381–390 of 539 posts
A Linux computer for my grandma. The correct tech answer when doing things for regular people is standard tech that lots of people use.
Actually true but for another reason ... When my relatives ask for help on Windows I apologize and tell them I'm a Linux user.
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There's a difference between selling knives to the general public, vs seeking out violent criminals and specifically marketing your knives to them.
Yes, and in the case of technology, it is REALLY EASY to simply sell no technology to any authoritarian regime, for any purpose. There are dozens of academic and GNOs that track democracy, e.g., [0]. Just select a reasonable cutoff of some level of democracy, and don't sell to anyplace below that. That does require management and sales to have ethics. Some do. [0] https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking
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Sounds like https://www.wakecap.com/ .
Just wow... from their FAQ >How do workers benefit from WakeCap? >Workers’ location and activity is identified within the boundaries of a project for the greater good of all involved within the project and to ensure every worker is safe especially when it comes to fall from height detection, ambient temperature extremes, and confined space crowd control, and more. We found that workers responded positively to the tec…
"This won't stop you feeling pain, but it will stop you caring about it.".
After doing lots of post mortem analysis, the paper system was far more capable and had a better audit trail and most of the objections that were formed were entirely spot on. But we steamrolled them because we were under the six sigma project flag.
After seeing the shit show and reflection, I quit and got a shit job throwing web sites together.
I kinda regret that I didn't just build one thing, and stick to it until it succeeded, but each project had valuable lessons (both business and code/architecture) that carried over into the next one. So far I've built:
- bill splitting service (2017)
I spent days agonising over which new framework to use (this was late 2017 after all), eventually learned to just use the tools I knew (react, node, postgres). I didn't really care about the problem space, so shut it down.
- jobs aggregator (2017/2018)
I learned that implementation is meaningless to the user if you're not delivering value. I wanted to copy remoteok.io and make it serverless (effectively free to serve traffic), I didn't realise existing sites provided value via their traffic. The reason StackOverflow can charge as much as it did is the millions of page views per month it receives, creating value for its job posters.
- appointment scheduler (2018)
I built an appointment scheduler, had no real means of attracting users, shut it down.
- room booking service (2018)
Spin-off of the previous idea, but for meeting rooms. Tried to build the whole thing using Google APIs, eventually got stung by API limitations, gave up (learned not to rely on other's APIs without understanding their limits first).
- graphql API monitoring service (2018/2019)
Traction again, couldn't find users (tried in-person sales for the first time, too).
- site speed monitoring service (2019/2020)
Essentially running google lighthouse as a service. had some users, but fixing all the edge cases around chrome/puppeteer/lighthouse across super slow websites was a total pain. Couldn't figure out distribution.
- uptime monitoring service (2021-current) - https://onlineornot.com
Doesn't seem to be as useless as the other projects. Has bought me the MacBook Air M1 I'm typing this comment on now.
Rewrote my old graphql API monitoring service from scratch to monitor APIs, websites and web apps, seems to be going well so far. Now also a status page service.
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"Thing is, when the company that pays you actively wants to track everyone, there's little you can do as the person that creates tech form them." You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit. There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company, perhaps consequences that you won't e…
> There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company This is why unions are so important, even in a field like software engineering. If you quit on your own, the company may not care. But using the threat of strikes, workers can demand better conditions for themselves and more ethical directions for their company.
My favorite counter-example is a collective action of about a thousand medical workers in SF Hospital demanding from Facebook an increase in censorship (and the censorship is impossible without surveillance).
Why do you think a union will support your ethical choices? And if it would not - you’d have to quit the company and the union, loosing not only your salary, but also union fees.
ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfec…
If it helps, you guys are still way more popular than the folks who work on Teams.
When I was at Akamai about 5 years ago, I was involved in building the system for making their CDN compliant in China. There were two main features, and they were activated on all servers running inside mainland china (not HK, macau or Taiwan) 1. Logs of the CDN were sent in real time to the ministry of technology -- there was about a 15 minute delay if I remember correctly, and they could impose fines if they were d…
Other engineering disciplines have a strong focus on 'engineering ethics' and it may be more acceptable in different branches of engineering to refuse to build something that you consider unethical. I do not know if there are any professional bodies or laws which protect the employment rights of individual engineers who refuse certain work on ethical bases. But I feel that software engineers should be able to exercise their conscience, reference a standard of professional ethical principles, and refuse to work on such projects.
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In the first novel written by Ernesto Sabato, The tunnel [1], in one of the novel's tangents, there is a twist on the common fairy tale of the knight, the princess, and the dragon. For Sabato, the moment of clarity, of truth, is to realize the princess is the dragon. The monster, the technological golem foreseen in the works of Lev Shestov, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul and more, is that because our tool-making inc…
You think you should have nuked the Russians for their own good? Horrible people
But sure, we can imagine a political-fiction novel à la Philip K. Dick where Oppenheimer, von Neumann, and Feynman team up and after nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they nuke Moscow and Washington D.C., and form a world government ruled by scientists, a techno-solar punk utopia based roughly on Herman Hesse's Castalia from The Glass Bead Game [1].