IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

It's a dying business to be in, even if IBM excel in it.

BWAHAHAHA! Nothing about that program had any redeeming quality, the fact that everything was based on solidity was enough to confirm this: I knew IBM would be split into 2 companies when the upper brass refused to wise up to the obvious scams like ETH and eventually with Stellar. So much is put behind short term gains selling Z mainframes and empty promises of Watson for everything that nothing gets left over for anything actually innovative.

Tell me, for all the anti BTC propaganda in the training and talking points, it must really have humbled a few people and hopefully got enough people fired to see that the SEC and even Blackrock ended up on our side and not yours.

Instead all IBM has is a place amongst all the other s** coins no one uses with nearly no utility/volume or value to speak of [0]: whereas BTC keeps breaking hashrate ATH.

You guys really dropped the ball on this one, and to be honest the fact that it's a bunch of dinosaurs running that place made it apparent it was never going to live up to it's promise: I just wished the rank and file had taken more effort to make this happen, some of us did try, as so many corps IBM services were willing to pilot-test this tech.

I hate being this crass, I really do, but seriously you guys really screwed this one up.

0: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/

No companies in SV, or Microsoft/Amazon, offer a single product that has that kind of guarantee, that I know of.

By definition, the only time it's possible to be brave is when it's hard.

You're right about that, but unfortunately got the facts wrong. In reality most people that weren't high ranking officials were let go.

I don't know how to prepare for it, though. What should I be doing, and what should I be telling others to do?

I always demo it where people are open to it, I show them how it can used to steal their banking data (that has been the case already for many years), explain how everything they do is tracked (to those a little bit savy i show them the "hidden" tracking pixels here and there), I demo how people can talk about certain topics or search on site A and then similar content is shown on site B, and so on.

Spread the word, demo, explain, educate.

The mainstream is interested but they don't know how it works. They imagine cabals of people in secret dark chambers when in fact it was product managers in daily standups planning and delivering all this and an all too open to corruption politicians happy to keep the maases obedient and numb.

Where has technology as disruptive as 'AI' ever been defeated by regulations? That's just more rules that the rich can ignore with impunity.

Western society doesn't really have real solidarity. It's a performance we go into every election season but it's just that: a performance.

Society will do nothing about this until it affects the rich. As always.

That's the likely outcome if people are lead towards that outcome and if that's the only given option. And so far the only voices that validate their concerns are those that would benefit from such outcomes. Those that want a "better world" are too busy berrating those that have genuine concerns and as a result the only people they can take refuge in are those like Musk. It's time for genuine innovation and genuine conversation without losing track of the good in both sides.

Then there come people like Jones, and fill in the void, and suddenly name the issue (naturally they name a false issue, but nonetheless it sounds plausible to the untrained), and they do so in terms easy to understand. Now if they do this for a decade or longer they've successfuly radicalised people and polarised society just like we have been radicalised into thinking that these folks are just idiots and have no value.

That's why we need patience, active listening to their concerns, and actual real solutions that take into account the needs of both sides.

> people think it was a conspiracy and Epstein didn't kill himself

The guy is not interesting nor is the gossip. What I am worried about is that there is a climate that can even lead to a conspiracy theory. It means a good chunk of people don't trust any of our institutions (EU/US/UK) - the police, the government, the media, the prison system, are all rightfully prone to being suspected of dubious acts. We haven't been therein that cell, and the revelations surrounding Epstein have shown that even people that once were considered to be trustworthy beying doubt are now less than 90% trustworthy. Us saying he did kill himself is as ridiculous as those saying he didn't. We simply don't know, we paid investigators to do their jobs with no room for doubt. Why aren't they doing it?

It's a reasonable explanation, but not the only one. You're taking a huge organization or organizations (UK government departments) that have a revolving door of top-level leadership, plus ever-evolving technology, plus another huge organization (IBM) with a huge cast of people constantly being shuffled around...

Incompetence, disorganization, bad management, bouts of good management trying to re-rail things, new leadership undoing old leadership decisions... I can think of lots of reasons why government projects fail that aren't directly tied to corruption. (And just because there's corruption in a deal doesn't mean the vendor won't deliver, the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.)

There's plenty of other explanations that don't include corruption.

Lack of scope, mismanagement, what's developed isn't what they wanted, the people who decided the specs aren't the people using it so it's useless, etc.

We actually ended up delivering the first phase of the project (well, the 2nd iteration as the first was completely fluffed up by other developers trying to make a really complicated SPA that wasn't needed), but declined to bid on the second as we actually lost money and it was by that stage obvious they wanted the moon on a stick for phase 2 for very little money.

One of the Big Four were looking over the architecture in the 2nd iteration to make sure it could "scale" appropriately. But they knew exactly the load the app would face. 120,000 applications every year in the space of two months. It would never increase significantly as it was a factor of the total population. And it was basically a glorified 10 page form (admittedly each page had some complicated question routes depending on answers).

The architecture, which included event-sourcing, API gateways, load balancing and an inexplicable use of the mediator pattern (didn't make the slightest bit of sense), was utterly pathetic. Yet signed off as "best practice" by two separate software architects in the big four.

Within weeks I was pointing out serious bottlenecks in the code plus violations of GDPR that the client had explicitly said to watch out for. Any time we had to add a new property to the most important classes we had to change about 30 odd files, it was "best practice" gone nuts.

All that crazy architecture when a simple, normal, sane, "monolith" web app could have handled that load easily on a small VM. For a lark I refactored the DB saving code to see how much simpler I could make it and think I got rid of 25 of the 30 files and thousands of lines of pointless code in a day or two. Of course, it wasn't signed off by the "architects" so I didn't bother trying to check it in.