Posts

  • Persona Non Grata

    I had to stop myself from giving this article it’s previous working title: Stop Externalizing The Costs Of Your Service Directly Into Your Users Face. This is the follow up I promised to write, when I omitted the longer complaint I had about Anubis

  • Consent Is Required

    As I sit here attempting to decide what exactly belongs in this intro, I wonder how many more times someone is going to remind me exactly how important consent is, or remind me how easy it is to lose sight over how much influence any individual has over another. In addition to how easy it is to miss the connections between some action and its outcome; the more layers of indirection required as any system increase in size, the harder it becomes to even describe how, or who plays which part. The ease at which anyone might forget, or how the difficulty grows as the system becomes more complex, doesn’t seem to be the part that irks me. Sadly, the more I look for it, the more I see software engineers directly, or indirectly through the systems they drive, ignore consent when it’s expedient: This is bad! The behavior of these systems come from decisions that an engineer made. Engineers can, and should make the best decision, that also does what’s right by the people who use these systems. While admittedly, they don’t often feel like it; the ethical decisions are easy decisions to make. As engineers, collectively, we should take pride in what we build such that we want to make the best decision. Enough pride, that we all also feel embarrassed when we fail to do so.

  • Say The Thing

    In the long long ago, I used to be an EMT. I’ve picked up a lot of good stories from what I’d describe as a quite remarkable experience. EMTs generally, and instructors specifically are a very special breed. I also learned a lot of things while doing that training, many of them had nothing to do with medicine or healthcare of any kind. It was from firefighters I learned what might be the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.

  • Keep Yourself Drain Ready

    You have a direct personal, professional, and ethical responsibility to keep yourself drain ready at all times.

  • Donations Accepted

    I rarely enjoy using free and open-source software. Which I admit seems very counter-intuitive given how often I proselytize FOSS, and how much I attempt to use only FOSS. I’m absolutely convinced that FOSS is the simplest way to write ethical software. So if that is true, how can I say I don’t enjoy using it?

    The simplistic answer is the same for why seemingly everyone chooses proprietary software; it’s just easier1.

  • Your adversary will gaze back

    There’s a corollary to one of my favorite memes

    You either die in alpha; or live long enough to see yourself implement content moderation.

    It goes something like, ‘When you gaze into the adversary, the adversary will gaze back.’ I could quickly give a few dozen translations for this aphorism I just made up; but in opposition to my normal style of never ending rant. I’ll make an attempt to stick to a single meaning.

  • Escape From Tarkov Cheating

    Nearly every player in Tarkov has a map they avoid because they’re tired of dying to some suspicious gaming chair. Depending on who you believe, there’s between 5 and, somehow, “negative 2” people cheating in some way in every raid. The general consensus is the problem is getting worse, and rarely better. Escape From Tarkov clearly has a cheating problem.

    Now this isn’t a problem that’s unique to EFT, but prevalent throughout not only all online games, but all online systems.

  • But first; cut the red wire!

    I don’t know who needs to read this, But warnings go BEFORE the content/instructions they’re connected to.

  • Passwords Considered Harmful

    Passwords, plainly, are not only bad at their intended purpose, but nearly everyone is incapable of using them correctly. That includes both developers, and users. Meanwhile they’re a constant security risk, not only because individual passwords can be broken, stolen, guessed, or given away. But also because, if you have no other data than email and password pairs you do have something worth stealing. Painting an even larger target on your back.

  • Informed Consent

    In news that’s surprising to no one who’d read this. OK Google Voice recordings leaked Yet, this is still breaking news. When I first read this story, I felt bad for the people who were contacted for comment by the news reporting agency who broke this story. It’s not hard to imagine that they were surprised that the device was recording their conversation, especially given that they didn’t even say the keyword.

  • Do less

    I have a strange take on YAGNI. You should do less, write less code, consume and produce less data, instead of being a 10× dev, be a 10÷ developer. Now, that may be a bit misleading, because I don’t want to suggest you should want to be, just a software developer. Really what I’m getting at is that I think you should try to channel the ideals of what it is to be an engineer.

  • It seemed like a good idea at the time…

    Context: While working on wifi functionality for HUDTDS (heads up display that doesn’t suck), because iw warns not to screen scrape, I looked into exactly how it works and learned about a cool thing you can do. Because I’ve never seen anything like this, I thought it was interesting.