As an American close to the tech industry, I’m often jealous of the GDPR. I understand it may not be perfect and often feels restrictive, but I think we’re seeing the results of unfettered “innovation” here in America right now and realizing that most of this “innovation” is not anything any of us ever wanted or needed and not nearly worth the price.

At some point in the past I noticed there is no longer an option to even opt-out of most emails. When purchasing something from a site, they’ll usually get my email as part of the ordering process and while I have searched and searched, most don’t make any indication for opting out. You’ll only notice days later when you’re getting spammed with promotions, sometimes daily.

As well, further restrictions must’ve been loosened because there are companies I’ve dealt with years ago that have begun emailing me promotions. Just the other week I got an email from a company that sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t recall. When I searched my inbox, I had bought a custom USB cable from them nearly 6 years ago.

Complete and utter lack of respect for consumer privacy. Disgusting. I hate it here.

“It trivialises what we’re facing,” says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.

Oh, OK. So it’s worse than “zombie deer disease”. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

I cannot upvote this enough. “Just migrate to X, it’s every bit as good!” when end users know it’s not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don’t have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they’ll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.

The argument has to be made honestly. It’s not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you’ll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.

I know we’re all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we’re facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.

As someone who has worked in the tech industry near Seattle, I don’t know how well known it is to the wider populace or people in Europe, but open source is absolutely anathema here. It’s seen as insecure, unstable, and unreliable.

I work in IT so I’ve tangentially worked across a number of sectors supporting their stacks and it’s pervasive within the American culture. There is a major de-prioritization of in-house IT knowledge and sysadmins in favor of enterprise support contracts. When shit hits the fan, it’s less important to have a knowledgeable team and more important to have a foot to stamp down on until the issue is resolved. Often that foot has another foot that stamps down, onward and onward until someone manages to engage the MSP or cloud provider that set the service up initially with their scant documentation.

It’s a nightmare both for tech workers and from a cyber security perspective. A lot of this contains my own personal bias and perspective on the matters, but let me say, I have stared into the void and I can’t stop screaming.

I think one of my favorite examples was using simple salt to trap them within the confines of white lines that they didn’t think they could cross over. I really appreciate the imagery of using salt circles to entrap the robotic demons …

No, I get it. There’s this unspoken understanding that barcodes are strictly utilitarian and unobserved as their nature. In stylizing them, there’s an acknowledgement of being unexpectedly seen by the human consumer and not the intended digital scanning device.

I’m still absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly we all moved on from Trump literally getting clipped in an attempt on his life.

They tried to muster some outrage and solidarity, but most of us just shrugged and went, “Damn. Oh well, maybe next time.”

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.