I’m always baffled when I read news about unethical things that a piece of software does; I can’t comprehend how software engineers, people who probably have the ability to do critical and structured thinking, program such software and feel ok with it - they can’t just plead ignorance and say they’re just doing their assigned tasks or sth, they actively make the decision to participate in this.
The managers, I think it makes more sense: they may be evil about coming up with these decisions, but may not have much exposure to the product to understand the consequences of how it works so they just get money and handle they contracts etc.
But the people who write the logic, they’re the ones who are sitting down days at a time focusing on their task to think how to design the algorithms, from killing people, to simply tracking people online and exploit a user’s behavior, data about their personal life and relationships etc
“Hmm yes if a user seems to spend much on microtransactions in games, we could maybe lure them to an online casino! Lets now work on the algorithm that recommends betting games based on their online behavior. Oh did they lose their job recently? They now have more free time to sink into our platform! We may be able to lure them with games that have small bets 🤔 I’m so good at my job I might get a raise now!”
And I guess now with vibe coding this can only get worse 😕
https://docs.libre.space/en/stable/operation/it-infrastructure-operations.html (archive)
Most notably:
We use gitlab.com in general, so we also use it for support tickets if that’s what you mean 🤔