Who benefits from anti-vaccination or flat-earth?
Conspiracy theories are probably a lucrative industry if you get enough of a following.
1,242 karma · joined December 17, 2018
Conspiracy theories are probably a lucrative industry if you get enough of a following.
So while our teachers/nurses could legally use ML for planning as they have a legal right to use the data for planning, our digitisation department can’t build/train/support it and neither can a 3rd party supplier.
Since laws are very open to interpretation, at least until they are tested a few times in the courts, you could interpret them different than us. Which I’m guessing is what our neighbouring municipality is doing. They have the advantage of being 10 times bigger than us though, giving them much more influence, so much in fact, that they may end up paving the way for the rest of us.
That’s what I meant to say, but I should certainly have voiced what I meant better.
It’s also an area that’s subject to a lot of requires/shared resources. I mean, you have the regular schedule which takes up a lot of time on its own because you need to find replacements when someone is missing. If I get sick, no one really cares that we go a day without an Enterprise Architect, but if a teacher goes sick, multiple classes will need an replacement. Then there is the irregular stuff like rehabilitation, special school events or a range of things.
Basically it’s so complicated that it takes up the time of several full time positions.
It’s not the kind of complicated that’s not solvable by ML though. Our neighbouring municipality did a PoC on it, and I’m not sure how the procured the rights use the data for it (they probably didn’t), and it turned out that they could automate almost all of the planning and scheduling. Humans still had to make decisions, but it would suggest available resources or alternative schedules making the process much smoother.
That’s a lot of nurses and teachers you could actually put to work, nursing or teaching if it works.
It works by knowing what resources are needed though, and in the case of rehabilitation that involves knowing that someone needs anti-suicidal therapy at 10 am at a certain address. Which is extremely sensitive data, that the algorithm isn’t allowed to access under our adoption of the GDPR.
I did mean public sector data though.
I think it’s absolutely the right direction for private companies though. I know, I know, a lot of you are distrustful of government, but I’m Danish and we generally trust our public sector in to an extend that would truly surprise a lot of you.
So with that out of the way, I think it’s a shame that we spend so much public funding burying public data in silos. I think we should absolutely keep citizen data safe, but I think we should also use it and perhaps work to make some of it less sensitive. Because some of it frankly doesn’t have to be sensitive.
In my country we have a social security number. You get it 1-5 minutes after you’re born, and in the olden days, it was used to identify you when you wanted to do things like open a bank account. It’s still used for that to some extend, but in the meantime we’ve created this thing called NemID (soon to be mitID), which is a national 2-factor secure digital identity, that we use to enter online agreements because it turned out that your social security number wasn’t actually safe. We’ve also had leaks and hacks exposing nearly half of the current social security numbers over the past 25 years.
Because a social security number is deemed sensitive by the GDPR, we’re spending hundred of millions on the bureaucracy around it. It’s by far the most reported thing to our national data protection agency, I think almost 80% of the public cases involve it. And it makes no sense.
Why the hell didn’t we make it illegal to use it as an identifying number instead? It would have saved us so much money.
And that’s just one issue with the GDPR. Another is machine learning and data. This is obviously a sensitive area. I don’t personally think we should troll through citizen cases to try and find possible alcoholics. Maybe someday, but society has to deem it morally acceptable first.
I do think we should use citizen data to schedule shifts though. It makes no sense to me, to have 10 nurses and 15 teachers do full time scheduling in a city of 60,000-100,000 citizens when an algorithm can do it instead. But we can’t, because the GDPR prevents us from using data that way.
I like the GDPR, but I think it needs a revision for the modern public sector, and I think we should really ask ourselves what we want with our data.
Do we want to spend trillions on a bureaucracy guarding it, or do we want to demystify some of it and put it to good use, so we can spend the trillions on nurses, teachers and better infrastructure?
/disclaimer I work in the public sector.
I sit on folding seats in the conjunction between carts because I commute with my folding bike, and it’s just easier to sit out here, but I do think you’re absolutely spot on. I think “wasting” time is extremely valuable.
The reason I have the XS was mainly because I wanted more screen space for things that fall in the “toys” category, things like hackernews, and I’m certainly looking forward to playing the Harry Potter Pokemon go. I also wanted the better camera to take better pictures of my newborn, that I share with our family in Tinybeans.
I don’t see a problem with that at all though. I did turn notifications off from everything except the e-mail where I get alerts. I use todoist, a todo app, to schedule a lot of things, but even that doesn’t allow to alert me, not even with a little red number on the app icon.
I suggests this to everyone. I did it at a suggestion of my personal-efficiency-coach, but once the apps stopped reminding me to open them, it instantly freed up hours of daily time. Now I check them when I want to, like right now, where the alternative to my smartphone is quite literally staring at the open train bathroom across me. This had the added advantage/side effect of making me realise what apps I didn’t actually want.
The pay isn’t great, but we do get opportunities to work with cutting edge tech because every change doesn’t need to be billed by the hour.
It was still deemed illegal under the government adapted GDPR laws because we didn’t have consent. So how on earth is London getting away with this, and I guess you could say the same about their CCTV footage?
Now I prefer the mix, I can certainly understand people who prefer the separation.
I know a guy who works with laravel, and we’ve teased him so much about PHP over the years, because PHP. The truth is, that his backend is actually more suited for the modern world than what we currently run. .Net core is getting to where it’s competitive, but it’s still a bitch to build something like a mixed asp mvc and Vue components app, which is truly effective/productive alternative to MVVM clients or jquery/Ajax for smaller projects.
The mobile client, I really like the gmail iOS client. I think fastmail was better than the native iOS mail client, but I just really like the gmail one.
Google docs, photos and drive are nice additions, but it’s mainly the first two.
I tried all of them, fastmail, protonmail, tutanota, Runbox and a few others, and none of them came close to using gmail. So I figured, what the hell, g-suite is around the same price and it gets me 30gb of cloud storage as well.
I wish google was a little more clear on where the privacy starts and ends though. Like if you want to use google home with a g-suite, you have to enable a bunch of tracking. I know this has to do with the fact that google wants to separate business from personal use, but really, I don’t want two e-mails.
I mean Microsoft has the upper hand compared to Google or AWS because they are better at GDPR and privacy shield stuff. Microsoft is also miles better in terms of enterprise support, but it’s those reasons and not their solutions that sell.
This may sound silly, but you’re likely not doing it right now because you focus too much on what you think they think about you.
You need to switch that external focus into an internal one, where your thoughts are your own and not filled with trying to read minds. Because I’m guessing that you can’t read minds.
So look at people and judge them, with practice you’ll eventually start to forget worrying about what they may be thinking. Hell, you might even notice that you rarely judge people negatively, and if you don’t judge them negatively, then why would they do it to you?
Another good trick is to join a group that does public speaking followed by sessions where you review each other. By doing that you’ll learn that no one is as critical of you as you fear.
But you should see a therapist, it can take years to overcome social anxiety.
I mean, the latter requires a higher education, which is something that doesn’t exactly rain on people below the middle class, it also pays better and the problems are more interesting, but I know which of the two I’d personally prefer.
There is a sea of terrible games, and that’s especially true on mobile, and in my experience it’s impossible to find the ones I like.
When I was younger, my friend group had time to try a lot of games to find the good ones. Once you found a good one, you’d recommend it to other people, and they would do the same to you.
That’s how I found the original Fallout. I played all the demos that came with a PC magazine of the time, and one of those demos was Fallout. I found x-com ufo enemy unknown because my cousin played it at my grandparents house. Dune 2 because it was installed in my youth club. Diablo because it was the hottest game at a Net-cafe.
With age I’ve lost that recommendation zone. I don’t have time to try games and neither do my friends, so we don’t. Once in a while something will blow up so large that you can’t avoid hearing about it. But finding the gems? How do you even do that? I mean, I guess you could turn to gaming-“journalism”, but that is mainly just advertising.
We simply have too much software that only runs on; and too much staff schooled for Windows. You’re right that we could change if we wanted to, but it’s just hard to justify such an investment in an area where it would mean that we had to fire teachers and nurses to pay for it.
We don’t even have a good business case. I mean, our total Microsoft licenses are around the same expense as 4 employees. It would be literal decades before we brought the investment home if we made a full switch.
That doesn’t really work in political organisations, and it’s likely why all the previous attempts to switch have failed. To do this, we’d need massive public support for it, so the political leadership doesn’t get cold feet during the “short” term investment, and the truth is, the public couldn’t care less.
That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore. But it’ll take a long time, and maybe it’ll never make sense to leave Microsoft. I mean, what’s the open source alternative to office365?
That doesn’t really make sense though, because our IT staff can’t support it, so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.
I work in a Danish municipality with 100.000 citizens. We operate more than 300 IT systems, some of these are one of a kind systems that have no alternatives and some of those only run on Windows.
We also have 8000 employees, a lot of them couldn’t tell you if the smartphone they use each day is an android or an iPhone. They know windows and they know office, switching them to pages and macOS would be almost impossible, Linux and libre office is out of the question.
We have an IT staff of skilled people who were willing to skip pay for ideology they are all certified Microsoft and have little other education. They could all easily leave for other positions in the Microsoft infrastructure. It would cost around a million to replace just one of them.
We could easily switch our tech to Linux, we would need to build a lot of replacement software but that could be done in a reasonably manner, but moving the business side to Linux would be the most expensive thing we ever did.
Which is why I’m a skeptic of something I believe should happen. We pay a tech tax to Microsoft, by we can’t stop. It’s just not doable.
It’s several times more complicated to debug something that runs on the clients device than something that runs on your server.
I never knew American supermarkets were so terrible. I mean, you read about the Amazon grocery stores and get the picture of Europe being far behind.
Between Ajax and JQuery we can build things that are perfectly reactive and come with the added benefit of being extremely easy to debug. They can’t run offline, and if we need to build something that does, then we’ll turn to something like angular/react/ (typically Vue, because we actually use Vue components in our MVC apps from time to time, but which one is beside the point).
When we interview junior developers about this, they often think we’re crazy for not having access to NPM, but we’re the public sector, we need to know what every piece of our application does. That means it’s typically a lot easier to write our own things rather than to rely on third party packages.
Since then we’ve moved to a world where every program is web-based. I mean, even huge enterprise systems in healthcare run on some JavaScript MVVM framework and a web-backend in the cloud.
The truth is that php is more adapt at handling this than a lot of the stacks you see in enterprise. It’s really kind of silly, but I don’t think we’ll ever adopt php either exactly for its bad rep. But sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t.
Couldn’t you start with less, and then scale when you need to?