous use possible too, but a lot of the time there is ultimately no other protection against dangerously wrong use of tools than not using the tools dangerously wrongly. Too bad that's a tall order for very complicated machines that can do vastly different things depending on configuration.
pjc50 7y ago
Right. That means you have to pick which domains those are. Picking some to learn about means not picking others, because there's an infinity of domains. Forcing everyone to become a security expert to survive limits all their other options. I know people are going to quote Heinlein here, but civilisation exists so that not everybody has to be a specialist in everything.

We can act more effectively in the domains in which we are most authoritative, knowledgeable and able to effect change.

by dictum 7y ago

We can act more effectively in the domains in which we are most authoritative, knowledgeable and able to effect change.

Yes, we, as tech workers. Most people aren't "us". It's perfectly understandable for places like the android/apple app stores to be heavily moderated. Same reasoning for forcing people to have their cars serviced by mechanics and not do their own maintenance in their backyards. Otherwise we'd have people driving cars without pipes and DIY break pads. I'd much rather have that enforced by megacorps/govt than by an infinite amount of businesses/individuals trying to game the system. For most people a smartphone is an entertainment device, a tool at best, they don't give a single fuck about the underlying tech and they should not. Feel free to root your phone and install whatever you want, you can't ask people to become tech literate, it's your hobby/job, not their. Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. Look at your own life, chances are you don't even have surface knowledge of 99% of the things you use daily, and that's perfectly fine, nobody expects you to be a furniture designer, building safety inspector and car mechanic.

jtbayly 7y ago
Yikes. Really? Where do you live? I can’t imagine living someplace where I’m forbidden from picking up a wrench. Heaven forbid I buy some PVC pipe. Who knows what mischief I might get up to! For the record, I do my own break pads. And have done the master cylinder (thing that powers the breaks) on my cars a couple of times. Not just without formal training. Without any training except what I could quickly Google.
- lm28469 7y ago
  Europe. When I lived in the US I saw cars with bald tires, clearly damaged frames, spewing insane amount of smoke &c. on the road daily, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that over here.
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    44 states have minimum tread depth specified in the law. Almost nobody has the tool necessary to replace a tire anyway, so nobody does that themselves. So what’s your point? Not sure why you would assume that prohibiting people from working on their cars would increase the level of maintenance.
jkilpatr 7y ago
In every other field people are reasonably held responsible for their failures. As a service tech if I fill a car with tomato sauce instead of oil I pay for the car. As a programmer I can sell all the users data, leak it to hacks, then laugh all the way to the bank. As a furniture salesman I can requirements on materials transparency. If I break those I'm liable. As a programmer I can totally change the rules of my application at any time. If society wants to trust tech it will have to hold it's creators responsible.
- lm28469 7y ago
  In which country are developers above the law ?
  - gravypod 7y ago
    In every country the ruling party does not understand technology. It's very difficult to regulate something you don't understand. The back door encryption thing is a fun example of this.
    - lm28469 7y ago
      Yes, and this is the real issue to me. The end user having a computer science PhD or not won't change that.
      - Santosh83 7y ago
        How is that? If more 'ordinary' people understood that the only functional encryption is one that is resistant to MitM etc., and the undesirability of implementing backdoors, even for ostensibly legitimate reasons, there would be far more pressure on legislators to not keep advancing these proposals than there is now.
        lm28469 7y ago
        Again, knowing that privacy is good doesn't have anything to do with the "underlying tech" and doesn't require any technological understanding. You can read a book without knowing how it was printed.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
The problem is the authoritarianism. You are advocating for totalitarian control as a solution to the possibility that some individuals might misbehave. If there is one thing we should have learned from history by now, it's that that's about the worst solution to a problem ever.
- lm28469 7y ago
  We're talking about an app store, not the Final solution. And as far as I know in developed countries companies still have to follow the law.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Nazi Germany was a pretty developed country, and its companies followed the "law" pretty well ? Imagine how useful an app store would have been to identify the "indesirables" and how long / whether the app store owner would have resisted?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
    So? I don't understand your point. Authoritarian solutions are good as long as they are not "the Final solution" because ... ? And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this? Even "the Final solution" was law, and in a developed country at that, so ... yeah, could you explain what your point is there?
    - lm28469 7y ago
      If any rule/law = "authoritarian regime" to you I think we can't stop the discussion now and save us both some time. > And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law, I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon. Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime. If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously. But I guess it's fashionable these days to compare everything to nazi germany/fascism/_insert_bad_people_, no matter how convoluted the comparison is.
etiam 7y ago
> Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. But, you can't really provide them safe tools without fixing some of the behavioral components, can you. "Don't try to lick the sharp parts, especially when running the machine" is an implicit and important (albeit obscure) part of the safety to operating, let's say, a band saw. Unfortunately, the intellectual bar seems to be noticeably higher for "When a very urgent and heavily accented Microsoft Support representative calls you out of the blue, don't type into your shiny techno-thingy what they tell you to". I'm generally all for sane defaults and constructing to make spontaneous use possible too, but a lot of the time there is ultimately no other protection against dangerously wrong use of tools than not using the tools dangerously wrongly. Too bad that's a tall order for very complicated machines that can do vastly different things depending on configuration.

pjc50 7y ago

Right. That means you have to pick which domains those are. Picking some to learn about means not picking others, because there's an infinity of domains. Forcing everyone to become a security expert to survive limits all their other options. I know people are going to quote Heinlein here, but civilisation exists so that not everybody has to be a specialist in everything.