With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.
There's nothing voluntary when your options are homelessness and starvation. The bank won't accept your morals in lieu of money when accepting mortgage repayments.
Thankfully I don't live in the US and I don't work for anything even remotely related to this. I don't know if I would have the fortitude in the current US job market (based on what I read here) to threat the well being of the wife and daughter by taking principled stances.
Dilapidating the world for an easy buck is gonna bite you and/or your kids eventually. We have reached technological sophistication where certain kinds of mistakes are not allowed if civilization as we know it is to survive.
When the bank reposseses the house because you are not paying the mortgage, this will bite you and your kids too.
You can call it an "easy buck", and it is just coping. An easy way to make some poor schlemiel creating a miserable report with user location data during his sprint into a greedy bastard that is just enriching his bank account out of the suffering of plenty.
Atomization enables this. Any number of individuals are individually weak against their employer/some org, but a big group of them can be quite powerful.
If many were to sacrifice their morals out of financial pressure easily (the control over which is in increasingly few hands) the path the US is treading becomes pretty deterministic... We've seen it in the movies and read it in the books.
You guys seem to need collective action and civil disobedience.
Then again.. maybe the will for collective action comes only after the repossessions...
One of the reasons I chose to move to Europe is because I value the mininal safety nets and labor protections on this side of the pond. Yes, I make less money and pay more taxes but I believe this is how society should work, I reject the hyper individualism that ignores any sort of collective.
But I am also not naive. Expecting individuals to take the burden for decisions way beyond their control is silly. It takes immense fortitude to threaten the well being of those dear to you based on principle, when the only outcome is your own suffering (the company will likely find another employee right away anyway).
Okay, I'll accept your point for those software engineers that have a choice between working at an immoral company or "homelessness and starvation".
Thankfully, that isn't most of them. Despite the job market not being as good as it used to be, the vast majority of software engineers in the US could still find another job to pay the bills before becoming homeless and starving.
If that's the case, great then. I did work for a company I find morally objectionable in the past (i.e.: evil), and I eventually found my way out.
At the time I was still paying rent and needed employment to keep my visa. I also had little savings, and an ill parent that depended on me. I certainly couldn't take the principled stance of "fuck this, I'm out".
My point is that if you are in the position to take a principled stance, good for you. Maybe you already own your home, maybe you had time to accumulate savings, maybe you can do a few interviews and land a less evil job even in the current market (and perhaps a pay cut won't be a massive blow in you life). All that is awesome, but also a position of relative privilege.
Prescribing principled stance as universal without recognizing this is just cruelty though.
I sympathize with your situation, and I'm not calling you a monster. But "I had no choice, I had people depending on me" is the exact reasoning that has enabled every atrocity carried out by ordinary people; it's the banality of evil.
None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.
Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.
So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.
I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.
(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )
I understand quite well. The banality of evil is a thing because most people have actual very little power to enact meaningful change. Risking yourself for the well being of complete strangers is commendable, but often has an obscene cost for the individual.
I reject that societal and systemic issues can be fixed by individual action, unless as an individual you are extremely powerful (and the ones that are typically are the ones causing the societal and systemic harm).
As an common man you can do small things. Do a lousy job when processing the paperwork of evil. Malicious cooperation to the powers that be. Small acts of charity. That sort of thing.
Systemic change can only be achieved through collective action. Easier said than done.
The world is cursed. Life is tough even at the best of times. The system as it is ensures compliance through coercion and threats.
I honestly believe we would agree more than disagree on the current state of things. I just reject the approach that individual action is a way out of this sort of mess.
From the angle of your 2015 post, I can at least see where you're coming from. Modern adtech is much more granular and up to date than a census ever was.
There's nothing extreme in what I said, it is actually how the world we live in works.
It's an extremely unfair system based on coercion - you are beaten down into submission by the implicit threat that without work you won't be able to make ends meet.
Maybe you have a family that can support you financially. Maybe you already own the place where you live and could save up money over an extended period that you can weather a storm. If you are in these situations, that's great, but it is also an extremely privileged position to be in.
Absolutely no one with the skills to work in the software industry is in a position where working for unethical mega-corporations or literally starving are their only options.
Perhaps to show the level of privilege I enjoy as a software engineer with some level of seniority, I have had zero problem resigning from a position (more than once in fact) because I objected to something my employer was doing. It's been enough for me to filter potential opportunities exclusively to tech-for-good concerns.
Sure, I don't earn half a million a year total comp to kiss some billionaire's ass, but I still have a very comfortable lifestyle that is well above the median.
Yeah, software is perhaps one of the industries where the "I got bills to pay" argument is the least justifiable. If your lifestyle can only be sustained by working for unethical companies then your lifestyle is unethical. You certainly don't need to sell your soul to FAANG to live a comfortable and happy life.
There was never shortage of developers who "would sell their soul" for higher salary in conditions where job with slightly lower salary was easily available. I really do not think we have to pretend to our selves that if one of us does it, it is because he/she is poor and the kids would starve.
Also, layers are resining from positions in doj they find unethical. It is not like the jobs for them were easier to find.
> With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food
You really think adtech is the way to avoid starving on the street? There are a hell of a lot of jobs between entry level and adtech dev that could give you the same basic peace of mind.
No, there are ways to avoid working for adtech or tech support if you still have family or friends (I’m currently moving back to my parents’ place). But not everyone has this luck.
Their ban of “non-consensual sexual imagery” made several acquaintances of mine – furry art illustrators – move to harmful communities on questionable Mastodon servers.
I’m growing tired of those bans on legal content that isn’t inherently harmful (we are talking about fictional humanized animals here) but considered “icky” by platforms and payment processors.
So I don’t care if the AT protocol is technologically superior to ActivityPub (?) – the Mastodon community has a healthier moderation and mindset than Bluesky, in my opinion.
> Their ban of “non-consensual sexual imagery” made several acquaintances of mine – furry art illustrators – move to harmful communities on questionable Mastodon servers.
Furry art, including quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky and doesn’t seem be especially restricted by policy. I mean, unless they also happen to be depicting nonconsensual sexual interactions, an orthogonal concern to the furry aspect.
> I’m growing tired of those bans on legal content that isn’t inherently harmful (we are talking about fictional humanized animals here) but considered “icky” by platforms and payment processors.
Well, you are free to avail yourself of the forums that lack those policies. Now, I know you’ve complained that they are “harmful”, but... Maybe there is a reason that other forums choose to put bans in place.
> quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky
Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)
FWIW, you don't need to join questionable communities to have your content on mastodon, e.g. Wordpress blogs can meaningfully participate on activitypub (people con repost, like, reply) so that may be an alternative for your friends, without the need to host a complex app, so long as they can get any Wordpress hosting. Discovery suffers tho.
Yes, that’s what non-consensual could mean here (it also encompasses consensual non-consent, to be accurate). This kind of content (illustrated & fictional) isn’t illegal in most jurisdictions, as far as I know.
Small aside, consent also depends on the jurisdiction – in mine, it must be verbal, so it means that if I were to draw a situation which involves a character being forced to do something but showing their consent non-verbally, it would still be non-consensual, and thus, forbidden by Bluesky’s terms of service if the PDS was hosted in my jurisdiction.
Anyway, my point is that all those illustrations should be properly labeled, but not necessarily forbidden by Bluesky’s ToS. As I understand it, fictional non-con content being banned by Bluesky means that even hosting it on one’s PDS is a no-go.
I guarantee you're reading it correctly, we're talking about Bluesky. And any community that furry rape fetishists are participating in is going to have to be "questionable." If it wasn't before they got there, it is now.
Is “agentic browsing” really what the main population is asking for, or is it yet another push for LLM use similar to Microsoft putting “Copilot” in every single product of theirs?
(I am guessing most of the HN crowd is not using Chrome because of the Manifest v3 debacle.)
I've been using Gemini to plan a vacation (boo, hiss), it's surprisingly useful. It can look up flights (from Google Flights) or hotels (from Maps), has info about busy weeks in the destination, etc..
I guess "agentic browsing" will mean the user being able to say "Note this item" and then a few pages later ask "How does the product on this tab compare to the one I asked you to note 5 minutes ago". Or just to jot down notes.
Of course doing things manually is also possible, but hey, we can also add numbers by hand, or we can open Excel (of course Excel doesn't hallucinate, or does Excel Copilot 365 offer that feature?).
Somehow Gemini seems to have a lot of "insider knowledge" that one could gleam by reading a lot of forums and YouTube videos... or one can put faith in it and hope it's not hallucinating (safer for things like trips than for healthcare, so says I as I board my flight to Iran...)
> Apple is prioritizing reducing the AirTag's utility to stalkers.
No, Apple is prioritizing good publicity. A motivated stalker will just be using another product, which is a net financial negative for Apple. They just don’t want the possibility of the news talking about how someone got assaulted thanks to an Apple device.
That seems a little extreme. Another device won't have the advantage of Apple's "Find My Network". Competitors like Tile have a much smaller network. Or devices that rely on cellular are much larger and don't have a battery that lasts for years. Or even if there is an AirTag alternative that's just as functional, it's less well known and would-be stalkers will have a harder time finding it and using it. So by not supporting the stalking use case Apple is genuinely making it a little harder for stalkers.
But also, I agree that this is about reputational liability more than some higher desire to do good. But IMHO it's also doing some actual good.
But you don’t need the AT protocol and lexicons to describe semantics. Ontologies have been a thing for decades, and search engines (the “rich results”) and ActivityPub use them.
Why use the lexicons you described, instead of the more supported https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams ontology that ActivityPub uses, for example?
If you allow me to, I would be interested in re-writing your article but by using ActivityPub concepts instead. Maybe I will learn about a fatal flaw in one of the protocols during that process.
According to my (limited) testing, you can only control brightness when the transfer function used on the HDR content you see is HLG. When it is PQ, the luminance seems to be “absolute” and ignores the display’s brightness settings.
Thanks for the feedback. We are definitely not trying to hide it. We actually do have pricing listed in the API section regarding the different operations, but we could definitely work on making this clearer and easier to parse.
We are simply in an early stage and still finalizing our long-term subscription tiers. Currently, we use a simple credit model which is $1 per 10,000 credits. However, every account receives 50,000 credits for free every month ($5 value). We will have a dedicated public pricing page up as soon as our monthly plans are finalized.
Regarding semantic data, our JSON extraction endpoint is designed to extract any data on the page. That said, we would love to know your specific use cases for those ontologies to see if we can further improve our support for them.
It only works for languages and frameworks that are already in the training data (duh). It still is mostly useless when you need to create something from scratch in an unstable language.
That, and you can’t also get the amazing results if you’re poor or have bad internet.
Not true. I built some tools in Hare, which almost certainly isn’t in the training data to any significant extent. It was more work than having it build Go or Rust, but it got it done. It had to curl the docs a fair bit.
It’s an easy deflection. Dismiss any opinions because you’re using it wrong or not the latest.
Good for anything >= 1 month old.
Use other nonsense fear inducing argument in the mean time, continue gathering gobs of VC money, get your bag, continue till the bubble pops.
In all fairness, and putting hype and anti-hype aside, I’m really interested to see the actual value of LLM/agent services after the VC money subsidies dry out. Would people we willing to pay for services at 10x the current price?
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