I didn’t know that! I just subbed to their service for Make Some Noise so I kind of feel better about shelling out for it now.

We do. A24, for instance, is still making a couple movies by agreeing to work under the proposed terms by SAG. As far as I know, no one else has made such agreements yet. The more of such exceptions that get made, the weaker the AMPTP’s position will get.

They’re talking about the visions of sci-fi authors, filmmakers, and artists. The tech Bros are the ones being drawn towards those artists’ visions.

First thing I thought of as well: https://youtu.be/rBQhdO2UxaQ

IMO if we ever get to a point that pulling information from the Internet is as simple as “remembering” it the same way we remember any other information, that could have both significant advantages over having to first read the data visually to ingest it, and terrifying potential to implant “facts” into someones mind.

Am I taking crazy pills? Except for 76, an MMO, Bethesdas record has been pretty good for single-player games, no?

I’ve played all of their games since Morrowind on Launch and always had a blast.

I could not disagree harder. Bethesda puts a ton of work into making their games as extensible as possible and I think that’s not a deficiency at all.

This but like, unironically

Yeah, actually moderating an online space with even modest activity is fucking hard and takes a shitton of time.

I think a lot of people underestimate the effort involved and quickly lose interest once it becomes apparent.

That’s a really interesting perspective I didn’t think I’ve seen before. Thanks for posting.

Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.

I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.

Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.

How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?

How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the autopilot and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.

When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? Just for physical safety? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?

None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.

Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that’s why software engineer should mean something.

I know I learned it in high school at one point but definitely isn’t something I would have been able to recall on my own.

My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.

It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.

IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.

This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.

I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

Your example is a really really good one.

At a sketch:

• We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted

• You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.

• While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.

• Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.

• If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.

• If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.

There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.

Why would you assume consciousness is a fundamental force rather than an emergent property of complex systems built on the forces?

More good options is always a good thing.

Not a treasure