disruption – Page 20 – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Walking away from your desk

This, re yesterday’s post that was in some vincinity (though with quite some distance to spare…) of ranting about bureaucratic stupidity being a pleonasm.
By means of a pic, with:

A Bureacrat certainly designed this. The ejection seat would to a bureaucrat mean the danger of you escaping from the post you were supposed to hold no matter what — since in the bureacratic only thinkable scenario, nothing would ever happen or you’re unfortunate collateral loss but hey, the System continues to perform.
For all others (the handful, the few good men), the ejection seat is apparently surrounded by just that danger, and to be used to escape from from that immediate and urgent, life-threatening danger of death by utter boredom, by sitting still. Noting that the rig that the sign is on, invariably is one made for dangerous action, not for danger evasion… Ships are safe in harbour but that’s not what ships are for; kites [your check] so much, much less so!

Which side are you on; the sit-stillers’ or the Action Men’s ..?

Super Mario gives wrong impression of plumber's degree

On our first day of class, we had to pull three students from the sewer pipe

January 16, 2017 by Harry Withstander

At the start of every school season, Duke University welcomes hundreds of enthousiastic, motivated students, but after only a semester more than half of them will have dropped out, disillusioned and disaffected. “Young hopefuls arrive with the idea they too can be Super Mario”, Vice President Renzo DiLuigi says.

Almost immediately after the release of the very first Super Mario game in 1985, the Master of Plumbing program saw skyrocketing enrollment numbers. “That’s also where trouble starts”, explains DeLuigi. “On our first day of class, we had to pull three students from the sewer pipe. Party’s very much over for us, then. We learn people how to unclog a toilet, not how to save a princess.”

Jack Fore has been a teacher of Siphon Trap Technology with the Plumbling program. He has seen things develop before his eyes: “First day of the semester, they all come rushing into the car park in their carts, banana in hand. This makes clear to me: They’ll never be an A-grade plumber. If you want to fight with monkeys, why not do Biology, but don’t come wrecking the school building.”

Still, for DiLuigi the profession of plumber still is the best the world has to offer. “In the end, the true plumbers come to the fore. Every year, they generate so much energy on campus. As I use to say: Let’s-a go!”

[Original, in Dutch, on the Speld; translated with permission]

Two AI tipping point(er)s

You may have misread that title.

It’s about tips, being pointers, two to papers that give such a nice overview of the year ahead in AI-and-ethics (mostly) research. Like, this and this. With, of course, subsequent linkage to many other useful stuff that you’d almost miss even if you’d pay attention.

Be ware of quite a number of follow-up posts, that will delve into all sorts of issue listed in the papers, and will quiz or puzzle you depending on wether you did pay attention or not. OK, you’ll be puzzled, right?

And:

[Self-learned AI question could be: “Why?” but to be honest and demonstrating some issues, that’s completely besides the point; Toronto]

No, you're hacked

OK, we have a couple of little things:

“It’s not if but when an organisation is hacked”
This leads to access to some of your personal data however innocious (or not)
Only a handful of your however innocious personal data is needed to identify you and/or take over your ID
Your personal data however innocious on the surface (sic) is with so many organisations.

Syllogically, ID theft will ruin your life, pretty soon.

Now you may counter that … blabla you’re not interesting enough (maybe, but how sure are you, and if you’re so clean your ID has value to the not-so-clean), it won’t happen to you because it hasn’t happened to you (yet, that’s the point) … et cetera.

But oh, you will be hit …

And with that positive reminder, this:

[If life were as simple as at once major global city Edam…]

Electing Coke

Haven’t seen too many comparisons between Coke’s notorious botched A/B testing New Coke on the one hand, and the oh so similar (are they) recent US elections on the other.
If any of you would have a pointer to such an analysis, I’d be glad to hear.

That’s all. And:

[Which side you’d choose ..? Who cares about you / your choice ..? Zuid-As Amsterdam]

Four horsemen, with a badge

Now that ‘our failproof heroes of integrity’ (one of those five words is correct) have gained the right to hack and exploit each and every users’ device in their battle (huh) against the four horsemen, each, all and every proof of misconduct of however grave or minor import that anyone would conduct using any such ‘cyber’ device would not hold in court because no-one can prove it was the general user / suspect (sic) that put the data onto there or used it and the police would be implicated as well but cannot prove satisfactory it wasn’t them.

Obliterating any chance of ever proving actual foul horsemen…

But hey, they seem to have wanted that. For a reason? E.g., the above suspects were in majority already among the pursuers ..?

Why would I care… and:

[Your ‘straight’ thinking…; Zuid-As Amsterdam]

Integrity it is / ain't the quote

Given the recent upswing in attention for integrity, it is not strange but unfortunate to see the phrase and concept being so warped it has become a newspeak pastiche.

Integrity … taken as zealously chasing the company’s apparent only purpose… Integrity, taken as the ‘more than compliance’ ideal, then (almost exclusively) pursued in ways that seek only meek compliance with integrity rules [note the irony of ‘integrity’ and ‘rules’ other than in opposition] to get rid of the Dutch Uncles that without fail (yes) fail their own lessons.

Stemming of course from the misconception or more straighforward, lie that employees are only as integer as they align their efforts with the company’s objectives (when push comes to shove, profit being the only one that matters, don’t lie to me or to yourself or to the world ..!).

But then, you miss the mark. Even those that pursue their bizarre political aims through shooting up / blowing up as many totally innocent and irrelevant strangers, claim their integrity … not with the things you’d consider defensible but they do; in their warped-beyond-repair mind they act sincerely and with integrity to their (idiotic) ideas and morale, ethics.

On a less damaging note, re-study Bruce, e.g., as holiday present to ask for (from yourself ;-), and see that integrity may not be what you’re after after all. Integrity being on the side of, and of, the employees individually, for themselves. If they sell their expertise to some company, it’s only that that they can reasonably be expected to deliver, not all and their soul …!

All this, combined with the ridicule in:

“Integrity is a muscle you have to train every day”.

Which points out that apparently, every day you have to separately train (how?) integrity whereas the pool of metrics to determine the efficacy of the training is a vast desert (as it should; all that is of value, is immeasurable and vice versa) — and do you really need that much training; apparently people will daily find so many more detractors …!?

Plus, those that still cling to the above illogic (mult.) about integrity, may need to train their lung muscles every day in similar vein. Or not. Yes, if you’d really understand integrity, you’d see that it is a similar body function.

Oh well, plus:

[The aeons old fight of Order versus Chaos, often mistaken as Good versus Evil; Sevilla]

Throwback Thursday: Coke not (?) Classic

This Throwback Thursday (new category indeed — here), we start off with a Piece of Art, both qua visuals and musical score…
Of course, this can only be, and the title refers to, this. Click and admire.

We’re done.

The year of IT is no more Department

Or, once upon a long, long time ago in a land far, far away, there was IT, the hero department that ruled over all of information processing. Because information processing was a strange and dangerous thing and if you chopped off one security flaw, seven others would be introduced. So, the IT department was well-trained in keeping the architecture-and-infrastructure beast alive, with all its fresh new and old legacy body parts, fed every now and then with a fair maiden project.

Oh how things evolved. Lately (being the past couple of decades), the department was split, incompletely, between Development/Maintenance, and Operations. Things were run with ITIL and CobIT — as In Name Only as PINO was to the Prince, II.

The INO part being audited throughout (see previous post) but without anyone really caring about the outcomes of that. NO not even regulators or so, so devoid of truly understanding that the qualification ‘parasite’ isn’t too far off, even.

And now, there’s a slow but steady breakthrough of bands of liberators. Deperimetrisation, socmed, cloud, Big Data, flex work(place), hackers-contra-cyber (#ditchcyber), … the many-headed Central Scrutiniser is sprayed wth acid from all sides and is slowly shrunk. Softly wailing for mercy, some do but to not much avail. Maybe an embrace of Sloterdijk’s Part III foams may help.

Ah, I’m not positive but can be — at least, life will remain in the body that is infrastructure management (-coordination) and incident management, etc.

First, this:

Then, this:

[Outsourcing basic shopping to the experts at Milan]

You're not dumb

That’s why I agree so much with the first of this, and keep on ~~trucking~~ posting for the, hardly a, few reader(s) as per sub/secondhalf title of this. With the previous sentence demonstrating that thus.

OK, still with:

[For the views, with built (in) defences against the hoi polloi; Haut Köningsbourg]