[HN Gopher] IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then si...
___________________________________________________________________
IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M
contract for it
Author : rntn
Score : 216 points
Date : 2023-08-31 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| nicechianti wrote:
| [dead]
| MrQuincle wrote:
| If this article is concerned about ethics at IBM
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust might be an
| interesting read for people who haven't yet.
| stonogo wrote:
| How many of those people still work at IBM, do you suppose?
| opless wrote:
| I came to post the same thing.
| darkerside wrote:
| Well in their defense, when they said that they didn't know they
| could make $70M on it
| jmclnx wrote:
| Funny, some people in the Arab world are fighting required Hijab
| use. In the US and Europe, with this happening, I could see many
| people outside wearing Hijabs that cover your full face in the
| future.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| In my country it is actually illegal to cover your face. There
| was a substantial backlash on Islam.
|
| https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/gezichtsbedekkende-...
| popcalc wrote:
| >many people outside wearing Hijabs that cover your full face
| in the future
|
| I'd assume they would be seen as a freak by the average person,
| in the same way people under the age of 60 who don't own a
| smartphone are today.
| cpeterso wrote:
| COVID-19 made wearing face masks normal. No one needs to know
| if you're wearing a mask to protect against COVID or to
| protect your privacy.
| [deleted]
| n1b0m wrote:
| If you're referring to Iran then they're Persian not Arab.
| acheong08 wrote:
| The Arab world refers to the Islamic countries in the Middle
| East I believe. Not any specific country
| ptdn wrote:
| Iran is not considered part of the Arabic world and is a
| completely different branch of Islam.
| pas wrote:
| can you please elaborate on this?different how?
| n1b0m wrote:
| Shia vs Sunni
| n1b0m wrote:
| Iran is in the Middle East and and is also where the most
| recent and high profile protests against the forced wearing
| of the hijab have taken place. I'm pretty sure most
| Iranians wouldn't take too kindly to being called Arab
| unless they are from the minority Iranian Arabs.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| It's peak techbro delusion to think the rest of the population
| care that much about privacy.
|
| I wish I was wrong.
| seydor wrote:
| I think it s impossible to hold off the oncoming onslaught of Big
| State powered by AI , but i think we are doing a very bad job of
| telling the public to prepare for it, starting with AI powered
| online manipulation
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'd like to prepare for it. How?
| seydor wrote:
| You 're probably in tech so you already know. But the public
| isn't even aware how easy it is to e.g. copy someone's voice
| with AI. The mainstream news are uninterested
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, I already know about the increased use of facial
| recognition. But you said that we're doing a bad job of
| telling people how to prepare for it.
|
| I don't know how to prepare for it, though. What should I
| be doing, and what should I be telling others to do?
| seydor wrote:
| Tell them what is possible
| gumballindie wrote:
| > But the public isn't even aware how easy it is to e.g.
| copy someone's voice with AI.
|
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Ok, I'll say it.
|
| I am actively moving away from any type of serveillance
| device and software, where possible of course. Moved away
| from the data scraping OS made by windows to linux. De
| google, de apple, and spread the word. There may not be much
| we can do against the sheer amount of public surveillance we
| enjoy, a level that makes the STASI and KGB pale in
| comparison, other than voting voting and voting. Protesting
| and vandalism would only ridicule any attempt.
|
| Oh and I feel that there may also be a market for people that
| want an online presence but in a protected way. So starting
| businesses around that may also help. Nothing fancy. Just
| simple stuff such as not tracking users and not manipulating
| them. Requires avoiding venture capital, and that's fine. No
| point in being a paper millionaire with no life anyway.
| hedora wrote:
| So... how do you engage in commerce, use transportation,
| and connect to the internet?
| gumballindie wrote:
| "where possible of course"
|
| This is how :-) I am not trying to live like a hermit
| locked in a forest. I do what is reasonable and learning
| more about how to do it even better.
| HtmlProgrammer wrote:
| The general public won't care until it impacts them personally.
|
| Time to buy that country estate surrounded by trees so the
| surveillance state can't see the finer details of your eyes
| with their AI cameras
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there is no "general public" just like there is no 2.5
| children. More than 1 million working adults in the USA are
| in uniform or under non-disclosure to security sensitive
| things.. you will never address those people in the same
| breath as lowest-common-denominator fear mongering, as is
| immediately and unwisely suggested here by "good" people.. oh
| by the way .. "caring about human rights" people will start
| to behave in a mob like any other mob.. in many cases..
| crowds make bad decisions.. etc
| hedora wrote:
| The surveillance state adopted to lidar decades ago,
| specifically because it can see through trees.
| corinroyal wrote:
| And never leave. No going to the store. No driving. No
| friends coming by. No servants. Every supply run is a
| clandestine operation.
|
| Individualist solutions don't work here. Only regulatory
| solutions can address the source of the problem and those
| require solidarity and collective action.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Yeah because that's totally worked out, right?
|
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Just tell folks on the right that ai is going to take their
| rights, freedoms and guns and let them run with it. I am not
| joking, the only way to "wake" people up is to leverage those
| that, oddly enough, have predicted many of the upcoming
| changes. The issues with their conspiracy theories are with the
| how, whom, and why. There's no cabal of folks injecting people
| with microcips to control them and covid wasn't it. It's just
| regular corporations and corrupt politicians selling them
| technological sweets in order to extort them for money. Easy.
| Let them run wild, and hopefully the left and the right find
| middle ground and change this trajectory.
| nologic01 wrote:
| alas they are very selective about which rights they are
| concerned about. e.g. very territorial about physical space,
| but largely numb to big tech surveillance.
|
| but indeed this issue is not aligned with traditional
| political divisions. there is simply no meaningful part of
| society that is better of from this large scale digital
| surveillance that is being inflicted against _all_ people 's
| best interest. the only beneficiary is the small oligarchy
| that is orchestrating this.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the logical endpoint of that is some crazy guy shooting up a
| pizza place, not civil society taking back control of
| technology pointed at them. Ever played the original Deus Ex?
| There's a reason Musk on his Bob Page arc loves to stoke
| conspiracy nonsense and it isn't because it produces
| effective, rational governance reigning powerful people in
| gumballindie wrote:
| > the logical endpoint of that is some crazy guy shooting
| up a pizza place
|
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| that's not a bad idea
| gumballindie wrote:
| The more I think the more I realise that some of those
| people's hearts are in the right place. And the amusing
| part is that I am starting to realise that a lot of the
| surveillance tech was developed under either left and right
| governments and politicians. Thus we can find common
| ground. The enemy of enemy and all that :-)
| freedomben wrote:
| The only problem with that plan is that it's going to warp in
| ways that make us facepalm, especially because they like to
| have a named antagonist. Impossible to predict how it would
| go, but one thought might be that it will turn into "Bill
| Gates is investing in facial recognition so he can put us all
| in prison camps" or something.
|
| Unfortunately the damage from that will be severe and will
| probably make everyone on the left double down about how AI
| is "safe" and all that. Remember Alex Jones et al conspiracy
| theories about powerful people being involved in a pedophile
| ring? For years it was widely mocked and dismissed (including
| by me) and then Epstein came to light. The prediction was far
| from perfect, but was right in overall gist, but the suicide
| was largely the end of the reporting. A lawsuit here and
| there but very little news coverage and a lot of weird stuff
| was happening around that, to the point that even "regular"
| people think it was a conspiracy and Epstein didn't kill
| himself. But it went nowhere.
| gumballindie wrote:
| That is a very real risk, but I suspect that's partially
| because these people have been contanstly berrated or
| ignored. Let's look at it this way. They felt something was
| wrong. Couldn't tell what but they felt it was (well some
| things were obious - massive job losses, ignored by the
| government and the media, etc). Heck even we, "highly paid"
| tech workers are now facing the same issues - housing is
| expensive, corporations want to squeeze every penny out of
| us, we are being manipulated, etc.
|
| 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?
| freedomben wrote:
| I agree completely with everything you wrote. The "war"
| is going to just continue to heat up as long as people
| are strawmanned, mocked, and dismissed. That hasn't
| worked out well historically, it's not going to in the
| future either and it's something I'm very concerned
| about.
|
| Re: Epstein, if I meant to imply that I thought Epstein
| did kill himself, that was a mistake. I have no idea of
| course, but it seems pretty reasonable to me that he
| didn't...
| hooverd wrote:
| The problem with Alex Jones et al conspiracy theorists is
| they're predicted nine out of the last five pedophile
| rings/trafficking operations/secretly trans celebrities.
|
| I will admit he makes for great content though. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIffTdeuxGo
| kingkawn wrote:
| The thing that AI has already made possible is a total police
| state. Communication analysis can now feasibly be carried out
| on all text/spoken dialogue transmitted within a given domain,
| whereas in the past it was limited by the number of human
| agents available for this work.
| supermatt wrote:
| "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology,
| including facial recognition technology offered by other
| vendors..."
|
| They didn't feel the need to "include" themselves in their
| definition of "any"
| tempodox wrote:
| If a pittance of $70M makes IBM go back on their word, they
| must really be on their last legs.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'll do it for 10C/ on the dollar.
| willcipriano wrote:
| IBM's solutions are so ancient they are no longer considered
| technology.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| I dont know. My close relative works as infrastructure
| engineer at major automotive company, and about every 2 years
| they are buying new computation clusters (think tens to low
| hundreds thousands of cores, along with network and storage
| infra). Every time a public tender is held, and every time
| there are several companies promising to achieve required
| results with whatever hardware.
|
| Last decade I know of three different firms being selected,
| where they guaranteed to succeed on speed requirements (some
| even saying its tested inhouse), only to admit failure after
| year of trying, taking all their hardware back with no pay.
| IBM at higher price was selected as backup, and every time
| was the only firm actually able to deliver on their promises
| and meet the benchmark requirements.
|
| I often see IBM getting a lot of flak here for whatever
| reasons, just sharing some counterweight.
| tw04 wrote:
| It seems EXTREMELY unlikely that Cray would be unable to
| meet performance requirements and promises. They've
| consistently done so for decades in all manner of
| government and private institutions.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Cray was never selected. Either they didn't submit an
| offer, or their price was too high.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I've sat in on plenty of B2B sales pitches, and am fairly
| certain that no salesman ever believes that you will
| actually run those tests. And if even if you did, that
| you would actually throw away a full year of integration
| work to go with the backup plan.
|
| Plus, having seen/heard a lot about how salesman are
| employed - all too often their commission/compensation is
| locked in when the contract is signed. They get their
| money regardless of what happens a year or two down the
| road, and are thus incentivized to "misrepresent"
| performance and capabilities.
| stonogo wrote:
| Any sane HPC program has an acceptance testing phase in
| the delivery terms of the contract, with specific
| penalties (IBM calls them "considerations") for failing
| to meet the technical requirements. Sales teams in the
| HPC are extremely aware of this.
|
| Blue Waters is a great example of throwing away years of
| work and pivoting to the backup plan:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Ugliest day in a salesman's life: the day he learns about
| "clawback."
| fweimer wrote:
| HPE Cray are involved with Aurora:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(supercomputer)
|
| As far as I understand it, the project saw substantial
| delays so far.
| wmf wrote:
| The Aurora delays were clearly caused by Intel.
| stonogo wrote:
| No, they've consistently paid penalties for not doing so,
| especially during the decade or so their network stack
| tended to implode, taking the shared filesystem with it.
| They also benefited, during those decades, from an NSA
| program explicitly designed to fund US HPC OEMs in order
| to maintain American industry leadership in the space. I
| think it was a good policy, but it doesn't mean that Cray
| was hitting home runs right up to the HPE acquisition.
| Aperocky wrote:
| But the world is moving away from mainframes and into
| commodity hardware, even without considering the "cloud"
| aspect.
|
| It's a dying business to be in, even if IBM excel in it.
| [deleted]
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Quantum computers, cutting edge crypto, cutting edge physical
| reseach just to name a few? I think we are pretty much at the
| forefront of a lot of things.
|
| disclaimer: I work at IBM Research but this is my own
| opinion.
| unnah wrote:
| Maybe they caught on with all the youngsters who call
| software and AI stuff "tech" instead of technology, and make
| a clear distinction between the two.
| wredue wrote:
| IBM severed most of their ancient technology off in to
| Kyndryl. They're pretty much all cloud at this point.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Did they sell off mainframes too?
| tw04 wrote:
| They will never sell off mainframe. That's the one thing
| they can reliably tweak to hit their numbers and/or push
| other software that people don't want as a "bundle".
| wnc3141 wrote:
| What is IBM's competitive position? I always assumed they
| were in the assurance business. I.e. they have well tested
| systems with close support. Anyone with more insight?
| adolph wrote:
| It is foolish to think that an assertion without an incentivizing
| contract is anything other than marketing. What, is a public
| corporation going to turn down 70M because of something a leader
| said when it was popular? They have legal fiduciary obligations
| against not making money, not against changing directions.
|
| Even at the granularity of individual humans, what people want to
| do is largely orthogonal to what they do. In James Clear's book
| Atomic Habits one of the more hard-core ways of pre-committing to
| a course of action is to write a contract with an "accountability
| partner."
|
| Below is a sample:
|
| https://s3.amazonaws.com/jamesclear/Atomic+Habits/Habit+Cont...
| rqtwteye wrote:
| When will people learn that companies will almost always sell
| stuff as long as it's legal and profitable. They have no morals.
| If we declined into a dictatorship they would sell equipment for
| total surveillance and oppression. If we don't make it illegal to
| pollute they will pollute if they think it makes money.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Upton Sinclair -- 'It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not understanding
| it.'
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| IBM already helped the Nazis in the Holocaust. They never had
| morals to start with. If we elected Hitler's reanimated corpse,
| IBM would gladly help again
| mushbino wrote:
| Capitalism in a nutshell. It will always do this. It can't be
| reformed. Aside from the fact that we will eventually run out
| of resources to exploit. Infinite growth is just not possible.
| quacked wrote:
| I believe people should take care to add "men and women at"
| before talking about companies. Companies and corporations are
| abstractions. There are real people taking these actions.
|
| - "Men and women at IBM promised to back off facial
| recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it"
|
| - "Men and women would sell equipment for total surveillance
| and oppression"
|
| etc.
|
| The reason I think this is important is that there's actually a
| very small number of people relative to the general population
| that are capable of producing this technology. It's easy to be
| angry at the suits, or at the broad abstraction "IBM" for
| enabling this, but the fact of the matter is that there are
| spineless cowards out there getting up every morning to go and
| build facial recognition software. They deserve the ire of
| thinking people. No matter what the era is, there will be
| sociopaths running large organizations looking to control
| everyone, but these days there's a huge coterie of nerds
| getting paid handsomely to help.
| Retric wrote:
| I think you're vastly underestimating how many people can
| figure it out with a little research and on the job training.
| The basic government consulting model is to take fresh
| collage grads and have them muddle through. And while yes
| it's a horrific waste of taxpayer money, it also works
| surprisingly often.
| toyg wrote:
| > _spineless cowards_
|
| It's hard to be brave when you have to support a family, pay
| for a mortgage, pay for the kids' college, etc.
|
| I remember feeling queasy, almost 20 years ago, when I got
| hired for a very good salary to do helpdesk, and realized the
| customers I had to support included some Bad Actors: big
| mining, big arm manufacturing, even big spying... but I could
| finally afford to buy a small house, marry my partner, and
| start a family. So I sucked it up, and without that
| experience I wouldn't be where I am now.
| quacked wrote:
| > It's hard to be brave when
|
| By definition, the only time it's possible to be brave is
| when it's hard.
| toyg wrote:
| But there is "putting your own at risk" and "putting your
| family at risk".
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Reminds me of my favorite DS9 quite
|
| BASHIR: It's not your fault that things are the way they
| are. LEE: Everybody tells themselves that, and nothing
| ever changes.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You are right. This was settled with the Nuremberg principles
| and code in the wake of the last world war. Group apologetics
| are cowardly and unacceptable. People of excellent character,
| some of them genuine leaders, step up and accept
| responsibility for the moral failures of organisations they
| head. Those "merely following orders" deserve no protection.
|
| We must stop blaming "the system", or "inevitable progress",
| or "capitalism", or whatever abstraction. It is terribly weak
| and avoidant to do so. It seems perfectly fair to put names
| to actions having broad effect. I think the (as you say)
| _few_ people who make far reaching decisions in technology
| deserve treating as de-facto public figures, as worthy of
| public scrutiny as political representatives.
|
| Want to "invent" some disruptive new technology that changes
| the world? At least have the decency to put your name to it,
| stand by it and defend it ethically. Otherwise what you're
| doing looks more like terrorism than science.
|
| Actual individual _people_ make awful decisions, knowing that
| they are awful, and hoping to get away with it through
| "safety in numbers". We should welcome whatever puts moral
| pressure on such individuals to act properly, and not to hide
| behind their "gang". Corporations have become a rock beneath
| which rather little sunlight shines nowdays.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Or to avoid using the gender binary we could just use
| "People/Humans at IBM" :)
|
| Agree otherwise.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Or to avoid using the anthropocentric language, we could
| just use "Consciousnesses at IBM" :)
| [deleted]
| bo1024 wrote:
| Point taken, but an important point here is exactly that
| companies are abstractions, and they exhibit emergent
| behavior -- cases where the the company as a whole,
| responding to "its" incentives, "does" things that no
| individual at the company would necessarily do or even
| condone if it were all up to them.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| At the end of the day, some engineer has to sit down and
| say "I'm going to make this evil thing because the boss is
| paying me to do it". That's a breach of ethics. That
| emergent behavior is enabled, at every step, by
| complacency.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "there are spineless cowards out there getting up every
| morning to go and build facial recognition software."
|
| Almost any technology can be abused. There are a lot of good
| uses for facial recognition and also a lot of bad. I don't
| think the people who develop technology are responsible of
| cowards for how it's being used. That's up to the big guys.
| If you want to work on stuff that's for sure only used for
| "good" purposes, your world will be very small.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| This isn't a case of "we're making this for some noble
| purpose, but it might be abused". This is "we're making
| this so that we can use it for evil". Like the engineers at
| Palintir who were working on the whole predictive policing
| thing. There's no good that can come of that (I suppose the
| same could be true if you left out everything after
| "Palintir" in that sentence). The core motivation of
| developing the technology is evil.
| carbotaniuman wrote:
| Predictive policing feels like something that someone
| could think would be noble but could be abused though?
| Like to me, most things that we consider "evil", someone
| else could conceivably consider noble or useful or at
| least a net positive.
| wredue wrote:
| They actually don't even care if it's illegal.
|
| Businesses straight up killed a reporter with a car bomb a few
| years back. They don't give a fuck.
|
| How many companies blatantly break the law only to pull some
| accounting magic to entirely avoid consequences (Canada oil is
| legally required to clean up their mess, but never do. It
| always falls to the taxpayer with zero business consequence).
|
| How many times to they break the law, only to get a small slap
| on the wrist while running away with billions in profit?
|
| Companies don't give a shit if something is illegal.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Classic IBM. Principles are cheap unless you pay for them.
| [deleted]
| EGreg wrote:
| Don't trust Corporations in the capitalist system. Happens every
| day.
|
| OpenAI saying they will keep your private data safe from being
| used for training? I am wondering what the story will be in 5
| years hehe
| nijave wrote:
| Probably by backing off they meant they just re-orged and fired a
| few people in that department
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Actually this is a good thing.
|
| Knowing IBM's consultancy track record, this will serve as a
| money and time honeytrap for any government interested in this
| while not actually delivering any useable tech.
| pizzaknife wrote:
| as an eternal optimist, i hope this is how it shakes out
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| "IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced a hiring pause in May, but
| that's not all. Later that month, the CEO also stated the company
| plans to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI.
|
| Krishna noted that back-office functions, specifically in the
| human resources (HR) sector, will be the first to face these
| changes. In recent weeks, the company has opened up dozens of
| positions for AI-based roles to help develop and maintain these
| systems."
|
| The mask has fallen.
| paxys wrote:
| Who the hell is signing a large contract with _IBM_ and expecting
| them to deliver working tech?
|
| > IBM signed a $69.8 million (PS54.7 million) contract with the
| British government
|
| Ah, just good old fashioned grift. Nothing to be concerned about.
| The money is being spent on executive bonuses and government
| official kickbacks, not developing facial recognition.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I despise IBM but how is that grift?
| HtmlProgrammer wrote:
| $(PS?)70 mil contract with IBM with a government agency will
| get you some serious consultancy fees
|
| Source: father works for government and sees budgets for how
| much is wasted on IBM doing fuck all for the money
| w0m wrote:
| a joke about UK govt wasting money
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The UK routinely buys software that doesn't work for large
| amounts of money. The only reasonable explanation is
| corruption.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I've actually worked on a failed-ish (or at least put on
| pause) development for a government (no names!).
|
| 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.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I don't argue that they're not also incompetent but I
| would argue that that incompetence is a side effect of
| corruption that you're not privy to.
| hooverd wrote:
| Yeah, you can't just say software fell off a truck like
| physical goods.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Mostly apathy. "need to spend this year's budget"
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| No, it's corruption. The UK has a reputation as a low
| corruption state as it's pretty good with petty
| corruption. The corruption indices are based on
| corruption perception and the UK has historically been
| less corrupt so much of that perception is dated. The
| general public in the UK is not involved in the big
| ticket items so they tend not to see the machinations. It
| doesn't take much digging which is why it's ridiculous
| that the SFO abandons so many investigations due to
| 'insufficient evidence'.
| jzb wrote:
| "The only reasonable explanation is corruption."
|
| 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.)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Once corruption has set in the other explanations like
| 'apathy' and 'incompetence' are no longer reasonable as
| it is very much in the interest of someone to leverage
| that apathy and incompetence for corrupt reasons. The
| idea that people who professionally siphon off public
| money will let $70M slip by without getting a piece of
| that action does not hold water.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM - the results do not
| matter.
| pyrophane wrote:
| I think the reason for this is probably more:
|
| 1. Risk aversion. "Nobody gets fire for buying IBM" still has
| some truth to it. Even if they don't deliver, the fact that IBM
| is one of (or the?) largest consulting firms in the world is in
| itself a defense for selecting them.
|
| 2. The government bid process. I don't know how this works in
| the UK, but in the US you have to jump through a lot of hoops
| if you want to work on government contract, so the same few
| firms tend to get selected a lot not because they are good, but
| because they know how to work the process.
| geodel wrote:
| At lower level nowadays I see no one gets hired if they are
| still working on IBM products.
| namdnay wrote:
| IBM are just a big body shop contracting firm, like Accenture
| or Cap Gemini . I don't think they're any better or worse than
| the others
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > Who the hell is signing a large contract with IBM and
| expecting them to deliver working tech?
|
| Considering they have tens of billions in revenue every year, a
| lot of people. But what's IBM's niche? I remember they promoted
| watson a few years back and nothing seems to have come out of
| that. IBM is such an iconic name in tech but I don't remember
| them doing anything noteworthy for a long time. At this point
| IBM is just famous for being famous.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| watsonx.ai where have you been !
| thrashh wrote:
| Afaik a ton of companies use Watson.
|
| IBM doesn't market services... they market solutions. You
| contract with them and they figure out how they build
| something for you. And it may include Watson.
| _delirium wrote:
| Yeah, though it's not really what people think of from the
| Bob Dylan ads. Watson started as a specific piece of
| technology (an attempt to turn the Jeopardy-winning system
| into a general AI engine) and later morphed into just a
| catch-all brand for everything IBM offers in AI and ML.
| hanniabu wrote:
| How is that a grift? They'll get like 3 meetings with that
| contract!
| [deleted]
| rmah wrote:
| $70 mil is not what IBM would consider a large contract.
| Certainly not large enough to risk actions like kickbacks. Now
| if it was $700mil, then maybe.
| MagaMuffin wrote:
| [dead]
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