This seems like the type of argument that is possible to perform a data analysis to defend or refute. Lot of countries collect data on female participation in the workforce and birth rates. Many countries also collect data that could determine if this has an impact on the individual household level.
It’s a good point, but crimes against children are a higher priority because children are more vulnerable and the law exists in part to protect our most vulnerable.
Large portions of the tech sector thrive off the attention economy. If your goal as a product is to have someone spend hours a day everyday engaged with your product, and you focus on a data driven approach to maximize the time spent on the app, then you’ll create something not dissimilar to addiction.
Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.
Its basically impossible for them to not notice. I know someone who is a software engineer for lockheed. He told me that back in the 90s he wrote a bunch of software for a missile. He wasn't told that is what he was working on, it was all classified, and part of that is you only know what you need to know. But from the specifications and how the math worked, it was very clear to him that it was a surface to air missile. After the fact, it was confirmed that is what he was working on.
Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.
It is interesting that Software Engineering as it's practitioners like to call it, is unregulated.
If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.
Professional engineers are required to consider the interests of the public in their work, have an obligation to reject unethical or harmful instructions and are regulated by their professional organization to support competency and address malpractice. Much of this was driven over the past 50-100 years as society determined that they wanted things built by engineers to not kill people or have material deficiencies following construction.
From my understanding, software engineers are a long away out from this still but perhaps we'll get there once the dust settles on more of these sorts of lawsuits.
The dust will never settle because once people try to regulate they can basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else. Something great about being active in multiple places is the fact that these companies have leverage. There's not just a cost advantage to having amazon in luxembourg, just employ a few thousands (10 000 jobs are linked to amazon in luxembourg) and you can block votes in europe (because of veto power). 10K jobs is nothing for amazon but is 2% of all jobs in luxembourg.
Same way amazon being big in india isn't just great because of the vast talent pool and 'low' costs in India (even if many if most indian programmers are subpar, they got over a billion people), they basically ensure that the government in India can never turn against Amazon, because these jobs are concentrated in a specific region and India isn't a unified state. Amazon can try many getting into many different things in India without having the risk associated some small foreign company breaking into India would have.
> basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else.
You don't think that is true in other professions? You don't think I could get my accounts done in India, or a bridge designed in China? The regulatory environment in my country would still apply. Your answer is just exceptionalism
Management not having to listen to engineers is the structural problem. How do managers know which concerns that engineers bring up are actually relevant? How do engineers know which concerns have real world consequences (without having a incredibly high burden of proof)?
Having regulation, or standardisation is a step toward producing a common language to express these problems and have them be taken seriously.
Leadership gets a strong signal - ignoring engineers surfacing regulated issues has large costs. Company might be sued and executives are criminally liable (if discovered to have known about the violation).
Engineering gets the authority and liability to sign off on things - the equivalent of “chartership” in regular fields with the same penalties. This gives them a strong personal reason to surface things.
It’s possible that this is harder for software engineering in its entirety, but there is definitely low hanging fruit (password storage and security etc).
> In the software industry management rarely ever listens to concerns brought up by engineering even if it's technical concerns.
Yet they have to listen to a Chartered Accountant or a Chartered Engineer. Maybe it would be as much in the engineers interest to have a professional body as it would for the public
We don't even need formal regulation to start — just honest internal conversation. I work in tech and most teams I've been part of never once discussed the ethical implications of what we were building. Not because people are evil, but because the incentive structure doesn't reward asking "should we?" — only "can we ship it?"
The gap isn't education, it's accountability. Engineers building engagement loops know exactly what they're doing. They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.
Fair point — I contradicted myself. What I meant is: the first step doesn't require waiting for regulation (just have the conversation). But long-term, some form of professional accountability would help. Those are two different timescales, not alternatives. I wrote it badly.
And no, not vibebait — just a poorly structured comment from a guy with a fever typing on his phone.
So much AI statementmaking seems to be structured around "It's not X, it's not Y, it's not Z [emdash] it's A" and "What's important is '[experiential first-person descriptive quote]'". Maybe they overfit on Linked In data.
It's extremely embarrassing that my (American) employer refers to me as a "software engineer" when in fact I dropped out of the university computer engineer program and can not legally call myself an engineer in my country.
I would just as soon call myself a software doctor or software lawyer. Or software architect.
In the US anyway, calling yourself an "engineer" is only regulated if you sell your services to the public as one. Inside of a business, like a car manufacturer, the position title of "engineer" can be applied to any job at all, however the business wants.
As a degreed engineer myself, this was a bit jarring to me when I first entered the workforce, seeing co-workers who had never been to college calling themselves engineers. But fortunately I got over it.
Have been surveying Computer Science courses at university with my son recently. All the ones we looked at had a compulsory ethics module which shows the direction things are headed at least.
I wonder how many programmers working today are coming through universities though? I'm self-taught, most of my programmers friends are as well, same with most of my colleagues back when I worked. I can remember maybe the name of 3-4 people in total, out of maybe ~30 or so, who went to university for computer science before they started working.
In my experience CompSci ethics modules are about hacking or mishandling user data or code theft... i.e. things that companies don't want their employees doing.
I've yet to see an ethics module that covers ethics from the perspective of ethics over profit.
Whereas an accountant is taught that they should resign rather than get involved in unethical practices, like profit manipulation for example. I interview people with ethics questions. I discussed them frequently when training.
I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years.
Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same.
And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
This was not at all the ethics program that was taught in my university computing ethics course. They did indeed cover the societal and moral responsibility of software developers. This was way back in 2002.
Mine had one over a decade ago. After graduating, the industry decided that developing everything we just got done establishing was unethical, was the hot topic to innovate for the next decade. I never worked at any of those places and still got burned ethically in much more indirectly unethical product streams in the finance and insurance sectors. To be honest, if there is really good money to be made at this point, there is a safe bet that if you dig deep enough, there is an unethical core to it. Most of my peers assuaged themselves with some variant of "I'm a programmer, not an ethicist, and philosophy doesn't put food on my table. So sadly, the problem seems much more systemic and a priori to the capitalistic optimization function.
This is a comment that my reaction is different based on your age. If you're older, I'd be more disappointed. If you're young, I'd be more sympathetic. However, the careers mentioned by GP all require schooling where those ethics courses can be taught. In "Software Engineering", so many people are self taught or taken boot camps without formal schooling. The SE title is just a joke to me knowing that it is so overused and given to people that clearly are not trained as an engineer.
Maybe we should have Gavin Belson's Tethics be more widely taught???
Whereas accountants, lawyers, civil engineers and surveyors have to do postgraduate training with their institute to become chartered.
Interestingly many accountants in the UK never did a degree (very many more did a degree in something unrelated), but came through the technician route of evening, weekend or day release study. Many do their chartered training at weekends.
We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason.
Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.
> Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine.
Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
I joined Google Analytics in 2018 and had no idea that Analytics really meant "Tracking and Remarketing" until about 3 weeks into the role. At that point, what're you going to do, quit? I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it took two years to get out cleanly.
Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
You think Google is the single company out there who is willing to employ you? How come?
Edit: Thinking about it, your comment actually made me more frustrated than I realized. I've been poor enough to having to be homeless at some points in my life, and yes, I've worked for immoral companies too, because I need food and shelter. But once you move up in life to the comfy jobs like software engineering, you don't have any excuse anymore that it's just about "feeding your family" when you literally have a sea of jobs available. It might be an excuse you tell yourself to justify your reasoning for getting paid more, but if you truly did care about it, you'd make a different choice, and still be able to feed your family, and I'm almost confident your family would be OK with you making that choice too, unless they also lack the empathy you seem to be missing.
To be clear, I have no beef with Google the company and wouldn't mind working there again if it weren't in the ads division. After two years I transferred to the Chrome org and greatly enjoyed the work there. I was proud to develop something that is used the world over, it's open source, and I got to optimize tight code and tune for performance. (Yes, Chrome is fast, I don't understand the haters!) If I had just quit Google immediately, this wouldn't have happened and I would've missed out on a great experience.
Did you think I would have applied there, taken a job, worked for three weeks, and then realized I'm morally opposed to the concept of working at Google entirely?
I don't know what to think anymore, seemingly all everyone else thinks about is money, I guess that's ok. Take care, hope you have a nice day regardless.
You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.
It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.
Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
> You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
Yes, again the context is software engineering, the floor of what we earn as software engineers is above what other careers has as their maximum, and if you've been a developer since 2018 (almost ten years of experience) you're not having a tough time finding a new job, especially if you were at Google.
People get comfortable with their new living standards, that's natural. But they said they were able to get out, just took time, I'm guessing that's about vesting something, not because it's hard to find new opportunities.
Nothing to do with vesting. I didn't want to leave Google, I wanted to leave ads, and I did. I got into Chrome org and was happy that my patience paid off
Sure, but you could say that about anything. If you're American, then your labour is paying for concentration camps no matter where you work. In a company of 100k+ people, responsibility is diluted.
The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.
Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.
I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before.
And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there.
I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
Many people get used to the paycheck before they really discover the extent of their predatory practices. A lot of people will choose their own comfort and stability over morality.
Most people just want a steady paycheck, so it's not hard to find a bunch of very smart people that just want a paycheck. As for morals go, this topic is way too subjective to say whether it's wrong. People can make great cases for and against aspects of it. It'll be interesting to see what the jury says. It'll definitely be a precedent setting case.
Really, that little? Don't feel even slightly embarrassed about your morals being so cheap? You'd hurt your neighbors and acquaintances for 20K a month?
Given you probably don't earn that today, say you got paid that now instead of whatever you earn, what would you spend that money on in reality?
Sure, but what about all the other aspects of your life, those contributing more to your happiness? Corrupted people have money as their top goal in life, everyone else is trying to live a good life once they have enough, but there seemingly is no "enough" for quite a large part of the population, and in some places of the world this obsession seems worse than in others.
Hate the game, not the players. Somebody is supposed to be regulating this stuff. If you're in a poor city or country having a shot at such compensation would be life changing for the whole family, not just you and game-theoretically someone else will take that job anyway, for similar reasons, too.
First of all we have to make our minds. Do we need regulation or not. Many people cry from top of their lungs for less regulation, and now are we saying "if it's so damaging why we are not regulating it?" this is double-distilled, barrel-aged hypocrisy at its finest. You can bottle it and sell it as a limited reserve single malt.
Changing your life for a single generation while setting every pillar of a civilized society, moral imperative and human values and everything related on fire is again a monumental example of shortsightedness.
Trying to beat your conscience with the bat of "if I didn't do it, somebody else would do the same" will only make your heart and soul ache more and more over the years.
I (and many others) would live a peaceful life trying their best to leave the world a little bit better than they found rather than being slave of the money they earn and being bickered by their conscience because they betrayed to the essence and foundation of humanity just for a few {thousand, million, billion, trillion} bucks.
I have rejected much more lucrative offers because I value my family, people I love and personal life more than a shiny car which will rust in two decades anyway.
So, I'll hate the game and the players while trying to make our world a better place. At least I'll die peacefully.
No, I'm sorry, but fuck that. I've been one of the players, and it's definitively possible to not play the game, especially when you see what's going on around you, and still live a perfectly fine life that is above the living standards of most others in your country, if you're working as a software engineer. And I'm saying this as someone who never came close to FAANG salaries yet was lucky enough to paid enough to live better than I thought I'd ever do, but initially had really shit living situation and have had to steal at one point to feed myself. I've had chances that could mean I'd live a life of luxury earlier than what it ended up being, but I couldn't live with myself if I did those things, when I had anything resembling of a choice.
There is almost always a choice, and "hate the game not the player" is such a bullshit excuse for people to just participate because everyone else is. It's spineless and the answer of a chicken who doesn't want to consider the consequences of their actions.
Anytime anything comes up, I do talk with them, thank you for asking. However, they're an ocean away from where the really bad stuff happen, where seemingly all people think about is how to maximize their salaries and then deploy their services for everyone else in the world to get addicted, my representatives can't do a lot about that except what they're already doing.
I would feel embarrassed, yes. But that's 5 times my current salary for a 'similar' position. I am not sure it'd be 5 times worse in terms of societal effect. And even if it were, I am not sure I would be 5 times as embarrassed, if we are considering a linear conversion rate.
What I am trying to say is that I am on your side - as of this moment it is incredibly unlikely that I would ever see this kind of money. That makes it an easy position to take in a online conversation. But I have seen decent people throw out morals for a 100th of what we are talking about.
look, i dont want to work at any of those companies anyway. I am with you - i was trying to say that money can break most of us. I appreciate you being so farsighted by leaving such a position, but for many other people that would be unthinkable - And that does not make them monsters.
At this point I would be more worried about working for a US company, than which one exactly - (not totally serious of course, but also not entirely inaccurate)
I had no safety net and nearly became homeless after draining my savings helping a family member in the months after this happened. I come from a very poor background and have no family to rely on. I spent several years as a teenager and in my early 20s homeless, without parents or anyone to help me financially. I starved and was very ill.
I say this to make it clear that I didn't make this decision free of consequences, and it was unthinkable at the time for many from better backgrounds than I. I have experienced worse conditions than most of my peers ever will and my soul is still not for sale. There is no excuse. Selling heroin on a street corner is more ethical than what is going on at Google and Meta.
I did not mean to imply that you did not face any consequences. Sorry if that came across that way.
But my point stands. While I heavily disagree with almost everything Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, etc. stand for, I cannot hold the developers in these companies to the same level of judgment as I would politicians, lobbyists, and managers.
You may compare selling heroin on the street to whatever stuff is going on at these companies, and I might agree or disagree. But the fact is — selling heroin on the street is illegal, while training a recommendation model is not. Quite the opposite. And the complacency and failure to put reins on this situation 15 years ago is a deep failure of our civilization. As long as we train people at university for these positions and pull them in with such incredibly high salaries, I can't not forgive them to a large degree. I do not forgive the policymakers that enable this madness, however.
I understand that's just moving the blame to a higher level — that's not the intention. It's a systemic failure, and it needs systemic change.
Oh they absolutely know. I've had some tragi-comic interactions with trust and safety folk in tech. You aren't going to be very popular in the firm telling people their stuff is bad for users.
Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call.
So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave.
The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast.
This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again.
You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
> Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals?
Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare).
I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so).
For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.
While I appreciate the mention and the flattery, I'm just a person, my thought are not special and I'm starting to feel like you might be better off not focusing on what specifically I am saying :) Again, I do appreciate it, can't deny it feels nice initially, but don't treat me like I'm special, I'm not, I'm just sharing stray thoughts sent out the ether like everyone else.
haha, Sorry but I didn't intend to flatter you (atleast this time although your work in oaoh is commendable) but I literally just wrote it as a (blog?) because I was already writing a comment and I didn't want a massive wall of text & also you can see from my other project that I wanted to write more as blog posts rather than HN comments when they get too big.
I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions.
Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts.
In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted.
I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas).
This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them.
I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.
It has been frequently demonstrated that capitalism is terrible at pricing in externalities. In the U.S. it used to be industrial waste in the environment; now it's climate change and addiction and culture wars.
Without discounting social media's harmful effects:
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
Upvoting you because all the Zuck worshipers and meta stockholders downvoted you for speaking the truth.
The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease.
Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc.
For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people.
Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.
A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.
fun fact: the people working for those companies, even though the attribute they are optimizing for is "addictability", they call it "snackability". Probably b/c of motivation and ... legal.
The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.
So many problems on the internet stem from products trying to be “free” and funding themselves with ads.
I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.
Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like.
Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.
I mean engagement is the game. The overlap of other mediums like TV, movies, music, gambling clearly have the same focus, though they could only wish to have the same death grip that social media has been tuned to achieve.
"[T]hrive off the attention economy"? What a sinister way to describe building products that people want to use to connect to people whose words and images they enjoy. Nobody is pushing drugs here. There's no fraud or deception. The whole situation is Alice not liking the medium Bob and Charlie use to communicate and what they say to each other over it. Alice needs to mind her own business. She doesn't get to use the power of the state to separate Bob and Charlie just because she's indignant.
When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.
I’d argue that just because there’s no clear indication of fraud or deception immediately apparent doesn’t discount the reality that much of society has become dependent on their phones.
It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is.
Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them).
Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.
Not to argue too much because I agree with you, but it bears mentioning that many of these companies absolutely study the techniques employed by casinos et al and now you can see sports gambling using techniques refined by social media companies. The dialogue there is very damning when it comes to assessing whether they’re being deceptive/bad actors.
You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too.
This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
How is it sinister to describe what it is? The industry literally uses that term. Their entire goal is to maximize the amount of time you are on the screen by grabbing your attention with every single lesson they have learned from decades and billions of dollars of research, almost universally in service of throwing ads up in front of you. More time
= more ads = more revenue.
It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that.
Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.
Just being named in the files doesn’t mean you are guilty. In this situation being named in the files gave him an opportunity to demonstrate high moral character. “I turned down his money because he was scummy”
> Group A invests millions of dollars into your campaign.
The problem is elections aren't just about donations. Suppose you're not a fan of Zuck/Musk/whoever, or pick your least favorite media conglomerate. Is limiting their financial contributions to a campaign going to meaningfully reduce their influence? Of course not, because it mainly comes from controlling the feed or the reporting, so limiting money is primarily to the detriment of their opponents. This is one of the reasons you hear some talk about "campaign finance" from the media industry -- it lets billion dollar media corporations pretend they're defending the little guy when they're really trying to cement an asymmetric advantage in influencing politics because they can de facto donate airtime rather than money. But they have a mixed incentive, because they're also the ones getting money from the ads and don't actually want the spigot closed, which is probably why it's more talk than action.
And then there's this:
> Group A provides a lucrative contract to you after you leave politics so that they have a good reputation with the other politicians they finance.
Which isn't campaign finance at all. It's also kind of a hard problem, because after someone leaves office, it's reasonably expected that they're going to work somewhere, but then how are you supposed to tell if they're getting a fat paycheck because they're currently providing a valuable service or because they were previously providing a valuable service? It's not like they're going to put "deferred bribe" in the memo field of the check.
Storage space is at a premium. The PS5 has about 650gb of usable space. At ~100gb/game which is not uncommon you can store 6 games on the console without needing to free up hard drive space.
Filesize matters, especially to people with limited bandwidth and data caps. The increasing cost of SSDs only makes this situation more hardware constrained.
Do you have six games you are actively playing? That is more than most. And 100gb is not an average to my understanding sure there are AAA games that go over that but it isn't like you need to swap between a bunch of those. (Also they tend to be set piece so not something you go back to)
Again I agree optimization is good just pointing out it tends to not impact people. "My default driver can only handle six full game downloads" isn't actually a blocker to most people playing a PS5.
DDR5 is about $250-300 more expensive now for 16gb than it was at all time lows. The $400 price might be to absorb any additional cost increases while maintaining their existing profit margin.
EDIT: sorry, my numbers are off. It’s $250-300 more expensive for 32gb not 16.
Apple may be a good deal now, but historically they have been the expensive option. I would be concerned about the rug pull of spending time training people on macOS, setting the expectation that they will have it in the future, and then Apple returning to premium pricing before the next upgrade cycle.
At least with Windows you have several hardware vendors competing to force market rate pricing.
There are several good reasons to choose Apple, but I question the wisdom of choosing them for price.
Hard to know for sure, I'd be curious the breakdown in cost for enterprise laptops, it's hard for me to understand why the price has increased 50% while Apple has increased 10%.
Lenovo, Dell and HP are pretty much all the same price at this point. It's basically an oligopoly.
The prices have crept up over the past 5 years and they have no reason to lower them. They know they aren't even competing with Apple since most large enterprises are all in on Windows.
My bet is they have basically made their prices the same as Apple, and they plan to keep it that way.
If you have the freedom to buy from Best Buy, Amazon, etc, this is certainly the case.
However, depending on how you procure this hasn’t been the experience for over 20 years. By the time you’re done with CDW or whomever is your VAR, you’re not comparing a $600 basic PC laptop to a $1200 basic Mac Laptop. They know you’re like the GP and going to pay $1500 minimum and are probably game for $2000. They sell the “Business” line with whatever terms added.
When I did this in K12 in the late 00s the price for a truly terrible Dell or IBM/Lenovo was the same as an iMac.
For the corporate world there have been times you couldn’t get Virtualization support, hardware dock ports, and various other bits of support until you moved to buying the “Business” line and after a certain number of units the direct to retail options send you down the VAR path. There’s simply too much money involved for them to make it easier for you.
I have not had to deal with this as a buyer since 2019 but the song seems to be the same as I work for a company that sells through CDW. Per the reps, the same stupid games are being played.
The only times I haven’t had to deal with this is when the companies I’ve worked for just hand you a credit card to walk down to the Apple Store or are using Apple’s program which is basically the same thing but comes with a shared App Store account and some better support for swap outs.
Historically they've been the expensive option, but historically they've been much more niche than windows laptops. So their unit economics might be better nowadays due to volume.
Windows has problems all the time. There is widespread knowledge on how to troubleshoot and fix these problems.
Similar problems will have very different solutions for Linux. The knowledge of how to resolve them is much less widespread. I’ve had very good success in asking ChatGPT how to resolve Linux issues, probably better success then I would on Windows because the error messages on Linux are much more detailed.
A lot of the time the "solution" to problems on Windows is to reinstall/in-place upgrade because, as you said, Windows errors tend to be more generic so you can browse Google all you want but none of the instructions people provide will be of much help. So I'm not sure "widespread knowledge" is a point in favor of Windows when the errors frequently aren't specific enough to be reliably actionable.
Windows has a "check the Internet for solutions" option that never works. You can just let Claude code loose on your system and have it go fix your shit for you instead of copy and pasting anything.
reply