Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

Also Zalack@kbin.social

  • 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle






  • Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.

    How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?

    How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the autopilot and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.

    When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? Just for physical safety? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?

    None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.

    Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that’s why software engineer should mean something.



  • My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.

    It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.




  • I think the problem is that there is less often something to be said if you agree. Every now and then you might have something to add that fleshes out the idea or adds additional context, but generally if I totally agree with a comment I just upvote it.

    On the other hand, when you disagree with something your response will, by logical necessity, be different from the parent comment.

    So if you want to prioritize “adding something novel” there’s a logical bias towards comments that disagree since only summer percentage of agreement will tick that box.

    Otherwise you end up with a bunch of comments that literally or figuratively add up to “this”.





  • We really need to start redistributing how we spend money on health care. Public option, lower executive pay. More non-emergency long term facilities for patients with psych issues or rehabilitation, and chronic illness care. Better pay and shorter shifts for doctors and nurses. Subsidies for medical tech companies to offset end-user price. More government-funded research into medical tech.

    Health care should realistically be our biggest industry akin to a military with the social status of being a soldier and the compensation of being a software developer. We have the wealth and technology to help most people live healthy lives. We need the government to incentivize allocating it correctly.