Rather than safeguarding the fact that you are or were job searching, we threatened exposure. Current employers might retaliate if they saw that you were job searching. You did not expect that any personal information you’d given us, in the context of a private, secure job search, would be used publicly without your explicit consent. I sincerely apologize. It was my failure.
How about we stop giving our data to third parties just so we can use their software.
"The Cloud" is a corporate euphemism for "extreme centralization of data in our servers".
And "Software as a Service" is even worse, because it basically says you are RENTING the software, and trusting them to do "the right thing", including and especially with your data.
This is insane. It's 2020. Why are we doing this? One reason: we don't have a good open source alternative that can be hosted on many different places. Such an alternative should actually be end-to-end encrypted, and the hosting should be just redundant dumb boxes earning cryptocurrency for storing something.
So, what happened? How did I screw this up? I’ve been asking myself this question a bunch over the past 48 hours.
What happened was the same thing that happened 17 years ago when Mark Z laughed about the "dumb f$cks* who "trusted him" with their passwords. To quote the excellent V for Vendetta speech:
How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Look, I'm biased. I have put my money where my mouth is and am building this reality (https://qbix.com/platform and https://intercoin.org). I have historically been downvoted for even mentioning that I am doing tangible things to solve this and give away the software. But I persist in doing so because it's better to actually build the alternative than talk about it endlessly. The Impossible Burger will do more for veganism than decades of talk ever could.
If you want to join this effort, email greg at the domain qbix.com . But whether you choose to support Mastodon, Matrix, IPFS, Dat, MaidSAFE or whatever, realize that we need to move towards a future where infrastructure is decoupled from power over your data. Your data should be encrypted and only enough shared for indexing. It should be provable with verified claims and zero-knowledge proofs, but only with your consent.
TripleByte is literally the perfect example of a company that should be centralized. They work because they have a reputation that companies can trust. Trying to make it decentralized takes away any value that TripleByte provides.
Given that interviewing is a skill unto itself which needs to be practiced, what happens to candidates who need to take a few interviews before they start hitting their stride. For me, I can see that using Triplebyte once the candidate is "warmed up" makes sense.
If TripleByte was the only game in town then a new candidate would fail their test and then it is game over. No more job search.
I agree with your concerns about a monopoly, but just wanted to respond to your point about needing to “warm up”: Triplebyte gives you a free practice interview that doesn’t count (unless you ace it), and also lets you retry in a few months if you fail the actual interview.
That's exactly right, it does take away that value from TripleByte and gives it to everybody. The value that TripleByte provides is because of the current state of technology.
Take for example the telephone industry. We had telephone switchboard operators, and it cost $1-3 a MINUTE to make overseas calls. You could make the same argument: "AT&T is the perfect example of a company that should be centralized. They have a reputation for connecting your calls reliably, and you trust them to not broadcast your calls to others. But, of course, in the last 20 years the Internet has introduced Voice over IP and now ANY company can provide faceless, nameless infrastructure and get paid, while your calls go end-to-end encrypted via the wire.
Are we all better off? Yes! Having decoupled infrastructure from power over your data (calls), we have dropped the cost to zero. We went from monopolies and cartels and feudalism to "dumb pipes". We have videoconferencing right now, something unimaginable 20 years ago not just because of bandwidth but because there were "perfect examples of companies that should be centralized" and "reputations that we can trust". There is far more at stake.
In the past, we had human calculators, printers, mailmen, etc. They provided a lot of value. Lots of industries did. Today we don't. Don't blame TripleByte. Blame the lack of good permissionless, encrypted alternatives.
Unfortunately, TripleByte’s solution has nothing to do with technology. When a company is looking to hire, the reputation of TripleByte means that they can trust that whoever TripleByte gives them is high quality. It’s work just as well if TripleByte didn’t even have a website and required all their candidates to come into their office - that’d just need a lot more capital and be discouraging for potential users. That’s different from the type of trust that AT&T had, where you’re trusting the quality of the software but not their trustworthiness to not lie to you. (Although there is some of that when you’re trusting that generally people can’t listen in on your call)
I hear you. And yes, this reputation thing is different. But how do we know we can’t decentralize this trust?
Remember, the phone company was the canonical example of a “natural monopoly” by economists even including Milton Friedman. That’s why I chose that example. It eventually got decentralized too.
Please explain the meaning behind your words explicitly.
I am enjoying my -3 downvotes at the moment, waiting for my post to be flagged for daring to speak to the root of the issue.
The root of the issue is not TripleByte. Don't blame TripleByte. Blame the lack of open source, end-to-end encrypted alternatives. Why is saying this such a scandal?
Rather than safeguarding the fact that you are or were job searching, we threatened exposure. Current employers might retaliate if they saw that you were job searching. You did not expect that any personal information you’d given us, in the context of a private, secure job search, would be used publicly without your explicit consent. I sincerely apologize. It was my failure.
How about we stop giving our data to third parties just so we can use their software.
"The Cloud" is a corporate euphemism for "extreme centralization of data in our servers".
And "Software as a Service" is even worse, because it basically says you are RENTING the software, and trusting them to do "the right thing", including and especially with your data.
This is insane. It's 2020. Why are we doing this? One reason: we don't have a good open source alternative that can be hosted on many different places. Such an alternative should actually be end-to-end encrypted, and the hosting should be just redundant dumb boxes earning cryptocurrency for storing something.
So, what happened? How did I screw this up? I’ve been asking myself this question a bunch over the past 48 hours.
What happened was the same thing that happened 17 years ago when Mark Z laughed about the "dumb f$cks* who "trusted him" with their passwords. To quote the excellent V for Vendetta speech:
How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Look, I'm biased. I have put my money where my mouth is and am building this reality (https://qbix.com/platform and https://intercoin.org). I have historically been downvoted for even mentioning that I am doing tangible things to solve this and give away the software. But I persist in doing so because it's better to actually build the alternative than talk about it endlessly. The Impossible Burger will do more for veganism than decades of talk ever could.
If you want to join this effort, email greg at the domain qbix.com . But whether you choose to support Mastodon, Matrix, IPFS, Dat, MaidSAFE or whatever, realize that we need to move towards a future where infrastructure is decoupled from power over your data. Your data should be encrypted and only enough shared for indexing. It should be provable with verified claims and zero-knowledge proofs, but only with your consent.