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.

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.

I think it depends on the project. Some projects are the author’s personal tools that they’ve put online in the off-chance it will be useful to others, not projects they are really trying to promote.

I don’t think we should expect that authors of repos go too out of their way in those cases as the alternative would just be not to publish them at all.

I don’t think a medical-focused Trek show would have to take place during war time. Medical Ethics in general is ripe for the sort of show Trek lends itself to.

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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.

Self driving cars could actually be kind of a good stepping stone to better public transit while making more efficient use of existing roadways. You hit a button to request a car, it drives you to wherever, you need to go, and then gets tasked to pick up the next person. Where you used to need 10 cars for 10 people, you now need one.

Is !lostlemmings a thing anywhere?

My point was that Star Wars has been tied to the same characters for personal and business reasons, not inherently creative ones defined by the setting. The difference IMO is mostly down to who the creators and executives involved in the process of each IP have been, not the actual merits of the respective IP’s worlds.

If Gene Roddenberry has decided that Next Generation had to be about Kirk and his crew, and then Paramount also mandated all it’s other Star Trek projects to be about TOS crew, we’d be having the same discussions about “why can’t Start Trek get away from the original series?” even though it has nothing to do with the setting.

No offense meant, because you raise a lot of good points on why Star Trek works as a setting, but I fundamentally disagree with the Star Wars take here. Historically, Star Wars has centered around the Skywalker saga for Personal (George Lucas) and Business (Disney) reasons, not creative ones.

Star Wars offers an excellent setting with a framework to discuss ethics and morality baked directly into the universe. Stories like Knights of the Old Republic have shown that you can get away from the main Saga and still tell an engaging story rooted in the universe that Saga created. Tons of old Legends content didn’t tie directly into the original films and were excellent.

Andor has also shown that it’s also just that bad writing is what leads to IP burnout. I couldn’t finish Book of Boba Fett or Mandalorian season 3, but have watched Andor 3 times.

Not a treasure

In many cases it should be fine to point them all at the same server. You’ll just need to make sure there aren’t any collisions between schema/table names.

I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

Same. I write FOSS software in my free time and also paid.

Man, I really think you should either saddle up, don’t block ads, or use a free, non-ad-supported alternative.

Sync is made by a single dev who uses it as his main source of income. It’s not made by a corporation. Taking the fruits of someone’s labor, that they have priced to make it worth their time, feels kinda shitty to me.

If you really feel it’s so much better than the alternatives that you won’t even use them, then pay what the person making it feels they need to keep making it.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

I don’t know. This would dovetail well with a bunch of studies that have found verbal and physical abuse of retail workers at an all time high since the pandemic. Similar studies have found the same thing for road rage.

There has always been some fraction of poorly behaved people, but that fraction seems to have become larger since the pandemic, whatever the actual mechanism that caused it is.

I work in the film industry and can say, with certainty, that TNG was not shot with the same consideration.

Television back then knew it was being mastered for SDTV and the artists had a good idea of what it meant they could get away with compared to something that would be screened in 35mm. Final screening medium has always been the most important consideration, not capture medium.

Audiences have also gotten less forgiving of visual quality and less willing to suspend disbelief as the bar for quality has steadily risen. It means that shows are both working on higher definition target mediums and under more scrutiny than ever.

Like, I love TNG but go watch and tell me that it looks half as good as SNW.