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Comment by maximilianroos | Hacker News Reader

> He prefers his own “escalatory approach”, working through a system via an administrator’s access and searching for a “confluence”, a collection of information shared in one place, such as a workplace intranet.

Was this a mistaken transcription for Confluence, the Atlassian app?

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It sounds like the journalist didn't know what Confluence is and thought it was a term of art for any generic intranet.

edit: to those saying the word makes sense without referring to the Atlassian product, I'm not buying it. The journalist put it in quote marks, which to me suggests he thought it was a term of art — if he instead meant it metaphorically, I don't think he would have phrased it like that. It's also just an odd word to use to describe the idea.

This would be a fun SAT question: Wordpress is to blog as Conflunce is to __intranet__

The dictionary meaning of "confluence", namely an aggregation or coming together of disparate sources of stuff (information, in this case) into a single place, makes perfect sense here. And searching for places that lots of information gathers seems like a sensible approach to me. The fact that one product happens to have the same name didn't even cross my mind.

Confluence literally means the junction of two rivers, genericized it's where two or more things join or occur together ("a confluence of events"), so it could be either. But naming Confluence (the web application) is very specific, not everyone uses it.

To "conflate" is when two or more things are merged into one.

In tech we usually assume "confluence" means the Atlassian product, not "a merging of several items".

In case anyone doesn't know about the field of etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/confluence

Confluence, n.: a collection of semirandom characters emitted by employees trying to look busy, interned in a series of secure silos, with stringent access controls, to hide the evidence.

This is what happens when people 'sanitize' their writing with an AI. It doesn't often understand trademarks or context, so we get stuff like this.

I imagine the real human written sentence was "Trying to get admin access via a Confluence exploit," which there are many and an app that IT groups take their time updating.

As I wrote in the sibling comment to yours, it really could go either way. A confluence, a place where you find a lot of information like an intranet shared drive, is a reasonable interpretation without the original quote in place. But so is Confluence the application as an example of a confluence which also exists on an intranet, and the writer misunderstood and (being a writer) used their familiarity with English to infer more than was said.

We don't need AI for either interpretation, just familiarity with English.

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