Volkswagen detects when tests run in a CI server, and makes them pass (2018)
github.com
github.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
It's a little rich to look through fingers with all other companies because it would be inconvenient otherwise, and then boycott VW that saw its punishment.
I will only trust VW when they start fighting for the whistleblowers.
Even with such a democratic (closer to atleast) approach if whistleblowers are salted, I don't have much hope that quasi-secretive exec cabals are going to be more open. Outside a few niche startups, that eventually ditch any 'don't be evil' anchors.
Too big to punish is quite frankly just laughable.
Well, I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I'm going to go down the 'distribution of power' line here. It doesn't matter that purism or system76 is ethical when Google controls my every waking moment. When the mega evil Corps have all the power and the influence. When they control not just my life but also the ecological and political environment around me. Denying the power of Google is akin to climate change denial. So yes, I'm not going to point to a small company built off of open source and pretend that my life is okay.
Or I could go a bit further down the Marxist line, and say it's because capitalism requires large scale exploitation at a large scale. Ignoring that exploitation is supporting that exploitation, and is immoral. I'll not get into the theory to support this in this comment, but when Amazon warehouse workers literally work themselves to death for my shitty orders, we've got a problem. And it is immoral to point to the existence of Purism and say that everything is fine.
This is coming off more intense than I intended. I'm sorry. I swear this isn't personal criticism, just an attempt at productive engagement with ideology, but the world is breaking. It's really fucking hard to be kind.
Framed another way, I have yet to meet a C-level exec of an organization bigger than 50 employees who wasn’t an obvious sociopath.
It would be much easier than researching every business you want to interact with.
But because the rules vary by country and fewer rules generally mean less expenses, companies that behave badly and don't get caught or are overseas seem to have a competitive advantage.
Grammar question for anyone: is it capitalistic or just capitalist?
I keep seeing "-istic" tacked on to words these days, feel it is incorrect.
In this case, “capitalist” could be either a noun or an adjective while “capitalistic” is unambiguously an adjective. I tend to use “capitalist” as an adjective (pertaining to “capitalism”) as it’s usually clear from the context that the word is an adjective. However, it’s not wrong to use “capitalistic” and I’d say it’s a matter of personal style rather than grammar.
If it was so serious then how come almost no attention was paid to Fiat Chrysler when they were fined for shipping cars with defeat devices?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/civil-settlements-united-stat...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18067861 (119 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10349026 (20 comments)
If I see a project, and I get curious about its test results, I can just look at the logs of the tests running and the ways in which they're run. I can see exactly what's going on, and if something weird's going on, I can fork the project, enable tests, and start a discussion with the maintainers. Maybe it's important enough that the tests are enabled and the code is fixed.
What's really interesting to me about this is that there's no competition in sight. There are no market pressures that make someone look at the code or fix it, it's just the desire for good code. Whereas with market pressures, I'm incentivized to lock down code and hide test results! You can say that's an edge case or uncommon, but the fact of the matter is that it happened. Anyway, this makes me curious about two things:
1. In software specifically, does the reduction of competition necessarily contribute to a more collaborative and more productive development process than what we expect with traditional systems?
2. If 1 is true, how widely does this scale? What could be better if some of the control of owners was removed? For instance, if the test processes of VW were public, none of this would have happened.
I've spent so long being told that competition is the be all and end all of productivity, so I'm just curious about what's happening here, and I want to know how far it goes.
In the open source space there are certain characteristics that make your project more likely to succeed. Being, well, open is obviously one of them, just like passing emission tests is a factor in cars. So, open source projects have to be competitive along the openness axis in order to succeed, just like VW needs to pass these tests, one way or the other. To me it seems like the same mechanism really, just fed with different incentives.
The incentives in free software, in my limited experience, are to grow a productively maintained system, not necessarily a profitable one (assuming, of course, the existence of some outside source of stable income). And with that motivation, I feel that competition disappears. When I look at an alternative solution to a problem I'm trying to solve, it's more in the lense of 'oh, that's a good idea!' than anger that their solution is better than mine. Then, if I'm lucky, it might be the type of thing that can be refactored out into a library and shared across implementations. I still feel that competition precludes that, regardless of incentives.