7 ms·
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse
by spyspy 8y ago
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
- ben_jones 8y agoI'm sure there were a lot of interesting challenges creating the V2 rocket that terrorized London...
- bsagdiyev 8y agoLittle over an hour for the Nazi comparison
- jshap70 8y agothis is laughably hyperbolic
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoNot wanting to turn into a Nazi apologist but to play devil's advocate for a minute, that very same research put people in space as well as creating our current communications infrastructure.
- gilrain 8y ago"Not wanting to turn into a Nazi apologist but"
- cdelsolar 8y agoand the atomic bomb that terrorized Japan
- armandososa 8y agoI worked on something like this (but at a very much lower scale, of course) and it's fun at first but then I realized that my whole job was making users experience worst and I was miserable for as long as I had that job. I swore not to work on anything advertising-related ever again.
- matz1 8y agoYea of course it's not for everyone, everyone have different concern, but I could see myself work on this if it paid well.
- eropple 8y agoPerhaps reconsider. "If it paid well" externalizes the ills it inflicts on other people. And they matter, too.
- matz1 8y agosure, thats why I said what everyone consider 'matter' are different, for me this doesn't matter that much.
- eropple 8y ago...And I am lightly suggesting that maybe it should matter. Hurting others unnecessarily is the only sin in the world. Don't ever, ever be That Guy.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoMaking people looks at adverts is hurting them? Don't get me wrong, I'm a uBlock user myself but come on.
- eropple 8y agoIn and of itself? No, certainly not. Historically, however, advertisements have been a few things that matter. They've been passive--the level of attention a print advertisement is able to demand is constrained. Or they've been supportive--your "show X is brought to you by Y!" advertisements, which historically tended to have some kind of anchoring into the community surrounding the content or service being consumed. They're not anymore. To the first, advertisements are designed, by the platform, to for maximal attractiveness (newspapers of prior eras spent much less effort blending content and advertisement and it wasn't until about the year 2000 where loudness-compression made television advertisements blow out your speakers). To the second, these advertisements tend strongly--not always, don't but-for me, but tend strongly--to be disassociated from the community. Having some startup or multinational demand your attention for this-or-that doesn't tie back into your community, there isn't even a local aspect to the business to fall back on. It's just...voices, yelling at you for your attention and your money. That's just not good for us. I both pay for content (I was happy to sign up for YouTube Red, for example) and aggressively use ad-blocking and the difference on my mental well-being when I don't have access to my accounts, or when somebody insists on watching television and having it scream at me about how I must buy this thing, is noticeable. This shit is bad for us. We as technologists should not perpetuate it.
- pastor_elm 8y agomark zuckerberg, is that you?
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoI had a job where I had to reverse engineer broker API's. A few brokers sent us warning letters since it's technically legal but brokers obviously hate it. That was the best cat-and-mouse game. We had a revolving door of proxies that we would use to hit their endpoints so they couldn't catch us. So much fun.
- matthewwiese 8y agoIn what context was this done/could you provide more details (without giving away any information that you don't care to share)? Sounds like something I would enjoy doing as well!
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoIt was from a previous employer and I can't remember what I signed in my NDA, so I'd rather not put myself at risk. Sorry!
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoAlthough I can say that most financial institutions are not nearly as scrupulous in checking their systems as you would expect. When I would work my way through their auth layer, I'd be sending them like 500 login requests every hour. They never contacted the account I used, so I have to assume they weren't checking for abnormalities like that. The only time I really fucked up was when I tried to do that with a particular broker in Singapore. Singaporean companies have their shit _locked down_. I spent one hour debugging one of their endpoints, and it let off so many alarms that the CTO of their company was woken up in the middle of the night.
- matthewwiese 8y agoI respect the need to abide by an NDA, and I assumed something along those lines would be the case. Thanks for the tidbits nonetheless! The intersection between finance and tech at the highest levels like that has always intrigued me.
- plussed_reader 8y agoJust like training AI!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- modo_ 8y agoThe ad-blocking side of the puzzle looks just as fun without the ethical issues. The discussion on the uBlockOrigin repo trying to detect this markdown mangling is super interesting: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367#issuecomment-420846004 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367#issuecom...
- RobLach 8y agoEthics aside is a HUGE aside. You've just internally justified serial killing.
- kowdermeister 8y agoThis escalated quickly :) So if I put ads on my site, I'm literally Hitler?
- RobLach 8y agoMore like Goebbels.
- userbinator 8y agoWork on anti-user stuff in the day job, and outside of work, participate (under an alternate identity/pseudonym) in the community efforts to circumvent it --- that might be one way to feel less bad about yourself, although in a weird "solving the problems you created" way.