
Out of the frying pan and into the fire - dredmorbius
https://ar.al/2018/07/30/out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire/
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daniel-cussen
Quoted in the article:

> Google’s algorithm was developed with funding from the National Science
> Foundation, and the internet came from DARPA funding.

While Page was indeed a PhD student when he designed that algo, he licensed
the patent from Stanford and the university got paid about $500 million for it
in Google's IPO. And the guy mostly made it alone.

You might as well say people owe their algos to whoever was paying them at the
time. Maybe. Work for hire counts. But otherwise, and without personal
knowledge of how PageRank was developed, it's a very personal, introverted
endeavor (IMO) to design an algo, especially one with as many moving parts as
PageRank.

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brainwad
> When she says “let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and
> necessary data was created by all of us” it sounds like we voluntarily got
> together to create a dataset for the common good by revealing the most
> intimate details of our lives through having our behaviour tracked and
> aggregated. In truth, we did no such thing. We were farmed.

No, we willingly and voluntarily gave our personal information away to
companies in exchange for their services. Sucks to be us, but there do exist
people who refuse to give away their information online, and it's not exactly
impossible to be like them. To turn around after having received the benefits
from Google, Facebook, etc. and cry foul about them receiving their part of
the deal is childish.

> Specifically, surveillance capitalists like Google and Facebook design
> proprietary and centralised technologies to addict people and lock them in.
> In such systems, your data originates in a place you do not own. On “other
> people’s computers,” as the Free Software Foundation calls it. Or on “the
> cloud” as we colloquially reference it.

These systems, even if you think they are addictive (which is debatable), are
still voluntarily chosen by users. Users choose them because they are BETTER
than managing free software on their own machines (if they weren't better,
people wouldn't do it after all). People just don't want to manage their own
data, as shown by the mass transition of data into "the cloud" and the
abandonment of "ownership" of data for a streaming rental model (e.g. in
music, TV/movies, productivity software, etc.).

~~~
moccachino
>No, we willingly and voluntarily gave our personal information away to
companies in exchange for their services.

There is something to be said about informed consent, deceptive behaviour and
the like here. But I don't have time for that. I wanted to touch on

>People just don't want to manage their own data, as shown by the mass
transition of data into "the cloud" and the abandonment of "ownership" of data
for a streaming rental model

I suspect people actually do want to retain control and ownership of their
data. But it is getting increasingly complicated in ways it wasn't when
everything was physical. Perhaps the choice to transition into the cloud and
streaming services is less of a choice by consumers and more of a choice by
the companies what products they want to offer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Perhaps the choice to transition into the cloud and streaming services is
> less of a choice by consumers and more of a choice by the companies what
> products they want to offer._

Definitely. I find it that a lot of things in computing can be better
understood if you realize that consumers have little to no meaningful choice.
They don't know the possibilities, they don't know their needs, so they
_choose from what 's available on the market_. If companies decide the phones
need to keep getting thinner, or software needs to move to the cloud, and then
back that up with serious marketing expense, then people will follow - because
your typical user understands so little about technology that their thinking
works in categories of "what looks most hi-tech" and "what everyone else
uses".

The trend of moving everything into SaaS is insidious; negative consequences
aren't visible immediately. The first day you're happy you no longer have to
install anything to watch movies, or worry about your hard drive space running
out. But then, maybe a month or a year later, you find yourself on a trip,
unable to watch a movie because of a spotty Internet connection. Or you lose
the Internet halfway through your movie night. Or the movie that was there
yesterday is gone today, because $reasons. Or you want to show it to your SO,
who doesn't speak English, and you can't, because there's no way to add
subtitles and the company doesn't offer the language you need. SaaS means
losing ability to use capabilities of your computer, but you only find out
when you actually need them.

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geoah
Every time I play around with the idea of decentralized/p2p networks in my
head or discuss it with friends, one of the questions that always comes up is:

* If a company or product can't lock the user, their data, and their friends in their platform, how are they supposed to make money, learn, train their models, etc?

Could we somehow create a common framework that is responsible of normalising
and anonymising the user's data and providing them either for public
consumption or to exchange them in return of a company hosting their full
(encrypted) data or providing add-on services for them that require cpu
cycles?

I understand that it would hard to agree upon the normalisation and
anonymisation rules and maybe limiting in some cases but I don't think that it
would be out of the realm of possibilities.

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godelmachine
How come touch screen displays were developed using public funding? What’s the
story behind them?

