[camgunz]

Thomas Ptacek dismissed SWE AI concerns as hypocrisy, and I actually think he understated the argument. This is exactly what we get for:

- using BSD/MIT licenses instead of GPL licenses

- accepting absolutely no liability for security holes or data loss

- accepting absolutely no responsibility for poorly performing software that contributes to climate change

- shipping 17,000 web frameworks, founding one more blockchain startup, founding one more wrapper service around an MIT open source project

We're gonna turn around and be like "but what about the security issues" now? We made this bed.

[pdimitar]

Who is "we"?

A lot of "us" don't have the time to do programming as a hobby -- even if we started off that way.

Many of "us" don't accept blanket grouping with privileged others who had thousands of opportunities to improve the general IT area but were too cool to do it and invented yet another LISP interpreter instead.

And then they come to HN and use "we" as a big convenient scapegoat, obviously to escape responsibility.

Most of "us" are trying to have some semblance of a life, man.

Whoever could collect $200k+ a year and be comfortable should have been helping the IT area. Not me who still doesn't have his own house in his 40s.

[camgunz]

Hey same team. Earnestly asking: what should we do? I have some ideas but honestly they're so radical they feel like wild overreactions.

[int_19h]

We need unions, for starters. And not the small kind that is scoped to one employer, but large industrial unions that can deliver large losses to the capital through massive strikes.

The irony is that the easiest time to establish those was back when software developer jobs were abundant and we had a stronger position wrt employers. But, of course, back then most devs not only didn't see the point of a union, but were actively hostile to the idea. Now that employers have a much stronger upper hand and are flexing their muscle with layoffs etc the idea is suddenly much more palatable to many, but it's also much harder to get going because of the risks involved. But the longer we sit and wait, the more code is written by the robots without human involvement, and the less powerful such a union would be.

[pdimitar]

Wild overreactions is exactly what we need -- f.ex. the Linux kernel's gross negligence of security is no longer good enough is one thing that regularly comes to mind.

New geopolitics are in place, too. Our entire branch should do much, much better than they currently do.

One prediction: cybersecurity jobs might see some surge in the EU. Maybe.

In general though, I would work on transparently syncing world-wide database with partitions for personal data (photo galleries, contacts, calendars, media collections, game saves, anything at all) that is akin to, but much better than, torrents -- another very good example.

In general I am extremely mad at the privileged techies who just wrote philosophical essays about what "we" should be doing... while they themselves spent their riches on expensive (and likely sub-par quality) food in the restaurants of a certain coastal US city.