No problem!

You can do all those things while also not supporting FAANG

Depends. If you can find another employer that’s more ethical (which is not guaranteed just because they’re smaller) and pays as much with as flexible a work schedule, yeah, you should probably do that. Otherwise it might indeed be necessary.

I don’t know, are we doing concequentialist ethics here, or deontological? I feel like we’ve reached the level of splitting hairs where we need to decide. For the purpose of actual advice people reading might follow, I’d say just try and be a good person, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

I mean, a lot of companies do stuff like that, and yet you still need money to live. Just working there doesn’t necessarily make it your fault; by that logic it would be a sin to work checkout at Walmart, because you’ll have the same blood on your hands as the Waltons.

I don’t really like talking about capitalism as if it’s a well defined concept, but, no ethical consumption under.

I’m not ignoring the other two things listed, I’m realistic.

I didn’t mean you, FYI. I mean someone who does work for a FAANG and is looking for more justification to do nothing for the common good.

Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.

I’m not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.

Why not? Unlike Schindler you don’t have to worry about how many beatings are necessary to keep up appearances, and you might have a specific role that exposes you to very little evil at all. Meanwhile, you can donate some of that big wage to people like EFF, or volunteer using the flexible schedule.

I was kind of assuming that, since FAANG are American, but I’d guess they probably have foreign employees as well.

Canadians make pretty much the same as Europeans, I think. The Americans have a bunch of monopolies, and are characteristically weird and nationalist about who they share the spoils with. (I know, it’s not all of you guys, but it’s definitely some)

Yeah, I do worry someone will read the “work for a FAANG” part, and ignore the other two things listed. It’s absolutely not enough to go “welp, I’m just a little cog following orders”.

Maybe a one-man boycott is the wrong way to put it. Multi-person boycotts are obviously built from individual people. I guess my real point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; you actually have to look at the world, look at how you want it to be, and figure out how you can help make that happen from your place in it.

Agreed. Just working for somebody bad doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve given up, though. I mean, they made a movie about Schindler, and we all know who he worked for.

I like that! I’m going to steal it.

They are. You can get .debs through other sources quite often, though.

YEARS OF BACKPORTS yet NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND for staying more than ONE VERSION behind

I have a really old computer that still gets the job done, and just getting up to Bullseye broke it a bit.

I know, I know, it’s just a meme.

1 11 111 1111 11111 111111

That’s base 1. By convention, because it doesn’t really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.

But financially bussin’!

And also, it’s actually a complicated question. A one-man boycott doesn’t do anything. If you work at a FAANG, work for a better world when you’re off, and go whistleblower when they do something really evil, I find no fault in that at all.

If only I could believe a word it says. Evidence either way would have to be indirect somehow.

I can see you’re frustrated by the downvotes and pushback you’ve received. It’s understandable to feel defensive when your viewpoint isn’t well-received. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, even if it goes against the majority opinion here.

Thanks for the kind words. FWIW I’m doing fine, this feels like a worthy fight. I know a bad appeal to authority when I see one.

Interestingly, one could argue that NASA may have used agile-like practices in the space shuttle program, even if they weren’t labeled as such at the time. However, I did a quick search and couldn’t find much concrete evidence to support this idea. It’s an intriguing area that might merit further research.

There’s somebody else in the thread talking about the Apollo missions and Agile. Uhh, here, because I don’t know if federated comment links are supported yet. There’s no source for that already provided, though.

What do you see as the pros and cons of different methodologies? Your insights could add a lot to this discussion.

Honestly no. Sorry to undercut you a bit, but I’m not going to be the Dunning-Kruger guy. I know that I don’t know project management.

Honestly, I worry that it’s conscious enough that it’s cruel to train it. How would we know? That’s a lot of parameters and they’re almost all mysterious.

I was using the term pretty loosely there. It’s not psychopathic in the medical sense because it’s not human.

As I see it it’s an alien semi-intelligence with no interest in pretty much any human construct, except as it can help it predict the next token. So, no empathy or guilt, but that’s not unusual or surprising.

Campbell’s law goes brrrrr.

I mean, the Luddites were right, mechanical looms were bad for them personally.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

That’s a perfect description, actually. People debate how smart it is - and I’m in the “plenty” camp - but it is psychopathic. It doesn’t care about truth, morality or basic sanity; it craves only to generate standard, human-looking text. Because that’s all it was trained for.

Nobody really knows how to train it to care about the things we do, even approximately. If somebody makes GAI soon, it will be by solving that problem.