1,088 karma · joined January 1, 2013
"If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
The moral obligation Tutu captured with that aphorism has affected me immensely over the years.
Also:
“All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity of others.”
...for the users of the modified software, not everyone. If the only user is you, having the source code on your own machine is enough.
This is at the core of the issue: no technology, but especially not web3, is just a tool. Tech is inherently political because of both these kinds of underlying assumptions about the world, and how it shapes habits and beliefs of people using it.
Creating tech which accepts "trust is in low demand" and proceeds to fix it by making trusting people unnecessary, is a very effective way to promote right-libertarian policies.
So I understand why right-libertarian people support "web3". What I don't understand is why so many people with very different political values do.
IMO we need tech that promotes trusting each other, not tech where we can make do with a war of all against all.
Have to say it's entertaining to see Carmack roast Zuck publicly.
IMO open source developers writing code on their free time for the common good or just for fun should make sure with a licence like AGPLv3 that their work isn't appropriated by fundamentally immoral corps to increase profits.
It isn't a badge of honor that a FAANG uses your library, it's just exploitation.
https://www.leolinne.com/?portfolio=discourses-of-climate-de...
and a cartoon by Céline Keller:
Let me stop this right there. We as software engineers have to stop turning a blind eye to the impacts of the actual businesses our code is for. It isn't "green software engineering" if the businesses we are helping are by design net negative for the environment.
Don't help the ad industry create more needs that don't increase well-being, either directly by working for them or via monetization of some other service. Don't work for surveillance capitalists. Don't build software for industries selling vanity commodities or ones that are based on planned obsolesence. In general, make sure the purpose of your code isn't to accelerate overconsumption.
After that is taken care of, these are solid points.
"Social ownership doesn’t solve climate change,"
I skipped a few steps there: the reason we can't just stop overconsumption is because that would effectively stop and reverse economic growth. No growth just doesn't work without restructuring the economy.
The root problem is that we people of the Global North are incapable of looking ourselves in the mirror. The obvious solution is to stop all of the frankly idiotic overconsumption that hasn't increased our well-being in decades and – when no overconsumption means no economic growth – rebuild our economy on equity, instead of feverishly insisting that accumulation of almost all of the wealth to a few people is a the only alternative.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainabilit...
Edit. replaced "westerner" with "Global North" for clarity.
No. Even though researching these power plants is valuable to find low effort / high reward actions, blaming buildings is almost as bad as blaming each individual separately with carbon footprints. Both are diversions meant to make people not look closely at colonial fossil capitalism.
The problem is systemic and only system level solutions can be effective.
This isn't either or: we can heavily incentivize creating climate change tech AND drive for a systemic change. It is IMO immoral to just give up on a sustainable political solution because it is hard: huge changes have happened in the past and can happen again.
Find the sources for these from for example:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...
Edit. Here specifically on decoupling:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
"It is logically possible to have increasing GDP and a decreasing physical and energy throughput in an economy. However, it is a fallacy to move from claims about what is logically possible to claims about what is physically possible and another from what is physically possible to what is empirically actual."
If you actually look at the coupling of environmental pressure with historical empirical economic growth measured by GDP, we can't go on like this for even a few decades more, if we want to avoid complete ecological collapse. Trusting humankind's future on theoretical armchair economics magically becoming a reality, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, is complete madness.
As a counterpoint, IMO OW is in the most balanced place it ever has been now. A lot of it has to do with the making of OW2, which has meant no new heroes, but still I do think the OW team has done excellent work with competitive balance recently. This is reflected in the most diverse hero selections ever in Overwatch League (pretty much making hero bans there obsolete).
OW2 PvE and PvP 5v5 from what we know to me seem both to be good plans and can make the game huge again – or not. Depends on the execution.
I find it interesting PG thinks that dismissing entire branches of science without specifying which ones nor justifying why, is a) a good take or b) makes his essay better.
But given that recycling rate is at the moment for most materials miniscule, and our economic system can only work with global exponential growth, it alone can't be the solution – it's only valuable combined with also stopping growth in rich countries.
The most frustrating part of this all is that we are still mostly only talking about climate change, when our ecological disaster is that we have simultaneously crossed or are soon crossing most planetary boundaries (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries) at the same time.
Looking at only CO2 levels makes the solution seem technical: just start using better tech. Or worse: placing hope on geoengineering which is only about alleviating one boundary at the expense of most of the others.
But if you look at the facts that we have been for many decades exploiting nature faster than nature can regenerate, and that all economic growth has come hand in hand with more environmental stress, the root problem and the only solution becomes pretty obvious: heavy global tax to all nature exploitation and after that inevitably halts most economic growth, a redistribution of wealth and social restructuring.
We have no hope to have a livable planet the next century unless us westerners learn to not want more stuff, but learn to live with much, much less.
* "tieto": knowledge but also sometimes information or even data. Computer is "tietokone", knowledge machine (IMO "tieto" one of the worst words in Finnish due to the too broad scope which is why we also say "informaatio" and "data" these days)
* "käsittely": processing or handling
* "tiede": science
* Most software is done in teams.
* If the code is good, it will be in use for a long time.
* Hence if you want to work on software that matters, you will often work with a language that is not your one true love.
Me and my extremely brilliant collegues in my current project write Java, because that's the language the team has chosen. The language, when it's one of the major ones, has no significance.
I've seen way too many times how much confusion is created and time wasted when a developer not too familiar with the project comes up with a brand new verb for a common action, and couples it with a new synonym for an existing business domain entity – or worse still, uses the same name previously meant for a completely different domain entity.
The unfortunate burden with this is that a new developer might be right that their name is better for their use case, which then leads to laboursome debates about which is more important: consistency or slightly crisper name for the one use case.
But I could be wrong about the startup part and they in fact just want to be a profitable small business.