EdgarVerona

11 ms·

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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
When I read it, it felt more about the banality of evil than an explicit choice to be amoral - he actually explicitly goes into it a few paragraphs down. And it is a genuine problem in our industry. It's very easy for us to have our
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
The article is meandering, but I think at its core it has some key points that are worth considering, at least to me: 1) Organizations are built of individuals, and while the individuals can hold strong moral standpoints, it is difficult fo
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Nothing in this article mentions anything about government regulation: it is talking about self regulation, and asking your company to consider its moral principles in the face of psychologically manipulative practices. Did you read the ar
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Agreed - really folks, it's not going to be the end of the world if you use JSON for your configuration. Or XML. Or comma delimited text files. As long as you agree to it and you have it documented somewhere , I promise your codeba
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Yes - I have seen at some jobs what a horror "configuration files" can be if you let people add programmability into them. Many years ago I worked at a job that made an XML tag-based language that was turing complete with the inte
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Thinking about that theoretical effect on pacemakers and hearing aids makes me glad that we have safety regulations.
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
I'm sold on 3:2 aspect ratio, and wish there was a wider variety of modern laptops available possessing that screen ratio. I hate looking for laptops and finding the only ones with reasonable specs to have widescreen aspect ratios. I
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
I think it's important to distinguish between types of microtransactions. For me, where I draw the line between ethical and unethical is when the microtransaction is built to act like a slot machine, with variable ratio schedule rewar
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
When we see a statement like the one that CyberAgent official made, I can't help but think of the Banality of Evil. We're so focused as a society on economic growth - and surely, these employees have financial targets and objecti
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Great to hear. So are they going to start by removing slot machine microtransactions from games like Fire Emblem Heroes? I would love to see big, AAA studios step forward and be brave enough to say that variable ratio schedule-based microt
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
This quote within the article really drives the point home: "The goal of inclusion work is not "More black folk!" Or "More women!" The lack of black folk and women is a symptom of the root cause: opportunity to succ
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Something important that I think is worth noting is that you can reverse the symptoms of T2 Diabetes, but it does require a lifelong change of lifestyle. If you go back to your old lifestyle, those symptoms are just going to come right bac
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
That's what I'm hoping we can change. When I think of Engineering, I think of trades that tend to have a firm grasp on ethics and take the consequences of what they build very seriously. I know that organizations like the ACM an
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
That would have been/would be fantastic. I'd be all in on that.
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Awesome, glad to hear it!
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Good on you for putting your foot down! You not only learned from your past experience, but you also are setting a good example for other software engineers who may not be thinking about their ethical duties. People entering the industry n
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Thank you for sharing that story. I think it's important for young software engineers to see and hear about these stories, and for those of us who have experienced them to share them. Software development is such a rush when you'
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Other questions to ask are: * Would this product exist without the malicious use cases? * Can the company sustain itself without the malicious use case? * Are there ways to mitigate the malicious use cases, and could they be reasonably impl
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Thank you for sharing that. I hope that you continue to share this story. I think you can still do good with the situation by doing exactly what you're doing now: talk to other software engineers about this often overlooked duty. Tal
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Good on you for making the right move. I think we as an industry need to stop stretching for excuses for why greedy behavior might unintentionally do something good. It's not a worthwhile cause and it doesn't justify the behavior
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Definitely - and the intent of the business model and the business itself. I've worked on products before that on the surface (and even what I was told by the folks running it) could have done good. But the company had no intention o
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Yes. This is so true. This is something we need to teach young software engineers - to try and identify the true business model from the model that the company is claiming to incoming employees. To question what you've been told at
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
I've talked about this in a few places before... when this subject comes up, I try to talk about it because I think the ethics aspect of software engineering often goes overlooked in our industry. I'll copypasta from the last tim
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Oh, the dependency injection definitely works independently of ASP.NET Core - it's just something frequently talked about in tandem with it. Just wrote a console app that used it a couple of days ago. I don't know about the curre
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
I think it's because C# and (most of) its ecosystem is a joy to use compared to many languages that are popular with large corporations. Having that ecosystem and that particularly delightful language become cross platform is a welcom
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
This reads like a pump-and-dump article.
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
To me, it's not so much that they shouldn't be allowed to do that - it's just that we need to recognize the advantage it gives. These statistics should give a person pause when they talk about "bootstraps" or when t
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Aye, I went through my undergrad in the early-to-mid 2000's, and the ethics class (I think it was in 2004? It was a long time ago!) was more about your personal ethical duties to your company, with some discussion of general ethics.
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Aye, I definitely think it's a human thing. I apologize, because I'm going to use the word "addicting" in a non-scientific sense, but the normal use of the word that best conveys the situation in my opinion. Solving pr
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by EdgarVerona 8y ago
Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from the actual act of your work and the compensation around it tha

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