Since it's ultimately about morals, maybe it is time to reread CS Lewis' "The Inner Ring" from 1944[0,1]. It's about the same kind of choices but in situations which are much harder to extricate oneself from than just a random sleazeball messaging you out of the blue.
It's also one of the major subjects of his novel, That Hideous Strength. The novel is honestly a bit of a slog until it gets going, but I appreciated it more as I started feeling the same pull to be on The Inside. The speech linked above is simply very good.
Everything that is touching hardware, for example. Bluetooth stack, HDMI, you name it.
Everything W3C does. Go is evolving through specs first. Probably every other programming language these days.
People already do that for humankind-scale projects where there have to be multiple implementations that can talk to each other. Iteration is inevitable for anything that gains traction, but it still can be iteration on specs first rather than on code.
Prototype and the specs go hand in hand. Write a spec - prove you can implement it. Write an implementation - write a spec so we can talk about what is important (vs details of how you implemented it but someone else is allowed to implement differently) Often parts that are "obvious" are not implemented, or only the trivial version is implemented. You need to do both.
There's a ton of difference between a random person noting my presence at a single point in space-time and a commercial entity tracking and storing my movements all the time.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed. I can't find the argument I'm thinking of but it referenced how the police can sit outside your house and surveil you, but physically cannot do that to everyone all the time, and that is an inherent limit to their ability to conduct surveillance that gives you some freedoms and that limit should be respected. Making a machine that can do exactly that is not something cops are allowed to do.
The actual legal problem is that, the above does not apply to private companies. You have no fourth amendment rights from private companies. The constitution gives you no rights against companies.
So the company does exactly what the police aren't allowed to do, and then sell access to the police. For some reason, this literal circumvention of their restrictions has been explicitly allowed.
This is why Surveillance Capitalism is such a big deal. It is a direct circumvention of your explicit constitutional rights, and it just so happens to accomplish that because of the profit earned in the process. For a lot of assholes, this is the winingest of win-wins.
> Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed.
There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.
The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.
So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.
The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.
Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.
But this is not what Flock or other ALPRs do. They do not monitor nor aggregate your movements, unless specifically asked to. Or, at least, that's how they say they're being used, and until we find evidence to the contrary (we haven't), we should take them at their word and think about the model a little differently. If no one is looking for your movements in particular, after some period of time, the data that contains evidence of your movements if deleted. The vet result for most users is a temporary record of a short history of their movements that no one ever sees, and which is permanently forgotten after some period of time.
This is like when people complain that Facebook and Google are "selling their data". They aren't, but they are doing a closely-related thing: selling access to you, based on your data. These are not the same thing, and the difference is important when it comes to finding solutions to the problems it causes!
If we all voted to ban companies like Facebook and Google from selling your data, they'd shrug and say "sure I guess, we weren't selling it anyway", and nothing would change.
If we all voted to ban Flock from "tracking all of us", they'd shrug and say "that's already true" and it would not have any impact on their operations.
What we should instead vote for is strict controls over how long they can store the data, and how it is allowed to be used, and apply steep penalties for its misuse or unauthorized disclosure.
Street protests were an effective tool for suffrage, anti-segregation, labor rights, civil rights, anti-colonialism, gay rights to name a few. It is disingenuous to associate this with the Waco-style idiocy.
How far are you prepared to go with the "loyalty to the tribe" argument? If your "tribe" is 1942 Germany and you know about the ongoing Holocaust, does your line of thinking imply that you should keep quiet about it? You know, not to sow dissent by moralizing.
You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
Most people I know, including some on the right disagree with these tactics which seem designed more to intimidate and silence opposition. Of course you’re free to work with whomever you choose but it seems like a pretty empty virtue signal to avoid all companies in a huge, diverse country
The leader of that huge, diverse country controls the most powerful military in the world and is threatening to invade my country and is showing maps where it’s part of the US.
I have a 2 year old daughter.
With every fibre of my being I’m not spending a cent on any US business, person, company.
It might be empty but if enough people do this and put pressure on the US economy it might make a difference. It's unfortunate but many people won't care until it starts effecting them personally.
"Oh, you are donating your time and money to charitable programs to the poor? What virtue signaling." It has just become a cliche to say that doing anything based on your values whatsoever is bad.
You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
quick reminder that out of the 8 author of the seminal paper that arguably started the whole LLM thing (attention is all you need) only one is American.
all the other are foreign born, studied and worked abroad and only then were recruited by US FAANGs.
If your business model needs the impossible then it's a bad business model. If your margins are too thin to absorb the schedule uncertainty then don't produce software.
Alternatively treat it like a bet and accept it may not pay off, just like any other business where uncertainty is the norm (movies, books, music).
To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy).
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
[0] Link: https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
[1] HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696764
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