[brundolf]

It does bring up something we don't always like to think about, which is that by contributing to the progression of very general technologies we often empower people/organizations who are doing things that may be bad for the world.

But I'm not sure what there is to be done about that, and it isn't limited to Rust (or Facebook for that matter), and I don't think this event really makes that state of affairs worse in any particular way. It just remains an uncomfortable and (seemingly) unavoidable fact of our industry.

[cortesoft]

It is hard to imagine progress in any technology that couldn’t also be used for evil. Better food production could feed bad guys. Curing cancer could extend the life of a mass murderer.

I don’t think we will stop evil corporations by preventing them from using memory safe and performant programming languages.

[chmod600]

The other post just raised it as something to think about. It's a good idea to do a sanity check once in a while.

More technology has generally been better, but not in all cases and it's not guaranteed to continue that way.

Bitcoin is cool, but the consequence is using a lot of energy and facilitating a lot of extortion. Open source seems great, but it also facilitated the rise of AWS which effectively locks people out of software more than closed source software ever did.

We already know the rationalizations, we tell themselves to ourselves every day. But remembering the costs is healthy.

[eslaught]

I think the more appropriate analogy is not bitcoin, but underlying crypto technologies. Should stop researching crypto (or should we repudiate past crypto research) because it might result in new mining technologies? I think the answer to that is clearly no. But that's precisely the issue with these very general technologies: they enable a broad set of use cases that includes things you might not have thought about.

[khuey]

Roads enable bank robbers to get away from the crime scene but nobody thinks that's a reason not to have roads.