Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 221 posts

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#51

Post by thriftwy »

jstanley wrote: post #31
thriftwy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We knew from the day one that over-reliance on cloud giants like Facebook or Google in holding all your life worth of data is a bad idea. We told everybody that it is a bad idea. Everybody promptly ignored our warnings. Some laughed. I guess they don't laugh anymore, do they? Now, who was right? Obligatory https://xkcd.com/743/

Unfortunately, I think they still mostly laugh.

They've not even started to feel the pain. They mostly read about it in media. That would be the next step.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#54

Post by crispyambulance »

jrs95 wrote: post #35

"Silicon Valley is Not Your Friend...but we, at The New York Times, totally are."

    > ...but we, at The New York Times, totally are.
That's a false dichotomy, but yeah, the NYTimes REALLY IS more like "my friend" than Facebook, Google, or other massive organizations that make money from using "me" as their product while pretending to serve my needs.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#56

Post by vasilipupkin »

this may be the dumbest most fud filled article I have ever read. I mean it's just a bunch of words that mean what exactly? what exactly does the author think those companies are doing that is evil ? I can't figure it out. Driverless cars are not a worthy goal? don't buy one once it's for sale.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#57

Post by humanrebar »

KirinDave wrote: post #6

Let's be selfish for a moment. Mandating decentralization of these services is probably a net good not only for society (and us, because we'll be the ones employed to do it) by way of distributing more wealth, opportunity and responsibilities to more people. But it'll also be good from a technical standpoint. We're in desperate need of a wake-up call about the centralized and often legacy, government mandated insecur…

I agree, but I'm also concerned that decentralization could increase the surface area exposed to attack.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#58

Post by vasilipupkin »

danenania wrote: post #49
losvedir wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they knew, I'm still not totally clear on what's wrong with running those ads. It seems everyone has such a low opinion of everyone else these days. I really wish the outcome of learning that Russians bought ads on facebook was a cultural antibody to not believe ads, not a call to ever more closely regulate what stuff people should see.

While I agree that we don't want legally mandated censorship, companies like Facebook are constantly making decisions about what sorts of ads and content to allow or disallow on their platforms. I don't think it's too much to ask that they extend these policies to material that is designed by spy agencies to function as divisive and destabilizing propaganda. This kind of stuff can even lead directly to physical viole…

Sure, but to somehow blame them for the stupidity of people that can be swayed by a ridiculous facebook ad is itself ridiculous. Facebook ads is not why Clinton lost to Trump and continuing to pretend like it is is just dumb.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#59

Post by walshemj »

s_kilk wrote: post #14
dragontamer wrote: post #3

Okay, there are a lot of ills in Silicon Valley / Tech world, but this article... frankly speaking... is a load of anti-corporate rage. I've read about halfway through this article, and it seems like the biggest "sin" of Silicon Valley, according to this article, is their acceptance of advertisements (Google / Facebook Mobile) and possibly Amazon's dominance of the online marketplace? Facebook's "sin" of allowing Rus…

No, the "sin" is in Valley programmers broad refusal to acknowledge the social impacts of their work, their refusal to believe that technology, which is inseparable from the context it is used in, could possibly have any negative impact on that context, and the people who use it. Even in 2017 we still have engineers crowing about how technology is value neutral, it's a-political, and how any attempt to claim otherwis…

And is this different to news papers how - when the phone hacking scandal broke in the Uk it was obvious that even a liberal news paper like the gruniad had a substantial number of journalists who thought the end justifies the means, or maybe they wanted to keep the possibility of working for NI open.

Re neo feudal helscape isn't that the brexit the rich news paper owners want ?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#60

Post by vasilipupkin »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #56

this may be the dumbest most fud filled article I have ever read. I mean it's just a bunch of words that mean what exactly? what exactly does the author think those companies are doing that is evil ? I can't figure it out. Driverless cars are not a worthy goal? don't buy one once it's for sale.

sure, you can downvote, but those downvoting can you explain to me in a nutshell what is the specific point made by this article ?
Post reply on HN