> I write systems that predict the moods in real-time of nearly a million people who are communicating on the internet (HNProfile.com & RedditProfile.com).
Moral bankruptcy at its finest. No one is forcing you to write systems that do this. You can easily make top-tier salaries at companies that value the privacy of their customers.
The systems will be written anyway.
If enough high-level tech talent starts refusing to write such systems then trust me, govts and corps are slowed down and inconvenienced for real. 5 junior programmers can't write software as well as 1 senior.
Sure those orgs might win in the end, but we can delay that "end" with years if not decades. And if they get frustrated by the delays, they'll make a mistake.
The most horrific products of the Holocaust did not build themselves. Same with the Chinese and their current endeavors.
Orgs will just continue importing talent from abroad to work around labor shortages.
Governments can always publicly execute a few pain in the ass engineers to make the rest fall in line.
When I live by this standard I don't have any reason to protect the environment and take care to not harm our future.
In the end this logically leads to life without meaning and we could as well commit mass suicide.
You need a phone, car, society to function and live a reasonably high quality of life.
OP has options here and this makes all the difference. No one is forcing him to write deanonymizing software, and he faces no loss in quality of life by finding a job in which he can work on something more ethical, whereas the people in the comic all face a significant loss.
Is that actually true? Yes that may be necessary in society Today. But does that = quality of life ?
> Hell, as a one man startup, I write ...
The "Hell," being commonly used as "Hey, even I do it!". In that context, it makes perfect sense: the author is showing their own involvement in what they so lament to demonstrate just how dire they see the situation.
I honestly don't see the incongruity. People are hypocrites. All of us, all the time. If only the morally pure could have meaningful conversations, the only people speaking would be infants.