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0 pointsryandrake1y ago0 comments

I think of worthwhile software projects as stools with three legs: The business opportunity, the interesting technical problem, and the social/ethical issues. They all need to be good in order to have an acceptable product, IMO.

Unfortunately, whenever you read an article about a new technology or read an interview of a founder or something, they spend all their time talking about the first two, and either ignore or give passing lip service to the third one. Even look at HN discussions. Few engineers here really care about the ethics of what they are working on. It's just "is it cool technology?" and (sometimes) "does it make money?" You ask someone if they are working on something good for the world and they look at you like you have an antler growing out of your head. "Yes, I'm making the Torment Nexus, but it uses blockchain and LLMs and it's written in Rust. It's written in RUST!"

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bluefirebrand1y ago

I think a lot of it stems from a misguided sort of "yes I'm inventing the torment nexus, but it will never be used on me, because I'm the inventor"

Or perhaps "If it isn't me inventing the torment nexus, then someone else will"

Either way, I wish people cared more about how their inventions would be used

rjbwork1y ago

Nature of the system. The incentives are in place that you can either wallow in the torment nexus with everyone else, or try to invent it and get rich and escape to some little imagined slice of paradise. The world, and especially the USA, is no longer about trying to make things better and solve real actual problems - it's about trying to accumulate enough capital such you can personally opt out of the problems entirely.

jappgar1y ago

very few people can afford to be ethical.

it's like Joe Rogan trashing factory farms and bragging about only eating wild elk be killed with his bare hands on his private game preserve.

writing software for an oil company doesn't make you evil it makes you like everyone else. not particularly helpful nor particularly harmful

alistairSH1y ago

But surely there’s a line somewhere? Maybe not a clear line, but at least a fuzzy one.

Just about anything ever created can be used to oppress and do evil. But you don’t have to be the final step that enables that evil.

Rockets - you can build rockets to take us to the moon. And somebody will repurpose it for destruction. But you don’t have to be that somebody.

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