Zalack

joined 1 year ago
[–] Zalack@startrek.website 11 points 1 year ago

This but like, unironically

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it depends on the project. Some projects are the author's personal tools that they've put online in the off-chance it will be useful to others, not projects they are really trying to promote.

I don't think we should expect that authors of repos go too out of their way in those cases as the alternative would just be not to publish them at all.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Yeah, actually moderating an online space with even modest activity is fucking hard and takes a shitton of time.

I think a lot of people underestimate the effort involved and quickly lose interest once it becomes apparent.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago

I don't think a medical-focused Trek show would have to take place during war time. Medical Ethics in general is ripe for the sort of show Trek lends itself to.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 2 points 1 year ago

That's a really interesting perspective I didn't think I've seen before. Thanks for posting.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 37 points 1 year ago

This is mostly about normalizing "impeachment" so that Trump's two impeachments don't look as bad. This is a classic Republican tactic: when your guy gets caught doing "thing" start slinging "thing" around at your enemies until it loses all meaning.

Similar tactic to co-opting "fake news", "woke", "feminism", and "critical race theory". All were terms that threatened to undermine the conservative ideology, and so were quickly hurled around as insults until their original meaning was completely distorted.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Imo that's still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.

I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn't check if it was accepting feedback.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Why shouldn't we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?

I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.

Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.

Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.

How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?

How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I'm thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots' natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the autopilot and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.

When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? Just for physical safety? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?

None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.

Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves "engineers", we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that's why software engineer should mean something.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago

I know I learned it in high school at one point but definitely isn't something I would have been able to recall on my own.

[–] Zalack@startrek.website 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.

It's why I kind of wish that "engineer" was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.

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